Important step forward for safety of xenotransplantation

This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Immerge BioTherapeutics, Inc., announced that they have identified the receptors that are used by porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV) in order to enter and infect a cell (PNAS; May 27, 2003; vol. 100, no. 11; 6759-6764). This is a critical discovery because it allows scientists to begin to develop strategies to prevent PERV replication. PERV has

Milestone to Fulfill Metallization Requirements for Chip Manufacturing into Next Decade

Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX) today announced that its Munich Research Labs have demonstrated, by shrinking present film thicknesses into nanotechnology geometries, that the stringent requirements of thin encapsulation films in metallization schemes of future chip generations will be met. The results shows that thin barrier films, key components for advanced copper chip wiring, will meet t

390 million hectares (circa 80% of the total land area) in Europe is currently laid to waste by acid soil toxicity. Now EUREKA project CEREALSTRESSOL is developing new varieties of crops that can cope with adverse due to natural stresses such as drought and due to abiotic, non-living stresses such as acid soil toxicity.

Acid soil toxicity is caused by the leaching of aluminum, manganese and other toxins into the soil through acid rain, acid forming fertilizers as well as the decay of

If successful in humans, vaccine could eliminate annual flu shot

Globally, the influenza virus, or flu, is thought to cause between three and five million cases of severe illness and between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths annually, according to the World Health Organization. New strains of the virus emerge each year, so that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and other public health services must produce and distribute a new vaccine against the new flu strains each year. And each year,

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University this week announced preliminary study results showing smallpox vaccine protection lasts longer than previously thought. Until now, it was widely accepted that smallpox vaccine protection lasted approximately three to five years. However, early study data shows that significant, partial protection may last many decades after inoculation.

“More than 90 percent of Americans older than 35 have already been vaccinated against smallpox. This trans

One barrier to protecting biodiversity is that there are no good ways of figuring out how many species there are in large areas. Now we may finally be able to find out: a new method accurately predicts the total number of North American butterfly species even when only a tenth of the ecoregions are sampled.

This could “at last enable ecology to estimate worldwide species diversity,” say Michael Rosenzweig, Will Turner and Jonathan Cox of the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Taylor Rickett