The pinhole camera, a technique known since ancient times, has inspired a futuristic technology for lensless, three-dimensional imaging. Working at both the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at FLASH, the free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany, an international group of scientists has produced two of the brightest, sharpest x-ray holograms of microscopic objects ever made, thousands of times more efficiently than previous x-ray-holographic methods.

The x-ray hologram made at ALS beamline 9.0.1 was of Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing "Vitruvian Man," a lithographic reproduction less than two micrometers (millionths of a meter, or microns) square, etched with an electron-beam nanowriter. The hologram required a five-second exposure and had a resolution of 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter).

DÜSSELDORF, Germany, August 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- Further Focus on Pharma & Life Science

Gerresheimer AG is to discontinue its business in technical plastic systems. The business segment, which primarily manufactures system components for suppliers to the automobile industry, is not part of the core business of pharma & life science. For this purpose the sale process has been started through an international invitation for bids.

"Through the sale of the technical plastics business we are, as previously announced, continuing our focus on the core business of pharma & life science, "says Dr. Axel Herberg, CEO of Gerresheimer AG.

INTRODUCTION

The most common causes of massive bleedings from the hemorrhagic erosive gastritis and similar lesions of duodenum and thin intestine, which well react on the operational treatment, are ulcerations induced with stress, or with ingestion of aspirins and alcohols. Stress, aspirin and alcohol, disrupt the “gel-function” of gastric mucus, so-called the mucosal barrier for the backscattering H-Jons, which is it’s the most important defensive factor.

The increased backscattering of H-Jons, enable ulterior damage, liberating vessel-active substances, and leads to degranulation of mastocits of gastric mucous membrane, and liberation of heparin, and consecutive bleeding.

On August 1, a total solar eclipse was visible in parts of Canada, northern Greenland, the Arctic, central Russia, Mongolia and China. The eclipse swept across Earth in a narrow path that began in Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut and ended in northern China’s Silk Road region.

Though the eclipse was not visible in most of North America, NASA TV and the Exploratorium made streaming video of the event available online. The following images are taken from that video, shot from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China near the Mongolian border. The sun appears differently in some of the images because of the different filters used to capture the event. Times listed are ET and approximate.

GENEVA and PARIS, August 1 /PRNewswire/ --

SunGard and GL TRADE today announced SunGard's intention to acquire a majority stake in GL TRADE, a global financial software solutions company serving more than 1,600 customers.

New knowledge points to the fact that a genetically induced lack of filaggrin, a key protein of the skin barrier, plays a decisive role in the origin of allergies.

In a large study on more than 3000 school-children scientists of the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technische Universität München found that about 8% of the German population carry variations of the filaggrin gene, which raise the risk to develop atopic dermatitis more than threefold. In addition, these genetic variations predispose to hay fever and asthma in those with atopic dermatitis.

A leading fungi expert has accidentally stumbled upon a new species in Scotland – as he walked home from work. Dr Andy Taylor, from Aberdeen’s Macaulay Institute, noticed the Xerocomus bubalinus growing near a lime tree in the city’s Albyn Place. This very rare fungus was only described for the first time in 1991 in the Netherlands, and has not previously been recorded before in Scotland.

As well as his city centre find, Dr Taylor, a professional mycologist, also recently discovered a species (Russula vinososordida ) not found in the UK before, and another very rare species (Buchwaldoboletus lignicola) in the very grounds of the Macaulay Institute where he works.

Dr Taylor said: “I couldn’t quite believe it that I had found this species, which isn’t supposed to occur here in Scotland, and that it was living right here under our noses.”

Creatine, a popular nutritional supplement renowned for enhancing athletic performance and muscle strength, does not improve exercise outcomes in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a new study. The randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind study provided the most powerful evidence to date that the effect of creatine (Cr) supplementation was negligible at best among these patients.

"We have evidence to suggest Cr uptake into muscles [in COPD patients] but are unable to explain why an increase in muscle Cr did not enhance training," wrote the study's lead author, Sarah Deacon, M.D., specialist registrar at the Institute for Lung Health at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England.

The results were published in the first issue for August of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine by the American Thoracic Society (ATS).

Sleep-disordered breathing (also known as sleep apnea) is associated with an increased risk of death, according to new results from the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort, an 18-year observational study supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers found that adults (ages 30 to 60) with sleep-disordered breathing at the start of the study were two to three times more likely to die from any cause compared to those who did not have sleep-disordered breathing. The risk of death was linked to the severity of sleep-disordered breathing and was not attributable to age, gender, body mass index (an indicator of overweight or obesity), or cardiovascular health status.

University of Illinois researchers writing in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience report this week that chronic exposure to estradiol, the main estrogen in the body, diminishes some cognitive functions. Rats exposed to a steady dose of estradiol were impaired on tasks involving working memory and response inhibition, the researchers found.

The researchers made the discovery when studying the effects of estradiol on activities mediated by the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that is vital to working memory and to the ability to plan, respond to changing conditions and moderate or control one's behavior.