Paper published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences

Below is an advisory distributed today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper can be found in the online early edition of PNAS at www.pnas.org.

The study, conducted by Dr. Cassian Yee, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, involved 10 people diagnosed with advanced melanoma. For each patient immune system cells able to identify and target melanoma wer

A first in Canada, the Alberta Research Council (ARC) reached a milestone in the technical development of its own version of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology. ARC scientists are developing a proprietary micro solid oxide fuel cell (µ-SOFC) source of energy for small-scale portable applications such as laptops or personal digital assistants (PDAs).

“This is an important milestone as we pursue our strategic initiative in fuel cell technologies,” says John Zhou, manager, Advanced Materi

Danish authors of a study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET provide reassurance to pregnant women—maternal fever in the early stages of pregnancy is probably not a risk factor for miscarriage or stillbirth.

Increased maternal body temperature can cause fetal death in some animals, which has lead to the suspicion that maternal fever early in pregnancy (when embryonic development is at a critical stage) could have a similar effect in the human population.

Anne-Marie Nybo Andersen an

From 800 km in space, you would have to squint really hard to see one of these – a micron-sized phytoplankton and its armoured shell. But when a lot of them get together, say, a few trillion or so…

…what you see is the image below from the European Space Agency’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument. The sensor, carried onboard the Envisat satellite, acquired imagery of a phytoplankton bloom that occurred this summer in the north Atlantic, off the coasts of Nova Scotia

A new study of elderly Americans shows a strong link between air pollution and higher costs of medical care, both inpatient and outpatient, and especially for respiratory ailments.

Millions of Medicare records of whites between the ages of 65 and 84 from 1989 to 1991 provided a study sample for researchers Victor R. Fuchs, professor emeritus at Stanford University, and Sarah Rosen Franks, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. They write in the November/December issue

Researchers from Midwestern University in Illinois, Curtin University of Technology in Australia, and Illinois State University have found that when bacteria become resistant to pine oil cleaners (POC), a common household disinfectant, they may also be resistant to some antibiotics. Their findings appear in the November 2002 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

In the study, POC-resistant Staphylococcus aureus were found to also be resistant to the antibiotics, vancomycin and ox