Arkansas
DURHAM, NC -- A carefully administered daily dose of peanuts has been so successful as a therapy for peanut allergies that a select group of children is now off treatment and eating peanuts daily, report doctors at Duke University Medical Center and Arkansas Children's Hospital.
Beyond the winter chill that many of us have to contend with, there's also stormy space weather in the forecast for the week. A fast-growing sunspot group designated AR 10720 has been causing a stir as it sent a series of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, hurtling through space at breakneck speed. The large blast on Monday was classified as X-3, with "X" being the most powerful designation, followed by the degree of severity. Scientists expected the charged radiation from that event to have reached Earth by Tuesday night or Wednesday.
physicists have discovered a new phase in tiny nanodisks and nanorods that potentially may enable researchers to increase memory storage by more than one thousand fold. This finding also opens a new area in physics to fundamental investigation. ''This ordered phase with technological relevance is previously unknown... The new phase is possible because the nano-size of the disks wouldn't allow disorder due to properties no one has characterized before.''
Eighth-grade girls who think they have some control over their lives and who have high expectations for their future education may be less likely than their peers to become pregnant during high school, a new study suggests.
Nearly one-third of patients with advanced multiple myeloma who had failed current standard therapy of chemotherapy or stem cell transplantation responded to thalidomide for a median duration of nearly one year in a Mayo Clinic study of the effects of thalidomide on myeloma. The findings are reported in the January issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Many studies in the last three years have determined that thalidomide is effective in the treatment of multiple myeloma, following the initial report by researchers at the University of Arkansas. However, information is limited on how long thalidomide therapy works and on survival rates with such therapy.
A new study by a University of Arkansas psychologist proposes that beliefs about the afterlife may amount to more than a cultural construct. They may in fact have a biological basis ? arising from the human brain's unique ability to comprehend the mental states of other people. "The vast majority of cultures, if not all of them, have developed some theory about what happens to personal consciousness after death. Even in our own culture, 82 percent of Americans believe in some form of personal continuation after death," said the study's lead author. "There are superficial differences in religious beliefs between cultures, but those all arise out of the same question. Beliefs in an afterlife ? or at least thoughts about life after death ? are both universal and natural."
The energy required to create an accurate quantum computer may limit the ability of scientists to make these novel devices small, fast, cheap and efficient, says a University of Arkansas researcher. Quantum computing relies on using single atomic particles as units for information storage. Manipulating this information requires pulsed electromagnetic fields?which contain energy. The researcher found that the energy needed to perform a calculation is inversely proportional to the error rate: In other words, more energy means less uncertainty.
A completely new type of therapy, using a unique class of synthetic compounds, may someday protect both men and women from the bone-weakening disease osteoporosis. Researchers reported in the October 25 issue of Science that early studies of one of these compounds called estren successfully preserved and even restored bone mass in an animal model without the side effects associated with sex hormone therapies.
