Zoo Atlanta recently became the first zoological institution in the world to obtain voluntary blood pressure readings from a gorilla. This groundbreaking stride was made possible by the Gorilla Tough Cuff, a blood pressure reading system devised through partnership with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Created as a senior design proj...

Engineers at the University of Leeds have developed a simple technology which can be used in existing chemical reactors to ensure "right first time" drug crystal formation. ...

Biologists for the first time have documented a second breeding season during the annual cycle of five songbird species that spend summers in temperate North America and winters in tropical Central and South America. It was known that these species, which migrate at night when there are fewer predators and the stars can guide their journey, breed during their stay in temperate regions of the Unite...

A team of Harvard chemists led by X. Sunney Xie has developed a new microscopic technique for seeing, in color, molecules with undetectable fluorescence. The room-temperature technique allows researchers to identify previously unseen molecules in living organisms and offers broad applications in biomedical imaging and research. The scientists` results are published in the Oct. 22 issue of Nature. ...

Investigators have identified a drug that is currently approved to treat certain types of cancer, Gleevec, that could provide the first treatment for scleroderma, a chronic connective tissue disease for which a treatment has remained elusive. The news will be presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology on October 18 in Philadelphia. "There has never been a drug tha...

For the first time, researchers are able to look at the need for every gene in a bacterial cell in a single experiment. The new method will transform the study of gene activity and the search for weaknesses in bacterial armouries. Using a newly developed, next-gen sequencing method, a team established which genes Salmonella Typhi needs to survive and which are more of a luxury. The results and the...

The National Institute for Computational Sciences` (NICS`s) Cray XT5 supercomputer—Kraken—has been upgraded to become the first academic system to surpass a thousand trillion calculations a second, or one petaflop, a landmark achievement that will greatly accelerate science and place Kraken among the top five computers in the world. Managed by the University of Tennessee (UT) for the N...

The raptor-like Archaeopteryx has long been viewed as the archetypal first bird, but new research reveals that it was actually a lot less "bird-like" than scientists had believed. In fact, the landmark study led by paleobiologist Gregory M. Erickson of The Florida State University has upended the iconic first-known-bird image of Archaeopteryx (from the Greek for "ancient wing")...

For the first time, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have demonstrated that it is possible to successfully recruit and retain a large number of adolescent smokers from the general population into a smoking intervention study and, through personalized, proactive telephone counseling, significantly impact rates of six-month continuous quitting. These findings, by Arthur V. Peter...

There are approximately 40,000 species of spiders in the world, all of which have been thought to be strict predators that feed on insects or other animals. Now, scientists have found that a small Central American jumping spider has a uniquely different diet: the species Bagheera kiplingi feeds predominantly on plant food. The research, led by Christopher Meehan of Villanova University and Eric Ol...