Imagine if your computer only allowed you to see one line at a time, no matter what you were doing – reading e-mail, looking at a Web site, doing research. That's the challenge facing blind computer users today. But new research from North Carolina State University is moving us closer to the development of a display system that would allow the blind to take full advantage of the Web and other computer applications.
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A small study of children with cancer enrolled in therapeutic clinical research trials shows that they don't fully understand what physicians and parents tell them about their participation, nor do they feel they are genuinely involved in the choice to take part.
The study, led by Yoram Unguru, M.D., an associate faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, will be published online March 29 in the journal Pediatrics.
DALLAS – March 29, 2010 – Minority children in the U.S. face a pervasive gap in the quality and extent of health care received compared to Caucasians, according to a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics written by a UT Southwestern Medical Center physician.
The country's 31.4 million minority children face higher overall death rates than Caucasians, and certain groups face greater violence and higher incidence of HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, asthma, ADHD and certain types of cancers, according to the report.
Engineering yeast to transform sugars more efficiently into alcohols could be an economically and environmentally sound way to replace fossil fuels, say scientists presenting at the Society for General Microbiology's spring meeting in Edinburgh today.
Dr Christian Weber and Professor Eckhard Boles from Frankfurt University, Germany, have worked out how to modify yeast cells so that they successfully convert a wider range of sugars from plant waste such as wheat and rice straw into alcohol that can be used as biofuel.
By combining a new generation of piezoelectric nanogenerators with two types of nanowire sensors, researchers have created what are believed to be the first self-powered nanometer-scale sensing devices that draw power from the conversion of mechanical energy. The new devices can measure the pH of liquids or detect the presence of ultraviolet light using electrical current produced from mechanical energy in the environment.
The Applied Forensic Sciences Department at Mercyhurst College continues its landmark research into the recovery and interpretation of burned human remains from fatal fire scenes with a mock fire and excavation in Montgomery County, Pa., this weekend.
Most people have experienced back pain – and many hope that massage will relieve it. But not all forms of massage have been scientifically proven to help against low back pain. That is what the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) pointed out in information published on informedhealthonline.org today.
University students have developed a computer game that is operated by eye movements, which could allow people with severe physical disabilities to become 'gamers' for the first time, they announce today.
The students, from Imperial College London, have adapted an open source game called 'Pong', where a player moves a bat to hit a ball as it bounces around the screen. The adaptation enables the player to move the bat using their eye.
To play the game, the user wears special glasses containing an infrared light and a webcam that records the movement of one eye.
Once considered a hospital anomaly, community-acquired infections with drug-resistant strains of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus now turn up regularly among children hospitalized in the intensive-care unit, according to research from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is part of an international sea search operation formed to locate the deep-sea wreck site of Air France Flight 447 and to retrieve the flight recorders from the Airbus A 330.
University of California, Berkeley, biologists have found a signal that keeps stem cells alive in the adult brain, providing a focus for scientists looking for ways to re-grow or re-seed stem cells in the brain to allow injured areas to repair themselves.
The researchers discovered in fruit flies that keeping the insulin receptor revved up in the brain prevents the die-off of neural stem cells that occurs when most regions of the brain mature into their adult forms. Whether the same technique will work in humans is unknown, but the UC Berkeley team hopes to find out.
The effectiveness of ordinary surgical masks as opposed to respirators in protecting health care workers against the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus has been the subject of debate. An observational study published in the April 1, 2010 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, available online (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/651159), suggests that surgical masks are just as effective as respirators in this regard.
Queensland, Australia was recently hit by its second tropical cyclone of the season.
Tropical Cyclone Olga, which made landfall on the east coast of Queensland just south of Cairns back in late January, brought widespread rains to the region. The most recent cyclone to hit Queensland is Tropical Cyclone Ului, which also made landfall on the east coast of Queensland but much farther south near Airlie Beach south of Townsville.
Scientists from Frankfurt´s Goethe University and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) developed a system that substantially reduces the energy consumption for processing huge amounts of data. They improved over the power efficiency of the former record holders from Stanford University by a factor of three to four. The record is listed in the "sort benchmark", which is published by companies like Hewlett-Packard und Microsoft.
Just like the old song by Buck Owens, "Tiger by the Tail," NASA satellite imagery showed that Imani appears to have developed a "tail" of clouds extending southeast from its center. It has indeed become a "tiger" because it is now a category one cyclone on the Saffir-Simpson Scale as it continues to move through the Southern Indian Ocean.
The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Cyclone Imani on March 25 at 0747 UTC (3:47 a.m. EDT) and it showed Imani developed a "tail" of clouds, extending to its southeast.