A team from Imperial College London based at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea, Hammersmith and the Royal Brompton Hospitals has worked with equipment developed by scientists at QinetiQ, Europe’s largest science and technology organisation, to study the heart rate of unborn babies in minute detail.

The technique, reported in this months British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, will allow doctors to monitor the health of babies’ hearts and obtain the full fetal ECG (fECG), particularl

Global warming will not be helped much by efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere, say two scientists who have studied the matter.

Dr. Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist from the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. Jan Veiser a geochemist at the University of Ottawa in Canada and Ruhr University in Germany, say that temperature variations are due more to cosmic forces than to the actions of man.

In a recent article publishe

Researchers sifting through the indispensable machinery that senses and fixes broken DNA have discovered a new culprit that can induce instability in the genome and thereby set the stage for cancer to develop.

Studies in mice have shown that loss of H2AX, a gene that produces a protein called a histone that is part of the chromosomal structure, can tip the delicate balance of proteins that are curators of the human genome. When H2AX ceases to function properly, lymphomas and solid tu

Blocking the formation of neurons in the hippocampus blocks the behavioral effects of antidepressants in mice, say researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their finding lends new credence to the proposed role of such neurogenesis in lifting mood. It also helps to explain why antidepressants typically take a few weeks to work, note Rene Hen, Ph.D., Columbia University, and colleagues, who report on their study in the August 8th Science.

“If antidepressants work by stim

Like the snap of a clothespin, the sudden mixing of closely related species may occasionally provide the energy to impel rapid evolutionary change, according to a new report by researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions. Their paper was made available online by Science magazine´s “Science Express” service.

A study of sunflower species that began 15 years ago shows that the sudden mixing and matching of different species´ genes can create genetic super

In the future, many cancer scientists and physicians believe, a “molecular fingerprint” of an individual´s cancer may be used to diagnose that patient´s disease and tailor therapy.

Researchers at Vanderbilt have moved a step closer to that scenario with the identification of a distinct pattern of expression of 15 proteins in lung cancers that can predict a poor prognosis or a good prognosis. All patients in the poor prognosis group had died one year after diagnosis, while all patient