news 2011

Penicillin doses for children should be reviewed, say experts A team of scientists and clinicians, led by researchers at King's College London and St George's, University of London, are calling for a review of penicillin dosing guidelines for children, that have remained unchanged for nearly 50 years.

University of Sydney scientists working with an international team using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, have made an important step towards the discovery of the Higgs boson - a theoretical particle that physicists predict will explain why matter has mass. Known as the 'God particle', the Higgs boson has captured the imagination of both the public, and the physicists searching for evidence of the proposed particle.

Scientists have created 18-karat gold that's harder than tempered steel and virtually unscratchable.

At the KTH Symposium, the director of the U.S. National Science Foundation explains how scientific co-operation with Sweden benefits American research. Reception and service at central level for international students after arrival at KTH. For Master's students For Exchange students It's not easy to determine the elastic properties of steel by experimenting on single crystals.

In the first study to examine cereal-buying patterns in homes in the United States, researchers at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity found that African-American and Hispanic families are most likely to buy cereals that are advertised directly to children, which are also the least nutritious cereals.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.-They shook light from darkness. They coaxed something out of what we normally think of as nothing-the vacuum of space. And now their work has been named one of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year by Physics World, the international magazine announced today. University of Michigan physics researcher Franco Nori is involved in The physicists directly observed, for the first time, light particles that flicker in and out of existence in the vacuum.

Contrary to the ideal of a completely engaged electorate, individuals who have the least interest in a specific outcome can actually be vital to achieving a democratic consensus. These individuals dilute the influence of powerful minority factions who would otherwise dominate everyone else, according to new research published in Science.

AUSTIN, Texas — The efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased, according to new research on the mechanisms of solar energy conversion led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin. Zhu and his team have discovered that it's possible to double the number of electrons harvested from one photon of sunlight using an organic plastic semiconductor material.

University pledges continued cooperation with NCAA inquiry Hotels to support RAINN over commencement weekend A message from President Rodney Erickson As lawmakers review child abuse laws, Erickson expresses support Blue out, canning efforts raise $47,000 to fight child abuse, rape A generally accepted, 44-year-old assumption about how certain kinds of bacteria make energy and synthesize cell materials has been shown to be incorrect by a team of

CHAMPAIGN, lll. Researchers have developed a bandage that stimulates and directs blood vessel growth on the surface of a wound. The bandage, called a "microvascular stamp," contains living cells that deliver growth factors to damaged tissues in a defined pattern. After a week, the pattern of the stamp "is written in blood vessels," the researchers report.

In August, as amateurs and professionals alike turned their telescopes on the nearest Type Ia supernova discovered in decades, University of California, Berkeley, research astronomer Weidong Li focused instead on what could not be seen. Li pulled up images of the northern sky taken over the past nine years by the Hubble Space Telescope in search of the star and its binary companion as they looked before the supernova explosion.

Professor Aephraim Steinberg and colleagues at the Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control at the University of Toronto had the top physics breakthrough of the year according to Physics World magazine. Steinberg led an international team in applying a modern measurement technique to the historical two-slit interferometer experiment in which a beam of light shone through two slits results in an interference pattern on a screen behind.

The NSW Muslim community believes Islamic law is already accommodated in Australian society without legislative change and is not seeking to establish it as a separate legal system, according to the University of Sydney's Ghena Krayem. In the first empirical research project to be completed in Australia on sharia, or Islamic law, Krayem found that the NSW Muslim community wants Islamic principles integrated within the existing Australian legal system, not to create a rival legal system or special legislation to allow its recognition.

At the KTH Symposium, the director of the U.S. National Science Foundation explains how scientific co-operation with Sweden benefits American research. Reception and service at central level for international students after arrival at KTH. For Master's students For Exchange students KTH researchers and their colleagues from France and Japan have found a method to reveal previously unknown details of the atomic binding process.

Full news release: Acid rain poses a previously unrecognized threat to Great Lakes sugar maples To further test the effects of leaf litter accumulation on the emergence and establishment of sugar maple seedlings, the forest floor mass was experimentally manipulated at one of the four Michigan sugar maple test sites.

Suppressing a newly identified protein involved in regulating cell division could be a novel strategy for fighting certain cancers because it stops the malignant cells from dividing and causes them to die quickly, according to a study by researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. During the five-year study, designed to seek new targets for anti-cancer therapies, researchers discovered that depleting the protein, called STARD9, also helped the commonly used chemotherapy drug Taxol work more effectively against certain cancers.

A combination of two common drugs, lamotrigine and valproate, is more effective in treating difficult-to control epilepsy than other anti-epileptic regimens, according to a University of Washington report to be published online this week in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Protein dynamics are helped by water, synchrotron researchers find Central to life and all cellular functions, proteins are complex structures that are anything but static, though often illustrated as two-dimensional snapshots in time. Cornell scientists, using the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), have gained new insight into the underlying mechanisms of how protein structures change at low temperatures.

Researchers have discovered how the structure of a protein allows a certain bacteria to interfere with the tomato plant's immune system, causing bacterial speck disease. The work helps explain how Pseudomonas syringae, a bacterial pathogen, has evolved to cause disease and may open the door to breeding tomato varieties that are resistant to speck disease, which can prompt costly losses in tomato crops.

Complex sex life of goats could have implications for wildlife management A new study of the mating habits of mountain goats reveals the vastly different strategies of males in different populations. A Durham University-led research team has found that male chamois (a species of wild goat-antelope) adopt different strategies in different populations in order to succeed in the rut: some put a lot of energy in at a young age, while others wait until they are much older.