A biomedical-imaging technique that would highlight the cytoskeletal infrastructure of nerve cells and map the nervous system as it develops and struggles to repair itself has been proposed by biophysics researchers at Cornell and Harvard universities.

Reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS June 10, 2003) , the researchers say that besides the new imaging technique’s obvious applications in studying the dynamics of nervous system development, it could answer the

The tiny spheres inside brain cells that ferry chemical messengers into the synapse make their rounds much more expeditiously than once assumed, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) – funded researchers have discovered. They used a dye to track the behavior of such synaptic vesicles in real time, in rat brain cells. Rather than fusing completely with the cell membrane and disgorging their dye contents all at once, brain vesicles more often remained intact, secreting only part of the tracer car

C.J. Zhong hopes that within the next three to five years diabetics the world could see their quality of life enhanced by his tiny invention-a chip-sized pump with no moving parts. The device is also expected to find its way into myriad industrial and environmental applications, where it could mean huge savings in manufacturing and monitoring processes.

Zhong’s patent on the low-power, electrically driven pumping device is one of the reasons the State University of New York has broken i

Inflation’s got nothing to do with it. Since the beginning of time, a picture has always been worth more than a thousand words. But in this age of information proliferation, that reality is the taproot of a vexing problem that Zhongfei “Mark” Zhang, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University, is determined to help solve.

From personal and commercial digital image libraries and multimedia databases to data mining programs and high-tech security and defense survei

The answer to how the complex, cavernous inner ear forms from a mostly homogenous group of cells may be that it doesn’t, says a Medical College of Georgia researcher who has found a new cell type that appears to migrate to the developing ear.

Dr. Paul Sohal first saw the cells he named ventrally emigrating neural tube cells in 1995, following the path of newly formed nerves out of the developing neural tube.

His research published in the June issue of the International Journal of D

Researchers will assess how businesses manage waste

Researchers at Cardiff University, UK, are aiming to gather vital information from a load of garbage.

Businesses and commercial organisations in Wales, UK, generate millions of tonnes of waste each year, and much of it goes to landfill sites – a method of disposal which is causing mounting environmental concern and is increasingly subject to legislation.

Yet current data on how much waste is produced, what it comp