Technology
A California research team has mapped an entire group of human enzymes, providing important information for the development of a new generation of drugs to treat cancer and other diseases. The findings will be published in the Dec. 6 issue of Science. In the study, the team from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the biotechnology company SUGEN created a detailed catalog of the 518 protein kinase genes encoded by the human genome. Protein kinases are among the most important regulators of cell behavior. By chemically adding phosphate groups to other proteins, they control the activity of up to 30 percent of all cellular proteins, and are involved in almost all cellular functions.
Evacuating heat is one of the great problems facing engineers as they design faster laptops by downsizing circuit sizes and stacking chips one above the other. The heat from more circuits and chips increase the likelihood of circuit failures as well as overly heated laps. "Space, military, and consumer applications, are all bumping up against a thermal barrier," says Sandia researcher Mike Rightley, whose newly patented "smart" heat pipe seems to solve the problem. The simple, self-powered mechanism transfers heat to the side edge of the computer, where air fins or a tiny fan can dissipate the unwanted energy into air.
The prevailing view among scientists is that global climate change may prove beneficial to many farmers and foresters -- at least in the short term. The logic is straightforward: Plants need atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce food, and by emitting more CO2 into the air, our cars and factories create new sources of plant nutrition that will cause some crops and trees to grow bigger and faster. But an unprecedented three-year experiment conducted at Stanford University is raising questions about that long-held assumption. Writing in the journal Science, researchers concluded that elevated atmospheric CO2 actually reduces plant growth when combined with other likely consequences of climate change -- namely, higher temperatures, increased precipitation or increased nitrogen deposits in the soil.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the use of fossil fuels for household cooking and heating may make more environmental sense for the estimated 2 billion rural poor in the world, according to a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley. Because they contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuels have been largely dismissed as a viable alternative for the one-third of the world's population who now use coal and local biomass - including wood, crop residues and dung - for cooking and heating, said Kirk R. Smith, professor and chair of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. Efforts have been focused on equipping the rural poor with renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power.
A full-body computed tomography (CT) scan may be beneficial to fewer people than previously thought, according to a study presented December 3, 2002 at the 88th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago. The results of a second study pointed out the need to establish guidelines and standardized reporting systems for this hotly debated diagnostic procedure.
Study findings from the Inner City Health Research Unit at St. Michael's Hospital/ University of Toronto and the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center demonstrate that screening and treating new immigrants from developing nations for the latent stage of tuberculosis infection would result in substantial public health and economic benefits. Results are published in tomorrow's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. Tuberculosis is one of the world's most prevalent diseases which infects nearly two billion people worldwide or roughly one-third of the world's total population, most of which live in developing nations.
For several years it has been widely believed that increased ultraviolet-B radiation because of thinning of atmospheric ozone was a major culprit in deforming amphibian offspring and dwindling populations. Now two new studies cast serious doubt on that assumption, and the lead author of one says the belief could have had negative impacts on efforts to save amphibians. "All of the concentration on UV might have misdirected our conservation and research priorities," said Wendy Palen, a University of Washington zoology doctoral student.
Researchers have developed an automated system that can swiftly map capillaries in a live tumor. What used to take days of manually tracing the vessels, now takes two minutes. The diagnostic tool, in use at Harvard Medical School and at Northeastern University, is a boon to oncologists who aim to understand how blood vessels form in tumors.
Most baby-boomers are not aging well, and as they enter their golden years, the burden and cost of their health care will only increase according to a new Emory University study that found only one in five adults has good, comprehensive mental and physical health. Baby-boomers composed the largest demographic portion of the survey, and a majority of them fell within the "incompletely healthy" category, signaling that only a few are aging with their health intact, and many have the potential to develop serious illnesses, says Corey Lee Keyes, lead researcher and assistant professor of sociology at Emory. The study appears in the November/December issue of the "American Journal of Health Promotion."
A unique design for self-organizing robots controlled by "hormonal" software is moving toward space. At the Robosphere 2002 conference held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley November 14-15, Wei-Min Shen of the USC School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) presented an overview of an audacious project to have pieces of the proposed half-mile-long Space Solar Power System satellite put themselves together--self-assemble--without the help of astronauts.
Scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have identified a signaling pathway that is turned on when benign moles turn into early-stage malignant melanoma. The pathway could provide a new target for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of the most lethal form of skin cancer. The research was reported in the December issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research.
NASA Hubble Space Telescope's crisp view has allowed an international team of astronomers to apply a previously unproven technique (astrometry) for making a precise measurement of the mass of a planet outside our solar system. The Hubble results place the planet at 1.89 to 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter, our solar system's largest world. Previous estimates, about which there are some uncertainties, place the planet's mass between 1.9 and 100 times that of Jupiter.
Forget about chocolate and greasy foods. Eating too much refined bread and cereal may be the true culprit behind the pimples that plague many a youngster, reports Britain's New Scientist magazine. That's the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Highly processed breads and cereals are easily digested. The resulting flood of sugars makes the body produce high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1). This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones. These encourage pores in the skin to ooze large amounts of sebum, the greasy goop that acne-promoting bacteria love. IGF-1 also encourages skin cells called keratinocytes to multiply, a hallmark of acne, the team say in a paper that will appear in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.
One of the world's most successful fusion devices of the eighties, the ASDEX experiment of Max-Planck-Institut f?r Plasmaphysik at Garching, near Munich, went into operation again on 2 December 2002 at Southwestern Institute of Physics in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China. Five years after shutdown in 1990 ASDEX was given to the People's Republic of China. The ASDEX (Axially Symmetric Divertor Experiment) large-scale device was shut down in 1990 after ten years of successful experimentation, when its successor, ASDEX Upgrade, went into operation. The internationally acclaimed results achieved with ASDEX ? including the discovery of a plasma state with improved thermal insulation ? made it one of the most successful fusion devices of the eighties.
Researchers say they have found defects in the gene that produces a common protein in urine and that these defects are linked to two inherited kidney diseases. For six years, the researchers had studied a family from Western North Carolina that has been plagued with a rare kidney disease, trying to learn more about the genetics of the disease. The gene ordinarily produces a protein called either uromodulin or Tamm-Horsfall protein. Uromodulin is the most common protein released into the urine, but its function is unclear. Researchers identified mutations in the gene leading to defects in the protein. Defects in this protein led to a disease called familial juvenile hyperuricemic nephropathy.
