The Lancet today finally retracted the paper that sparked a crisis in MMR vaccination across the UK, following the General Medical Council’s decision that its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, had been dishonest. The medical journal’s editor, Richard Horton, told the Guardian today that he realised as soon as he read the GMC findings that the paper, published in February 1998, had to be retracted. It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false,
he said. I feel I was deceived
Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products
Desert ants in Tunisia smell in stereo, sensing odours from two different directions at the same time. Pigeons, rats and even people may also smell in stereo, but ants are the first animal known to use it for navigation
The ultra-high-strength composite metal foam created by Afsaneh Rabiei is a highlight of a well-traveled career during which the researcher has tried to learn everything she can about advanced materials. The result: a brand new material that can save energy and lives
Single sided deafness affects around 200 out of every million people the world over. The loss of stereo hearing can prove dangerous when crossing the street, or other mobile environments. Sonitus Medical has developed a new device, SoundBite, that uses the natural conduction of teeth and bone to transmit sound to the inner ear even after the outer and middle ear are damaged
Bill and Melinda Gates announced plans Friday to invest $10 billion in the fight against a number of illnesses including AIDS and said the record donation could save nearly nine million lives. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, they said the 10-year program will focus on vaccines for AIDS, tuberculosis, rota virus and pneumonia. We must make this the decade of vaccines,
said Bill Gates. Vaccines are a miracle,
added Melinda Gates. With just a few doses, they can prevent deadly diseases for a lifetime. We’ve made vaccines our priority at the Gates Foundation because we’ve seen firsthand their incredible impact on children’s lives
A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show. The controlled fusion of atoms — creating conditions like those in our Sun — has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.—However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the plasma
they create could interrupt the fusion
Neurons have been created directly from skin cells for the first time, in a remarkable study that suggests that our biological makeup is far more versatile than previously thought. If confirmed, the discovery that one tissue type can be genetically reprogrammed to become another, could revolutionise treatments for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s, opening up the possibility of turning a patient’s own skin cells into the neurons that they need
Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus. The research, based on the first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, found diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms floating atop liquid forms. The surprising revelation gives scientists a new understanding about diamonds and some of the most distant planets in our solar system
Japanese scientists from the Tokyo University have invented a new material, which consists of water by 95 percent. The report said it’s safe for humans and environment and could, therefore, be used in medicine in a long-term perspective. The new material was obtained by adding about two grams of clay and a small quantity of appropriate organic matters into normal water. The new aqua substance is elastic and transparent and looks very much like jelly. Its characteristics make it possible to use it in medicine for sticking together tissues
For every 300 Muscovites, there’s a stray dog wandering the streets of Russia’s capital. And according to Andrei Poyarkov, a researcher at the AN Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the fierce pressure of urban living has driven the dogs to evolve wolf-like traits, increased intelligence, and even the ability to navigate the subway
Ordinary cotton and polyester fabrics have been turned into batteries that retain their flexibility. The demonstration is a boost to the nascent field of wearable electronics
in which devices are integrated into clothing and textiles
This seems like a harmless tube. In fact, it was harmless: Israeli farmers used the first version to scare birds from crop fields. Then, somebody converted it into a crowd dispersion mechanism. And then, they discovered it could kill. The Thunder Generator uses mixture of liquefied petroleum, cooking gas, and air to create explosions, which in return generate shock waves capable of stunning people from 30 to 100 metres away. At that range, the weapon is absolutely harmless, making people run in panic when they feel the sonic blast hitting their bodies. However, at less than ten metres, the Thunder Generator could either cause permanent damage or kill any person
Aurochs were immortalised in prehistoric cave paintings and admired for their brute strength and elephantine
size by Julius Caesar. But despite their having gone the way of the dodo and the woolly mammoth, there are plans to bring the giant animals back to life. The huge cattle with sweeping horns which once roamed the forests of Europe have not been seen for nearly 400 years. Now Italian scientists are hoping to use genetic expertise and selective breeding of modern-day wild cattle to recreate the fearsome beasts which weighed around 2,200lb and stood 6.5 feet at the shoulder. Breeds of large cattle which most closely resemble Bos primigenius, such as Highland cattle and the white Maremma breed from Italy, are being bred with each other in a technique known as back-breeding
. At the same time, scientists say they have for the first time created a map of the auroch’s genome, so that they know precisely what type of animal they are trying to replicate
A deep-sea snail shell’s ability to withstand heavy blows could inspire new generation of body armour. Crysomallon squamiferum, commonly known as the scaly-foot gastropod, was discovered in 1999 in the Kairei black smoker
field on the Central Indian Ridge, at a depth of 2420 metres
Alligators and birds share a breathing mechanism which may have helped their ancestors dominate Earth more than 200 million years ago. Research published in the journal Science found that like birds, in alligators air flows in one direction. Birds’ lung structure allows them to breathe when flying in low oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions. This breathing may have helped a common ancestor of birds and alligators thrive in the hypoxic period of the Triassic
When Ross Clark read in New Scientist that the US military considered the Nintendo Wiimote controller accurate enough to control bomb disposal robots, it set him thinking. Could the Wii’s skiing and snowboarding attachment, the balance board, help rehabilitate people who have had a stroke? I wanted to know if it would be any good for assessing the standing balance of patients,
says Clark. He reasoned that being able to measure the centre of pressure of a person’s foot will be useful to a physio who is helping someone relearn how to stand. Yet the lab-grade force platforms
needed to do that cost more than £11,000 — putting them out of the reach of many physio clinics. So Clark and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Australia, took apart a Wii balance board and hacked into its strain gauges and accelerometers to tap into their raw data. We found the data to be excellent. I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up
Many experiments in biology rely on manipulating cells: adding a gene, protein, or other molecule, for instance, to study its effects on the cell. But getting a molecule into a cell is much like breaking into a fortress; it often relies on biological tricks such as infecting a cell with a virus or attaching a protein to another one that will sneak it through the cell’s membrane. Many of these methods are specific to certain types of cells and only work with specific molecules. A paper in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a surprisingly simple and direct alternative: using nanowires as needles to poke molecules into cells
Researchers have demonstrated a simple, cheap way to create self-assembling electronic devices using a property crucial to salad dressings. It uses the fact that oil- and water-based liquids do not mix, forming devices from components that align along the boundary between the two. The idea joins a raft of approaches toward self-assembly, but lends itself particularly well to small components. Crucially, it could allow the large-scale assembly of high-quality electronic components on materials of just about any type, in contrast to “inkjet printed” electronics or some previous self-assembly techniques
A new kind of glass can swell to absorb pollutants in water. This is the discovery that could put the College of Wooster on the map: glass that swells like a sponge. Put together like a nano-matrix, the new glass can unfold to hold up to eight times its weight. The glass binds with gasoline and other pollutants containing volatile organic compounds but it does not bind with water, so it acts like a smart
sponge, capable of picking and choosing from contaminated groundwater
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