Science In The News Daily
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first Pap test until age 21, and be screened less often than recommended in the past.
The advice, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is meant to decrease unnecessary testing and potentially harmful treatment, particularly in teenagers and young women. The group's previous guidelines had recommended yearly testing for young women, starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse, but no later than age 21.
Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chairwoman of a panel in the obstetricians' group that developed the Pap smear guidelines.
Read more...
Save to Library
from National Geographic News
A "saber-toothed cat in armor" and a pancake-shaped predator are among the strange crocodile cousins whose bones have been found beneath the windswept dunes of the Sahara, archaeologists say.
The diverse menagerie of reptiles ruled Gondwana--a landmass that later broke up into the southern continents--about a hundred million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.
"There's an entire croc world brewing in Africa that we really had only an inkling about before," said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and leader of a new study. "We knew about SuperCroc, the titan of all crocs, but we didn't have quite an idea of what existed in the shadows of the Cretaceous...."
Read more...
Save to Library
from Nature News
Plant biologists have something special to be thankful for this US Thanksgiving Day. The genome of maize (corn)--a staple crop first introduced by Native Americans to the European settlers centuries ago--has finally been sequenced.
The genetic secrets of maize, one of the world's most widely grown grains, should accelerate efforts to develop improved crop varieties to meet the world's growing hunger for food, animal feed and fuel.
The genome "is really a tremendous resource," says John Doebley, a maize geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the project. "It gives us a tool for mapping genes that we didn't have before."
Read more...
Save to Library
from Popular Mechanics
San Jose, Calif. -- Scientists at IBM's Almaden research center have built the biggest artificial brain ever--a cell-by-cell simulation of the human visual cortex: 1.6 billion virtual neurons connected by 9 trillion synapses. This computer simulation, as large as a cat's brain, blows away the previous record--a simulated rat's brain with 55 million neurons--built by the same team two years ago.
"This is a Hubble Telescope of the mind, a linear accelerator of the brain," says Dharmendra Modha, the Almaden computer scientist who will announce the feat at the Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Ore. In other words, in the realm of computer science, the team's undertaking is grand.
... Modha hopes the simulation, assembled using neuroscience data from rats, cats, monkeys and humans, will help scientists better understand how the brain works--and, in particular, how the cortical microcolumn manages to perform such a wide range of tasks.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
About 15,000 years ago, North America was home to an astonishing number of large plant-eating mammals--giant sloths, mastodons, mammoths. A thousand years later, they were all gone, wiped from the face of the Earth with sudden finality.
Scientists have floated a variety of possible explanations for this mass die-off, from climate change to a cataclysmic asteroid impact. But now a team of American researchers may be closing in on the answer, hidden in the thousands-year-old muck of an Indiana lake.
... The research focused on the amounts of the fungus Sporormiella present in the sediments, according to Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a co-author of the paper appearing in today's issue of the journal Science.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Smithsonian Magazine
At the threshold of a sterile lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, I pull on a white clean-room suit, a surgical cap and mask, booties and latex gloves. My host, a mineralogist named Mike Zolensky, swabs my digital voice recorder with alcohol to remove flakes of skin and pocket lint. He doesn't want any detritus to contaminate the precious dust in the room.
Once inside, Zolensky retrieves a palm-size glass box from a cabinet. The box holds a rectangular chunk, less than two inches across, of eerily translucent material. I lean in and squint at it but can't quite focus on anything. Zolensky turns off the lights and hands me a laser pointer. The red beam reveals thin streaks in the chunk that start at its surface and penetrate fractions of an inch, like the traces of tiny bullets. "Those are the comet impacts," he says. "It's beautiful to look at."
The tracks were made during the world's first--and only--attempt to chase a comet and bring a bit of it home. The NASA mission, called Stardust, sent a spacecraft to Comet Wild 2 (pronounced "VILT-too") on a seven-year journey that ended in 2006. It brought back the only material--other than moon rocks--taken directly from an extraterrestrial body.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Christian Science Monitor
The Internet revolution may finally be televised. Innocuous little software applications, popularly known as "widgets," may turn out to be the back door to your TV screen that Internet companies have been waiting for.
For more than a decade, businesses have been trying to make the Internet available on the largest screen in most homes. In 1996, Time Warner offered WebTV, which failed to find an audience and folded. Even today, projects like Hewlett Packard's MediaSmart (2006) and Apple TV (2007) have yet to win over large numbers of viewers, hampered by complicated setups or limited programming choices.
Widgets promise to bring the perks of the Internet to TV screens, using a familiar remote control instead of a computer mouse. All indications are that widgets are going to "move very quickly to a great many of the TVs being sold in the next few years--if not all of them," says Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates, a market research firm in Dallas that specializes in emerging consumer technologies.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Scientist (Registration Required)
The government agency tasked with funding crucial life science research needs to focus more attention on ethical quandaries and nefarious business practices that often obscure the path from discovery to public benefit, says a strongly worded letter to Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), signed by more than 100 biomedical researchers, journal editors, and health care administrators in the US.
"...we ask that you acknowledge the research gap on the effect of conflicts of interest and commercial influence on medical decision making," the letter reads, "and set in motion a process that leads to recognition of the importance of funding studies on research ethics, the beliefs and behaviors of researchers and clinicians, and the effects of industry-academic relationships on the generation and dissemination of medical knowledge."
"It would be great to raise [the NIH's] awareness, and maybe have them actually do an RFA [request for applications] on this," said Adriane Fugh-Berman, director of PharmedOut, a group seeking to educate physicians on how the pharmaceutical industry influences prescribing practices, which spearheaded the writing and dissemination of the letter.
Read more...
Save to Library
from New Scientist
Kitted out with the latest scuba gear, Garry Momber peers through the murky water to the seabed below. It's dark--Momber is 11 metres below the water's surface and the black peat of the seabed absorbs what little light reaches the bottom. Then the tide turns, and as clearer water flows in from the open seas, the decaying remains of an ancient forest emerge from the gloom.
Working quickly, he records details of the exposed material before the strengthening current forces him away from the site. This is all in a day's work for Momber, who is director of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology in Southampton, UK.
His job is to search for clues to a prehistoric world lost beneath the waves in the channel that separates the Isle of Wight from the south coast of England .... Momber's work is just part of a growing trend for searching the deep for clues to our distant past.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Scientific American
More than half a million people in the U.S. have died from HIV infection, and more than a million currently live with the virus, but a relative handful of people infected with HIV never get treatment for it and never get sick from it. The immune systems of this small population--perhaps 50,000 Americans--somehow control the virus for long periods of time.
Of course, there is typically a bell curve of response to any disease, but figuring out how these people control the virus is one of the most vexing mysteries of the AIDS pandemic. Solving it might unlock new ways to prevent and treat HIV infection, and now several research teams are going after the answer.
... "Long-term nonprogressors" is a category of persons whose disease progresses less rapidly than average. Researchers originally used the term broadly but now they have been able to tease out two subsets of patients within a hierarchy...
Read more...
Save to Library
Total Records : 3723