Texas Children’s Hospital has been named the national lead center for a 12-hospital, 36-month clinical trial of the German-manufactured pediatric heart pump called Berlin Heart EXCOR® Pediatric Ventricular Assist Device (VAD).

Charles D. Fraser, Jr., MD, chief of pediatric and congenital heart surgery at Texas Children’s and professor, Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, will serve as the National Principal Investigator for the Investigational Device Exemption prospective study.

LONDON, January 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Morria Biopharmaceuticals Plc, a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of novel anti-inflammatory drugs, today announced the preliminary safety results from its Phase I safety and tolerability study of MRX-4 in 16 patients suffering from allergic rhinitis (AR).

MRX-4 was nasally administered as a single dose once a week for four consecutive weeks. The first administration was given without a nasal allergen challenge (NAC) while the subsequent three were carried out in conjunction with a NAC. The protocol was double-blinded and placebo-controlled. During the trial, no adverse effects were observed with blood analysis and pharmacokinetic data further indicating safety.

As levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rise in the 21st century, the nutritional value of many major food crops could decrease, according to a study conducted at Southwestern University.

Max Taub, an associate professor of biology at Southwestern, did a "meta-analysis" of previous research that had been done on the effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide on the protein concentrations in barley, rice, wheat, soybean and potato.

His study found that the crops had significantly lower protein concentrations when grown in atmospheres containing elevated levels of carbon dioxide. Potatoes showed a nearly 14 percent decrease in protein, while the grain crops of barley, rice and wheat showed reductions of 15.3 percent, 9.9 percent and 9.8 percent respectively.

You don't need other people to feel less lonely. You just need things you think are people.

Social scientists call this tendency “anthropomorphism.” As a research topic, the phenomenon carries important therapeutic and societal implications, says Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.

The behaviors described in the paper are not limited to the lonely. Nevertheless, they are well-known to casual observers, from the stereotype of the woman who lives alone surrounded by her menagerie of cats, to the movie portrayal by Tom Hanks of a tropical island castaway talking to a volleyball.

Why is it difficult to pick out even a familiar face in a crowd? We all experience this, but the phenomenon has been poorly understood until now.

The results of a recent study may have implications for individuals with face-recognition disorders and visual-attention related ailments — and eventually could help scientists develop an artificial visual system that approaches the sophistication of human visual perception.

The study is part of a recently completed Journal of Vision special issue titled “Crowding: Including illusory conjunctions, surround suppression, and attention”. “Crowding” is a failure to recognize an individual object in a cluttered environment.

Water has fascinated scientists for thousands of years. Along with being the elixir of life, it acts in counter-intuitive ways like expanding when frozen while most liquids contract.

Sometimes the best way to understand a mystery is to create one just like it. Chemical engineer Pablo Debenedetti and collaborators at three other institutions found a highly simplified model molecule that behaves in much the same way as water, a discovery that upends long-held beliefs about what makes water so special.

“This model is so simple it is almost a caricature,” Debenedetti said. “And yet it has these very special properties. To show that you can have oil-water repulsion without hydrogen bonds is quite interesting.”

New research by Professor Michael Benton and our own Sarda Sahney at the University of Bristol indicate in a Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper that specialized animals forming complex ecosystems, with high biodiversity, complex food webs and a variety of niches, took over 30 million years to recover from the last major extinction.

About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, a major extinction event killed over 90 per cent of life on earth, including insects, plants, marine animals, amphibians, and reptiles. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were restructured and organisms were left struggling to recover.

ATLANTA, January 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Elekta, a world leader in clinical solutions for radiation therapy and radiosurgery, announced today that two sites are utilizing Elekta technology to implement clinical treatments with Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT)(i). With the recent CE designation of VMAT in Europe, the way has been cleared for The Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, UK and General Hospital Vienna in Austria to treat cancer using Elekta's VMAT solution.

BARCELONA, Spain, January 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Centre seeks solutions to challenges and opportunities coming with multi-core processors.