Parasitic diseases, especially leishmaniases and trypanosomiases, kill hundreds of thousands of people every year in the world, mainly in the countries of the South. The most severe form of leishmaniosis (kala-azar, the visceral form), induced by Leishmania donovani and L. infantum, affects about 500 000 people per year and proves fatal if no treatment is given.
Although drugs do exist for treating these diseases, they are not always effective, owing to the appearance of r
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Technical University Munch have discovered evidence of a phenomenon that may lead to drastically lowering the cost of manufacturing of materials from plastics to fertilizers. Studying nano-sized clusters of gold on a magnesium oxide surface, scientists found direct evidence for electrical charging of a nano-sized catalyst. This is an important factor in increasing the rate of chemical reactions. The research will appear in the 21 January, 2
Newly published North Carolina State University research into the evolution of birds shows the first definitive fossil proof linking close relatives of living birds to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Research by paleontologist Dr. Julia A. Clarke, an assistant professor in the marine, earth and atmospheric sciences department at NC State, and colleagues provides unprecedented fossil proof that some close cousins to living bird species coexisted with dinosaurs more than
Although mass is the most important property of stars, it has proved very hard to measure for the lowest mass objects in the universe. Thanks to a powerful new camera, a very rare, low-mass companion has finally been photographed.
The discovery suggests that, due to errors in the models, astronomers have overestimated the number of young “brown dwarfs” and “free floating” extrasolar planets. An international team of astronomers lead by University of Arizona Associate Professor La
Engineering researchers at the University of California, San Diego are using the shell of a seaweed-eating snail as a guide in the development of a new generation of bullet-stopping armor. The colorful oval shell of the red abalone is highly prized as a source of nacre, or mother-of-pearl, jewelry, but the UCSD researchers are most impressed by the shell’s ability to absorb heavy blows without breaking.
In a paper published in the Jan. 15 issue of Materials Science and Engin
How do you remember your own name? Is it possible ever to forget it? The memory trace, or engram, “feels” like it is stored permanently in the brain and it will never be forgotten.
Indeed, the current view of memory is that, at the molecular level, new proteins are manufactured, in a process known as translation, and it is these newly synthesized proteins that subsequently stabilize the changes underlying the memory. Thus, every new memory results in a permanent representation in