Sodium cyanide is highly toxic but vital for extracting metals such as gold from its ore. Currently sodium cyanide is transported to and from a site,
Among other things, MEMS devices are able to measure acceleration, gravity, chemicals, the indicators of disease or the presence of explosives.
Key scientific and technological advances in the CYPHER 2. 0 service include modelling the interaction of the reservoir's natural fracture networks with the fractures induced by the hydraulic fracturing process.
This results in a more accurate fracture network model with which to simulate the production performance of the completion design.
Critical operational factors can then be adjusted in real time between stages during the fracture treatment to further optimize well performance.
and also aid in the stimulation design to help improve their fracture efficiency and effectiveness.
and sensors into a desirable geometry with 5d data reconstruction Enhancing fracture determination from seismic data with improved full azimuth imaging
using full-azimuth fracture orientation and intensity analysis Wojciech Kobusinski, head of Depth Imaging Group at Geofizyka Torun,
such as in the medical industry. A surgeon could potentially ook through his hands to what he is actually operating on, for instance.
The lenses could even be applied to allow drivers to see through blind spots on their vehicles
#Could bacteria from honeybees replace antibiotics? Bacteria are increasingly outsmarting our most overused antibiotics creating a boom of drug-resistant diseases.
This could be the dawn of a post-antibiotic era the World health organization warns when common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill.
Honey is a natural antibacterial which helps explain why it never goes bad and why people have used it as medicine for thousands of years.
Its viscosity acidity and sugar content make it good at sealing wounds and it even contains small amounts of hydrogen peroxide.
But there's also something else at work. Could honey's secret weapon against bacteria be other bacteria?
According to a newly published study those 13 bacteria are experts at stifling other bacterial infections including dangerous superbug strains such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Pseudomonas aeruginosa and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE.
The bee bacteria beat every pathogen they faced a promising result given the global threat posed by superbugs.
but they did work wonders for 10 horses with persistent wounds. The bacteria were mixed with honey
and applied directly to the horses'wounds which had resisted other attempted remedies. The mixture healed all 10.
The researchers say their next step is to investigate wider use of these bacteria against topical infections in more animals including humans n
Is it a headache that there isn just one fast charging standard? You bet. One positive development is the availability of chargers that have wands for both types
resistance to stress and self-healing abilities could allow them to be used on airplane wings.
Since the fresh air radius of the billboard is up to five blocks it could go a long way toward reducing the health risks to inhabitants of large urban areas.
The man-made DNA could be used for everything from the manufacture of new drugs and vaccines to forensics
7 Clever Technologies Inspired By nature DNA alphabet The field of synthetic biology involves tinkering with DNA to create organisms capable of novel functions in medicine, energy and other areas.
"Compare this to a medicinal chemist, who explores a much greater diversity of structures in the small-molecule drugs they synthesize,
and when disorders like autism first take root researchers say. This is another installment in our suite of brain atlases to try to map how all genes are used across the brain
The team used brain tissue with no known abnormalities or viruses such as HIV. Researchers took snapshots of brains at two different stages of prenatal development.
Mice are used widely in biomedical research as a model for humans and these maps could give scientists insight into how mice brains are similar
Allen Institute for Brain science) The map of a healthy developing brain also provides clues to the origin of developmental disorders such as autism the researchers said.
Other studies have revealed certain genes that are active in autism. Lein's team saw these genes were turned on in newly generated excitatory neurons
(which activate other neurons) in the prenatal cortex suggesting autism may start in the womb as opposed to later in life.
and pieced together from scratch paving the way for designer organisms that could produce new medicines food products
and then synthesized the entire thing from scratch said study leader Jef Boeke a synthetic biologist at NYU Langone Medical center who was previously at Johns hopkins university.
Today he said the fungus is used also to makevaccines medicines and biofuels and the ability to create custom-made yeast would provide useful too for the biotech industry.
For example researchers could make synthetic strains of yeast to produce rare medicines such as the malarial drug artemisinin or vaccines like the Hepatitis b vaccine.
which seeks to treat diseases by replacing defective genes with functional ones. Synthesizing plant and animal genomes is a long way off Boeke said
as biologists and doctors are unlikely to be prepared to wait hours for an image to form. o
#'Astroskin'smart shirt monitors astronauts'health in Antarctica Remember that pivotal scene in the movie"Apollo 13"in which crewmembers rip the biomedical sensors off their bodies?
From the ground, doctors can see an astronaut's vital signs, as well as how well the spacefarers are sleeping
while spending 45 days in a previously unexplored region of the continent, are beaming their medical information back to civilization while wearing Astroskin graphicastroskin.
"CSA chief medical officer Raffi Kuyumijian said in a new videoreleased by the agency.""People who live in remote communities,
for example, will have an easy access to a doctor,"Kuyumijian added.""They can have these shirts on them all the time.
and alert the doctors following at a distance.""Indeed, the technology is used already for sports monitoring On earth.
#For stem cells in 30 minutes just add acid Embryonic stem cells have huge potential in treating everything from cancer to diabetes because of their ability to morph into almost any other type of cell within the human body.
This stress was enough to make the cells pluripotent in as little as 30 minutes. Not only that they were more malleable than the ips cells developed back in 2006.
I would have thought never external stress could have this effect. The idea came from another biologist at the same facility Haruko Obokata who says it took her five years to persuade her colleagues that this technique would work.
The work ties into Obokata's other research into stress. As explained on her lab's web page All organisms possess instincts to survive exposures to external stresses by adapting to their environment and to some degree regenerating injured tissues or organs.
Thus it is not surprising to observe dramatic cellular plasticity after exposure to significant external stresses such as an injury.
but said It's exciting to think about the new possibilities these findings offer us not only in regenerative medicine but cancer as well.
and that it could lead to personalized reprogrammed cell therapies to treat a variety of conditions.
Clearly kitchenware will never be the same and without the potential toxicity of conventional nonstick surfaces.
Aside from its importance in the development of quantum computers, the maser could also lead to advancements in a variety of fields such as communications, sensing and medicine,
The opportunity to improve access to education health care financial systems and employment will take a revolution one that we are tremendously proud to be said part of Branson.
instead there are hard data on how much it will cost to treat the asthma cases that are caused by the extra pollution.
Of course, the disease-eradicating, condom-reinventing Microsoft cofounder didn actually drink human excrement Sedro-Woolley-produced sewage sludge at its finest.
Nature News In a milestone for a politically charged field, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the world's first clinical trial of a therapy generated by human embryonic stem cells.
phase I safety study of a stem cellerived therapy for spinal cord injury. The publicly traded company has an extensive patent portfolio relating to embryonic stem cell research,
In the trial, eight to ten paralyzed individuals within 7 to 14 days of their injury will be injected at the point of injury with stem cellerived precursors to oligodendrocytes,
The cells have demonstrated both capabilities in animals. 1 The company said it expects to begin enrolment early this summer at up to seven US medical centres.
Politics and approval In a conference call with analysts and reporters, Geron's president and CEO Thomas Okarma said that the trial"marks the dawn of a new era in medical therapeutics.
Those in hot, arid regions may be losing trees because of drought stress. Even if rainfall is stable,
and his team captured may be symptoms of climatic stress that make the forests more liable to such catastrophes."
"These changes in mortality rates are really an indication of overall system stress, and when trees are stressed,
Nature News The global drive to eliminate the last pockets of polio infection is to receive a boost of more than half-a billion dollars from international donors.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary international and the governments of the UK and Germany this week pledged $630 million over five years for a massive final push to eradicate the crippling disease.
along with the World health organization, UNICEF and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
The new money will go to vaccination programmes, better disease surveillance and research on new vaccines.
Eradication hope"We are on the brink of eradicating one of the most feared diseases in the world"
He adds that the big injection of new money should galvanize governments and non-governmental organizations to step up funding
it would follow smallpox, which in 1980 became the first disease to be officially wiped out from the planet.
The global polio initiative, a mammoth programme involving the vaccination of billions of children, has reduced the number of polio cases by 99
%since it's launch in 1988, from an estimated 350,000 cases in 125 countries to just 1, 600 last year.
Pockets of the disease exist in four countries: Nigeria, where polio vaccines were denounced by religious leaders,
and false rumours circulated that they carried HIV and caused female infertility; the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar provinces in India, where vaccine effectiveness has been hampered by poor sanitation and high population density;
and in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where conflict has hampered vaccination campaigns. Unless the virus is eliminated in these regions,
a single case of the infectious disease could spawn new outbreaks of the disease, and export it to the many countries that are now officially polio-free,
and so risk undoing the progress already made. The existence of residual pockets of infection is the main reason why the drive to completely erase the disease has failed so far,
with target dates repeatedly being pushed back. Budget gap But in recent years, the global polio programme has faced funding shortfalls,
The large new commitments by non-governmental organizations therefore offers a much-needed cash injection to finish the job.
"Rotarians, government leaders and health professionals have made a phenomenal commitment to get us to a point at
a UK medical research charity that is funding the new grant along with the UK's Department for International Development and Canada's International Development Research Council.
They also want to raise an endowment from international donors that could provide a more stable source of funding for medical research in Kenya.
a UK epidemiologist who has been based in Africa for most of the past 15 years. He warns against excessively high expectations for this first attempt."
"Claustrophobia is a widespread problem in clinical MRI, "says Pruessmann. Removing the coil from the machine provides a less constraining cavity.
The technique was unveiled last May at the International Society for Magnetic resonance in Medicine meeting in Toronto
This provoked Graham Wiggins of the Center for Biomedical Imaging at New york University's Medical center to build his own version.
Forget about it Current treatments for patients who have strong fearful memories, for example people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD
"There are a lot of treatments for anxiety disorders but you see a lot of relapse, "says Kindt. In addition, the drug treatment didn't affect how well the participants remembered the link between the spiders and the shock.
and may soon try out the therapy on stronger fearful memories. To discover whether drug treatment would change this,
and may soon try out the therapy on stronger fearful memories r
#The genomics of the sniffles: Nature News Genome sequences of the cold virus could reveal new secrets behind its prowess.
could be used to design new therapies against colds or to determine, for example, why one strain can cause more severe symptoms than another."
colds in children can cause middle-ear infections or increase the likelihood of developing asthma.
Asthma sufferers, in turn, can find that catching a cold worsens their symptoms.""From that perspective, rhinovirus deserves to be attacked with the modern tools we have available to us,
"says Stephen Liggett, director of cardiopulmonary genomics at the University of Maryland Medical center in Baltimore,
What's more, a newly discovered class of rhinoviruses called HRV-C can cause serious, flu-like lung infections."
along with 10 additional viruses isolated from patients with upper respiratory infections. They compared these sequences
more symptomatic infections.""To date, there has been a lack of understanding as to which rhinovirus gives you a more complex cold,
says Caroline Tapparel, a virologist at the University Hospital of Geneva in Switzerland, but she cautions that with the exception of the troublesome HRV-C viruses,
and leukaemia after receiving a stem-cell transplant from a donor who is genetically resistant to HIV.
and prepared to perform a transplant. But haematologist Gero H tter of the Charit Universit tsmedizin in Berlin took the search for a donor one step further.
but when he realized that his patient would need a transplant, he remembered a paper he had read more than a decade earlier about HIV resistance in people who carry a specific genetic mutation.
his patient might be less susceptible to HIV infection. The patient had 80 matches in the bone-marrow registries of the German Bone marrow Donor Center,
and in February 2007, the transplant was performed. Even though the technique has only been applied in one patient
if you can make the majority of your cells resistant to infection, you can really stop the virus. Meanwhile,
The virus could be lurking in cells that doctors have not been able to test such as cells in the brain or heart.
The risks involved with a bone-marrow transplant far outweigh those that come with years of antiretroviral drug therapy
Before receiving the transplant, recipients are conditioned with drugs and radiation to destroy their own blood-producing stem cells.
The procedure leaves them vulnerable to infection, and there is also the possibility that their bodies will eventually reject the transplant.
You could. One CCR5 inhibitor, called maraviroc, is made by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer and is approved for use in the United states and Europe.
#What causes schizophrenia?:Nature News Findings from a'brain training'study challenge theory. Researchers in Sweden have revealed a surprising change in brain biochemistry that occurs during the training of working memory,
The discovery may have implications for understanding disorders in which working memory is deficient such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD.
Torkel Klingberg, a neurologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and his colleagues studied what happened to D1 receptors in the brains of healthy young men during such training1.
"The density of neurotransmitter receptors is known to change in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, and this has been considered a cause of the diseases,
"says Klingberg.""But now we see that cognitive activity also affects receptor density.""In the future, researchers will need to consider
or part of the disease process itself, he says. Calming effect?""This is an important consideration that applies to many findings of purported brain changes in mental disease,"comments Sol Snyder, a neuroscientist at Johns hopkins university in Baltimore, Maryland."
and evolved to fight disease. Despite previous reports that the German group's Neanderthal samples may have been contaminated with DNA from modern humans1,
chemical and toxicological properties of nanomaterials they make or import in quantities greater than one kilogram.
now that air pollution is a serious health risk, "says Wang.""But attempts, such as China's, to regulate air quality have not yet borne fruit."
#RNA fragments may yield rapid, accurate cancer diagnosis An article by Scientific American. Fragments of RNA that cells eject in fatty droplets may point the way to a new era of cancer diagnosis,
potentially eliminating the need for invasive tests in certain cases. Cancer tumor cells shed microvesicles containing proteins and RNA fragments, called exosomes, into cerebral spinal fluid, blood, and urine.
Within these exosomes is genetic information that can be analyzed to determine the cancer s molecular composition and state of progression.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered that exosomes preserve the genetic information of their parent cells in 2008
however exosomes have not seen widespread clinical testing as a means of cancer diagnosis until now.""We have never really been able to detect the genetic components of a tumor by blood
or spinal fluid, says Harvard university neurologist Fred Hochberg.""This is really a new strategy. He says exosome diagnostic tests could potentially detect
and monitor the progression of a wide variety of cancers. He is one of the lead researchers in a multicenter clinical study using new exosomal diagnostic tests developed by New york city-based Exosome Diagnostics to identify a genetic mutation found exclusively in glioma, the most common form of brain cancer.
When treating other forms of cancer, surgeons are able to biopsy tumors to diagnose and monitor the state of the disease.
For brain cancers like glioma, however, multiple biopsies can be life threatening. Bob Carter head of neurosurgery at the University of California, San diego, says well-preserved RNA in blood
and spinal fluid enables researchers to test and monitor for these genetic changes noninvasively. He says study researchers separate exosomes from bio-fluids with a diagnostic kit
and then extract the relevant genomic information. Once the specific cancer mutation is identified, clinicians will periodically draw additional bio-fluids to monitor the mutation levels to determine
whether a patient is responding to therapy. Whereas Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a useful tool, tumors only show up on imaging scans once they are at least one millimeter in diameter
and comprise about 100, 000 tumor cells. By that time, it may be too late for an early intervention.
On the flip side, MRIS can also yield false positives. Hochberg says individuals who have been treated with conventional radiation therapy often have benign residual tissue from dying tumor cells that have been killed by the treatment but
which the body has eliminated not yet. This tissue is mistaken often for tumor growth on a MRI scan."
"You would identify to the patient that the drug is not working when in reality it is doing well,
Hochberg says.""On the other hand, having an easily accessible biomarker for glioma would give you a clear response.
There are 18 U s. hospitals participating in the clinical trial, sponsored by the Accelerated Brain Cancer Cure Foundation.
Hochberg says study researchers have recruited 41 of 120 patients so far. Preliminary results will be presented in April at the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles Symposium in Boston.
From a technical standpoint I don t believe there is a barrier, Carter says.""This test can certainly be used now,
what we are trying to finalize is the sensitivity and specificity of the test. Exosomes may be a reliable method of screening for prostate cancer as well.
A PSA test is currently the most common, noninvasive means to screen for prostate cancer in the U s. PSA testing measures for elevated levels of prostate specific-antigen antigen,
a protein produced by the prostate gland that is used to liquefy semen in men. The higher a man s PSA level, the more likely it is that he has prostate cancer,
says James Mckiernan, director of urologic oncology at Columbia University Medical center. There are additional reasons, however, for high PSA levels
-and some men with prostate cancer do not always have elevated PSA, he added. In addition, for many cases of prostate cancer, new research published in May 2012 in The New england Journal of Medicine shows that treatment does not actually extend the life of the patient."
"Honestly PSA is not cancer-specific, says Sudhir Srivastava, head of the National Cancer Institute s Cancer Biomarkers Research Group."
"Exosomes could be very much more cancer specific. PSA might give you one specific biomarker for cancer identification,
but exosomes can give you an entire disease specific profile so you would know whether or not it is a form of prostate cancer that necessitates treatment.
Researchers at Exosome have developed a diagnostic kit for prostate cancer with a diagnostic accuracy of around 75 percent-a rate comparable with that of actually taking a tissue biopsy,
says Wayne Comper, a renal physiologist and chief science officer at Exosome. He says the first diagnostic kit could be available commercially by the end of 2013.
Researchers use the kit to look for the genetic biomarker TMPRSS2: ERG or T: E in exosomes taken from a urine sample.
Comper says levels of T: E are nine times higher in a cancerous prostate versus a healthy one.
Mckiernan says researchers found these exosomal diagnostic tests gave better predictive results for cancer than current prescreening methods, such as PSA.
PSA levels are measured via a blood draw but also require a visit to a doctor s office for a digital rectal exam,
something that isn t necessary with an exosomal diagnostic test.""Our study got enough interest to put together a series of sites for investigation to lead to potential FDA approval of this particular kit,
he says.""That is ongoing right now and the last time I checked there were about 1, 000 patients who have been enrolled in the study.
More from Scientific American. Srivastava says Exosome's prostate kit could prove to be extremely relevant in cancer treatment
if it survives the U s. Food and Drug Administration s grueling approval process. He says it is a precursor to
what he hopes will be a series of multiple-gene-signature cancer tests.""We are looking for something with about 90 percent accuracy before it can be used by itself for clinical diagnosis,
he says.""NCI has done two prostate trials with exosomes to date and is looking into creating standard isolation procedures to make the tests more specific.
In the meantime Srivastava says exosomal tests could be used in conjunction with current methods of diagnosis like PSA to help physicians better determine
if the nature of a prostate tumor is severe enough to warrant radical treatment or removal without ever performing a biopsy."
"If someone has high PSA and also has biomarkers which are positive in exosomes that would be a great test,
he says.""Exosomes have the potential to really further the detection of cancer and help analyze things that would have otherwise not been detected noninvasively y
#'Asian Nobels'will bring prize-giving up to date Taiwanese tycoon Samuel Yin stunned the world on 28 january with the announcement of the Tang Prizes:
awards that will offer bigger winnings than the Nobel prizes. Yin contributed 3 billion Taiwanese dollars, the equivalent of roughly US$100 million,
to set up the Tang Prize Foundation. The prizes are named after the Chinese Tang Dynasty (ad 618-907.
I wanted to found a prize to reflect the new challenges faced by humanity#such as climate change, energy shortages, emerging diseases, clashes of cultures and ideas,
#Overharvesting leaves Himalayan Viagra fungus feeling short Yarsagumba, the world s most expensive medicinal fungus, is in serious decline in Nepal because of over-harvesting,
and Tibetan medicine for a wide range of conditions including impotence, asthma and cancer. The peculiar life cycle of the fungus has earned also it the names'winter worm, summer grass'and'caterpillar fungus'.
But the long stalemate between growers and the fungus behind the devastating disease has broken#with the fungus taking the advantage.
The disease is so universal that it"is not going to be eradicated; or the only way to eradicate the disease in practice is to eradicate all of the coffee,
says Mccook. By 1970, the fungus had been detected in Brazil, and severe outbreaks were seen in Costa rica in 1989
#But changes to management practices had brought the disease mostly under control.""Coffee rust was considered a solved problem by most of the coffee growers
"People didn t fear the disease. The outbreak may have taken hold because of patchy use and effectiveness of fungicides.
and to find molecular markers that distinguish between different strains of the pathogen and that could be used to develop tailored strategies for its control.
as well as from Kenya, India, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, to screen for resistant coffee plants and to analyse varieties of the pathogen."
"Scientists need to continuously develop resistant varieties in order to keep coffee leaf rust disease at bay, Phiri says."
where it is required to provide local solutions to the epidemics, he says d
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