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Obama's health reform political maneuvers may prove successful

"After months of plodding work by five Congressional committees and weeks of back-room bargaining by Democratic leaders, President Obama's arms-length strategy on health care appears to be paying dividends, with the House and the Senate poised to take up legislation to insure nearly all Americans," The New York Times reports.

2 Nov 2009

Protein Discovery and New Objective sign co-marketing and development agreement

Protein Discovery, Inc. and New Objective, Inc. today announced that they have entered into a strategic co-marketing and development agreement designed to enable and expand key applications for intact protein analysis using mass spectrometry ("top down" proteomics).

22 Oct 2009

World Food Day marked, Actionaid International releases hunger report

Today marks World Food Day, with the aim of bringing "awareness to the issue of hunger," as the world faces "more mouths to feed but fewer farmers to grow the needed crops," Deutsche Welle reports.

19 Oct 2009

Opinions: Fighting hunger; property ownership, trade key to Africa's development

"For one billion people around the world, the daily effort to grow, buy or sell food is the defining struggle of their lives. This matters to them, and to all of us," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton writes in a Times of India opinion piece.

19 Oct 2009

Health bill fails to address the root cause of national health collapse: Earth Intelligence Network

Robert David STEELE Vivas, CEO, Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 Public Charity chartered in the Commonwealth of Virginia, has released a single graphic showing Health Policy Fundamentals, three quarters of which are being ignored by both proponents and detractors of the new national health bill.

18 Sep 2009

System 50 years out of date for chronic illness

Many people with chronic health conditions have more than one disease, which makes caring for them much more complex. Unfortunately, the way our health system is structured now, and the way it is paid for, reflects the health needs our society had about 50 years ago.

27 Jul 2009

Impaired ability to monitor behavior, emotions may underlie vulnerability to drugs; suggests new targets for treatment

Parts of the brain involved in monitoring behaviors and emotions show different levels of activity in cocaine users relative to non-drug users, even when both groups perform equally well on a psychological test.

25 May 2009

DNA origami rectangle made with 'bottom-up' construction approach

The construction of complex man-made objects--a car, for example, or even a pizza--almost invariably entails what are known as "top-down" processes, in which the structure and order of the thing being built is imposed from the outside (say, by an automobile assembly line, or the hands of the pizza maker).

9 Apr 2009

Schizophrenics appear to rely considerably less on top-down processing during perception

Patients with schizophrenia are able to correctly see through an illusion known as the 'hollow mask' illusion, probably because their brain disconnects 'what the eyes see' from what 'the brain thinks it is seeing', according to a joint UK and German study published in the journal NeuroImage.

6 Apr 2009

Allergies may be caused by a malfunction of the respiratory epithelium

One reason for the development of allergy may be malfunction of the respiratory epithelium, which allows allergens to bind to, enter and travel through the epithelium.

6 Apr 2009

Bottom up assembly of cells into 3-D microtissues

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory can now control how cells connect with one another in vitro and assemble themselves into three-dimensional, multicellular microtissues.

5 Mar 2009

Veeco releases new BioScope Catalyst Life Science Atomic Force Microscope

Veeco Instruments Inc. announced today the release of its BioScope Catalyst Life Science Atomic Force Microscope (AFM).

2 Mar 2009

Integrated Children's System fails the children it was designed to protect

Just days after the head of Ofsted, Christine Gilbert, promised an overhaul of child protection inspection services in the wake of the death of Baby P, a new study claims that the IT-based procedures used by staff working at the 'front door' of local authority children's services could be putting the very children which they are designed to help at increased risk.

15 Dec 2008

Panel blasts Bush administration's nanotech risk strategy

A National Research Council (NRC) committee has issued a highly critical report describing serious shortfalls in the Bush administration's strategy to better understand the environment, health and safety (EHS) risks of nanotechnology and to effectively manage those potential risks.

10 Dec 2008

Discovery may lead to new therapeutic approaches for pain reduction

By manipulating the appearance of a chronically achy hand, researchers have found they could increase or decrease the pain and swelling in patients moving their symptomatic limbs.

25 Nov 2008

New hypothesis on feeling sleepy

Feeling sleepy? That's because parts of your brain are actually asleep, according to a new theoretical paper by sleep scientists at Washington State University.

8 Nov 2008

Can knowledge of objects be used to identify color?

One of the easiest ways to identify an object is by its color -- perhaps it is because children's books encourage us to pair certain objects with their respective colors. Why else would so many of us automatically assume carrots are orange, grass is green and apples are red?

22 Jul 2008