A team of researchers from have discovered that lycopene – the red pigment in tomatoes – is extremely successful at guarding against the harmful effects of radiation.
Dr Ruth Edge from The University of Manchester, together with her colleagues Professor George Truscott from Keele University and Professors Fritz Boehm & Christian Witt from Berlin, undertook a study of lycopene (one of the carotenoids – plant pigments found in many fruits and vegetables) and its effectiveness at protecting against radiation at the University of Manchester’s Dalton Cumbrian Facility, part of the Dalton Nuclear Institute.
AUSTIN, Texas — Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered that a type of cancer found primarily in children can grow only when signaled to do so by other nearby cells that are noncancerous. The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contributes to a growing body of research that implicates the environment around a cancer in its spread — an area of study that holds promise for new alternatives to treat the disease.(more…)
ANN ARBOR — With precarious particles called polaritons that straddle the worlds of light and matter, University of Michigan researchers have demonstrated a new, practical and potentially more efficient way to make a coherent laser-like beam.
They have made what’s believed to be the first polariton laser that is fueled by electrical current as opposed to light, and also works at room temperature, rather than way below zero. (more…)
There is only one planet we know of, so far, that is drenched with life. That planet is Earth, as you may have guessed, and it has all the right conditions for critters to thrive on its surface. Do other planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, also host life forms?
Astronomers still don’t know the answer, but they search for potentially habitable planets using a handful of criteria. Ideally, they want to find planets just like Earth, since we know without a doubt that life took root here. The hunt is on for planets about the size of Earth that orbit at just the right distance from their star – in a region termed the habitable zone. (more…)
A decade ago, spurred by a question for a fifth-grade science project, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang that started our universe nearly 14 billion years ago.
Now, armed with more sophisticated data from a satellite mission observing the cosmic microwave background – a faint glow in the universe that acts as sort of a fossilized fingerprint of the Big Bang – Cramer has produced newrecordingsthat fill in higher frequencies to create a fuller and richer sound. (The sound files run from 20 seconds to a little longer than 8 minutes.) (more…)
A new look at conditions after a Manhattan-sized asteroid slammed into a region of Mexico in the dinosaur days indicates the event could have triggered a global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush and tree on Earth and led to the extinction of 80 percent of all Earth’s species, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
Led by Douglas Robertson of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, the team used models that show the collision would have vaporized huge amounts of rock that were then blown high above Earth’s atmosphere. The re-entering ejected material would have heated the upper atmosphere enough to glow red for several hours at roughly 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit — about the temperature of an oven broiler element — killing every living thing not sheltered underground or underwater. (more…)
Using a video game system to get exercise at home can help patients overcome one of cancer’s most common and cumbersome symptoms: severe, persistent fatigue.
Michigan State University’s Amy Hoffman and colleagues showed in an earlier study that the Nintendo Wii system was a safe and effective source of light-intensity exercise for patients with non-small cell lung cancer in the first six weeks after surgery. (more…)
Japan fisheries data provides a look at how the ocean is faring 18 months after the worst accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history
Japan’s “triple disaster,” as it has become known, began on March 11, 2011, and remains unprecedented in its scope and complexity. To understand the lingering effects and potential public health implications of that chain of events, scientists are turning to a diverse and widespread sentinel in the world’s ocean: fish.
Events on March 11 began with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the fourth largest ever recorded. The earthquake in turn spawned a massive 40-foot tsunami that inundated the northeast Japanese coast and resulted in an estimated 20,000 missing or dead. Finally, the wave caused catastrophic damage to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, resulting in the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history, 80 percent of which ended up in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. (more…)