Tech

SAN ANTONIO - In a large review of breast cancer patients with mucinous carcinoma, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have identified an association between this rare type of breast cancer long-associated with a favorable prognosis and multiple tumors undetected by mammography or ultrasound.

San Antonio, Tex. — A new drug cocktail might be the right mix to fight breast cancer after it becomes resistant to standard therapy. Details of a new study supporting this approach suggest it's possible to re-sensitize tumors thus allowing treatments to work again. The findings were presented today at the CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Rainfall in the once-known Cyclone Cleo has really diminished over the last 24 hours, and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite has confirmed it. Cleo is fading and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center has acknowledged its demise, in its final warning on the storm today.

WASHINGTON -- While vaccines help prevent many diseases in the United States, we lack immunization protection against several serious illnesses, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine that identifies priority areas for updating the National Vaccine Plan. The revised plan should include a strategy to accelerate development of high-priority vaccines, said the committee that wrote the report.

DALLAS – Dec. 10, 2009 – The advice of a pediatrician to place infants on their backs to sleep appears to be the single most important motivator in getting parents to follow these recommendations and a key reason that the rate of sudden death syndrome (SIDS) has plummeted since the "Back to Sleep" campaign was launched in 1994, says a UT Southwestern researcher.

Multiple studies have shown that placing infants on their backs to sleep limits the risk of SIDS, the leading cause of death among children in the U.S. under the age of 1.

Not so long ago our computers had a single core which had to be boosted for performance – making each machine into a great central heating system. Beyond 85° C, however, electronic components become unstable. To overcome this physical limit, a solution was found with the multicore technology, where the same chip includes several processors which share tasks. Most of today's consumer electronics proudly boast a "dual core" or "quad core". However, in time the technology will come up against the same physical limits.

The roe of hake, lumpsucker and salmon is the best dietary source of Omega 3, according to a study carried out by researchers at the University of Almería (UAL). The scientists analysed the eggs, or roe, of 15 marine animals, and found all of these contained high levels of these fatty acids, which are essential to the human body.

December 11 2009 (Portland, Ore.) – More than 10 percent of women of Chinese and Korean heritage may be at risk for developing diabetes during pregnancy, according to a Kaiser Permanente study of 16,000 women in Hawaii that appears in the December issue of the Ethnicity and Disease journal. The study also found that Korean-American and Chinese-American women's gestational diabetes risk is one-third higher than average—and more than double that of Caucasian and African-American women.

Five-year-olds can reason about the world from multiple perspectives simultaneously, according to a new theory by researchers in Japan and Australia. Using an established branch of mathematics called Category Theory, the researchers explain why specific reasoning skills develop in children at certain ages, particularly at age five. The new theory, published December 11 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, shows that these reasoning skills have similar profiles of development because they involve related sorts of processes.

SAN ANTONIO – Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) coupled with mammography detects almost all cancers at an early stage, thereby reducing the incidence of advanced stage breast cancer in high-risk women.

"Earlier stage breast cancers are more likely to be curable," said lead researcher Ellen Warner, M.D., M.Sc., medical oncologist in the Department of Medicine, Division of Medical Oncology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center, in Toronto, Canada.

Physicians should be comfortable referring some patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) for effective stroke prevention surgery, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). The findings indicate that CKD patients gain a significant benefit from the procedures without an increased risk of dying from surgical complications.

Cardiologists and oncologists must work together in an attempt to avoid or prevent adverse cardiovascular effects in patients from certain chemotherapies, especially for those who may be at a higher risk for such effects, according to a new review published online December 10 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.

In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- University of Maryland researchers have developed and successfully tested new computer software and computational techniques to analyze patterns of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan or other locations and predict the locations of weapons caches that are used by insurgents to support those attacks.

ARGONNE, Ill. (Dec.10, 2009) — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory are developing a way to control the Casimir force, a quantum mechanical force, which attracts objects when they are only hundred nanometers apart.

"The Casimir force is so small that most experimentation has dealt simply with its characteristics," said Derrick Mancini, interim director of the Center for Nanoscale Materials. "If we can control this force or make it repulsive, it can have dramatic effects on the development of nanoelectromechanical systems."