Biomed Central launches a multimedia resource of the most significant scientists of the 20th century

BioMed Central is pleased to announce the launch of Science Archive, a new multimedia resource consisting of extensive autobiographical video recordings with some of the most important scientists of the last century. The service is launching with the audiovisual autobiographies of two giants of modern biology, Sydney Brenner and John Maynard Smith with other scientists to be added l

Psychologists have found that colors enhance an individual’s visual memory. From a series of experiments, researchers learned that subjects were more likely to recall the color version of an image than the same scene in black and white. The results, which appear in the May issue of the journal Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, also indicate that natural colors make a difference. A photo of a landscape with a green sky, for example, will not lodge as effectively in the brai

Work on developing a prototype wearable ’artificial pancreas’ to improve care and lifestyle for diabetic people is showing “very encouraging results” at City University, London.

The European Commission-funded project mimics the way that insulin is naturally delivered in the body and could mean that people with Type 1 diabetes – often babies and young children – could have their blood glucose levels much closer to normal than is currently possible.

“We have been developing

Researchers of the Hospital of San Sebastian and the Biomedicine Institute of Valencia have discovered the genetic basis of hereditary epilepsy. The work leaded by the researchers Adolfo Lopez de Munain and Jordi Perez Tur has analysed the effect of the gene called LGI1/Epitempina.

Temporal lateral epilepsy is the type of epilepsy that affects the side of the brain. The main characteristic of this type of epilepsy is that patients hear some noises before they lose consciousness. Many researc

Roughly 15 billion years ago, during the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and anti-matter should have been created, with an anti-particle for every particle created. Yet when matter and anti-matter meet, they both disappear in a flash of light, so why didn’t they annihilate each other completely? For some reason, during the first moments of the Big Bang, although lots of matter and anti-matter did meet and annihilate, we were left with a slight surplus of matter, which makes up the Universe today. W

A revolutionary method for detecting which human embryos are most likely to develop successfully to the stage at which they implant in the womb has been developed by scientists at the University of York and clinicians at Leeds General Infirmary.
The research has been funded by the Medical Research Council.

The discovery, if confirmed in clinical trials, could bring new hope for many couples undergoing fertility treatment since current failure rates are high. One of the problems is that e