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Disease, Queen Identified as Main Bee Colony Risk Factors
Researchers at North Carolina State University, University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, and U.S. Department of Agriculture found a mysterious disease and aberrant queen behavior highly associated with the recent widespread death of bee colonies. The authors published their findings in a recent issue of the journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine. The team led by University…
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Consortium to Develop Disease Model for Multiple Sclerosis
A coalition of research institutes, analytics companies, and a patient network are building computational tools and models to better understand the causes of multiple sclerosis. Orion Bionetworks, based in Boston, is a consortium of the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis, Institute for Neurosciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, GNS Healthcare, MetaCell, and PatientsLikeMe. Orion…
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Bacterial Biofilms Found to Quickly Clog Medical Devices
Molecular biologists and engineers at Princeton University in New Jersey discovered that bacterial formations called biofilms can quickly tangle and trap other bacteria, disabling medical devices. The study by postdoctoral researcher Knut Drescher and colleagues appears online in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (paid subscription required). Drescher, working in…
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Gold Nanoparticle Biosensor Developed for Simple Diagnostics
Biomedical engineers at University of Toronto in Canada developed a simple, portable DNA diagnostic process using gold nanoparticles and requiring only small specimen samples. The team of doctoral candidate Kyryl Zagorovsky and professor Warren Chan reported their findings online in a recent issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie (paid subscription required). Zagorovsky and Chan (pictured…
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Wireless Brain Sensor Designed, Tested in Animals
Neuroscientists and engineers at Brown University in Providence developed a wireless broadband implanted brain sensor that the researchers are testing in lab animals. The team led by Brown engineering professor Arto Nurmikko described their findings at this week’s 2013 International Workshop on Clinical Brain-Neural Machine Interface Systems in Houston, and in the April 2013 issue…
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Faster, Lower Temperature Ceramics Method Developed
A materials scientist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh discovered a new technique for making high-density ceramics needing lower temperatures and that takes only a second. Jay Narayan describes his process in two recent papers appearing online in the journal Scripta Materialia, a viewpoint essay posted last week, and a technical paper published last…
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Mylan Acquires Generic Injectables Manufacturer for $1.6B
Mylan Inc., a producer of generic and specialty branded drugs in Pittsburgh, will acquire Agila Specialties in Bangalore, India, a developer of generic inectable drugs and division of Strides Arcolab Ltd. Mylan will pay $1.6 billion cash for Agila Specialties, with up to $250 million in contingent payments possible later on. Mylan offers some 1,100…
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Ball-Mounted Cam Provides Unique View of Football Field
Engineers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo designed a miniature video camera mounted inside a football, with an algorithm to process the images, to provide a view of the game rarely, if ever, seen. Carnegie Mellon’s Kris Katani and UEC’s Kodai Horita will describe their system in a…
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Gastric Model Lands Funding for Expanded Applications
An artificial digestive system developed at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, U.K. for lab tests of physical and biochemical processes in the human stomach and intestines, secured more than £900,000 ($US 1.4 million) for research on new models of nutritional quality and health benefits. The two-year grant is provided to the Institute of…
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Roche Increasing Access to Clinical Trial Results
The pharmaceutical company Roche, based in Switzerland, will increase access to its clinical trial data for third-party researchers. The company also promises access to clinical data for its flu medication Tamiflu, after review by independent scientists, for which the British medical journal BMJ and evidence-based medicine organization Cochrane Collaboration have long-standing requests for access. In…