The saga of how a few monstrous stars spawned a diverse community of additional stars is told in a new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The striking picture reveals an eclectic mix of embryonic stars living in the tattered neighborhood of one of the most famous massive stars in our Milky Way galaxy, Eta Carinae.
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A vaccine against pneumonia and invasive pneumococcal disease, a severe form of bacterial infection, can substantially reduce hospital admissions and improve the survival of children in developing countries, concludes a trial published in the March 26, 2005 issue of THE LANCET. The authors believe the vaccine should be made available to children in Africa, where rates of severe invasive pneumococcal disease are up to ten times higher than in industrialised countries.
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A substance that naturally opens airways also offers protection against asthma, a condition that affects about 15 million people in the United States, including five million children, according to Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers at Duke University Medical Center.
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A new study demonstrates the potential effectiveness of treating tumors by combining agents that damage DNA with a drug that sensitizes cancer cells to these agents.
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In response to the growing number of lipids expected to be discovered through lipidomics and in anticipation of the massive amounts of data that will be generated by the lipid community, an international group of scientists has developed a comprehensive classification, nomenclature, and chemical representation system for lipids. The details of the system appear in the May issue of the Journal of Lipid Research, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal.
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An online asthma management program can help asthma patients get top-rate care and overcome barriers to healthcare access, according to a study to be presented at the American Thoracic Society International Conference on May 22 in San Diego.
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Elephants learn to imitate sounds that are not typical of their species, the first known example after humans of vocal learning in a non-primate terrestrial mammal. The discovery, reported in today’s Nature, further supports the idea that vocal learning is important for maintaining individual social relationships among animals that separate and reunite over time, like dolphins and whales, some birds, and bats.
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New research shows that exposure to harmful chemicals and drugs during critical developmental periods early in life may actually “reprogram” the way certain genes respond to the female hormone estrogen. This genetic reprogramming may determine whether people with a genetic predisposition for a disease actually develop the disease.
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As the ever-increasing power of computer chips brings us closer and closer to the limits of silicon technology, many researchers are betting that the future will belong to “spintronics”: a nanoscale technology in which information is carried not by the electron’s charge, as it is in conventional microchips, but by the electron’s intrinsic spin.
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Scientists at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine have discovered the cause of a deadly type of secondary stroke known as cerebral vasospasm.
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