CALI, Colombia, May 18 /PRNewswire/ --

LONDON, May 18 /PRNewswire/ --

The MS Society has today (18 May) called on Gordon Brown to ring-fence funds for stem cell research into multiple sclerosis (MS).

Four years ago the UK Government announced a GBP50million windfall for stem cell science but there has been no evidence of significant UK advances in research into conditions such as multiple sclerosis (MS).

Without a commitment to target funding of UK stem cell trials, the charity has said research into the benefit of stem cells may be at risk of going down a blind alley.

And without evidence of fruitful UK trials into the benefit of stem cells, patients will continue to seek unproven therapies abroad, it warned.

NEW YORK, May 17 /PRNewswire/ --

- JOHN HANCOCK AND BABCOCK BROWN INFRASTRUCTURE FUND NORTH AMERICA'S MANAGEMENT TEAM TO ACQUIRE PARTNERSHIP INTERESTS AND MANAGEMENT RIGHTS OVER THE US$1.9BN UNLISTED INFRASTRUCTURE FUND FROM BABCOCK BROWN

The management team of Babcock Brown Infrastructure Fund North America LP, (BBIFNA or the Fund), a San Francisco based unlisted infrastructure fund that owns and manages energy and infrastructure assets throughout North America, and John Hancock Life Insurance Company (John Hancock), a diversified financial services organization and an existing limited partner of the Fund, today announced the acquisition of Babcock Brown's (BB) interests in the Fund as well as BB's management rights over the Fund.

In a previous article here I considered from a statistical standpoint the signal of Omega_b candidate decays extracted by the DZERO collaboration in a large dataset of proton-antiproton collisions -the ones produced by today's most powerful hadron collider, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

A recent study of adult neural stem cells suggests a new route for research and development of  treatments for neurodegenerative disease in elderly patients.

Within the last 20 years neuroscientists have shown that new neurons are generated in the brain throughout the lifespan. This finding opened a new area of research aimed at understanding if adult neural stem cells can be used in therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.

A challenge with this approach is that there are fewer neural stem cell in the aged brain and the loss of stem cells occurs at just the time when neurodegenerative diseases are most common. But a new study is providing important information that neural stem from an aged brain still have the capacity to mature into functional neurons.

Before the days of mandatory underseat pet carriers, my airline colleagues received a call from a woman who needed to bring her therapy pet, a pig, on a flight. The airline didn’t see a problem, since Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs are about the size of dogs and just as well behaved. However, the animal that the woman showed up with was no potbellied pig. On the day of the flight, the woman showed up with a 300 pound barnyard pig on a leash.  The pig took up the entire aisle, calmly sleeping through the flight. 

Astronauts blazed through their third of five spacewalks Saturday as they continued servicing the Hubble Space Telescope, installing the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and repairing the main science camera of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) which has been disabled since February 2007.  Initial tests verified that both instruments were alive and able to communicate with ground control.

(2007 photo: Cariana Nebula imaged with ACS and CTIO; credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith, STScI, AURA, NOAO, NSF)

A team of atmospheric chemists say they have moved closer to what is considered the "holy grail" of climate change science;  the first-ever direct detections of biological particles within ice clouds.  The team, led by Kimberly Prather and Kerri Pratt of the University of California at San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, sampled water droplet and ice crystal residues at high speeds while flying through clouds in the skies over Wyoming.

Some pregnant women do not wear seat belts due to fear that the belt itself could injure the baby in a car crash.  Urban myth or legitimate concern?

It is well established that seat belts save lives but if some pregnant women do not wear seat belts out of fear that the belt could harm the baby in a car crash, are they really helping or just placing themselves in danger?    It's difficult to fault mothers for erring on the side of caution when it comes to unborn babies but is it actually the case that the seat belt can put the baby at risk?

Exposure to particulate matter has been recognized as a contributing factor to lung cancer development for some time, but a new study indicates inhalation of certain particulates can actually cause some genes to become reprogrammed, affecting both the development and the outcome of cancers and other diseases.