In a major scientific breakthrough, a new blood pressure measurement device is set to revolutionise the way patients' blood pressure is measured.
The new approach, invented by scientists at the University of Leicester and in Singapore, has the potential to enable doctors to treat their patients more effectively because it gives a more accurate reading than the current method used. It does this by measuring the pressure close to the heart – the central aortic systolic pressure or CASP.
Washington—February 17, 2011--The convergence of people, animals, and our environment has created a new dynamic in which the health of each group is inextricably and globally interconnected, without borders. It is against this background that One Health has emerged as a multidisciplinary effort to attain optimal health of humans, animals and our environment.
New research gives the first accurate estimate of how much faster the Earth's core is rotating compared to the rest of the planet.
Previous research had shown that the Earth's core rotates faster than the rest of the planet. However, scientists from the University of Cambridge have discovered that earlier estimates of 1 degree every year were inaccurate and that the core is actually moving much slower than previously believed – approximately 1 degree every million years. Their findings are published today, Sunday 20 February, in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The new research also has implications far beyond a single parasitic disease, the researchers say. T. spiralis is just one of many thousands of parasitic roundworms called nematodes that, according to the World Health Organization, infect 2 billion people worldwide, severely sickening 300 million. Other species of parasitic nematodes cause diseases in pets and livestock and billions of dollars of crop losses annually.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – While many researchers generally credit the desire for smaller families for the decline in fertility rates in developing, low-income countries, new research suggests that prevention of unwanted births may actually be a larger factor.
The advent of safe and more effective birth control means that people have better control of when and if they have children, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Ask any political leader if they are in favor of sustainability, and the pat answer is typically a resounding, "Yes."
Evaluating its effectiveness, however, is a much trickier endeavor. Thomas Dietz, a sociology and environmental science and policy professor at Michigan State University, took steps to indentify a universal framework to evaluate sustainability at a national gathering of scientists Feb. 20.
"Over the last couple of generations, there has been a huge amount of groundwater pollution worldwide, and this has had a negative impact on our drinking water supply," says Barbara Sherwood Lollar, Canada Research Chair in Isotope Geochemistry of the Earth and the Environment at the University of Toronto.
Washington — New evidence bolsters the notion that deep saline groundwaters in South Africa's Witwatersrand Basin may have remained isolated for many thousands, perhaps even millions, of years.
The study, recently accepted for publication in Chemical Geology, found the noble gas neon dissolved in water in three-kilometre deep crevices.
The global scientific community is capable of policing its own behavior and should resist creation of a central oversight body to enforce 'universal standards' that may have unintended consequences, a renowned physicist and director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin said Saturday.
University of Rochester optics professor Jannick Rolland has developed an optical technology that provides unprecedented images under the skin's surface. The aim of the technology is to detect and examine skin lesions to determine whether they are benign or cancerous without having to cut the suspected tumor out of the skin and analyze it in the lab. Instead, the tip of a roughly one-foot-long cylindrical probe is placed in contact with the tissue, and within seconds a clear, high-resolution, 3D image of what lies below the surface emerges.
While a world free of nuclear weapons remains a goal for governments around the world, nuclear security constitutes a major challenge for the 21st century, as recognised at the 2010 nuclear security summit in Washington. Citizens are generally aware of international efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but they are often unaware of nuclear security research and the important role science in this field. A new European nuclear security training centre and enhanced international collaboration are good examples.
The arrival of affordable, high throughput DNA sequencing, coupled with improved bioinformatics and statistical analyses is bringing about major advances in the field of molecular plant breeding. Multidisciplinary breeding programs on the world's major crop plants are able to investigate genome-wide variations in DNA sequences and link them to the inheritance of highly complex traits controlled by many genes, such as hybrid vigor. Furthermore, there has been a step-change in speed and cost-effectiveness.
SAN DIEGO, CA – Despite known risks and outcomes of the common elbow procedure known as Tommy John surgery, parents, coaches and players still have incorrect assumptions regarding player performance, say researchers presenting their study at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's Specialty Day in San Diego, CA (February 19th).
DALLAS – Feb. 17, 2011 – Low levels of the anti-aging hormone Klotho may serve as an early warning sign of the presence of kidney disease and its deadly cardiovascular complications, according to findings by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers.
Using mice, investigators found that soft-tissue calcification, a common and serious side effect of chronic kidney disease (CKD), improves when Klotho hormone levels are restored. The study is available online in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
One bad apple is all it takes to spoil the barrel. And one misfolded protein may be all that's necessary to corrupt other proteins, forming large aggregations linked to several incurable neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Stanford biology Professor Ron Kopito has shown that the mutant, misfolded protein responsible for Huntington's disease can move from cell to cell, recruiting normal proteins and forming aggregations in each cell it visits.