Tech
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — A UC Davis team of cardiovascular specialists has demonstrated the effectiveness of using stents -- as compared to traditional open-chest surgery -- to repair aortas that are torn as the result of accidents. The researchers will present their findings at the American Association for Thoracic Surgery Aortic Symposium 2010, which takes place April 29-30 in New York City.
NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites are helping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) keep tabs on the extent of the recent Gulf oil spill with satellite images from time to time. NOAA is the lead agency on oil spills and uses airplane fly-overs to assess oil spill extent.
In this latest image acquired by ESA's Envisat on Thursday at 16:23 UTC, oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico can be seen as a dark blue swirl advancing toward the Louisiana coast.
On Thursday night, the oil spill – five times larger than first estimated – had spread to just under 5 km from the coast, threatening environmental disaster.
A Texas A&M University scientist spends hours at a time peering at slides of pollen samples, comparing them to track down the origins of honey with questionable heritage. Some of the samples contain labels from other countries when in fact they originated in China but were re-routed to avoid tariffs of up to 500 percent, says Vaughn Bryant, a palynologist and an anthropology professor at Texas A&M University.
Pokeberries – the weeds that children smash to stain their cheeks purple-red and that Civil War soldiers used to write letters home – could be the key to spreading solar power across the globe, according to researchers at Wake Forest University's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.
Nanotech Center scientists have used the red dye made from pokeberries to coat their efficient and inexpensive fiber-based solar cells. The dye acts as an absorber, helping the cell's tiny fibers trap more sunlight to convert into power.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is making it easier to find chemical information online. EPA is releasing a database, called ToxRefDB, which allows scientists and the interested public to search and download thousands of toxicity testing results on hundreds of chemicals. ToxRefDB captures 30 years and $2 billion of testing results.
Washington, DC— Doctors at Children's National Medical Center have found that carbon monoxide levels in the blood of young children increase during routine general anesthesia.
Forget what you know about how diseases are diagnosed—new research published in the May 2010 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) details a noninvasive ground-breaking tool that detects signs of disease at early molecular stages before symptoms can be seen using traditional methods. Even better, this tool promises to detect some eye diseases so early that they may be reversed before any permanent damage can occur.
A series of novel imaging agents could light up tumors as they begin to form – before they turn deadly – and signal their transition to aggressive cancers.
The compounds – fluorescent inhibitors of the enzyme cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) – could have broad applications for detecting tumors earlier, monitoring a tumor's transition from pre-malignancy to more aggressive growth, and defining tumor margins during surgical removal.
A pioneering world first robotics system operation is to be conducted at Glenfield Hospital Leicester thanks to expertise at the University of Leicester and University Hospitals of Leicester.
Dr André Ng, Senior Lecturer in Cardiovascular Sciences at the University of Leicester and Consultant Cardiologist and Electrophysiologist, Glenfield Hospital, University Hospitals of Leicester, is the first person in the world to carry out the operation remotely on patients using this system.
Scientists have discovered that changes in the amount of ice floating in the polar oceans are causing sea levels to rise.
The research, published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, is the first assessment of how quickly floating ice is being lost today.
According to Archimedes' principle, any floating object displaces its own weight of fluid. For example, an ice cube in a glass of water does not cause the glass to overflow as it melts.
Pop a bubble while washing the dishes and you're likely to release a few drops of water trapped when the soapy sphere formed. A few years ago, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) pioneered a method* using a microscopic fluidic (microfluidic) device that exploits the same principle to create liquid-filled vesicles called liposomes from phospholipids, the fat complexes that are the building blocks for animal cell membranes.
The promise of switchgrass, the challenges for forests and the costs of corn-based ethanol production: Ecological scientists review the many factors surrounding biofuel crop production and its implications on ecosystem health in three new Biofuels and Sustainability Reports. Produced by the Ecological Society of America (ESA), the nation's largest organization of ecological scientists, and sponsored by the Energy Foundation, these reports explore the production and use of biofuels from an ecological perspective.