A new chemotherapy drug being investigated for its potency against two types of cancer was found by scientists at Houston Methodist and seven other institutions to be effective in about one-third of the 58 patients who participated in a phase I study.

The drug, alisertib or MLN8237, inhibits the enzyme aurora A kinase, which is known to be very active during cell division. The present study, published in the journal Investigational New Drugs, looks at the safety, tolerability, and preliminary success of alisertib in treating non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

University of Adelaide research has for the first time confirmed that women who eat a poor diet before they become pregnant are around 50% more likely to have a preterm birth than those on a healthy diet.

Researchers at the University of Adelaide's Robinson Research Institute investigated the dietary patterns of more than 300 South Australian women to better understand their eating habits before pregnancy.

It's the first study of its kind to assess women's diet prior to conception and its association with outcomes at birth.

Research from North Carolina State University finds that a lack of plant diversity is a key contributor to the widespread defoliation caused by cankerworms in cities, and highlights the role that increasing diversity can play in limiting future damage.

Fall cankerworms (Alsophila pometaria) are caterpillars that are native to the eastern United States and hatch in early spring. The cankerworms defoliate trees and other plants, eating new leaves as they emerge – which is both unsightly and can ultimately kill the plants.

Word-of-mouth marketing is recognized as a powerful route from long-tail sales to blockbuster and in the age of social media and online networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, spreading the word could mean the difference between consumers seeing a product as the best thing since sliced bread or the most rotten of tomatoes.

Bright yellow fields of oilseed rape are a common sight at this time of year but what lies beneath is a lot more exciting.

Straw from crops such as wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape is seen as a potential source of biomass for second generation biofuel production. Currently the UK produces around 12 million tons of straw and much of it is used for animal bedding, mushroom compost and energy generation but there still exists a vast surplus.

Tecnalia has collaborated in a study for the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel (STOA) on the future use of methanol, produced from carbon dioxide, in motorised transport. STOA is the panel that advises MEPs in the sphere of Science and Technology.

The study analysed the barriers –technological, environmental and economic– to producing methanol using carbon dioxide as well as the options that would allow possible uses in automobile transport in the medium and long term.

The costs and benefits were evaluated from the life cycle perspective in order to compare various raw materials for producing methanol and in order to reflect the potential benefits of methanol obtained from CO2.

Wildfires and flooding affect many more people in the USA than earthquakes and landslide and yet the dread, the perceived risk, of the latter two is much greater than for those hazards that are more frequent and cause greater loss of life. Research published in the International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management, suggests that a new paradigm for risk assessment is needed so that mitigation plans in the face of natural disasters can be framed appropriately by policy makers and those in the emergency services.

I am spending the week in the pleasant resort of La Biodola, in the Elba island. Elba is a beautiful island just off the coast of Tuscany. Here Napoleon was exiled after his abdication in 1814 (he arrived here on May 30th). Exactly 200 years later, 100 Italian researchers have decided to exile themselves here to discuss the future 10 years of accelerator-based experiments, to understand where to "put their money", or better their research activities and efforts.

Wind energy is getting a lot of attention and a lot of money - it just isn't generating a lot of electricity yet, no matter what gets claimed in rosy projections. In the real world, they do quite poorly and building more of them doesn't fix it.  Dr. Hui Hu and his group at Iowa State University want to solve a puzzle that has stumped scientists and engineers for hundreds of years; how to make wind work.

Using a large-scale Aerodynamics/Atmospheric Boundary Layer (AABL) Wind Tunnel at Iowa State University, they studied the effects of the relative rotation directions of two tandem wind turbines on the power production performance, the flow characteristics in the turbine wake flows, and the resultant wind loads acting on the turbines.

Children who receive cochlear implants (CI) to help alleviate severe to profound hearing loss are at greater risk of having deficiencies in executive functioning (EF), which are the skills to organize, control and process information in a goal-directed manner.

Permanent hearing loss is a common condition of early childhood, occurring in about 1.5 of every 1,000 births. Cochlear implants help children to achieve spoken language because the devices help them perceive sound. Still, children with cochlear implants can struggle with reading and writing skills and other aspects of cognition.