ITS amazing that nobody has spotted it before. Superimposed on every ocean on the planet there is a striped pattern of currents. Yet what causes them is a mystery.
Between 1992 and 2003, Peter Niiler of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and colleagues collected data from more than 10,000 drifting ocean buoys, which they tracked with satellites. As expected, the buoys movements were influenced mainly by known global currents, which are driven by wind and by differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater.
Each winter, strains of influenza A virus infect North Americans, causing an average of 36,000 deaths. Now, researchers say the virus comes from a viral reservoir somewhere in the tropics, settling a key debate on the source of each season's infection.
"We now know where the influenza A virus comes from every year," said Edward Holmes, professor of biology at Penn State. "And because we now know how the virus evolves, we have a much better chance of controlling it."
WA researchers investigating how blood vessel growth keeps cancers alive have made a world-first discovery that could boost the chances of successfully treating life-threatening tumours.
Western Australian Institute for Medical Research (WAIMR) Associate Professor Ruth Ganss and her team have found that a gene called RGS5 can reverse angiogenesis the growth of blood vessels inside the tumour.
The discovery is published in the most recent edition of Nature, one of the worlds most prestigious scientific journals.
Ice cores are essential for climate research, because they represent the only archive which allows direct measurements of atmospheric composition and greenhouse gas concentrations in the past. Using novel isotopic studies, scientists from the European Project for Ice Coring In Antarctica (EPICA) were now able to identify the most important processes responsible for changes in natural methane concentrations over the transition from the last ice age into our warm period.
Outbreaks of the most common type of influenza virus, A (H3N2), are seeded by viruses that originate in East and Southeast Asia and migrate around the world, new research has found. This discovery may help to further improve flu vaccines and make the evolution of the virus more predictable.
Seasonal influenza strains constantly evolve in overlapping epidemics in Asia and sweep the rest of the world each year, an international research team has found.
These findings suggest that by focusing surveillance efforts on East and Southeast Asia, researchers may be able to extend their forecast of the flu strains most likely to cause epidemics, which may in turn help experts decide which strains should go in the flu vaccine each year.
SAN DIEGO Irregular molecules in the lining of the mouth, the saliva, the fallopian tube or the bladder can identify early stage cancer, according to research presented today at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, April 12 16. Scientists who hope to apply basic knowledge to medical practice are developing tests that diagnose, predict or monitor cancer risks without invasive tissue sampling.
Oral Epithelium as a Surrogate Tissue for Assessing Smoking-Induced Molecular Alterations in the Lungs: Abstract 1599
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - New clinical data showed some cancer patients with recurrent lymphoma benefited from an experimental drug called AME-133v, said a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
The data was presented April 15th during the 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in San Diego.
Madison, Wis. April 16, 2008 An article published in the May 2008 issue of Epilepsia calls attention to the lack of knowledge regarding cognitive aging in chronic epilepsy patients. For persons with chronic epilepsy, little is known about the impact of aging on the course of cognitive and brain health, the prevalence of clinical disorders of aging (mild cognitive impairment, dementia), or the disease burdens and risk factors associated with abnormal cognitive and brain aging. The study presents data that suggest several reasons for concern.
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