Infection control experts at The Johns Hopkins Hospital have found that a combination of robot-like devices that disperse hydrogen peroxide vapor into the air and then detoxify the disinfecting chemical are highly effective at killing and preventing the spread of multiple-drug-resistant bacteria.


Of special note, researchers say, was that enhanced cleaning with the vapor reduced by 80 percent a patient's chances of becoming colonized by a particularly aggressive and hard-to-treat bacterium, vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE). ...

Sometimes, the Sun itself seems to dance. On just this past New Years Eve, for example, NASAs Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft imaged an impressive prominence erupting from the Suns surface. The dramatic explosion was captured in ultraviolet light in the above time lapse video covering four hours. Of particular interest is the tangled magnetic field that directs a type of solar ballet for the hot plasma as it falls back to the Sun. The scale of the disintegrating prominence is huge -- the entire Earth would easily fit under the flowing curtain of hot gas. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a month, and may erupt in a Coronal Mass Ejection expelling hot gas into the Solar System. The energy mechanism that creates a ...

The very first bionic hand that allows the amputee to actually feel what the hand is touching will be transplanted later this year.

According to doctors involved in the surgery the hand will be attached directly to the patient’s nervous system via electrodes clipped onto two of the arm’s main nerves. This will allow the patient to control the hand directly with his thoughts, and receive sensory signals to his brain from the bionic hand.

This will be a major breakthrough in prosthetics and could open the door to a new generation of artificial limbs with sensory perception. ...

Imagine a battery the size of the one in your cell phone with enough juice to jump-start a car. It's actually not too far-fetched. Scientists at the University of Illinois have been developing microbatteries. Only a few millimeters long, these batteries may pave the way for electronics to become smaller and thinner, while still providing enough energy to be highly effective. The best part is that it recharges 1000 times faster than current batteries. Good things do come in small packages ...

Listeria bacteria has been enlisted by researchers to selectively infect metastatic pancreatic cancer cells and deliver radioisotopes into them. The experimental treatment dramatically decreased the number of metastases (cancers that have spread to other parts of the body) in a mouse model of highly aggressive pancreatic cancer without harming healthy tissue. Mice livers are shown above. The saline control liver on the left presents a large number of metastases compared to the liver on the right which was subject to the radioactive Listeria treatment. ...

Overhunting is one reason for wildlife population decline, but do these animals even know what we’re doing to them? New research suggests that they do. Woolly monkeys in the Amazon were observed to react differently to people in their territory, depending on the behavior of the human.

In areas where hunting is heavy, humans gathering food or performing research do not elicit much of a response from the monkeys. Hunters, however, result in the monkeys becoming very quiet and motionless. In quieter areas where human contact is less frequent, the monkeys are more wary of the researchers and gatherers. This indicates that the monkeys are behaving based on experience.

The long term advantage of this behavior is uncertain. Woolly monkeys are highl ...