Researchers who want to include surgeries in studies have to make first contact through non-medical administration staff who act as roadblocks, says a group of researchers whose planned leg ulceration study was hamstrung by a physician recruitment rate of 2% and who have published the reasons why so many surgeons did not participate.

The qualitative information, featured in the open access journal BMC Medical Research Methodology, may be of use to those designing trials of their own.  Given the current health care debate in America, another layer of bureaucracy and the impact on research studies is one facet of the discussion that has been least considered. 
 

Early modern humans living on the southern Africa coast employed pyrotechnology, the controlled use of fire, 72,000 years ago,  to increase the quality and efficiency of their stone tool manufacturing process, according to a report in Science.

The international team of researchers deduces that "this technology required a novel association between fire, its heat, and a structural change in stone with consequent flaking benefits." Further, they say their findings ignite the notion of complex cognition in early man.

If their findings hold up, it could mean humans' ability to solve complex problems may have occurred at the same time their modern genetic lineage appeared, rather than developing later as has been widely speculated.

A real life Alice In Wonderland story is a little closer to reality now that researchers in China have created the first tunable electromagnetic gateway.

In a new paper,  researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Fudan University in Shanghai have described the concept of a "a gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but that allows the passage of other entities" like a "'hidden portal' as mentioned in fictions."

The gateway uses transformation optics and an amplified scattering effect from an arrangement of ferrite materials called single-crystal yttrium-iron-garnet that force light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation in complicated directions to create a hidden portal. 

The green of a tree's leaves is from the larger proportion of the chlorophyll pigment in the leaves.  As days get shorter, less chlorophyll is  produced and green is no longer dominant because yellow xanthophylls and orange carotenes are also present in the chloroplasts.

But why will the leaves of some trees be red in America yet yellow in Europe?  

Did late Lower Paleolithic people hunt or were they scavengers?    A University of Arizona anthropologist says that humans living at a Paleolithic cave site (Qesem Cave) in central Israel between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago were as successful at big-game hunting as were later stone-age hunters at the site, but earlier humans shared meat differently.

Qesem Cave ("Qesem" means "surprise") people hunted cooperatively, then carried the highest quality body parts of their prey to the cave, where they cut the meat with stone blade cutting tools and cooked it with fire.

Garter snakes like to eat newts. Newts don't like to be eaten, and to deter snakes from eating them, they have evolved a seriously lethal neurotoxin. This toxin, called tetrodotoxin (TTX), is chemically similar to that found in pufferfish, and a few milligrams is enough to take out a hefty adult human.

But some garter snakes really like newts, and instead of searching for other prey, several species of garter snakes have managed develop resistance to newt neurotoxins.

PALO ALTO, California, August 10 /PRNewswire/ --

- Proof of Concept Study Investigating NS4B-RNA Binding Inhibitor

Eiger BioPharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company developing antiviral therapies, announced today that the first patients have been dosed in an innovative clinical trial in patients chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV). The trial, run in centers in Australia and New Zealand, will investigate the antiviral effect of clemizole monotherapy in the absence of interferon.

LONDON, August 11 /PRNewswire/ -- The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) has called on the Prime Minister to introduce parity between nurses and pharmacists in the prescribing of controlled drugs.

In its evidence to the Prime Minister's Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery, the RPSGB points to the existing discrepancy between the ability of nurses to prescribe controlled drugs in certain conditions as independent prescribers, when pharmacist independent prescribers cannot so prescribe, even when the medicine in question is a controlled drug which they can sell as ingredients in over the counter medicines.

HONG KONG and LAKE ZURICH, Illinois, August 12 /PRNewswire/ --

Fenwal, Inc. of Lake Zurich, Illinois, and Golden Meditech (stock code: 801.HK) of Hong Kong, announced today they have agreed to form a joint venture in China to focus on blood collection and transfusion products for the fast-growing Chinese medical market.

The transaction is expected to be completed in early 2010, subject to the signing of a definitive agreement and other customary company and regulatory conditions.

CRANBURY, New Jersey, August 12 /PRNewswire/ --

- BlackLight Power Physics Grand Slam: Power, Hydrinos, Light Signature, Theory Prediction Validated

BlackLight Power, Inc. (BLP) today announces that scientists at Rowan University have for the first time independently formulated and tested fuels that on demand generated energy greater than that of combustion at power levels of kilowatts using BLP's proprietary solid-fuel chemistry capable of continuous regeneration. Operating power systems using BLP's chemistry, Rowan University professors have reported a net energy gain of up to 6.5 times the maximum energy potential of the materials in the system from known chemical reactions.