KVISTGARD, Denmark, August 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Bavarian Nordic's US subsidiary, BN ImmunoTherapeutics has entered into a scientific partnership with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the United States. Under the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) the NCI and Bavarian Nordic will jointly develop new immunotherapies for the treatment of prostate cancer. Under the CRADA, BN ImmunoTherapeutics has rights to exclusively license intellectual property that results from this collaboration.

U.S. and Swiss scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding how a type of white blood cell called the eosinophil may help the body to fight bacterial infections in the digestive tract, according to research published online this week in Nature Medicine.

Hans-Uwe Simon, from the University of Bern, Switzerland, Gerald J.Gleich, M.D., from the University of Utah School of Medicine, and their colleagues discovered that bacteria can activate eosinophils to release mitochondrial DNA in a catapult-like fashion to create a net that captures and kills bacteria.

Biofuels are a bad word these days, due to the fact that everyone from Al Gore to George Bush thought ethanol was a good idea due to a lack of understanding actual science much less basic economics.

But before grain ethanol and biodiesel there was 'gasification' and it's getting a new look from researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University.

By combining gasification with high-tech nanoscale porous catalysts, they hope to create ethanol from a wide range of biomass, including distiller's grain left over from ethanol production, corn stover from the field, grass, wood pulp, animal waste, and garbage.

LONDON, August 13 /PRNewswire/ --

- Orange Launches Mobile Fleet, a Set of Tools to Help Manage Fleet Worker Productivity

Orange Business Services today launched Mobile Fleet, a set of tools designed to increase the productivity and availability of fleets of vehicles and mobile workers within small and medium size businesses. The solution includes customisable, award winning Orange Mobile Forms(1), 4MB of data allowance and access to real time traffic updates from the RAC and Trafficmaster(2).

An academic from Swansea University’s History Department has received a research grant of £101,000 from the Wellcome Trust to investigate the history of medicine in Joseph Stalin’s concentration camps of the mid-twentieth century.

Dr Dan Healey’s project, entitled Medicine in the Gulag Archipelago, will be done in collaboration with Dr Kirill Rossianov of the Moscow Institute of the History of Natural Sciences and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and focus on the history of medicine in the Soviet Union’s Gulag network of labor camps and will show how doctors and medicine were integral to these far-flung places of confinement during the 1930s to 1950s.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center and at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) say they have shown how broken sections of chromosomes can recombine to change genomes ... and spawn new species.

The scientists used X-rays to break yeast chromosomes, and then studied how the damage was repaired. Most of the chromosome aberrations they identified resulted from interactions between repeated DNA sequences located on different chromosomes rather than from a simple re-joining of the broken ends on the same chromosome.

Chromosome aberrations are a change in the normal chromosome complement because of deletion, duplication, or rearrangement of genetic material. On rare occasions, the development of one of these new chromosome structures is beneficial, but more often DNA changes can be detrimental, leading to problems like tumors.

Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, is not an optimistic guy about the future. He says human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral and the result will be mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past.

He cites the synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff as culprits in a grand transformation of once complex ocean ecosystems. Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease.

Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, has tagged the ongoing transformation as "the rise of slime."

All countries should take steps to govern organ donation and transplantation, thereby ensuring patient safety and prohibiting unethical practices, according to an article appearing in the September 2008 issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN).

The document is a consensus of more than 150 representatives of scientific and medical bodies from around the world, government officials, social scientists, and ethicists, who met in Istanbul, Turkey, this spring.

SHEFFIELD, England, August 13 /PRNewswire/ --

- With Photo

Rocksure Systems in association with leading housebuilder Taylor Wimpey has been announced as a finalist in the prestigious Housebuilding Innovation Awards 2008. Rocksure's Peoplesafe system is entered into the Best Innovation in Technology category, the winner of which will be announced on the 23rd of October.

Taylor Wimpey's comprehensive health and safety policy was the prime reason behind signing a national agreement for the Peoplesafe service which is a comprehensive lone worker safety system - not just a panic alarm.

In prior articles, we found the scientific validation of Stephen Colbert's 'truthiness', and now it turns out that anecdotal evidence of a 'Colbert bump' following an appearance (anecdotal evidence provided, naturally, by Colbert himself) on the show has legs as well - but only if you're in one political party. Democratic politicians receive a 40% increase in contributions in the 30 days after appearing on "The Colbert Report" while Republicans essentially gained nothing.

Stephen Colbert is right - the "Colbert bump" boosts campaigns.

This analysis of one of America's most well-known pop icons of recent years is conducted by political scientist James H. Fowler (University of California, San Diego), who is also a self-identified fan of the show. The research appears in the July issue of PS: Political Science and Politics.