A new article in The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics calls for a change in the regulations surrounding xenotransplantation, the transplanting of animal cells, tissues or organs into humans.
Although few xenotransplantation procedures have been done to this time, there appears to be a lack of awareness among potential xenotransplant patients about the risk of the procedures, and the required lifetime of infectious disease monitoring that come with it.
Juries across the country make decisions every day on the fate of defendants, ideally leading to prison sentences that fit the crime for the guilty and release for the innocent. Yet a new Northwestern University study shows that juries in criminal cases many times are getting it wrong.
In a set of 271 cases from four areas, juries gave wrong verdicts in at least one out of eight cases, according to “Estimating the Accuracy of Jury Verdicts,” a paper by a Northwestern University statistician that is being published in the July issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.
The prognosis for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), an autoimmune disease that mainly affects women in their reproductive years, has improved recently, prompting a shift toward improving quality of life.
For men with SLE, concerns have been raised about their future fertility.
USC computer scientist Kristina Lerman thinks she has found a new source of artificial intelligence computing power to solve difficult IT problems of information classification, reliability, and meaning - people.
She says that extracting 'metadata' about transactions -- who is talking to whom, who is listening, how conclusions are reached, and how they spread -- can help researchers answer currently refractory problems about documents: their accuracy and quality, their categorization, the relation of their embedded terminology.
A ban on smoking in England may be good for more than just public health. It may be good for the phone company. A new survey by Sheffield Hallam University and, not surprisingly, Virgin Mobile says smokers will turn to texting to talk about it and even improve their social lives in the process.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered that attaching polymeric nanoparticles to the surface of red blood cells dramatically increases the in vivo lifetime of the nanoparticles. The research, published in the July 07 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, could offer applications for the delivery of drugs and circulating bioreactors.
A £9.2m research centre at the University of Nottingham will break new ground in our understanding of plant growth and could lead to the development of drought-resistant crops for developing countries.
The Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB) will focus on cutting-edge research into plant biology — particularly the little-studied area of root growth, function and response to environmental cues.
Scientists of the Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment of the University of Granada have studied how some psychological variables such as erotophilia (positive attitude towards sexuality), sexual fantasies and anxiety are related to sexual desire in human beings.
The adaptive significance of the unique ability in many primates to distinguish red hues from green ones (i.e., trichromatic color vision) has always enticed debate among evolutionary biologists.
The conventional theory is that primates evolved trichromatic color vision to assist them in foraging, specifically by allowing them to detect red/orange food items from green leaf backgrounds.
Two new studies suggest older men and women taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, are prone to increased bone loss.
The jointly released studies by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University, and in San Francisco, Minneapolis, San Diego and Pittsburgh, found that elderly men taking the so-called SSRIs had lower bone mineral density, and that elderly women taking the antidepressants had a higher rate of yearly bone loss.
A new drug delivery method using nano-sized molecules to carry the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin to tumors improves the effectiveness of the drug in mice and increases their survival time, according to a study published online June 26 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Fish use the threat of punishment to keep would-be jumpers in the mating queue firmly in line and the social order stable, a new study led by Australian marine scientists has found.
Their discovery, which has implications for the whole animal kingdom including humans, has been hailed by some of the world’s leading biologists as a “must read” scientific paper and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B.
Any machinist will tell you that a little grease goes a long way toward making a tool work better. And that may soon hold true for plastic electronics as well.
Carnegie Mellon University chemists have found that grease can make some innovative plastics vastly better electrical conductors. They outline a chemical process that could become widely adopted to produce the next generation of tiny switches for transistors in radio frequency identification tags, flexible screen displays, and debit or key cards.
In a host of neurological diseases, including multiple sclerosis (MS) and several neuropathies, the protective covering surrounding the nerves – an insulating material called myelin – is damaged.
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science have now discovered an important new line of communication between nervous system cells that is crucial to the development of myelinated nerves – a discovery that may aid in restoring the normal function of the affected nerve fibers.
Umbilical cord blood may safely preserve insulin production in children newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, according to findings from a small national pilot study .
University of Florida researchers sought to determine whether it is feasible to use a patient’s own cord blood stem cells to neutralize the body’s autoimmune attack on the pancreas and help restore the organ’s ability to make insulin, which regulates how the body uses sugar and other nutrients for energy.