An international team of oceanographers investigating the role of iron on ocean productivity in the northerly latitudes of the Atlantic Ocean will assess the impact of ash from the recent Icelandic volcano eruption on ocean biology. The five-week expedition started out on July 4, 2010.

Researchers say that dementia in some diabetics appears to be caused often by vascular disease in the brain, and the dementia that develops in people without diabetes is more likely associated with deposition of the plaque seen in people with Alzheimer's disease.

You can teach an old drug new chemotherapy tricks. Researchers took a drug therapy proven for blood cancers but ineffective against solid tumors, packaged it with nanotechnology and got it to combat an aggressive type of breast cancer prevalent in young women, particularly young African-American women. The drug is arsenic and the cancer is triple negative breast cancer. It has a high risk of metastasizing and poor survival rates.

People who wish to escape the ‘meat paradox’ -- i.e., simultaneously disliking hurting animals and enjoying eating meat -- may do so by denying that the animal they ate had the capacity to suffer, researchers in the UK have found in a new study. Those participating in the study also reported a reduced range of animals to which they felt obligated to show moral concern. These ranged from dogs and chimps to snails and fish.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's announcement this week that he has been implanted with a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) to aid his ailing heart highlights one of several technologies available to people suffering from heart failure. Earlier this week, Scientific American wrote about a new six-kilogram portable artificial heart driver from SynCardia Systems, Inc. that has given three cardiac patients the freedom to await a possible transplant at home, rather than being tethered to a 180-kilogram driver in the hospital. [More]



Dick Cheney - Heart failure - Ventricular assist device - SynCardia Systems - Health

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's announcement this week that he has been implanted with a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) to aid his ailing heart highlights one of several technologies available to people suffering from heart failure. Earlier this week, Scientific American wrote about a new six-kilogram portable artificial heart driver from SynCardia Systems, Inc. that has given three cardiac patients the freedom to await a possible transplant at home, rather than being tethered to a 180-kilogram driver in the hospital. [More]



Dick Cheney - Heart failure - Ventricular assist device - SynCardia Systems - Health

Recycled printer paper and fair-trade coffee might have higher prices at the register, but these feel-good products often fail to bring in big bucks for companies. [More]



Coffee - Fair trade - Beverages - Food - Shopping

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the existence of a baked object that could be called a "cometary planet." The gas giant planet, named HD 209458b, is orbiting so close to its star that its heated atmosphere is escaping into space. Observations taken with Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) suggest powerful stellar winds are sweeping the cast-off atmospheric material behind the scorched planet and shaping it into a comet-like tail.

New experiments offer insights into how defects influence the formation of wrinkles, and could prove helpful in understanding wrinkles in biological tissue.

How a retrovirus, like HIV, reproduces and assembles new viruses is different than previously thought, according to new research. Understanding the steps a virus takes for assembly could allow development of a way to prevent the spread of retroviral diseases.