A team of Carnegie Mellon University and NASA scientists will travel to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile in April to conduct research that will help them develop and deploy a robot and instruments that may someday enable other robots to find life on Mars. The researchers will be using the Atacama, described as the most arid region on Earth, as a Martian analog.

The group is funded with a $3 million, three-year grant from NASA to the university’s Robotics Institute. They are collabo

The expensive, energy-intensive process of turning wood into paper costs the pulp and paper industries more than $6 billion a year. Much of that expense involves separating wood’s cellulose from lignin, the glue that binds a tree’s fibers, by using an alkali solution and high temperatures and pressures. Although the lignin so removed is reused as fuel, wood with less lignin and more cellulose would save the industry millions of dollars a year in processing and chemical costs. Research at North Caroli

’Hamlet’ algorithm answers the question: ’To buy, or not to buy?’

It’s a classic dilemma for air travelers in today’s world of wildly varying ticket prices – should you purchase now if the rate seems reasonable, or wait for a better deal and take the risk that the price will go up?

Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Southern California appear to have taken out some of the uncertainty with a new computer program tha

Acetaminophen, the medicine in Tylenol®, clears rapidly and completely from the bloodstream even in doses as high as twice the daily recommended dose, according to new research presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Society of Toxicology recently in Salt Lake City.

“Our objective was to take what we already knew about the pharmacokinetics of acetaminophen and go a step further,” explained lead investigator Cathy K. Gelotte, PhD, Executive Director, Medical and Regulatory Product Develo

Research helps physicians understand rare form of ataxia that causes patients to appear ’drunk’ at times
Scientists at Oregon Health & Science University are the first to produce an animal model for episodic ataxia. The condition causes patients to suffer bouts of extreme clumsiness where they have balance, speech and motor difficulties. The research helps scientists better understand this rare and intriguing disorder. It may also help provide valuable information for improved, t

The benefit of some cancer vaccines may be boosted by treating patients with an antibody that blocks a key protein on immune system T cells, according to a small, preliminary study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The study, to be published online on April 1 in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (www.pnas.org), tested the effect of a single injection of the antibody MDX-CTLA4 in nine patients who