Women who have received a heart, heart-lung or lung transplant are having successful pregnancies after transplantation, according to a study by researchers at Jefferson Medical College.

While such pregnancies are considered “high risk,” the results are encouraging, says Vincent Armenti, M.D., Ph.D., professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

The researchers compiled information through the National Pregnancy Transplantation Regi

Non-smokers who are exposed to environmental tobacco smoke for at least 30 minutes a day are at far greater risk of developing acute coronary syndromes compared with people who are not exposed, finds a study in Tobacco Control.

These findings support the role of environmental tobacco smoke in the development of adverse cardiac events.

A total of 847 individuals with a first event of acute coronary syndromes and 1,078 cardiovascular disease-free controls were included in the study. P

The production of fusion energy with a PetaWatt laser is a step closer now that a team of scientists from Japan and the UK has demonstrated that the physics works. Using the GEKKO XII laser system at the Osaka University in Japan, the team has successfully conducted experiments at laser powers equivalent to those required for a full-scale ignition system, and the results will be published in Nature on Thursday 29 August 2002.

“We carried out a first “proof of principle” experiment in 2001 th

Every morning millions of Americans reach for the world’s most popular drug to help them start their day.

“That drug is caffeine,” said Dr. James Bibb, assistant professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Bibb is one of the authors of a new report explaining how caffeine exerts its stimulatory effect by altering the biochemistry of the brain. The findings appear in an August issue of Nature.

“Caffeine is the most frequently self-administered dru

Medical researchers would like to use nano-scale tubes to push very tiny amounts of drugs dissolved in water to exactly where they are needed in the human body.

The roadblock to putting this theory into practical use has been the challenge of building pumps small enough to do the job. In addition to the engineering challenge of building a nano-scale pump, there is the added complication of clogging by any biological molecule that can occur in valves small enough to fit a channel the size of

A NASA researcher finds that the amount of sea ice that moves between Greenland and Spitsbergen, a group of islands north of Norway, is dependent upon a “wave” of atmospheric pressure at sea level. By being able to estimate how much sea ice is exported through this region, called Fram Strait, scientists may develop further insights into how the ice impacts global climate.

This export of sea ice helps control the thermohaline circulation, a deep water ocean conveyor belt that moves warm, sal