To run an airline, you need not only pilots, airplanes, and fuel, you also need landing rights at airports matching your planned routes and times. Today airlines must buy these rights one at a time via trades, and so risk ending up with mismatched slots that they cannot use. Thirty years ago economists designed and tested [...]

Dr. J. chats with Kevin Kelly, the former publisher and editor of the late and lamented Whole Earth Review, co-founder and Senior Maverick of Wired magazine, and author of New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control.  They talk about his new bo

NASA has selected a mission to Saturn's Moon for Discovery Program Development. The Titan Mare Explorer, or TiME, would perform the first direct inspection of an ocean environment beyond Earth by landing in, and floating on, a large methane-ethane sea on

Over the past decades, researchers seeking to understand molecular mechanisms underlying various diseases, notably cancer, have taken advantage of DNA microarrays to interrogate tissues specimen of patients for the expression status of thousands of genes at once. Jointly, such gene expression status of each gene in the genome, measured as the level of their transcripts, constitutes the gene expression profile. Since each of the tens of thousands of genes can be switched on or off, a gene expression profile contains complex information, akin to a huge bar code with tens of thousands of digits for every sample. While microarray data was initially used by gene hunters to identify novel genes, such as those which are only active in samples of particular cancer tissues, researchers have later learned to employ sophisticated computational tools to classify these bar codes into subgroups and to find subgroup specific signatures. In cancer research such statistical analysis of gene expression patterns can serve to identify new cancer subtypes and help classify patients more accurately.

US lawmakers announced plans on Friday to introduce "Do Not Track" legislation that would let Internet users block companies from gathering information about their online activities.

While children of all ethnicities can contract Kawasaki disease (KD), a study led by researchers at the Kawasaki Disease Research Center at the University of California, San Diego and Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego finds that Filipino children with KD are at a higher risk for inflammation of the blood vessels of the heart than those of other Asian and non-Asian backgrounds. Nearly 24 percent of Filipino children with KD in San Diego County were found to have aneurysms compared to 10.5 percent of children of other Asian descent.

Green roofs like the one atop a Con Edison building in Long Island City, Queens can be a cost-effective way to keep water from running into sewer systems and causing overflows, Columbia University researchers have found.

Roger Longstaff, engineer at Reaction Engines Ltd (REL), said that the company intends to test its amazing "pre-cooler" technology in June, 2011. An REL spokesperson announced that they had secured $350 million of further funding, contingent on successful completion of the full-sized precooled jet engine test in June 2011. In paper studies, the costs per kilogram of payload are hoped to be lowered to £650/kg (US$1000/kg as of 2011), including the costs of research and development (R&D;), with costs expected to fall much more over time after the initial expenditures have amortized. Eventually prices would fall to $100-200/kg.

The pre-cooler is the key to REL's (Reaction Engines Ltd) amazing SABRE engines, which are themselves perhaps the primary factor permitting a single-stage-to-orbit space plane.

The company describes the SABRE engine as being a rocket furnished with and additional pre-cooled turbocompressor. Air is taken in at the front of the SABRE and almost instantly cooled down to the point at which it is almost liquid, using terrifically powerful freezer kit employing a liquid-helium loop. The supercold air takes the place of liquid oxygen in the combustion chamber, reacting with liquid-hydrogen fuel to produce thrust in much the same way as the space shuttle main engines. Heat sucked from the intake air is dumped into the fuel.

The breakthrough for Reaction Engines has been in the development of its pre-cooler system. At Mach 5, SABRE will need to cope with gases entering at temperatures reaching 1,000 degrees celcius. The pre-cooler uses thousands of small-bore thin-wall tubes, each around the width of a human hair, to drop the air temperature to -150degrees celcius in just 30ms. Back when Skylon was still a concept, the required heat exchangers for this type of pre-cooled jet engine were impossible to make, but with improvements in materials and manufacturing techniques, Varvill believes the technology has turned a corner

This use of air instead of liquid oxygen for takeoff and the early part of the flight up to orbit means that the Skylon doesn't need to carry nearly as much liquid oxygen as the Shuttle does, and thus that it can carry a cargo to orbit without needing to throw large parts of itself away. It can also make a runway takeoff, so avoiding the costly and troublesome need to point itself vertically into the sky for launch.

The Register interviewed REL technical director Richard Varvill in 2010, and he said that the company is expecting to test a SABRE on the ground as soon as 2013 or 2014. However, before REL's backers will fund the building of a complete SABRE, it seems that they need to see the pre-cooler working.

REL has a 10-year roadmap to actual Skylon flights, with costs during that time of maybe $15bn. The plan works like a snowball: at first, comparatively small investments lead to comparatively minor tests and trials, which then unlock bigger sums allowing bigger building blocks to be built and validated and so on – until in the final years, big cheques get signed and actual Skylons get built.

The amazing spaceplane is expected to be able to repay those big investment cheques, as it will be able to deliver payloads – admittedly, at first quite small ones of only 10 tonnes or so compared to its own substantial mass of 275+ tonnes – at low cost. The whole Skylon is reusable, and re-using it is a comparatively simple matter of refuelling it, loading it up again and taxiing it back out onto the runway as opposed to strapping on a brand new set of tanks and boosters and standing it on end next to a launch gantry.

The ceramic aeroshell is to be just 0.5mm thick. The undercarriage has had to be lightened too, so that a Skylon won't be able to land on just any runway – it will need a special reinforced one able to cope with heavily loaded wheels moving rather fast. If the craft itself should gain just a few per cent in fuelled-up weight during the development process, this would wipe out its entire payload margin.

There are those who would argue that operations using liquid hydrogen fuel will simply never be economical: the stuff takes up so much room that hydrogen aircraft – including the Skylon – are always made up mainly of fuel tanks.

Private funding is lined up to see it through all stages of development, culminating with the start of commercial operations in 2020. That funding, however, is contingent on Skylon hitting some key milestones along the way, and a big one looms just a few months off.

Nextbigfuture interviewed Richard Varvill at the end of 2009



Crowlspace speculation on eventual Successful Skylon spaceplane costs

If 30 SKYLONs are made and each flies 200 times before replacement, then the development cost divided over all those 6,000 flights is $1.67 million, or $139/kg. If 300 SKYLONs are built then it’s just $13.9/kg. That’s development cost, to which we add per unit cost, per flight costs, and fuel costs, then profit. SKYLON uses 66 tons of hydrogen and 150 tons of LOX for propellant, which costs ~ $250,000 total adding $20.8/kg to the bill. Then there’s vehicle costs incurred due to wear and tear of the components of the cryogenic system, SABRE ejector ramjets, landing gear, RCS and avionics every flight. I’m not sure what the best estimate of those would be, but let’s assume roughly comparable to the fuel costs. Thus the bill is up to $55.5/kg. If a SKYLON costs ~$200 million per unit – expensive jet-fighter value – then that’s $1 million per flight over its lifetime, which adds $83.3/kg. That seems excessive and might go down with large production volumes. Perhaps we can halve it. Thus SKYLON might cost $100/kg to deliver payload to LEO.

How much payload do 300 SKYLONs need to carry to LEO to drive costs down? All up they represent 720,000 tons of payload lofted on 60,000 flights. If a 1 GW SPS masses 3,000 tons, including the GEO delivery system for its subcomponents, then 240 GW of SPS power could be installed. To power the whole world to the tune of 24 TW then 30,000 SKYLONs making 6,000,000 flights will be needed.

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The latest presentation to the Future In-Space Operations (FISO) is the European Prospects on High-Power Electric Propulsion Technology for Future In-Space Operations by Cosmo Casaregola (32 pages) SEP Transfers in the Earth-Moon System •Three Power level

A bold new design for thin film solar cells that requires significantly less silicon – and may boost their efficiency – is the result of an industry/academia collaboration between Oerlikon Solar in Switzerland and the Institute of Physics' photovoltaic group at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

In the May-June issue of the journal American Mineralogist, a team of scientists announced the discovery of the new mineral krotite, one of the earliest minerals formed in our solar system. It is the main component of an unusual inclusion embedded in a meteorite (NWA 1934), found in northwest Africa. These objects, known as refractory inclusions, are thought to be the first planetary materials formed in our solar system, dating back to before the formation of the Earth and the other planets.

(AP) -- T-Mobile USA lost a record number of subscribers in the first three months of the year, posing a conundrum for regulators as they look at whether to let AT&T; Inc. buy the smaller carrier for $39 billion.

(AP) -- The very travels that inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and shaped modern biology may have led to one of the illnesses that plagued the British naturalist for decades and ultimately led to his death, modern researchers say.

The Washington Post Co. said Friday that revenue was flat in its newspaper publishing division in the first quarter but net profit fell by two-thirds on lower enrollment in its education business.

Cyber-environmentalists from Cambodia to Brazil are using Google Earth-based software to target and banish trash from the countryside as they gear up for World Cleanup 2012, event organisers said Friday.

A renowned British climber has taken Twitter to a new high, firing off the first "tweet" from the peak of world's tallest mountain.

The wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton attracted 72 million live streams on YouTube in 188 countries and over 100 million views on the big day itself, the Google-owned video-sharing site said Friday.

It is an article of faith among many critics of public schools that there is no correlation between spending and learning outcomes. But it's not so—at least where library spending is concerned.

A Massachusetts judge has ruled that Skyhook Wireless Inc. can move ahead with its legal case against Google Inc., intended to bolster its claim that the Internet search giant interfered with Skyhook's business partnerships.

LISTEN (downloads tab) Tim Flannery’s “Here on Earth” There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Volume 14, Number 8 - 4/30/11 FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS DID YOU KNOW THAT… The early universe, in its first fractions of a second, may have had only one dimension. A growing number of scientists suspect that the magnetic pole shift that seems to be underway may be the real culprit behind climate change. Bolivia is set to [...]

Novelda is a startup in Norway that has Impulse Radar on a 5 millimeter by 5 mm chip. The device can sense the distance to one or more remote objects by emitting and receiving very short pulses of electromagnetic energy. The pulses used by the Novelda Imp

The University of Cambridge has pentagonal tiles which are paving the way towards organic electronics.

New research paves way for the nanoscale self-assembly of organic building blocks, a promising new route towards the next generation of ultra-small electronic devices.

Ring-like molecules with unusual five-fold symmetry bind strongly to a copper surface, due to a substantial transfer of charge, but experience remarkably little difficulty in sideways diffusion, and exhibit surprisingly little interaction between neighbouring molecules. This unprecedented combination of features is ideal for the spontaneous creation of high-density stable thin films, comprising a pavement of these organic pentagonal tiles, with potential applications in computing, solar power and novel display technologies.

Physical Review Letters - Weak Intermolecular Interactions in an Ionically Bound Molecular Adsorbate: Cyclopentadienyl/Cu(111)

The dissociative adsorption of cyclopentadiene (C5H6) on Cu(111) yields a cyclopentadienyl (Cp) species with strongly anionic characteristics. The Cp potential energy surface and frictional coupling to the substrate are determined from measurements of dynamics of the molecule together with density functional calculations. The molecule is shown to occupy degenerate threefold adsorption sites and molecular motion is characterized by a low diffusional energy barrier of 40±3  meV with strong frictional dissipation. Repulsive dipole-dipole interactions are not detected despite charge transfer from substrate to adsorbate.

Currently, commercial electronics use a top-down approach, with the milling or etching away of inorganic material, such as silicon, to make a device smaller. For many years the computing power of a given size of computer chip has been doubling every eighteen months (a phenomenon known as Moore’s law) but a limit in this growth is soon expected. At the same time, the efficiency of coupling electronic components to incoming or outgoing light (either in the generation of electricity from sunlight, or in the generation of light from electricity in flat-screen displays and lighting) is also fundamentally limited by the development of fabrication techniques at the nanometre scale (a nanometre being one billionth of a metre).

Researchers are therefore looking for ingenious solutions in the creation of ever smaller electronics. The field of nanotechnology is taking a bottom-up approach of creating electronics using naturally self-assembling organic components, such as polymers, which will be capable of spontaneously forming devices with the desired electronic or optical characteristics.

The latest findings are from scientists at the University of Cambridge and Rutgers University who are working on the development of new classes of organic thin films on surfaces. By studying the fundamental forces at play in self-assembling thin films, they are developing the knowledge that will allow them to tailor these films into molecular-scale organic-electronic devices, creating smaller components than would ever be possible with conventional fabrication techniques.

Dr Holly Hedgeland, of the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, one of the co-authors of the paper, said: “With the semiconductor industry currently worth an estimated $249 billion per year there is a clear motivation towards a molecular scale understanding of innovative technologies that could come to replace those we use today.”

It is not simply the electronic properties of a molecule on a surface that will control its potential to form part of a device, but also whether it will move by itself into the required structural configuration and remain stable in that position even if the device becomes heated in use.

Molecules that are strongly bound to the substrate with a high degree of transfer of charge offer a range of new possibilities, though little is currently known of their behavior. A number of organic molecules, usually featuring carbon rings across which electronic charge can conduct, potentially demonstrate the right electronic properties, but the long-range forces which will govern their self-assembly during the first phases of growth often remain a mystery.

Now the interdisciplinary team based in the Departments of Physics and Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, have reported the first dynamical measurements for a new class of organic thin film where cyclopentadienyl molecules (C5H5) receive significant electronic charge from the surface, yet diffuse easily across the surface and show interactions with each other that are much weaker than would typically be expected for the amount of charge transferred.

Hedgeland explained: “By coupling the experimental helium spin echo technique with advanced first-principles calculations, we were able to study the dynamic behavior of a cyclopentendienyl layer on a copper surface, and to deduce that the charge transfer between the metal and the organic molecule was occurring in a counter-intuitive sense.”

Dr Marco Sacchi, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, who carried out the calculations that helped explain the startling new experimental results, said that “the key to the unique behavior of cyclopentadienyl lies in its pentagonal (five-fold) symmetry, which prevents it latching onto any one site within the triangular (three-fold) symmetry of the copper surface through directional covalent bonds, leaving it free to move easily from site to site; at the same time, its internal electronic structure is just one electron short of an extremely stable `aromatic’ configuration, encouraging a high degree of charge transfer from the surface and creating a strong non-directional ionic bond.”

The researchers’ findings, reported in Physical Review Letters today, Friday 06 May, highlight the potential of a new category of molecular adsorbate, which could fulfil all the criteria required for useful application.

Hedgeland concluded: “The unusual character of the charge transfer in this case prevents the large repulsive interactions between adjacent molecules that would otherwise have been expected, and hence should enable the formation of unusually high-density films. At the same time, the molecules remain highly mobile and yet strongly bound to the surface, with a large degree of thermal stability. In all, this is a combination of physical properties that offers huge potential benefit to the development of new classes of self-assembled organic films relevant for technological applications.”

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In July 2010, Nextbigfuture had a Sander Olson interview of roboticist Dennis Hong. Dennis Hong's dream for 2020 is to see the CHARLIE H robot being used in millions of households as a robot helper.

Forbes has a recent feature on Dennis Hong and his humanoid robot Charli.

New robot wave using open source software and hardware

The new wave of robots work is taking place on open-source hardware and software so more innovators can play a role. IRobot designed AVA, a customizable robot with a tablet computer "head" and a wheeled-column body, to serve as a development platform for robotics, like Linux for computers.

AVA's "brain" consists of either a Google Android tablet or an iPad. Angle, who sees potential for home security and medical reminder apps, as well as downloadable personalities, says, "A huge community could create apps that add utility to AVA."

AVA will join PR2, a human-size robot that Silicon Valley company Willow Garage introduced in 2010. The dual-armed, wheeled PR2 is powered by ROS, an open-source robot operating system Willow Garage has distributed free since 2007. The closely held firm has donated 11 PR2s to institutions around the world and sold 5, and wants to encourage app development. One early program from UC, Berkeley taught the robot to fold socks and towels.

Willow Garage PR2 robot, iRobot AVA, Charli and other robots

Hong's lab in Virginia recently designed an 18-inch-tall humanoid that can be built in a few days with standard parts, including a 1.6 gigahertz Intel Atom processor, gyroscope and accelerometer for stabilization and 2-megapixel camera for object recognition. A ready-made version costs $12,000, a bargain compared with the fortunes typically spent on research robots. (Willow Garage's PR2 costs $280,000 to $400,000.)

Called DARwIn-OP--the OP is for Open Platform while the rest stands for Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence--the robot represents the most comprehensive effort yet to coordinate robotics research among U.S. universities.

Willow garage's PR2 and the stealth-mode Heartland Robotics work were featured recently.



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Bumblebees, honeybees, butterflies and other pollinating insects are in decline worldwide. So what better way to help stem their decline than by installing a bumblebee nest box in your garden? The only trouble is they don't work.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., is managing a project to explore the organic seas of Saturn's moon Titan, one of three proposals selected by NASA this week as candidates for the agency's next Discovery Program mission.

(PhysOrg.com) -- An all-time favorite of skywatchers on both hemispheres, the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8, or M8) is among the most striking examples of a stellar nursery in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy. Visible in small telescopes and binoculars its fuzzy glow reveals the type of chaotic environment where new stars are born.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a bit of science mixed with whimsy, a Japanese company has created a set of electromechanical cat ears that can be worn on the human head and manipulated with nothing but the mind. Called the necomimi (a combination of the Japanese words for cat and ear) and looking very much like the ears that come with a cat costume, the ears respond to thoughts or mood by means of a sensor on a second small band pressed against the forehead; they can stand straight up when the wearer is concentrating, or wriggle and turn slightly when amused, or lay flat when tired or bored, demonstrating what the company calls, an ability to reveal emotion.

In nearly 20 years, Youth Radio has grown from a small radio skills training program in Berkeley, Calif. to a national organization with bureaus in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The program has helped young people develop marketable behind-the-scenes and on-air skills, winning it the most coveted awards in journalism.

Russian-American billionaire Len Blavatnik's Access Industries is buying storied music company Warner Music Group for $3.3 billion in an all-cash transaction.

Wild monkeys don't seem to care that Hong Kong is a concrete jungle -- they thrive so well on its fringes that the government has introduced birth control to curb a population boom.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ramps up the rate and impact of its collisions, physicists hope to witness the emergence of the Higgs boson, an anticipated, but as-yet-unseen, fundamental particle that scientists believe gives mass to matter.

Malaysia on Friday defended a multi-million dollar plan to provide email accounts to its citizens against accusations of cronyism and waste.

(PhysOrg.com) -- According to findings presented at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Glasgow, young adults are just as vulnerable to suffering a quarter-life crisis as their older counterparts are to suffering a mid-life crisis. The stress of jobs, relationships, and expectations are the contributing factors.

Via Charlie Stross, a piece at The Economist looking at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis two months on. Long story short: a very nasty accident, but not the disaster it could have been, which is pretty impressive considering it was caused multiple major natural disasters far in excess of even reasonable modern design specs happening [...]

Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!

Billions of dollars are lost every year, plucked out of Joe and Jane Taxpayer’s pockets, because religious groups are allowed to be parasites.

China has doubled its target for installed photovoltaic power capacity over the next five years to 10 gigawatt (GW) by 2015, the Shanghai Securities News said on Friday, citing an official from the research arm of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

The government has also raised its installed solar capacity target for 2020 to 50 GW, up from the previous goal of 20 GW, said Li Junfeng, deputy director-general of the Energy Research Institute of the NDRC.



China's current installed solar capacity is less than one gigawatt, the official China Daily said last month.

Li said China will soon publish a five-year blueprint and other supportive policies for the solar power industry.

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NASA's Ames Research Center has recently spent $2 million on a powerful microwave source to be used primarily for propulsion research. Kevin Parkin's team is collaborating with Escape Dynamics in Broomfield, Colorado, which is likewise dedicated to developing microwave-based rockets. High-power microwave sources called gyrotrons have been developed for nuclear fusion research, and the gyrotron bought by Ames Research Center can pump out a megawatt of microwave power. ($2 per watt)

Kevin Parkin's 2006 thesis proposed a new idea to achieve both high Isp and high T/W: The Microwave Thermal Thruster. This thruster covers the underside of a rocket aeroshell with a lightweight microwave absorbent heat exchange layer that may double as a re-entry heat shield. By illuminating the layer with microwaves directed from a ground-based phased array, an Isp of 700–900 seconds and T/W of 50–150 is possible using a hydrogen propellant. The single propellant simplifies vehicle design, and the high Isp increases payload fraction and structural margin



In the mid-90s Jordin Kare also had worked on a heat exchanger microwave powered rocket. It is fitted with a fuel tank containing a gas such as hydrogen, plus a set of pipes or channels into which the gas is pumped. An incoming laser beam heats the channels to a few thousand degrees and the gas expands and shoots out at high speed, pushing the rocket along.

A 120-meter-wide dish could keep a microwave beam focused to a few meters across at a range of 100 kilometers. The dish would combine the power from a few hundred gyrotrons, and to prevent too much of that power being absorbed by water vapour in the atmosphere, the beam facility would need to be in a high, dry location, such as Chile's Atacama desert.

That heat exchanger will be the crucial component, and Parkin has been experimenting with different materials and arrangements of channel. "At the moment we're making multichannel thrusters the size of a credit card by micro-machining them out of graphite," he says. These are hit with 20 kilowatts of microwave power, a fair advance on the 200 watts of his first experiment. Parkin says a full-scale vehicle might use carbon-fibre channels coated with silicon carbide, which absorbs microwaves well and can protect the channels during re-entry into the atmosphere as it is oxidation-resistant.

While real hardware is being developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Escape Dynamics is taking a virtual approach, designing and testing their prototype rockets using computer simulations. "By the end of this year we want to complete the proof-of-concept by taking the heat exchanger and beaming virtual energy to it, to see how efficient energy transfer is," says Tseliakhovich. If all goes well, they will construct a working prototype in 2012.

Parkin and Tseliakhovich calculate that a small microwave rocket should be able to carry up to 15 per cent of its weight as payload - compared with about 2 per cent for current launchers - and send cargo into space for less than $600 per kilogram.

The Spacex Falcon Heavy is expected to cost $1000 per kilogram, but it is not flying yet.

NASA's Glenn Research Center and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have spent the last six months studying beamed propulsion, looking at Parkin's plans along with two other schemes for beam-riding spacecraft.

Jordin Kare has a concept study for laser arrays and heat exchangers, 1000 of these units combine to launch a 100-kilogram payload, carried by an arrow-like rocket with a 29-metre-long propellant tank and a flat 4-metre heat exchanger mounted at the base. "I'm hoping to be able to do some heat exchanger tests very soon, since we have several kilowatts of lasers available," says Kare. In 2009, for example, US-based IPG Photonics announced a 10-kilowatt fibre laser for welding and cutting.

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China has more than doubled its target for solar power capacity to 50 gigawatts by 2020, state media said, as the world's largest polluter steps up efforts to boost clean energy sources.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists in China and the US have modified a common thermoelectric material to vastly improve its thermoelectric properties. The development could lead to new devices capable of converting waste heat into useful amounts of electricity.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Fifty years ago on May 5, 1961 only 23 day after Yuri Gagarin of the then-Soviet Union became the first person in space, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard launched at 9:34 a.m. EDT aboard his Freedom 7 capsule powered by a Redstone booster to become the first American in space. His historic flight lasted 15 minutes, 28 seconds.

A new report by UNSW’s Journalism and Media Research Centre argues that Australia’s media content regulation system is broken and that it is time for a full review to manage content in the 21st century.

(Medical Xpress) -- Women with painful periods show increased sensitivity to pain throughout their cycles, even when there is no background period pain.

(PhysOrg.com) -- For some time it has been believed that vitamin E, selenium and soy were natural ways to prevent prostate cancer. However, a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology shows that these supplements do not provide any additional benefit when it comes to prostate cancer prevention.

(Medical Xpress) -- Latest insights into immunity to HIV could help to develop a vaccine to build antibodies’ defences against the disease, a University of Melbourne study has found.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Obese individuals shown in online news images are frequently portrayed in a negative and stigmatizing way, according to a study from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. The study is published online in the Journal of Health Communication.

The closest gathering of four bright planets in decades will be on display low in the eastern sky before dawn during May.

(Medical Xpress) -- Yale University researchers have identified four unique host defense proteins among thousands that seem to play a crucial role in mobilizing the immune system's response to bacterial infections, they report in the May 6 issue of the journal Science.

Intro video on The Futures Agency, Gerd Leonhard, CEO

(AP) -- Sony Corp. Chief Executive Howard Stringer apologized for "inconvenience and concern" caused by the security breach that compromised personal data from more than 100 million online gaming accounts.