On July 30th 2002, the engineers and scientists of the Association Euratom-CEA in Cadarache (France) have achieved a three and a half minutes long plasma discharge on Tore Supra, sustained by 3MW of current drive power, thus requiring to exhaust more than 600 Megajoules of thermal energy during the experiment. It establishes a new world record in this domain after the 280MJ discharges of 1996. Prior to the record discharge, a number of long pulse shots have been achieved, demonstrating the capability

Researchers in Oxford University¡¦s Department of Chemistry have devised a new method of selectively oxidising terpenes to produce compounds of particular interest to the perfumery, flavour and pharmaceutical industries.

Terpenes and their derivatives are commonly used in industry to modify flavours and fragrances, and new compounds for trial are continuously needed. The terpenes themselves are not of commercial interest, but rather the derivatives that commonly require stereoselective funct

Researchers at Oxford University’s Department of Materials have devised a new method of coating materials that are to be implanted into bone, resulting in encouraged bone in-growth and bonding while reducing the possibility of loosening implants.

Bone implants are desirable and/or essential in various medical procedures, and are often metallic and secured by an adhesive. Inert materials such as metals do not bond to the surrounding tissue and adhesives eventually degrade, allowing the implan

If you have had a bad nosebleed recently, think back over the last few days. Have you been taking Viagra? If so, it is worth mentioning it to your doctor, say surgeons writing in the August Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Lucy Hicklin and colleagues at St George’s Hospital in London describe two case histories where very severe nosebleeds followed Viagra-enhanced sexual activity, and suggest possible reasons why the two could be connected.

A six-hour nosebleed

The

Excessive use of ‘reliever’ inhalers for asthma is linked to a significantly increased risk of dying from the disease, finds research in Thorax.

The researchers based their findings on over 96,000 patients diagnosed with asthma whose details had been entered anonymously onto the General Practice Research Database between 1994 and 1998.

They calculated the relative risk of dying from asthma – risk for someone with taking a particular medication, compared with someone not taking that

Scientists from Baylor College of Medicine (Texas, USA) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Cambridge, UK) have deciphered how neurons can synthesize a diverse range of proteins from a relatively limited number of genes – a discovery with important implications for understanding how complex neural circuitry is formed and maintained throughout our lives.

A long-standing question in neurobiology is how each of the tens of thousands of neurons that populate the mammalian brain are instruc