A new plan to further reduce, refine and replace the use of animals in research and regulatory testing, commonly referred to as the 3Rs, was unveiled today by the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM).

Traditionally, chemicals, consumer products, medical devices and new drugs are tested on animals to predict toxicity on humans, but scientists in ICCVAM are working to promote the development and validation of alternative test methods. Alternative test methods are those that accomplish one or more of the 3Rs; of reducing the number of animals used in testing, refining procedures so animals experience less pain and distress or replacing animals with non-animal systems.

ICCVAM has evaluated more than 185 test methods since its inception in 1997. ICCVAM itself does not conduct research but makes evaluates proposed solutions and makes recommendations about their usefulness to federal regulatory agencies.

More than 25 per cent of the world’s adult population are hypertensive, and it has been estimated that this figure will increase to 29 per cent by 2025. In addition, hypertension causes around 50 per cent of coronary heart disease, and approximately 75 per cent of strokes.

In demonstrating that nitrate is likely to underlie the cardio-protective effect of a vegetable-rich diet, researchers at Barts and The London School of Medicine have discovered that drinking just 500ml of beetroot juice a day can significantly reduce blood pressure.

Led by Professor Amrita Ahluwalia of the William Harvey Research Institute at Barts and The London School of Medicine, and Professor Ben Benjamin of Peninsula Medical School, the research reveals that it is the ingestion of dietary nitrate contained within beetroot juice - and similarly in green, leafy vegetables - which results ultimately in decreased blood pressure.

Previously the protective effects of vegetable-rich diets had been attributed to their antioxidant vitamin content.

An international team writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) say anthropogenic forcing could push the Earth’s climate system past critical thresholds, so that important components may “tip” into qualitatively different modes of operation. They say even small changes can have large long-term consequences on human and ecological systems.

“Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change,“ the researchers around Timothy Lenton from the British University of East Anglia in Norwich and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research report. Global change may appear to be a slow and gradual process on human scales. However, in some regions anthropogenic forcing on the climate system could kick start abrupt and potentially irreversible changes. For these sub-systems of the Earth system the researchers introduce the term “tipping element”.

Aerospace engineers are again looking to natural flyers to create the next generation in airplanes.

For example:

• A Blackbird jet flying nearly 2,000 miles per hour covers 32 body lengths per second but a common pigeon flying at 50 miles per hour covers 75.
• The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second.
• Select military aircraft can withstand gravitational forces of 8-10 G. Many birds routinely experience positive G-forces greater than 10 G and up to 14 G.

In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play.

More than 230 million video and computer games were sold in 2005, and polls show that 40 percent of Americans play games on a computer or a console. According to a 2007 Harris Interactive survey, young males are two to three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games, such as the Halo series so popular in recent years.

"These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on video games than females," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was recently published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

"T-rays", pulses of terahertz radiation, could let art historians see murals hidden beneath coats of plaster or paint in centuries-old buildings in much the same way X-rays let doctors see through skin and could also illuminate penciled sketches under paintings on canvas without harming the artwork, according to new research.

Current methods of imaging underdrawings can't detect certain art materials such as graphite or sanguine, a red chalk that some of the masters are believed to have used.

The team of researchers used terahertz imaging to detect colored paints and a graphite drawing of a butterfly through 4 mm of plaster. They believe their technique is capable of seeing even deeper. A paper on the research is published in the February edition of Optics Communications.