Finland Leads Europe In The Development Of Biodegradable Plastics

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, has made degradable bioplastic more durable due to reinforcement with natural fibres. This biocomposite, which is totally biodegradable, supports sustainable development. The waste costs for products made from this will be small, and in the future consumers will have an enhanced appreciation of biodegradability of materials.

VTT achieved this biocomposite using flax fi

New high-speed imaging techniques are allowing scientists to show how a single cell mobilizes its resources to activate its immune response, a news research study shows.

Howard R. Petty, Ph.D., professor and biophysicist at the University of Michigan Health System’s Kellogg Eye Center, has dazzled his colleagues with movies of fluorescent-lit calcium waves that pulse through the cell, issuing an intracellular call-to-arms to attack the pathogens within.

He explains that these

Photonics and ultrasound engineering researchers from Duke University and The George Washington University have collaborated to design an optical scanner miniaturized enough to be inserted into the body, where its light beams could someday detect abnormalities hidden in the walls of the colon, bladder or esophagus.

The experimental device, called an “electrostatic micromachine scanning mirror for optical coherence tomography,” is described in an article published in the April 15, 2003, issu

A group of researchers led by the University of Colorado at Boulder have solved the crystal structure of a molecule switch that can trigger heart disease and cancer, paving the way for future drug designs to mitigate these diseases.

The key component of the switch is a protein called MEF2 that binds to the DNA and is involved in muscle cell, T cell and nerve cell development. In cases involving human hearts, it can lower gene activity that causes enlarged hearts, known as hypertrophic cardi

A new study suggests that lead may be harmful even at very low blood concentrations. The study, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, will appear in the April 17 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The five-year study found that children who have blood lead concentration lower than 10 micrograms per deciliter suffer intellectual impairment from the exposure. The researchers also discovered that the amount of impai

The bizarre hydrothermal vent field discovered a little more than two years ago surprised scientists not only with vents that are the tallest ever seen – the one that’s 18 stories dwarfs most vents at other sites by at least 100 feet – but also because the fluids forming these vents are heated by seawater reacting with million-year-old mantle rocks, not by young volcanism.

The remarkable Lost City hydrothermal vent field, so named partly because it sits on a seafloor mountain named the