Earth

PHILADELPHIA – May 22, 2009 – Shire plc (LSE: SHP, NASDAQ: SHPGY), the global specialty biopharmaceutical company, announced results of a study showing that coadministration of the ADHD medication VYVANSE® (lisdexamfetamine dimesylate) CII with the proton pump inhibitor (PPI) Prilosec OTC® 40 mg (20 mg X 2), did not alter the median time it took for maximum plasma concentration of d-amphetamine to be reached in the subjects evaluated.

If you own a computer, chances are you have experienced the aftermath of a nasty virus at some point. In contrast, there have been no major outbreaks of mobile phone viral infection, despite the fact that over 80 percent of Americans now use these devices. A team headed by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University, set out to explain why this is true.

A new NOAA report on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI), protected by the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, provides the sharpest picture yet of the region's marine life and ecosystems.

Prepared by NOAA's National Center for Coastal Ocean Science, the report, A Marine Biogeographic Assessment of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, examines the geographic distribution of the island chain's marine life and habitats, and the conditions that determine where they are found.

Ultrafast laser research at Kansas State University has allowed physicists to build on Nobel Prize-winning work in photo-electronics by none other than Albert Einstein.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his theoretical explanation in 1905 of the so-called photo-effect -- that is, the emission of electrons from a metal surface by incident light.

Liquid fuels from biomass and coal have the potential to reduce petroleum fuel use and CO2 emissions in the U.S. transportation sector over the next 25 years, says a new report from the National Research Council. Even with abundant resources in biomass and coal, however, substantial investments in research, development, and commercial demonstration projects will be needed to produce these alternative liquid fuels in an environmentally conscious way, and at a level that could impact U.S. dependence on imported oil.

NEWPORT, Ore. – Using a system of underwater hydrophones that can record sounds from hundreds of miles away, a team of scientists from Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has documented the presence of endangered North Atlantic right whales in an area they were thought to be extinct.

The discovery is particularly important, researchers say, because it is in an area that may be opened to shipping if the melting of polar ice continues, as expected.

The most extensive study of pollutants in marine mammals' brains reveals that these animals are exposed to a hazardous cocktail of pesticides such as DDTs and PCBs, as well as emerging contaminants such as brominated flame retardants.

Current radiation therapy treatment damages a patient's healthy tissue as well as eradicating the tumour it is intended to destroy, making the treatment especially invasive and often causing nasty side effects.

A new development in radiotherapy will enable a far more precise and accurate treatment for cancerous tumours by using real-time images to guide the radiation beam.

A new sponge-like material that is black, brittle and freeze-dried (just like the ice cream astronauts eat) can pull off some pretty impressive feats. Designed by Northwestern University chemists, it can remove mercury from polluted water, easily separate hydrogen from other gases and, perhaps most impressive of all, is a more effective catalyst than the one currently used to pull sulfur out of crude oil.

Graphene is an atomically thin sheet of carbon that has attracted significant attention due to its potential use in high-performance electronics, sensors and alternative energy devices such as solar cells. While the physics of graphene has been thoroughly explored, chemical functionalization of graphene has proven to be elusive.

Now researchers at Northwestern University have identified conditions for chemically functionalizing graphene with the organic semiconductor perylene-3,4,9,10-tetracarboxylic-dianhydride (PTCDA).

A new sponge-like material that is black, brittle and freeze-dried (just like the ice cream astronauts eat) can pull off some pretty impressive feats. Designed by Northwestern University chemists, it can remove mercury from polluted water, easily separate hydrogen from other gases and, perhaps most impressive of all, is a more effective catalyst than the one currently used to pull sulfur out of crude oil.

A team of UC San Diego-led atmospheric chemistry researchers moved closer to what is considered the "holy grail" of climate change science when it made the first-ever direct detection of biological particles within ice clouds.

College Park, MD -- Scientists have devised a new technique for real-time detection of freely moving individual neutral atoms that is more than 99.7% accurate and sensitive enough to discern the arrival of a single atom in less than one-millionth of a second, about 20 times faster than the best previous methods.

Dr. Jared Strote at the University of Washington Medical Center led a group that examined the medical records of nearly 900 patients subdued by the Seattle Police Department with a Taser over a six-year period. Less than one percent required hospital admission for an injury related to the restraint incident. No deaths occurred, even when patients exhibited signs of excited delirium.

Of the 92 naturally occurring elements, add another to the list of those that are superconductors.

James S. Schilling, Ph.D., professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Mathew Debessai, Ph.D., — his doctoral student at the time — discovered that europium becomes superconducting at 1.8 K (-456 °F) and 80 GPa (790,000 atmospheres) of pressure, making it the 53rd known elemental superconductor and the 23rd at high pressure.