Tech

Washington, DC – A new study by researchers at the Georgetown's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center finds a higher level of common household pesticides in the urine of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a cancer that develops most commonly between three and seven years of age. The findings are published in the August issue of the journal Therapeutic Drug Monitoring.

Researchers caution that these findings should not be seen as cause-and-effect, only that the study suggests an association between pesticide exposure and development of childhood ALL.

In light of health care reform measures, Rush University Medical Center has launched a study of its program to help older adults transition from hospital to home.

The goal of the study is to determine whether the program, first implemented two years ago, succeeds in reducing readmissions within 30 days for seniors. If it does, it could serve as a model for hospitals across the country that are seeking ways to lower their rates of readmission.

Near-normal control of glucose beginning as soon as possible after diagnosis would greatly improve the long-term prognosis of type 1 diabetes, concludes a study published in the July 27, 2009, issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, which updates information about the clinical course of type 1 diabetes.

Chief Technology Officer Stephen Turner of Pacific Biosciences will discuss Single Molecule Real-Time (SMRT) sequencing, which will sequence DNA at speeds 20,000 times faster than current methods. It is due to be released commercially in 2010, at the 2009 Industrial Physics Forum, a component of the 51st Annual Meeting of American Association of Physicists in Medicine, which takes place from July 26 - 30 in Anaheim, California

Researchers at the University of Washington have combined two nanoparticles into one tiny package. The result is the first structure that creates a multipurpose nanotechnology tool for medical imaging and therapy. The structure is described in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"This is the first time that a semiconductor and metal nanoparticles have been combined in a way that preserves the function of each individual component," said lead author Xiaohu Gao, a UW assistant professor of bioengineering.

According to a study in an issue of Medical Decision Making, in the case of a large-scale, covert anthrax attack on a large city, hospitals would be overwhelmed. This is because even with an extremely effective public health response, there would be expected delays in detecting the attack and initiating a response to it, as well as a huge strain on resources.

URBANA - Using electrolyzed water rather than harsh chemicals could be a more effective and environmentally friendly method in the pretreatment of ethanol waste products to produce an acetone-butanol-ethanol fuel mix, according to research conducted at the University of Illinois.

Researchers have developed a new technique that allows them to make a movie of bacteria infecting their living host.

Whilst most studies of bacterial infection are done after the death of the infected organism, this system developed by scientists at the University of Bath and University of Exeter is the first to follow the progress of infection in real-time with living organisms.

Could straw houses be the buildings of the future?

That's what researchers at the University of Bath will be testing this summer by constructing a "BaleHaus" made of prefabricated straw bale and hemp cladding panels on campus.

And people around the world will be able to watch its progress online via "Strawcam" starting Monday 20 July at: www.bath.ac.uk/features/balehaus/ - which will also have blogs, videos, photos and lots of other information about the project.

Much like humans, materials are capable of some pretty remarkable things when they're placed under pressure. In fact, under the right conditions, materials can even produce electricity.

HOUSTON -- (July 27, 2009) -- New video showing the atom-by-atom growth of carbon nanotubes reveals they rotate as they grow, much like the halting motion of a mechanical clock's second hand. Published online this month by researchers at France's Université Lyon1/CNRS and Houston's Rice University, the research provides the first experimental evidence of how individual carbon atoms are added to growing nanotubes.

The many dozens of researchers who helped test the machine allowed Chinook's handlers to work out the bugs. Because there are so few clusters of this size, the testing was a vital part of the process, and the more realistic the testing, the better.

"If you just have a few people running large jobs, the amount of communication back and forth between the nodes is very different than if you have a hundred people running calculations of various sizes and in various places on the machine," said PNNL's Erich Vorpagel, who manages all research projects on Chinook at EMSL.

Scientists at Penn State University, in collaboration with institutes in the US, Finland, Germany and the UK, have figured out the long-sought structure of a layer of C60 – carbon buckyballs – on a silver surface. The results, which could help in the design of carbon nanostructure-based electronics are reported in Physical Review Letters and highlighted in the July 27th issue of APS's on-line journal Physics (physics.aps.org).

By studying gold nanoparticles with highly uniform sizes and shapes, scientists now understand how they lose energy, a key step towards producing nanoscale detectors for weighing any single atom.

Such ultrasensitive measurements could ultimately be used in areas such as medical research and diagnostics, enabling the detection of minuscule disease-causing agents such as viruses and prions at the single molecule level.

Researchers are interested in nanosized materials because the smaller the components of a detection device, the more sensitive it is.

Mine shafts on the point of being closed down could be used to provide geothermal energy to local towns. This is the conclusion of two engineers from the University of Oviedo, whose research is being published this month in the journal Renewable Energy. The method they have developed makes it possible to estimate the amount of heat that a tunnel could potentially provide.