An entirely new method for purifying blood has been developed at the Lund Institute of Technology, LTH, in Sweden. The blood is led out in hair-thin channels and is processed with ultrasound. A company in the neighboring research village IDEON is now perfecting the first medical application: a treatment to separate out clotted fat so-called fat embolin blood. But the method is a general one and can be applied to other medical treatments.

Heart surgery can be troubled by certain intellectual

Study Suggests Promising New Avenues for Nanotube Research

Superconducting nanotubes may lie on the technology horizon, suggests a theoretical study recently published by researchers from the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Pennsylvania, and Bilkent University in Turkey.

The intriguing possibility is the team’s most recent finding in a spate of studies showing how changing the shape of tiny single-walled

Internet-based therapy can help sufferers cope with tinnitus, the medical term for the ringing sound in the ears that is experienced by 10 to 14 percent of adults, suggest the results of a Swedish study.

No cure for tinnitus exists, although some experts recommend the use of hearing aids and white-noise generators to help minimize the ringing, and sometimes hissing, chirping or clicking sounds associated with tinnitus. Symptoms are mild for most tinnitus patients, but the one-third of patien

Although stressful life events may affect the health of both men and women, men are more vulnerable, according to a recent study of nearly 3,000 people in Finland.
The study, published in the September/October issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, looked at whether psychological problems (such as anxiety and mental distress) and health-risk behaviors (such as smoking and alcohol use) underpin the health effects of life events.

Four major life events were studied: the death or serious illnes

In the first look at the molecular diversity of the starch pathway in maize, research at North Carolina State University has found that – in contrast to the high amount of diversity in many of the maize genes previously studied – there is a general dearth of diversity in this particular pathway.

That’s important, says Dr. Ed Buckler, U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) researcher, assistant professor of genetics at NC State and one of the study’s

Cornell University researchers have demonstrated a novel method of separating DNA molecules by length. The technique might eventually be used to create chips or other microscopic devices to automate and speed up gene sequencing and DNA fingerprinting.

The method, which uses a previously discovered entropic recoil force, has better resolution — that is, better ability to distinguish different lengths — than others tried so far, the researchers say. They separated DNA strands of two differ