LONDON, March 30 /PRNewswire/ -- A pilot scheme for Personal Budgets for people with long term conditions has been discussed in the media today (Sunday) after the Department of Health confirmed it was considering the plan.

Also known as Individual Budgets, the scheme could mean people with multiple sclerosis (MS) will be able to plan what health care they receive and when they receive it.

The Government is already trialling Personal Budgets in social care and this will extend the scheme into the NHS.

MS Society chief executive, Simon Gillespie, said: "This is an opportunity to provide people with MS with the effective care they need when they need it and in the most appropriate way.

3-D images are very useful in medicine and now they're gaining ground in physics. Researchers from Hahn-Meitner-Institute (HMI) and the University of Applied Science in Berlin have succeeded in creating a direct, three-dimensional visualization of magnetic fields inside solid, non-transparent materials for the first time.

This could prove invaluable because to understand high temperature superconductivity it is vital to understand how magnetic flux lines are distributed and how these flux lines can be established in materials. With this new experimental setup, it is now possible to visualize magnetic domains in magnetic crystals three-dimensionally.

The researchers in the imaging group used neutrons, subatomic particles that have zero net charge, but do have a magnetic moment, making them ideal for investigating magnetic phenomena in magnetic materials.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electrical currents without any loss below a certain temperature. Normally, high magnetic fields destroy superconductivity, turning the material into a normal conductor.

Novel experiments on organic superconductors revealed a new superconducting phase between the normal conducting and the superconducting state.

Prof. Peter Fulde from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden and Prof. Richard Ferrell predicted the existence of this special superconducting state in 1964, characterized by a spatial modulation of the superconductivity. At about the same time, two further researchers independently predicted the same phase. Therefore, the state is called Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state.

PRINCETON, New Jersey, March 28 /PRNewswire/ --

Pharmasset, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRUS) received a second loan of US$10 million from Horizon Technology Finance under an existing working capital loan agreement that was entered into during September 2007. Pharmasset received the first loan of US$10 million in October 2007 and, at its option, may receive a third loan of US$10 million by November 30, 2008, provided certain conditions are satisfied.

On March 26, 2008, surgeons at UC San Diego Medical Center removed an inflamed appendix through a patient’s vagina, a first in the United States.

Following the 50-minute procedure, the patient, Diana Schlamadinger, reported only minor discomfort. Removal of diseased organs through the body’s natural openings offers patients a rapid recovery, minimal pain, and no scarring. Key to these surgical clinical trials is collaboration with medical device companies to develop new minimally-invasive tools.

The procedure, called Natural Orifice Translumenal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES), involves passing surgical instruments through a natural orifice, such as the mouth or vagina, to remove a diseased organ such as an appendix or gallbladder. Only one incision is made through the belly button for the purpose of inserting a two millimeter camera into the abdominal cavity so the surgeons can safely access the surgical site.

When most people think of lightning strikes they picture the kind that go from clouds to ground, but some lightning goes upward, forming blue jets and gigantic jets and, perhaps the most dangerous lightning, appears as "bolts from the blue" – lightning that begins upward, but then moves sideways and then downward to hit the ground as much as three miles from a thunderstorm.

However, about 90 percent of lightning occurs inside clouds and is not visible to the casual observer. A group of researchers wondered if lightning that appears within clouds and the lightning that escapes upward or downward shared the same development mechanisms.

For intracloud lightning, the most common form of lightning, the transfer of charge occurs between the most negatively and most positively charged areas, the middle and upper parts of the cloud, respectively. Lightning that strikes the ground does so because precipitation or the storm's progression creates an excess of net negative charge in the mid-levels of the cloud. This results in either a direct ground strike or a bolt from the blue.

After half a century of debate, a University of Alberta researcher has confirmed that dome-headed dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs could collide with each other during courtship combat. Eric Snively, an Alberta Ingenuity fellow at the U of A, used computer software to smash the sheep-sized dinosaurs together in a virtual collision and results showed that their bony domes could emerge unscathed.

The computer simulations by Snively and his co-author Andrew Cox of Villanova University offer clues as to how the dinosaurs (between 80 and 65 million years old and native to Canada, the United States and Mongolia), might have survived head-to-head combat like modern marine iguanas and musk oxen.

LONDON, March 28 /PRNewswire/ --

It's fair to say that UK women now have more choice than ever when it comes facial anti-ageing solutions. From innovative cosmetic surgery procedures to topical so called 'cosmeceuticals' and sophisticated skin-care, there's never been a wider range of beauty solutions available on the market. However, the latest anti-ageing consumer research, commissioned by Olay Regenerist with YouGov, shows that only 4% of UK women are actually opting to undertake more drastic cosmetic procedures and increasing numbers are confused about which so-called 'wonder ingredients' are really worth it. So what are their main concerns and what's the solution to this most modern of beauty dilemmas?

The Pressure To Look Good