A research team has found a way to determine the presence on a surface of trace quantities of chemicals - such as those found in biological and chemical warfare agents, as well as several common explosives - within a few seconds. The device has proven successful at detecting at the picogram level in lab tests.
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How heavy a man is at the time he is diagnosed with prostate cancer, as well as his history of weight gain, appear to play significant roles in how aggressive his cancer may become, say researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
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Japanese and U.S. institutions participated in the world’s first real-time international collaboration over optical networks in 4K — with four times the resolution of high-definition TV.
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Cardiovascular disease contributes to the high annual mortality rate (15-20%) in conventional hemodialysis patients. This study found a five-fold decrease in endothelial progenitor cells, which contribute to repair of blood vessel walls, in patients on conventional dialysis compared to patients on night hemodialysis and to healthy participants. Night hemodialysis patients also matched healthy participants on blood pressure and left ventricular mass scores, compared with day-time dialysis patients in the Toronto General Hospital-St. Michael’s Hospital study.
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A national team of researchers, led by a cardiovascular nuclear medicine specialist at the University of Maryland Medical Center, has demonstrated for the first time that an experimental radioactive compound can show images of heart damage up to 30 hours after a brief interruption of blood flow and oxygen. The discovery may help physicians in emergency rooms and in their offices determine whether a patient’s chest pain, which may have subsided hours earlier, is related to heart disease or something else, such as indigestion.
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Bowling Green State University researchers measured the electrical firing of 51 individual cells in the medial mammillary nucleus of five rats’ brains — “to our knowledge…the first recordings from medial mammillary body cells in awake animals,” according to their research paper.
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In the human brain, cells talk to one another through the routine exchange of electrical signals. But when people fall into a deep sleep, the higher regions of the brain - regions that during waking hours are a bustling grid of neural dialogue - apparently lose their ability to communicate effectively, causing consciousness to fade.
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The clinical outcome for prostate cancer patients who have been treated with hormone therapy and radiation therapy can usually be determined by how rapidly their prostate specific antigen level rises following treatment, according to a report published in the October 1, 2005 issue of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics, the official journal of ASTRO.
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For many areas of the West, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMS) overestimate the amount of land area within the 100-year floodplain. New research suggests a way to improve the maps.
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A truly colossal health problem, acquired immune deficiency syndrome will not go away — at least no time soon. The virus that leads to AIDS, human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, caused an odd illness that was a complete medical mystery only about 25 years ago. Now, HIV infects more than 40 million people around the globe, and each day, some 14,000 more people pick up that infection, studies have shown.
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