How do we get kids excited about math? In this age of high tech video games why would a kid want to be excited about math they have to do in their mind or with pencil and paper?

Maybe I am just too old, I remember the days before television and video games, I did get excited about math puzzles. Perhaps one of you video whiz kids can create a game series that uses the old math puzzles to allow players to advance from level to level. Until then, those of us who do care about math and math education have a responsibility to get kids excited about math - these will be the math innovators of the future.

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center are about to embark on a human trial to test whether a new cancer treatment will be as effective at eradicating cancer in humans as it has proven to be in mice.

The treatment will involve transfusing specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors, into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies.

Zheng Cui, Ph.D., lead researcher and associate professor of pathology, will be announcing the study June 28 at the Understanding Aging conference in Los Angeles.

The modern Olympic ideals differ dramatically from the way the games were actually played in ancient Greece, says a University of Maryland classicist who has heavily researched the Olympic past. The ancient games featured professionals with a “winning is everything” philosophy.

“Ancient Olympiads were more like the modern PGA golf circuit than the amateur ideal advanced for most of the 20th century,” says Hugh Ming Lee, a professor of classics at the University of Maryland. “The Greeks and Romans awarded honors to the most accomplished athletes and paid them for their efforts. These professionals traveled a competitive circuit. The Vince Lombardi notion of winning is much closer to the original Olympic spirit.”

The safeguards against unwanted pollination by genetically modified crops may already be built into plants, according to new research.

Plants are very selective when it comes to choosing mates. Flowering plant pollination systems are clever devices for attracting pollinators like birds, ants, and insects, but there are also mechanisms for keeping out unwanted pollen. Some plants happily self-fertilize with their own pollen but others reject such pollen because of the deleterious effects of inbreeding. In these plants, their own pollen or that of close relatives is rejected if it lands on the female stigma.

For all plants, the pollen of other species is undesirable, as it will result in aborted zygotes or infertile offspring. Plants have evolved various mechanisms for rejecting unwanted pollen. The self-incompatibility (SI) system, found in several plant families, including the Solanaceae, which includes tobacco, tomato, and eggplant, is the best studied. A number of components that function in the SI system have been identified, but the exact molecular mechanisms by which incompatible pollen is recognized and rejected and compatible pollen allowed to proceed to the ovary are still unknown.

Predicting climate change depends on many factors not properly included in current forecasting models, such as how the major polar ice caps will move in the event of melting around their edges. This in turn requires greater understanding of the processes at work when ice is under stress, influencing how it flows and moves.

The immediate objective is to model the flow of ice sheets and glaciers more accurately, leading in turn to better future predictions of global ice cover for use in climate modeling and forecasting.

Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London, say they are on the way to making true on-demand video games a reality.

The research is part of an EU funded project, Games@Large, which aims to develop the delivery of video games anytime, anywhere, and on any device, finding ways to enable consumer electronics devices such as set-top boxes and mobile phones to serve as easy-to-use gaming platforms.

It is hoped that this will facilitate more convenient game play options, encouraging uptake by new users who would not usually sit in front of a computer or buy a console. So Grandma could be playing scrabble with Aunt Doris online via her set top box and remote control.

In general, domesticated food plants have larger fruits, heads of grain, tubers, etc, because this is one of the characteristics that early hunter-gatherers chose when foraging for food and later planting it.

Domesticated tomatoes can be up to 1000 times larger than their wild relatives but how did they get so big? While tomatoes have long been bred for shape, texture, flavor and nutrient composition, but it has been difficult to study these traits in tomatoes, because many of them are the result of many genes acting together.

These genes are often located in close proximity on chromosomal regions called loci, and regions with groups of genes that influence a particular trait are called quantitative trait loci (QTLs). When a trait is influenced by one gene, it is much simpler to study, but quantitative traits, like skin and eye color in humans or fruit size in tomatoes, cannot be easily defined just by crossing different individuals.

OXFORD, England, June 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- t+ Clinical Showcase Their mPRO Solution

t+ Clinical launch a mobile phone based mPRO (mobile patient recorded outcomes) solution at the 44th annual meeting of the Drug Information Association in Boston USA, 22nd to 26th June 2008.

t+ Clinical is an electronic patient reported outcome solution that runs over the worlds largest data infrastructure. Using a unique mobile phone based data capture solution, t+ Clinical are able to offer fast rollout within days of a finalised study, combined with real time analysis of primary outcomes.

LONDON, June 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Following a breakdown in negotiations today 2,000 members of Unite based at Sellafield will vote on whether to take strike action over pay.

The maintenance and operations staff represented by Unite have rejected a pay offer worth 2% on pay with an extra potential 2% efficiency bonus. Unite and Prospect will be preparing to co-ordinate the ballots between the two unions.

Unite Regional officer Alan Westnedge, said:

"This offer falls way below our members expectations. We have no other alternative other than to ballot for industrial action. This is a pay cut in real terms and our members are already struggling to keep up with rising household bills and energy costs."

Contact Ciaran Naidoo +44(0)7768-931-315.

LONDON, June 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Physician experts at the British Association of Urological Surgeons' (BAUS) annual meeting this week heard how discussions with NICE have opened the way for patients with prostate cancer to have continued access to cryotherapy - a promising therapy threatened by earlier NICE guidance published in February.

At a session discussing the NICE Clinical Guideline on Prostate Cancer, urologists reiterated their concern that its recommendations will harm survival rates. In the UK, prostate cancer survival rates are below the European average.