An aging population means that neurodegeneration, such as Alzheimer’s disease, is one of the major health problems in the developed world.

One of the causes of neurodegeneration is a modification to the protein ‘tau’, which helps to maintain the stability of neurones in the brain, causing them to form aggregates termed ‘tangles’.

These diseases, or ‘tauopathies’ are believed to be caused by a form of the protein tau which has been excessively modified with phosphate.

When Sir Thomas More stood on the scaffold in 1535 he continued to make jokes. We don't often associate humor with executions by berserk kings over religious convictions but that is why humor has always fascinated us and it leads to questions about what is funny, how humor works at such moments, and when it is 'appropriate' to rely on a sense of humor.

Renaissance humor (1500-1700) comes under scrutiny at a conference at the University of Leicester on Friday 18th July, where experts in the literature of the period will gather for the first time to discuss Renaissance humor in some detail.

A flavor of humor of what the conference might have to offer can be found in Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607), in which Jonson's anti-hero, the miser and swindler Volpone, feels such contempt for the medical profession that he twists the English language into a glorious new direction, referring to a money-grabbing quack doctor as 'a turdy-facy, nasty-paty, lousy-fartical rogue.'

European researchers have taken a major step towards the goal of developing printable electronics that can be used for creating radio frequency identification tags and flexible watch displays.

Researchers have long dreamed of being able to print electronic components directly onto organic materials such as paper, fabrics, or plastic.

In addition to being able to fabricate large numbers of everyday devices such as watch displays and other applications cheaply, they envision novel applications including electronic paper, eyeglasses with embedded displays, or even smart clothing.

It’s Physics World time again, folks!

This month’s (July 2008) issue has a cover headline “On reflection: Symmetry and the Standard Model”, and a diagram of the 8-dimensional E8 group squashed flat like a beached jellyfish on the 2-dimensional page. The article itself (by Stephen Maxfield of Liverpool University) is as good a summary of the development the Standard Model as I’ve come across, and does serve to persuade me that those guys, by and large, really do know what they’re talking about. But what are they talking about?

A dynamic way to alter the shape and size of microscopic three-dimensional structures built out of proteins has been developed by biological chemist Jason Shear and his former graduate student Bryan Kaehr at The University of Texas at Austin.

Shear and Kaehr fabricated a variety of detailed three-dimensional microstructures, known as hydrogels, and have shown that they can expand and bend the hydrogels by altering the chemistry of the environment in which they were built.

Hydrogels have been in development over the last couple of decades and are being used as parts in biology-based microdevices and medical diagnostic technologies, for drug delivery, and in tissue engineering. But the future utility of these "smart materials" relies on finding better ways to control their conformation.

Six of every 100 patients who die in hospital do so as a consequence of an adverse drug reaction or, in other words, a fatal reaction to medicines, according to research carried out at the Department of Medicine of the University of Granada, in collaboration with the Clinical Hospital San Cecilio of Granada, by Alfredo José Pardo Cabello and directed by Professors Emilio Puche Cañas (Department of Pharmacology) and Francisco Javier Gómez Jiménez (Department of Medicine).

A adverse drug reaction to medicines (ADR) has been defined as any harmful and unwanted effect of a drug, at doses used for prophylaxis, diagnose or treatment. Their repercussion is usually minimal, but sometimes, they can be serious and they can even endanger the patient’s life.

The emotional well-being of families where children lack a genetic or gestational link to one or both of their parents (where the children have been conceived through surrogacy, egg donation or donor insemination) has long been a subject of debate.

In the first worldwide study of this issue, British scientists have shown that relationships within such families appear to be functioning well, and that there are few differences between them and families in whom children were conceived naturally.

Miss Polly Casey, from the Centre for Family Research, Cambridge University, UK, will tell the 24th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology this week that the study found that the egg donation, surrogacy, and donor insemination families showed more similarities than differences in the psychological well-being of the parents, the quality of parent-child relationships, and the psychological adjustment of the child.

Researchers in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Gabon, Germany, Japan, Rwanda, the United Kingdom, and the United States have found that simian foamy virus (SFV) is widespread among wild chimpanzees throughout equatorial Africa.

Recent studies have shown that humans who hunt wild primates, including chimpanzees, can acquire SFV infections. Since the long-term consequences of these cross-species infections are not known, it is important to determine to what extent wild primates are infected with simian foamy viruses.

In this study, researchers tested this question for wild chimpanzees by using novel non-invasive methods. Analyzing over 700 fecal samples from 25 chimpanzee communities across sub-Saharan Africa, the researchers obtained viral sequences from a large proportion of these communities, showing a range of infection rates from 44% to 100%.

Continuing from the prior article... “The Sun Ain’t Yeller”, cries the heliochromologist.  Undaunted by tradition, dogma, or tens of thousands of erroneous magazine and textbook images of our Sun, heliochromology, a colorful heterodox, is winning the day because the Sun is what it is, color and all, regardless of other’s puerile incognizance. 

The answer is not a vague, subjective one, but an objective one, as sure as red apples are red.  Heliochromology is our path to enlightenment that will bring resolve to this color conundrum -- a subtle polemic that has been dormant to all of astronomy for hundreds, nay thousands, nay nay, tens of thousands of years, perhaps since mankind first discovered the Sun and its daily color metamorphosis. 

We know not who the sagacious sapien may have been who indubitably made the first astronomical discovery of all time – the Sun.