Culture

The IWS's manufacturing experts will be exhibiting their two-in-one machining solution on the joint Fraunhofer stand at the EUROMOLD trade show in Frankfurt from December 3 to 6, 2008 (Hall 8, Stand L113).

On Dec.1, the global community commemorates the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day by remembering the millions of people lost to AIDS and renewing the commitment to fight the disease. Since the inception of World AIDS Day in 1988, considerable progress has been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS. This included the development of more than two dozen drugs to treat HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and the implementation of scientifically proven strategies to prevent people from becoming infected with HIV.

If you think the person most likely to be involved in an avalanche this winter will be a young hot-dogger who doesn't know any better, think again.

Like tuning a violin to produce strong, elegant notes, researchers at The Wistar Institute have found multiple receptors on the outside of the body's killer immune system cells which they believe can be selectively targeted to keep the cells in superb infection- and disease-fighting condition.

In a study published online November 30 in Nature Immunology, the researchers describe their discovery of seven different receptors on T cells that can tamp down immune responses during a prolonged battle with an infectious pathogen or against developing cancer.

A booster vaccination for parents of new babies and other household members may be the most effective way of preventing the fatal form of whooping cough in young infants, say a group of paediatric intensive care doctors on bmj.com today.

As most American families sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, a University of British Columbia researcher is revealing how one of the largest animals on earth feasts on the smallest of prey – and at what cost.

Some large marine mammals are known for their extraordinarily long dive times. Elephant seals, for example, can stay underwater for an hour at a time by lowering their heartbeat and storing large amounts of oxygen in their muscles.

New Haven, Conn. — Science fiction writers have long envisioned sailing a spacecraft by the optical force of the sun's light. But, the forces of sunlight are too weak to fill even the oversized sails that have been tried. Now a team led by researchers at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science has shown that the force of light indeed can be harnessed to drive machines — when the process is scaled to nano-proportions.

With hard bony shells to shelter and protect them, turtles are unique and have long posed a mystery to scientists who wonder how such an elegant body structure came to be.

Since the age of dinosaurs, turtles have looked pretty much as they do now with their shells intact, and scientists lacked conclusive evidence to support competing evolutionary theories. Now with the discovery in China of the oldest known turtle fossil, estimated at 220- million-years-old, scientists have a clearer picture of how the turtle got its shell.

Saturn's moon Enceladus may indeed hide an underground reservoir of water.

Scientists at Jet Propulsion Lab in California, the University of Colorado and the University of Central Florida in Orlando teamed up to analyze the plumes of water vapor and ice particles spewing from the moon. They used data collected by the Cassini spacecraft's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS). Cassini was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in 1997 and has been orbiting Saturn since July 2004.

Currently, solar cells are difficult to handle, expensive to purchase and complicated to install. The hope is that consumers will one day be able to buy solar cells from their local hardware store and simply hang them like posters on a wall.

HOBOKEN, N.J. — The current economic crisis is forcing companies to quickly evaluate and modify their business models, but unlike previous economic downtrends, the information technology organizations are not feeling the cuts as quickly as in the past, according to a newly released survey.

HOBOKEN, N.J. — The current economic crisis is forcing companies to quickly evaluate and modify their business models, but unlike previous economic downtrends, the information technology organizations are not feeling the cuts as quickly as in the past, according to a newly released survey.

Montreal, November 26, 2008 – According to a new study, published in the November issue of Diabetes Care, a majority of diabetics avoid physical activity because they worry about exercise-induced hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and severe consequences including loss of consciousness. Despite the well-known benefits of exercise, this new study builds on previous investigations that found more than 60 percent of adult diabetics aren't physically active.

Water shapes societies, but it is a factor only just beginning to be appreciated by social scientists.

The Norwegian professor, writer and film maker Terje Tvedt, of the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, argues that water has played a unique and fundamental role in shaping societies throughout human history. Speaking at a European Science Foundation and COST conference in Sicily in October, Tvedt proposed that social scientists and historians have long made a serious error by not taking natural resources into account in their attempts to understand social structures.

Carbon credit politics and misplaced technical concerns are impeding efforts to encourage sustainable land use practices in tropical regions, such as better forest management and growing more trees on farms, that could curtail up to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions while also boosting incomes of the rural poor, according to a new analysis by the Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Centre.