Dr. Shaohua Xu, Florida Tech associate professor of biological sciences, has an original theory of the origin of Alzheimer’s Disease and has earned a $150,000 grant from Space Florida to test it. The grant was matched with $30,000 from NASA’s Aerospace Medicine and Occupational Health Branch.

He is also the sole medical researcher at the State of Florida’s Space Life Sciences Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and the research is being conducted both at the university and KSC.

Xu’s theory, both controversial and praised, involves the start of the disease when molecules of a normal brain cell protein called “tau” do something very abnormal: they join together to form tangled fibers that the cell cannot remove.

LONDON, January 25 /PRNewswire/ --

Elertz has launched its widget technology, a patented desktop messaging system which provides online marketers with a new way of communicating with their users and driving website interaction.

The elertz widget is non-intrusive to users and sits in the system tray of their computer waiting quietly for notifications. Critically, end-users are always in complete control of the communication channel and they can manage the information they receive, meaning they are more likely to respond positively to brand marketers who are providing relevant services or innovative products.

LONDON, January 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Clinique is delighted to announce its partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital for the KISS IT BETTER appeal - to raise money to fund research into the causes and treatment of childhood cancer.

KISS IT BETTER is the brainchild of Carmel Allen whose daughter Josephine was treated at the hospital for Neuroblastoma - a type of cancer. After many months spent at the hospital, and struggling to reconcile life as a Beauty Editor, Carmel decided that she wanted to help and devised the KISS IT BETTER appeal.

KVISTGÅRD, Denmark, January 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Bavarian Nordic announced today that Executive Vice President, Peter Wulff has chosen to seek new challenges outside Bavarian Nordic A/S. He will resign from his position at the end of July 2008 whereupon he will continue as consultant for the company.

Peter Wulff held the position as CEO and President of the company from its inception and until August 2007, where he took over the position as Head of Business Development. The company's success, from its inception and until the commercial breakthrough in 2007, where a large contract with the U.S. government was landed, can largely be attributed to Peter's efforts and contribution.

The rushing floodwaters in Evan Almighty, the heaving seas of the latter two Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the dragon's flaming breath in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire all featured computer-generated fluids in spectacular action.

The science behind those splashy thrills will be recognized Feb. 9 with an Academy Award for Ron Fedkiw, associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and two collaborators at the special effects firm Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).

"The primary work started a few years ago when we developed a system designed for the female liquid terminator in Terminator 3," Fedkiw said. "Almost immediately after that it was used in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie to simulate the wine that the pirate skeleton was drinking out of the bottle in the moonlight. Things like the sinking ship in Poseidon and the large water whirlpool in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 are good examples of the system in action."

AACHEN, Germany, January 25 /PRNewswire/ -- The German pain specialist Grunenthal GmbH announces that a New Drug Application (NDA) has been submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for tapentadol immediate release (IR) tablets by its co-development partner Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, L.L.C. (J&JPRD). Tapentadol is an oral centrally acting analgesic and will be the first new substance in its class for more than 25 years after successful registration. In the European Union, tapentadol is currently in phase 3 of the development program for severe acute pain, and the Company plans to submit it for approval later this year.

COX-2 inhibitors are having a tough year. Vioxx was withdrawn voluntarily a few months ago and now Celebrex, the arthritis drug that blocks pain by inhibiting the COX-2 enzyme, has been shown in laboratory studies to induce arrhythmia, or irregular beating of the heart, via a pathway unrelated to its COX-2 inhibition.

University at Buffalo researchers discovered this unexpected finding while conducting basic research on potassium channels.

Celebrex (Celecoxib) has been taken by over 27 million patients since its approval by the FDA in 1998. The new research found that low concentrations of the drug, corresponding to a standard prescription, reduced the heart rate and induced pronounced arrhythmia in fruit flies and the heart cells of rats.

Rapid evolution of a protein produced by an immunity gene is associated with increased antiviral activity in humans, a finding that suggests evolutionary biology and virology together can accelerate the discovery of viral-defense mechanisms, according to researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

These findings by Julie Kerns, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Hutchinson Center’s Basic Sciences Division, present a striking example by which evolutionary studies can directly lead to biomedically important discoveries in the field of infectious diseases.

GENEVA, January 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- Effort Focuses on Dangers of Parental Smoking in Homes and Cars

It's a staggering statistic: 700 million children - almost half of the world's youth - breathe air polluted by tobacco smoke. People who smoke in confined spaces like the home or the car subject others to a dangerous mix of toxins including nicotine, carbon monoxide, and cyanide, even when the windows are open. Second-hand smoke exposes children to chronic health risks:

An endoscope is a flexible camera that travels into the body's cavities to directly investigate the digestive tract, colon or throat. Most of today's endoscopes capture the image using a traditional approach where each part of the camera captures a different section of the image. These tools are long, flexible cords about 9 mm wide, about the width of a human fingernail. Because the cord is so wide patients must be sedated during the scan.

A fundamentally new design has created a smaller endoscope that is more comfortable for the patient and cheaper to use than current technology.