news 2012

Health Technology Assessment is not 'pure science'. The drug industry is a key actor in the process of issuing recommendations" —Professor Larry King King and colleagues Piotr Ozieranski (University of Leicester) and Martin McKee (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) found that multinational drug companies are deploying their massive financial resources to capture stakeholders at every stage of the process for the scientific recommendation of drugs in Poland.

By Eliot Barford Researchers at Imperial College London have identified a molecule that sounds the alarm when viruses invade our cells. Our immune system has evolved to recognise distinctive features of infectious agents like bacteria, fungi and viruses in order to fight infections, but some viruses are hard to detect.

Using ESA's Cluster quartet of satellites as a space plasma microscope, scientists have zoomed in on the solar wind to reveal the finest detail yet, finding tiny turbulent swirls that could play a big role in heating it. Turbulence is highly complex and all around us, evident in water flowing from a tap, around an aircraft wing, in experimental fusion reactors on Earth, and also in space.

The Green Revolution has stagnated for key food crops in many regions of the world, according to a new study. Led by IonE research fellow Deepak Ray, the study team developed geographically detailed maps of annual crop harvested areas and yields of maize (corn), rice, wheat and soybeans from 1961 to 2008.

Humans are adept at setting goals and updating them as new situations arise — for example, a person who is playing a video game may switch to a new goal when their phone rings. Now, Princeton University researchers have identified mechanisms that govern how the brain incorporates information about new situations into our existing goals, according to research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Dr Gemma Catney is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning A study of the 2011 Census by the University of Liverpool has found that the population of England and Wales is more diverse than ever yet is more integrated. The study of the data found that the proportion of people who report themselves as being from an ethnic group other than `White' has increased to 14 per cent, an increase of five percentage points since 2001.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet have presented a new principle for fighting bacterial infections, in other words, a new type of antibiotic, in the medical journal FASEB. The new antibiotic mechanism is based on selectively blocking the thioredoxin system in the cells, which is crucial to the growth of certain bacteria.

18 Dec 2012 Their work on a 50 million year old lizard skin identified the presence of teeth (invisible to visible light), demonstrating for the first time that this fossil animal was more than just a skin moult. This was only possible using some of the brightest light in the universe, x-rays generated by a synchrotron.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. Researchers report that changes in social well-being are closely tied to one's personality, with positive changes in one corresponding to similar changes in the other. Their study reveals potential new mechanisms that can help individuals thrive as they age. Their findings appear in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

18 Dec 2012 The detailed analysis of the 2011 census data of England and Wales by the University's new research Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) reveals the term 'ethnic minority' is fast becoming redundant. Previously passionate debates over how segregated we are, they say, should now be a thing of the past.

18 Dec 2012 Whilst conditions such as a severe stroke have been linked to the disease, for many sufferers the tremors and other symptoms of Parkinson's disease can appear to come out of the blue. Researchers at the university's Faculty of Life Sciences have now discovered that a small stroke, also known as a silent stroke, can cause Parkinson's disease.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. In the early 1900s, an archaeologist, William Mills, dug up a treasure-trove of carved stone pipes that had been buried almost 2,000 years earlier. Mills was the first to dig the Native American site, called Tremper Mound, in southern Ohio. And when he inspected the pipes, he made a reasonable - but untested - assumption.

New research from the University of Toronto answers one of the most common questions parents ask their doctors: How much milk should I be giving my children? The answer is two cups per day. And while too little milk is a problem, so is too much, the study found. "We started to research the question because professional recommendations around milk intake were unclear and doctors and parents were seeking answers," said Professor Jonathon Maguire of the Department of Paediatrics and Institute of Health of Policy, Management and Evaluation.

Scientists trying to decipher the microenvironment of living biological tissues now have a way of taking high-resolution, high-speed, three-dimensional images of their inner workings. Cornell researchers led by Chris Xu, associate professor of applied and engineering physics, have demonstrated a new imaging technique that can quickly provide information not only about light intensity but also its "lifetime" - how long it takes for a photon to be re-emitted after excitation.

When the heart works too hard, the brain may be to blame, says new Cornell research that is changing how scientists look at high blood pressure (hypertension). The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in November, traces hypertension to a newfound cellular source in the brain and shows that treatments targeting this area can reverse the disease.

New research by Yale University scientists suggests an explanation for the amount of iron in the Earth's largest interior layer, the mantle: migrating "iron-rich blobs" generated by chemical interactions in the zone between the planet's core and mantle. Scientists have long known of the core's rich iron content, but they have struggled to explain how the rocky mantle acquires iron in any abundance.

A Yale scientist and colleagues in Britain have found a highly unusual ancient marine fossil that retains soft body parts as well as its shell, including limbs, eyes, gills and alimentary system. The fossil represents a new species of ostracod, a tiny crustacean related to crabs, lobsters and shrimps.

New research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reveals that sons of male rats exposed to cocaine are resistant to the rewarding effects of the drug, suggesting that cocaine-induced changes in physiology are passed down from father to son.

Magnonics is an exciting extension of spintronics, promising novel ways of computing and storing magnetic data. What determines a material's magnetic state is how electron spins are arranged (not everyday spin, but quantized angular momentum). If most of the spins point in the same direction, the material is ferromagnetic, like a refrigerator magnet.

Make no mistake, Alex Clark and Lionel Messi were not separated at birth. Both might be stars in their own right, but Clark, associate dean of research in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta, realizes he's not about to woo stadiums of crazed soccer fans like FC Barcelona's all-time top scorer.