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Buenos Aires, Argentina — Current research suggests that melatonin therapy may help treat uveitis, a common inflammatory eye disease. The related report by Sande et al., "Therapeutic Effect of Melatonin in Experimental Uveitis," appears in the December issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A Florida State University College of Medicine research team led by Yanchang Wang has discovered an important new layer of regulation in the cell division cycle, which could lead to a greater understanding of the way cancer begins.

A team at Rice University has determined that a strip of graphite only 10 atoms thick can serve as the basic element in a new type of memory, making massive amounts of storage available for computers, handheld media players, cell phones and cameras.

LA JOLLA, CA, November 20, 2008—Scientists from the Scripps Research Institute have discovered the key chemical that signals Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, to become lethal. This finding opens up new avenues of exploration for the development of treatments for bacterial infections.

The study was published in the November 21 edition of the journal PLoS Pathogens.

University of British Columbia researchers have developed a technique that brings scientists a big step closer to unlocking the secrets of the most abundant form of matter in the universe.

A plasma – or ionized gas – can be as commonplace as in fluorescent light bulbs, or exotic in the extreme, as a thermonuclear explosion. The Earth's upper atmosphere is a plasma, as are lightning bolts and virtually all stars that light up the night sky.

In 430 B.C., a new and deadly disease—its cause remains a mystery—swept into Athens. The walled Greek city-state was teeming with citizens, soldiers and refugees of the war then raging between Athens and Sparta. As streets filled with corpses, social order broke down. Over the next three years, the illness returned twice and Athens lost a third of its population. It lost the war too. The Plague of Athens marked the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Greece.

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have posited an explanation for superconductivity that may open the door to the discovery of new, unconventional forms of superconductivity.

In a November 20 Nature letter, research led by Tuson Park and Joe D. Thompson describes a new explanation for superconductivity in non-traditional materials—one that describes a potentially new state of matter in which the superconducting material behaves simultaneously as a nonmagnetic material and a magnetic material.

Cordiality and mutually beneficial arrangements can be more important than hard-negotiated deals when it comes to cementing strong working relationships among supply chain partners, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

Women who are exposed to hairspray in the workplace during pregnancy have more than double the risk of having a son with the genital birth defect hypospadias, according to a new study published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study is the first to show a significant link between hairspray and hypospadias, one of the most common birth defects of the male genitalia, where the urinary opening is displaced to the underside of the penis. The causes of the condition are poorly understood.

When a flow reaches a certain speed, things get turbulent: The fluid or the gas no longer flows in an orderly fashion but whirls around wildly. However, in contrast to what researchers assumed until now, this state is not permanent. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, and the Technical University in Delft, Netherlands, have shown that in pipe flows, all turbulence will disappear with time. The new measurements are significantly more precise than all previous experiments and computer simulations concerned with this question.

Cardiovascular conditions leading to heart attacks and strokes are treated quite separately from common cancers of the prostate, breast or lung, but now turn out to involve some of the same critical mechanisms at the molecular level. This in turn provides clues to more effective therapies for both cancer and cardiovascular diseases, but requires researchers in these distinct fields to come together.

The cranes have been dismantled and the muddy paths have given way to an attractive park: inHaus2 is finished. "At least finished as far as construction is concerned," specifies Klaus Scherer of the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS, who heads the inHaus innovation center in Duisburg. "In terms of research and development, on the other hand, we are far from reaching the end. All the exciting projects planned with our application partners are now about to begin, and the labs, as we call them, have been or are being set up."

Many patients with cardiovascular disease are not given adequate drug therapy. This is the result of an international study. In the current edition of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2008; 105[45]: 769-75), Uwe Zeimer et al. present the German results of this prospective, one-year survey.

Delhi, India – "Waterproof" versions of popular varieties of rice, which can withstand 2 weeks of complete submergence, have passed tests in farmers' fields with flying colors. Several of these varieties are now close to official release by national and state seed certification agencies in Bangladesh and India, where farmers suffer major crop losses because of flooding of up to 4 million tons of rice per year. This is enough rice to feed 30 million people.