The results of twenty years of experiments into the behaviour of bacteria in foods are now freely available on the internet. In an international collaboration between the Food Standards Agency, Institute of Food Research and US Department of Agriculture, the database will help food safety and quality to be predicted quickly and free of charge.

“The behaviour of food poisoning pathogens and spoilage organisms has been intensely studied since the early 1980s in response to major food poisonin

A research team at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) has for the first time incorporated on a single chip both a widely tunable laser and an all-optical wavelength converter, thereby creating an integrated photonic circuit for transcribing data from one color of light to another. Such a device is key to realizing an all-optical network. This research is being funded by a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) grant to push the boundary

Research led by Professor Paul Sharp at The University of Nottingham’s Institute of Genetics has shed further light on the origins of HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS.

For more than 10 years, Professor Sharp has been collaborating with Professor Beatrice Hann, at the University of Alabama, on research aimed at clarifying the origins and evolution of AIDS viruses. In 1999, this team identified the origin of HIV-1 as being transmission of a virus (SIVcpz) from chimpanzees to humans, but a mys

For just pennies per person per year, the new Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) plans to bring the benefits of foods fortified with vitamins and minerals and end micronutrient deficiency for the poor in developing countries, which can save millions of lives and prevent crippling conditions such as blindness and mental retardation.

“Micronutrient deficiency also has many invisible economic effects that are widely underestimated, because they sap the energy of working-age p

Using a so-called “data-mining” method, it is possible to automatically find previously unknown side-effects of drugs in the huge WHO database of side-effect reports. This is demonstrated in a doctoral dissertation by Andrew Bate at Umeå University in Sweden.

The use of pharmaceuticals sometimes causes side-effects. By gathering reports about suspected cases of side-effects, it is possible to detect previously unknown ties between a certain drug and a side-effect at an early stage, so-calle

Researchers uncover new tumor suppression mechanism

Cancerous and precancerous cells can detect that they are abnormal and kill themselves, or remain alive indefinitely but cease proliferating, through two intrinsic processes called programmed cell death and cellular senescence. One goal of cancer chemotherapy is to help stimulate these potent antitumor processes.

Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island have recently shown that by locking cancer cells int