February 13, 2007, 9:48 PM CT

Vastly Improved Medical Imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, has revolutionized health care, providing doctors with a highly accurate, non-invasive tool for diagnosing cancer, injuries and other maladies within the human body. Now, a Florida State University researcher has collaborated in a research project that could lead to ways of producing even sharper medical images.

Naresh Dalal, the Dirac Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at FSU, recently conducted experiments with other scientists from FSU, the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology that uncovered unique properties in a molecular magnet properties that could significantly increase the resolution of MRIs. Their paper, "Efficacy of the Single-Molecule Magnet Fe8 for Magnetic Resonance Imaging Contrast Agent Over a Broad Range of Concentration," was reported in the current issue of Polyhedron, a rigorously peer-evaluated science journal.

"There are continual efforts to enhance the level of image clarity found in today's MRI devices," Dalal said. "MRIs utilize injectable dyes, but those in current use, while easy to manufacture, offer a relatively low contrast. Our experiments show that a class of materials known as single-molecule magnets might produce greater contrast in medical imaging, meaning MRIs would be much more accurate."Working at FSU and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Dalal and another FSU researcher, chemistry graduate teaching assistant Vasanth Ramachandran, were able to synthesize a substance known as Fe8 that is one of the strongest magnets known......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

February 13, 2007, 9:34 PM CT

The second humanoid robot in France

The HOAP3 humanoid robot has just arrived at the Laboratory for Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics of Montpellier (LIRMM CNRS University of Montpellier 2). This platform supplements the one that was installed at the LAAS in Toulouse last June. They were both made in Japan and represent a strong robotics research potential for France.

Research activities in the field of human robotics are expanding rapidly. The establishment of the JRL (Joint Japanese-French Robotics Laboratory) based in both Japan (Tsukuba) and France (Toulouse-LAAS and Montpellier-LIRMM) contributed strongly to the realization, reinforcement and dynamization of the robotics research community in this field. The two humanoid robots are at the core of JRL's research.

The acquisition of HOAP3 by LIRMM, 50% co-financed by the CNRS, is part of this process. Within the framework of JRL-France, the LIRMM will thus offer the national community an open experimental platform for the validation of models or control methods contributing to ambulation and the handling of objects while maintaining balance.

This 8.8 kg, 60 cm tall robot has 28 motorized articulations. It has a large number of sensors including accelerometers, rate gyros, an infra-red range finder, pressure sensors and two cameras. This unit is based around a completely open software platform (RTLinux) allowing all of the researchers interested to freely evaluate and test their new theoretical developments concerning the modeling, control, vision or learning of these......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 13, 2007, 9:31 PM CT

Poor people worse off following heart attack

People from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who suffer a heart attack come to the emergency department more often, are less likely to be treated aggressively and have higher mortality rates a year after the attack, says new University of Alberta research that has important implications for access to cardiac care.

Dr. Padma Kaul and a group of U of A scientists investigated 5622 patients in Alberta who went to a hospital emergency department with a first heart attack. Following the common practice of using the neighbourhood median household income as a proxy for socioeconomic status, the scientists classified patients into separate income groups. Patients in the lowest income quartile were more likely to be older, female and to have other illnesses such as diabetes and peripheral vascular diseases. Scientists first looked at who was more likely to have an angioplasty or coronary bypass surgery and then did a one-year follow-up after the emergency department visit to see whether the patient was still alive. The study is reported in the January 2007 issue of the prestigious American Journal of Medicine.

"We found a clear discrepancy when it comes to socioeconomic status," said Kaul. "We may have equal access health-care coverage in Canada but the bottom line is that people may not be getting equal therapy"......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

February 13, 2007, 9:06 PM CT

Nuclear Fusion As Energy Source

For about six months of the year, bursts of a hot, electrically charged gas, or plasma, swirl around a donut-shaped tube in a special MIT reactor, helping researchers learn more about a potential future energy source: nuclear fusion.

During downtimes when the reactor is offline, as it is right now, engineers make upgrades that will help them achieve their goal of making fusion a viable energy source--a long-standing mission that will likely continue for decades.

MIT's reactor, known as Alcator C-Mod, is one of several tokamak plasma discharge reactors in the world. Inside the reactor, magnetic fields control the superheated plasma (up to 50 million degrees Kelvin) as it flows around the tube.

Fusion occurs when two deuterons, or one deuteron and one triton--nuclei of heavy hydrogen--fuse, creating helium and releasing energy. The reactions can only occur at extremely high temperatures.

Eventhough MIT's reactor is smaller than others, it has a stronger magnetic field than some larger reactors, allowing the plasma to become denser at comparable temperatures. "That positions us to provide important data you can't get anywhere else," said Earl Marmar, head of MIT's Alcator C-Mod project and senior research scientist in the Department of Physics......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 13, 2007, 8:39 PM CT

Schizophrenia-Related Gene Variation

University of Iowa researchers have learned more about a genetic variation that is a small risk factor for a mild form of schizophrenia, yet also is associated with improved overall survival.

The findings, which appear online in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, could help lead to treatments for schizophrenia and even other illnesses, and ways to leverage the gene variation's advantages. An abstract of the article is available at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/114112711/ABSTRACT.

This HOPA12pb gene variation advance drew on a genetic database that was about five times larger than sample sizes used in previous research, said Robert Philibert, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry in the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine and the study's co-author.

"The study used the National Institute of Mental Health's largest publicly available sample, and thus it provides even more convincing evidence that the gene variation is worth studying," Philibert said.

The genetic variation causes a change in the portion of the protein that regulates the development of dopamine-releasing neurons. Antipsychotic drugs work by blocking dopamine, but drug treatments have limited success, and so scientists seek other ways to treat patients......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

February 12, 2007, 9:27 PM CT

Glaciers not on simple, upward trend of melting

Two of Greenland's largest glaciers shrank dramatically and dumped twice as much ice into the sea during a period of less than a year between 2004 and 2005. And then, less than two years later, they returned to near their prior rates of discharge.

The variability over such a short time, reported online Feb. 9 on Science magazine's Science Express, underlines the problem in assuming that glacial melting and sea level rise will necessarily occur at a steady upward trajectory, as per lead author Ian Howat, a post-doctoral researcher with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center. The paper comes a year after a study in the journal Science revealed that discharge from Greenland's glaciers had doubled between 2000 and 2005, leading some researchers to speculate such changes were on a steady, upward climb.

"While the rates of shrinking of these two glaciers have stabilized, we don't know whether they will remain stable, grow or continue to collapse in the near future," Howat says. That's because the glaciers' shape changed greatly, becoming stretched and thinned.

"Our main point is that the behavior of these glaciers can change a lot from year to year, so we can't assume to know the future behavior from short records of recent changes," he says. "Future warming may lead to rapid pulses of retreat and increased discharge rather than a long, steady drawdown."........ Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

February 12, 2007, 9:13 PM CT

Be around friends to impair your memory

Youre watching a basketball game with some buddies and decide to order pizza during the commercial. Researchers from Indiana University found that people in a group setting exposed to brand information such as an ad for Pizza Hut -- have a hard time recalling the brands competitors. In other words, being around friends when deciding where to order takeout might cause you to forget completely about that local pizza place youve been wanting to try.

"When groups of individuals are exposed to brands in the shopping environment, their memory for other brands within the same product category is impaired," write Charles D. Lindsey and H. Shanker Krishnan (Indiana University). "The current research examines retrieval in a collaborative group setting, which is a novel context for brand memory research".

Appearing in the recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, the study found that this effect is magnified for very familiar brands. Lindsey and Krishnan argue that this happens because individuals in the group are exposed not only to the advertisement but also to mentions of the brand by other members of the group.

"The practical implications of this research imply that a group premium (over and above the standard market share premium) seems to exist for advertising brands during programming where a higher percentage of viewers are group-based," conclude the authors......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

February 12, 2007, 8:52 PM CT

Suborbital Sounding Rocket Launched

Marc Lessard of the physics department at the University of New Hampshire was the principle investigator for the experiment to investigate various aspects of pulsating aurora. The 662 pound experiment housed in the nose cone of a 65-foot Black Brant XII rocket arced above the atmosphere 408 miles above northern Alaska. Pulsating aurora is a subtle type of aurora that seems to blink on and off in large round patches.

Lessard's experiment, called ROPA (Rocket Observations of Pulsating Aurora), was complex even by rocket-science standards. It had a main instrument cluster, known as a payload, and three sub-payloads, which separated early after the rocket cleared the upper atmosphere at an altitude of 140 miles. Two of the sub-payloads had their own rocket motors, propelling them away from the main payload where they obtained measurements of the pulsating aurora, which occurred near the latitude of Toolik Lake on Alaska's North Slope. Dirk Lummerzheim of the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute was on the ground at Toolik Lake. During the launch, he identified what looked like pulsating aurora in the all-sky camera at the research station there.

This morning, a NASA suborbital sounding rocket launched from Poker Flat Research Range into an aurora display over northern Alaska at 3:45 a.m. Alaska Standard Time, allowing researchers to gather more data about the power source behind pulsating auroras......... Posted by: Brooke      Read more         Source

February 11, 2007, 9:40 PM CT

Speed limit for future superconducting magnet

A research team led by a Northwestern University physicist has identified a high-temperature superconductor -- Bi-2212, a compound containing bismuth -- as a material that might be suitable for the new wires needed to one day build the most powerful superconducting magnet in the world, a 30 Tesla magnet.

The material currently used in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging machines in both hospitals and research laboratories -- a low-temperature superconducting alloy of the metallic element niobium -- has been pushed almost as far as it can go, to around 21 Tesla. (Tesla is used to define the intensity of the magnetic field.) There are no superconducting magnet wires currently available that can generate 30 Tesla.

"A new materials technology -- such as a technology based on high-temperature superconductivity -- is mandatory to make the huge leap from 21 Tesla to 30 Tesla," said William P. Halperin, John Evans Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, who led the team. "We have shown that Bi-2212 could be operated at the same temperature as is presently the case for magnets made with niobium -- 4 degrees Kelvin -- and also achieve the stable state necessary for a 30 Tesla magnet".

The findings will be published online Feb. 11 by the journal Nature Physics.........

Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 11, 2007, 8:53 PM CT

Grape expectations for healthier wine

A new technique that uses ozone to preserve grapes could help prevent allergies and boost healthy compounds at the same time, reports Jennifer Rohn in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. The same technique could be used in the wine-making process to produce healthier wines without the added sulphites that can cause asthma and other conditions in some people.

Mass-marketed grapes can remain in storage for months and are usually treated with sulphur dioxide to prevent decay. Although the sulphur dioxide is effective, it is corrosive and can cause severe allergic reactions in some people. Wine-makers have a similar problem in that the sulphites added to wines to prolong their shelf-life and allow them to age can make their wines unpalatable to some drinkers.

Francisco Artes-Hernandez and his team at the Technical University of Cartagena in Spain compared several different preservative methods with a new technique that involves exposing macroperforated packages of grapes at 0 degress C to cycles of 0.1 micro liters per liter of ozone. They found that ozone treatment was 90% as effective as SO2 at preventing decay. In addition, ozone-treated grapes had up to four times more antioxidants than untreated grapes (Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, doi 10.1002/jsfa.2780).........

Posted by: Ashley      Read more         Source