A project between academia and industry is aiming to spark a world electronics revolution by producing faster, cheaper and more reliable microchips.

The University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, has joined forces with Amtel, on North Tyneside in the North East of England, to create ‘strained silicon’ microchips, which involves adding a material called germanium to the traditional silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing.

Atmel, whose silicon chips find applications in such diverse

It’s an all-too-common experience – the perfect photograph ruined by the demonic glow of the “red-eye” effect. Now, a researcher at the University of Toronto has developed a method that can automatically remove those unsightly scarlet spots from digital images.

“The technique will offer consumers a convenient, automatic tool for eliminating red-eye in digital photographs,” says Professor Konstantinos Plataniotis of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Chancellors and central bankers face a perennial headache: booms typically cause inflation, while recessions mainly reduce output without reducing prices or inflation. New ESRC-funded research by Professor V. Bhaskar of the University of Essex explains how this problem emerges through the phenomenon of ’asymmetric price adjustment’ – the fact that firms are far quicker to increase prices than to cut them.

This work has important implications for inflation targeting by the Bank of

Encouraging findings from a study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET suggest that factor VII—an agent involved in blood clotting—could be effective in reducing excessive blood loss during abdominal surgery.

Factor VII has been shown to promote blood clotting in patients with haemophilia. Marcel Levi from Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues investigated whether recombinant activated factor VII (factor VIIA) could be used to reduce excessive blood loss during sur

An important step towards controlling bubonic and pneumonic plague may soon be possible with the use of a straightforward and accurate diagnostic test, according to authors of a study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET.

Plague is a flea-borne rodent disease that is occasionally transmitted to man, with around 3000-4000 cases annually in more than 20 countries, mainly in Africa. A rapid diagnostic test for the disease is urgently needed as current diagnosis is not possible until severe sympto

Results appear January 17 in the journal Molecular Cell

A lab headed by a Saint Louis University researcher has made a major breakthrough that could lead to a better molecular understanding of cancer.

Results published today in the Journal Molecular Cell by Ali Shilatifard, Ph.D., and colleagues show for the first time how a protein known to be involved in the development of cancer functions in normal cells.

The research shows how the protein “Bre1” plays a pivotal