According to the World Health Organization, Tuberculosis ( Mycobacterium tuberculosis or TB) will kill two million people this year, with the projected number of new infections over the next twenty years reaching a billion. A rapidly moving, constantly mutating disease, TB’s effects are made worse by its ability to quickly react to new drug treatments, becoming resistant to antibiotics. Searching for a way to improve treatment, a group of researchers from the University of Tennessee developed
A strong and unexpected correlation between large numbers of howler monkeys and elevated counts of birds on islands created by a Venezuelan hydroelectric project has Duke University scientists looking for explanations. They say their discovery represents a prime example of the unexpected ecological insights that the science all-too-often yields.
The scientists working hypothesis is that excess plant-eating monkeys found on some of the smallest islands counterintuitively spur extra tre
Simple method may improve catalysts, nanodevices
A way to help next-generation computers boot up instantly, making entire memories immediately available for use, has been developed by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The patented technique is able to deposit flat, ultrathin metallic layers on very thin oxide layers. The thinness of the deposition reduces material cost and requires less electricity to produce more rapid mag
The kerosene that lights your heater or stove might be the same type of fuel powering the nation’s next space vehicle.
Kerosene — almost as common to American life as gasoline — is being considered as a fuel for two main engine candidates for a second generation reusable launch vehicle, now in development by the Space Launch Initiative. The Initiative is NASA’s technology development program to design a complete space transportation system with increased safety and reliability at a lower c
After two years of stubborn persistence, scientists at Johns Hopkins have determined the 3-D structure of part of a protein called HER3, which should speed efforts to interfere with abnormal growth and cancer.
“It took us more than two years to interpret the data and get HER3s structure,” says Dan Leahy, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor of biophysics in Hopkins Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. “Now that we have it, it might take only
Researchers at the University of Chicago have found a way to combine cancer chemotherapy with gene therapy designed to disrupt the growth of blood vessels to a tumor. The combination, tested in mice, is far more effective than standard chemotherapy and has no additional side effects. This innovative approach is described in the August issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
This new approach evolved out of a similar system, now entering phase-2 human trials, that combines gene ther