A new study from Bangladesh published online today in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal shows that routinely vaccinating infants against H. influenzae type b (Hib), a bacterium that causes deadly Hib pneumonia and meningitis, could save hundreds of thousands of children in Asia. Results showed that routine immunization of infants with a Hib conjugate vaccine prevented over one-third of life-threatening pneumonia cases and approximately 90% of Hib meningitis cases. A similar impact would be expected in other parts of the region.

Exercise has a similar effect to antidepressants on depression. This has been shown by previous research. Now Astrid Bjørnebekk at Karolinska Institutet has explained how this can happen: exercise stimulates the production of new brain cells.

In a series of scientific reports, she has searched for the underlying biological mechanisms that explain why exercise can be a form of therapy for depression and has also compared it with pharmacological treatment with an SSRI drug.

Penn State researchers did a study and found that web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results preferred Yahoo first and Google second even though more claimed to use Google regularly. These results, they say, provide evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off and that there is "carry over" branding in effect too.

Here is their method - they copied identical Google results pages (“camping Mexico,” “laser removal,” “manufactured home” and “techno music”) and attributed them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine they created for the study.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed an X-ray jet blasting away from a neutron star in a binary system. This discovery may help astronomers understand how neutron stars as well as black holes can generate powerful beams of relativistic particles.

The jet was found in Circinus X-1, a system where a neutron star is in orbit around a star several times the mass of the Sun, about 20,000 light years from Earth. A neutron star is an extremely dense remnant of an exploded star consisting of tightly packed neutrons.

Many jets have been found originating near black holes - both the supermassive and stellar-mass variety - but the Circinus X-1 jet is the first extended X-ray jet associated with a neutron star in a binary system.

Dr. Zahi Hawass
June 2007

When the Discovery Channel approached me to search for the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, I did not really think I would be able to make a definite identification. But I did think that this would give me the perfect opportunity to look at the unidentified female mummies from Dynasty 18, which no one had ever studied in as a group. There were already many theories about the identities of these mummies, but the latest scientific technology had not yet been used to study them.

There are a number of unidentified high-status mummies of the New Kingdom, mostly found in what we call the Royal Mummy Caches.

Experts from all over the world are gathering at the University to exchange the latest insights on concepts of 'Health and the Healthy Body' in early medieval times, 400-1200 A.D at a two-day conference, which brings together leading experts in the field from the USA, Norway, Germany, Israel and the UK on July 6-7, 2007.