Daily non-political popular news in brief.

UNC faculty and students to develop plan to get clean water in poorer homes

10-05-2007 · EurekAlert!

Faculty and students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are setting out to discover whether applying business principles to public health problems can result in solutions that will save lives in developing countries with limited access to safe drinking water.

Keywords: unc, faculty, students, develop, plan, clean, water, poorer, homes, student, home

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Learning how nature splits water
11-03-2006 · EurekAlert!
An international team led by scientists from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) pieced together high-resolution (approximately 0.15 Ångstrom) structures of a Mn4Ca cluster found in a photosynthetic protein complex. Their work could help researchers synthesize molecules that mimic this catalyst, which is a central focus in the push to develop clean energy technologies that rely on sunlight to split water and form hydrogen to feed fuel cells or other non-polluting power sources.
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Teamwork increases student learning and career success
11-02-2007 · EurekAlert!
A two-year study of college students at The Pennsylvania State University proves that students learn better and develop higher-level skills by participating in cooperative (team) activities, compared to traditional classroom teaching methods.
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Home-Schooled Student Wins Brookhaven Lab's Model Bridge Contest
04-03-2007 · Brookhaven National Laboratory
Benjamin Coburn, a home-schooled student from Center Moriches, won first place in Brookhaven National Lab's 2007 Model Bridge Contest. Coburn won second place in the contest last year, and he also placed first in 2005. Over 150 students from 12 Suffolk County high schools entered their model basswood bridges in the contest with the goal of making the lightest bridge that held the most weight.
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2 MSU professors spearhead international water project
06-22-2007 · EurekAlert!
Two MSU professors are leading an international partnership of environmental engineers and scientists from four research universities, including U.S., to purify the world’s waters. With the biggest funding of its kind -- a $2.5 million grant -- by the National Science Foundation, the team leaders are bringing together domestic and international expertise, as well as investing in students, to develop water purifying strategies using what are called “membrane-based” technologies.
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Department of silver linings
11-01-2007 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
For members of MIT's first Solar Decathlon team, what worked was the success of their Solar7 home with the 25,000 visitors who toured the 20 student-built solar homes that competed in the 10-day contest held in Washington, D.C.
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Case closed -- MIT gumshoes solve 'throbbing' oil mystery
07-17-2007 · EurekAlert!
Try this at home. Pour clean water onto a plate. Wait for the ripples to stop. Then mix a small amount of mineral oil with an even smaller amount of detergent. Squeeze a tiny drop of that mixture onto the water and watch as the oil appears to pump like a beating heart. It's a simple experiment, but explaining what happens has long mystified the scientific community. Now an MIT team has cracked the case.
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Starting university may be hazardous to your health: study
10-04-2007 · EurekAlert!
Moving away from home and adapting to a new social environment are just two of the many challenges that new students face as they enter university. An innovative new study conducted at the University of Alberta has found that these challenges can actually have a negative effect on a student's health.
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Nanotech promises big things for poor -- but will promises be kept?
02-27-2007 · EurekAlert!
"Nanotechnology has the potential to generate enormous health benefits for the more than five billion people living in the developing world," according to Dr. Peter A. Singer, senior scientist at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health and Professor of Medicine at University of Toronto. "Nanotechnology might provide less-industrialized countries with powerful new tools for diagnosing and treating disease, and might increase the availability of clean water."
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Advance in understanding of blood pressure gene could lead to new treatments
02-04-2007 · EurekAlert!
Research by scientists at UCL (University College London) has clearly demonstrated for the first time the structure and function of a gene crucial to the regulation of blood pressure. The discovery could be important in the search for new treatments for illnesses such as heart disease, the UK's biggest killer. In a paper published online today in Nature Medicine, the team, led by Professor Patrick Vallance and Dr James Leiper, UCL Department of Medicine, reveal the role of the human gene dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase (DDAH), showing that loss of DDAH activity disrupts nitric oxide (NO) production. NO is critical in the regulation of blood pressure, nervous system functions and the immune system. The role of DDAH is to break down modified amino acids (Asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) and monomethyl arginine (L-NMMA)) that are produced by the body and have been shown to inhibit NO synthase. These molecules accumulate in various disease states including diabetes, renal failure and pulmonary and systemic hypertension, and their concentration in plasma (the fluid component of blood) is strongly predicative of cardiovascular disease and death. In a healthy human body, the majority of ADMA is eliminated through active metabolism by DDAH. Scientists have hypothesised that if DDAH function is impaired, NO production is reduced, and that this could be an important feature of increased cardiovascular risk. To examine this pathway in more detail, the researchers deleted the DDAH gene in mice. These mice went on to develop hypertension, or high blood pressure. They also designed specific inhibitors (small molecules) which bind to the active site of human DDAH. These small molecule inhibitors also induced hypertension in mice, confirming the importance of DDAH in the regulation of blood pressure. Dr Leiper, UCL Medicine, said: “These genetic and chemical approaches to disrupt DDAH showed remarkably consistent results, and provide compelling evidence that loss of DDAH function increases the concentration of ADMA and thereby disrupts vascular NO signalling. “There has been considerable scientific interest in this pathway and the role of ADMA as a novel risk factor, but so far there's been little evidence to support the idea that it's a cause of disease, rather than just a marker. Genes and their pathways are crucial to our understanding of cardiovascular disease and a better understanding of DDAH-1 could lead to important new treatments. “It could help us to establish if genetic variation predisposes certain people to these diseases, or whether environmental factors exert some of their effects through modulation of DDAH activity. “Our research also shows that this pathway could be harnessed therapeutically to limit production of NO in certain situations where too much nitric oxide is a bad thing; for example, hypotension and septic shock. These are some of the biggest problems in intensive care medicine and there is a huge unmet need for drug treatments.” The study, which was carried out at UCL's Rayne Institute, was funded by grants from the British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council. Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, said: "The unexpected finding in the 1980s that a simple gas, nitric oxide (NO), is made by cells in the blood vessel wall and is a powerful control of blood vessel relaxation led to the award of the Nobel Prize in 1998 to its discoverers. "More recently, there has been increasing evidence that impairment of NO production is likely to be an important factor in the development of heart and circulatory disease, but the mechanisms responsible are not fully understood. "This study suggests for the first time that the loss of the activity of the enzyme DDAH-1 leads to reduced NO production and may cause heart and circulatory disease. These findings are likely to be important in the search for new ways to optimise the health of our blood vessels." ### Notes for Editors 1. For more information, please contact Ruth Metcalfe in the UCL Media Relations Office on tel: +44 (0)20 7679 9739, mobile: +44 (0)7990 675 947, out of hours: +44 (0)7917 271 364, e-mail: r.metcalfe@ucl.ac.uk2. 'Disruption of methylarginine metabolism impairs vascular homeostasis' is published in the February issue of the journal Nature Medicine. Advance online publication is embargoed to 18.00 GMT (13.00 US Eastern) Sunday 4 February 2007. Journalists can obtain copies of the paper by contacting the UCL Media Relations Office.3. The study was funded by the British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council. About UCL Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. In the government's most recent Research Assessment Exercise, 59 UCL departments achieved top ratings of 5* and 5, indicating research quality of international excellence. UCL is the fourth-ranked UK university in the 2006 league table of the top 500 world universities produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. UCL alumni include Mahatma Gandhi (Laws 1889, Indian political and spiritual leader); Jonathan Dimbleby (Philosophy 1969, writer and television presenter); Junichiro Koizumi (Economics 1969, Prime Minister of Japan); Lord Woolf (Laws 1954, Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales); Alexander Graham Bell (Phonetics 1860s, inventor of the telephone), and members of the band Coldplay.
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RAND study finds vaccination of nursing home staff, residents, key to reducing flu outbreak
11-15-2006 · EurekAlert!
Potentially deadly influenza outbreaks in nursing homes are less likely to occur when large numbers of staff and residents get flu shots, according to a study issued today by the RAND Corporation.The study by the nonprofit research organization found that nursing homes were 60 percent less likely to have a cluster of influenza-like illnesses if more than 55 percent of the staff and more than 89 percent of the residents were vaccinated for influenza.
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