Heavens

Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Science (MIPS) researchers, in collaboration with the biotechnology company Starpharma Holdings Ltd (ASX:SPL) have developed a new method to deliver medications that may benefit thousands of patients with particular types of cancer, HIV and lymphatic conditions world-wide.

The Melbourne-based research team has shown how PEGylated Polylysine dendrimers, a new type of nano-sized drug delivery system, can be altered to target either the lymphatic system or the bloodstream.

An analysis of more than 70,000 galaxies by University of California, Berkeley, University of Zurich and Princeton University physicists has them claiming that the universe – at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth – plays by the rules set out 95 years ago by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity. But that's not all.

Tropical cyclones typically don't form in the Southern Atlantic because the waters are usually too cool. However, forecasters at the Naval Research Laboratory noted that a low pressure system off the coast of Brazil appeared to have tropical storm-force winds yesterday.

Distant galaxy clusters mysteriously stream at a million miles per hour along a path roughly centered on the southern constellations Centaurus and Hydra. A new study led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., tracks this collective motion -- dubbed the "dark flow" -- to twice the distance originally reported.

To get life-threatening diseases under control, patients in the intensive care unit usually are administered many medications at the same time. Even for experts, it is difficult to keep track of the variety of possible side effects and interactions. The team headed by Dr. Thilo Bertsche, director of the cooperation unit for clinical pharmacy at Heidelberg University Hospital, has now shown that physicians can reduce serious events resulting from drug interactions by about half with the help of the "AiDKlinik" drug information system.

The Purple Mountain Observatory and the Department of Astronomy, Nanjing University, in Nanjing China-Research, cooperating with the Albert Einstein institute, in Hannover, Germany, put forward a model of the planar co-orbital circular restricted three-body problem, gave the equations of motion, a set of approximation formulas, and an approximate semi-analytical solution. The study is reported in Issue 53, No. 1 of SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy because of its significant research value.

Scientists have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in a galaxy in the early Universe.

The researchers, led by Durham University's Department of Physics, observed the massive galaxy as it would have appeared just three billion years after the Big Bang when the Universe was a quarter of its present age.

Forecasters are watching a low pressure area located off the east coast of Madagascar that appears ripe for development in the Southern Indian Ocean. If it becomes a tropical storm, it would be named Hubert.

In the first study of its kind in the United States, Henry Ford Hospital showed that skin transplant surgery is safe and effective for treating vitiligo.

Henry Ford researchers followed 23 patients for up to six months after surgery and found that the treated area regained on average 52 percent of its natural skin color. In eight patients with a specific type of vitiligo, the treated area regained on average 74 percent of its natural skin color.

The sooner people with diabetes start taking metformin, the longer the drug remains effective, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the March issue of Diabetes Care, a journal of the American Diabetes Association.

An international team of astronomers, including Professor Tom Marsh and Dr Danny Steeghs from the University of Warwick, have shown that the two stars in the binary HM Cancri definitely revolve around each other in a mere 5.4 minutes. This makes HM Cancri the binary star with by far the shortest known orbital period. It is also the smallest known binary. The binary system is no larger than 8 times the diameter of the Earth which is the equivalent of no more than a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

CHAPEL HILL – Children who have been abused psychologically, physically or sexually are more likely to suffer unexplained abdominal pain and nausea or vomiting than children who have not been abused, a study led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers concludes.

New breakthrough treatments for the most common cancers could soon come from cutting-edge research into some of the world's rarest tumors.

At the ESMO Conference on Sarcoma and GIST, to be held in Milan, Italy, on 9 and 10 March 2010, researchers and some of the world's leading experts will discuss exciting new science on sarcomas—a group of rare tumors found in muscle, blood vessels, deep skin tissues, nerves and the tissues around joints.

According to a new study, men employed in occupations with potential exposure to high levels of sunlight have a reduced risk of kidney cancer compared with men who were less likely to be exposed to sunlight at work. The study did not find an association between occupational sunlight exposure and kidney cancer risk in women. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study is the largest case-control study of kidney cancer to investigate the association with occupational sunlight exposure.

Shoulder motion after rotator cuff surgery remains significantly different when compared to the patient's opposite shoulder, according to Henry Ford Hospital researchers.

In the study, researchers used X-rays providing a 3D view of motion of the arm bone in relation to the shoulder blade, to compared motion in the shoulders of 14 patients who had arthroscopic surgical repair of tendon tears and no symptoms in their other shoulders.