science newsletter: Science News SciGuru.com

Τετάρτη 1 Μαΐου 2013

Science News SciGuru.com

First child in the world to receive tissue-engineered bioartificial trachea
Lake Found in Sierra Nevada with the Oldest Remains of Atmospheric Contamination in Southern Europe
Scientists Discover How a Protein Finds Its Way
Experimental Drug Inhibits Growth in All Stages of Common Kidney Cancer
Maternal diet sets up junk food addiction in babies
Is antimatter anti-gravity?

First child in the world to receive tissue-engineered bioartificial trachea

Posted: 01 May 2013 07:40 AM PDT

In a pioneering, first of its kind in the world operation, an international team of surgeons at Children's Hospital of Illinois created and transplanted a windpipe into a 32-month-old toddler born with a rare, fatal, congenital abnormality in which her trachea failed to develop.

Lake Found in Sierra Nevada with the Oldest Remains of Atmospheric Contamination in Southern Europe

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 11:55 AM PDT

Atmospheric contamination due to heavy metals is currently a severe problem of global proportions, with important repercussions in public health. However, this type of pollution is not a recent fact and can even be detected during pre-historic times.

Scientists Discover How a Protein Finds Its Way

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 11:48 AM PDT

Proteins, the workhorses of the body, can have more than one function, but they often need to be very specific in their action or they create cellular havoc, possibly leading to disease.

Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have uncovered how an enzyme co-factor can bestow specificity on a class of proteins with otherwise nonspecific biochemical activity.

Experimental Drug Inhibits Growth in All Stages of Common Kidney Cancer

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 10:28 AM PDT

Researchers at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida have discovered a protein that is overly active in every human sample of kidney cancer they examined. They also found that an experimental drug designed to block the protein's activity significantly reduced tumor growth in animals when used alone. Combining it with another drug already used to treat the cancer improved the effectiveness of both.

Maternal diet sets up junk food addiction in babies

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 10:17 AM PDT

Research from the University of Adelaide suggests that mothers who eat junk food while pregnant have already programmed their babies to be addicted to a high fat, high sugar diet by the time they are weaned.

In laboratory studies, the researchers found that a junk food diet during pregnancy and lactation desensitised the normal reward system fuelled by these highly palatable foods.

Is antimatter anti-gravity?

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 08:18 AM PDT

Antimatter is strange stuff. It has the opposite electrical charge to normal matter and, when it meets its matter counterpart, the two annihilate in a flash of light.

Four University of California, Berkeley, physicists are now asking whether matter and antimatter are also affected differently by gravity. Could antimatter fall upward – that is, exhibit anti-gravity – or fall downward at a different rate than normal matter?