California takes the gloves off

Robotics takes off.

n a mere 50 years, robots have gone from being a topic of science fiction to becoming an integral part of modern society. They now are ubiquitous on factory floors, build complex deep-sea installations, explore icy worlds beyond the reach of humans, and assist in precision surgeries. These robots are improving our health, adding to our scientific understanding, raising productivity, and perform...

Cardiac protection takes off.

Protecting the heart from ischaemiaand reperfusioninduced injury represents the greatest challenge of cardiology, since myocardial infarction is the major cause of mortality in industrialized countries. Research on cardiac protection has a long history in the discovery of new principles of protection, replete with triumphs but also broken dreams with respect to their clinical application. Treat...

Plasma jet takes off.

Thanks to a series of joint research projects by Los Alamos National Laboratory, Beta Squared of Allen, Texas, and the University of California at Los Angeles, there is now a more environmentally sound method for cleaning semiconductor chips that may also be effective in cleaning up chemical, bacterial, and nuclear contaminants. The Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jet uses a type of ionized gas cal...

Off-track takes Frizzled off the canonical path.

Like many other signalling pathways, the Wnt pathway is seen as part of a network that integrates extracellular information mediated by a variety of cell surface proteins to produce cell context-specific outputs. The identification of Frizzled as Wnt receptors (Bhanot et al, 1996) provided the essential link between extracellular Wnts and the intracellular components of Wnt signal transduction....

Radiokrypton dating finally takes off.