On the morning of November 13, mission controllers confirmed that ESA`s comet chaser Rosetta had swung by Earth at 8:45 CET as planned, skimming past our planet to pick up a gravitational boost for an epic journey to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta passed over the ocean, just South of the Indonesian island of Java, at exactly 08:45:40 CET, at a speed of 13.34 km/s ...

An important, ground-breaking initiative is unfolding in the global critical care community in response to the H1N1 pandemic. While front-line health care workers and infectious disease experts around the world are working round the clock to control, treat and prevent H1N1 infection, those who deal with the most severely ill patients — physicians working in hospital intensive care units (ICU...

As more people are diagnosed with H1N1 influenza infection, some will be admitted to hospital. The most severely affected may be treated in the intensive care unit (ICU) and placed on a mechanical ventilator to help them breathe while they recover from the infection. While mechanical ventilation clearly saves the lives of many people felled by serious illness, in some cases, this supportive measur...

A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) reports on Thursday their success in solving the molecular structure of a key portion of a cellular receptor implicated in Alzheimer`s, Parkinson`s, and other serious illnesses. Assistant Professor Hiro Furukawa, Ph.D., and colleagues at CSHL, in cooperation with the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory, ob...

The American health care sector accounts for 8 percent of the country`s carbon dioxide emissions, according to a first-of-its-kind calculation of health care`s carbon footprint. ...

Scientists at a group of 11 research centers in China are reporting for the first time assembly of the largest-ever collection of data about the proteins produced by genes in a single human organ. Their focus was the liver, and their massive database in both protein and transcript levels could become a roadmap for finding possible new biomarkers and treatments for liver disease. Those include hepa...

New software is under development that doctors hope will help them identify brain tumours in children that will grow aggressively. Some brain tumours in children remain benign and doctors choose not to operate. But a small percentage of those will suddenly start to grow aggressively. Doctors have not identified what triggers that aggressive tumour growth, despite the vast array of data they hold o...

Purdue University researchers are making progress in developing a new type of transistor that uses a finlike structure instead of the conventional flat design, possibly enabling engineers to create faster and more compact circuits and computer chips. The fins are made not of silicon, like conventional transistors, but from a material called indium-gallium-arsenide. Called finFETs, for fin field-ef...

Of the many characteristic traits a drug can have, one of the most desirable is the ability for a drug to be swallowed and absorbed into the bloodstream through the gut. Some drugs, like over-the-counter aspirin, lend themselves to this mode of delivery and are trivial to take. They can be pressed into a pill and swallowed. Other drugs cannot be swallowed and must be administered instead through m...

Scientists in Canada are reporting the development of a fast, inexpensive "dipstick" test to identify small amounts of pesticides that may exist in foods and beverages. Their paper-strip test is more practical than conventional pesticide tests, producing results in minutes rather than hours by means of an easy-to-read color-change, they say. The study is in the November 1 issue of ACS` A...