Magazine Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental has published an article on the effects of caffeine and glucose, separately and combined, on cognitive performance of individuals. The study’s authors are Ana Adam, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psycho-biology and member of the Research Institute of Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C) of the UB, and Josep Maria Serra Grabulosa, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psycho-biology UB and a member of the Institute of Biomedical Research August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS).

Research has shown improvements in attention and declarative memory tasks, and no significant change in the subjective condition of the participants. It has been concluded that the combination of caffeine and glucose has beneficial effects on attention (reaction time tasks sequentially) and learning and verbal memory consolidation, which could not be observed when the substances are are supplied individually.

To date, some studies have shown the effects of caffeine on human behavior and cognition. We knew then that caffeine has beneficial effects on sustained attention tasks and reaction time. It also demonstrated that caffeine reduces fatigue and increases alertness, among others, and other studies made clear that the positive effects of caffeine in low doses are not the same as in moderate and high doses, nor in situations with a deficit of activation. In addition, sensitivity to motivating and exciting effects of caffeine is related to the habit of habitual intake, ie the largest consumers of caffeine are more likely to perceive the benefits.

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In order to minimize radiation to healthy tissue by adapting radiation therapy in prostate cancer, researchers Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), in collaboration with the Hospital Universitario de La Princesa, MadridHave developed a new evaluation methodology for analyzing and quantifying the results of image processing algorithms used for automatic delineation of the contours of the organs of interest.

Progress in the various areas of technology has allowed the development of radiotherapy to the concept of Adaptive radiotherapy. This type of treatment is the planning of the distribution of the radiation dose adapted to the situation of each individual session. Thus, it could increase the dose of radiation on tissues to treat and reduce it while on the surrounding healthy tissue.

Image processing, and in particular the image registration algorithms that allow automatic delineation of the organs involved in treatment, has proven a key tool for the introduction of adaptive radiation. However, the methods used are not perfect, and its evaluation is a complex process since it provides a single reference (gold-standardd).

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The origin of the lithography (which is Greek word lithos, Stone and graphe, Drawing) dates back to the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, who carved their designs pre-cut stones in a cylinder, which used as rollers for soft clay to leave the impression in her original designs. Since then, the technique has changed little. Whereas today it is even possible to use molecules as printing patterns or designs.

The so-called “soft lithography” includes a set of techniques which have in common is the use of a flexible polymer as a vehicle to transfer and position-according to a micrometer-scale geometric motif, the material that underlies the structure of a surface.

A range of possible forms of “soft lithography”, highlights by microcontact printing or stamping (microcontact printing, μCP), Whose main advantage lies in the fact, to allow simple and economical manner, the microstructuring the substrate using a variety of materials such as biological material, and in particular, enzymes.

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The materials used in this project have shown excellent properties in previous studies in vitro conducted in collaboration with the University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), and could be used in the near future as bone prosthesis coaters used after the removal of the bone where the tumor. In addition to the benefits of its anticancer action, most of these materials have the ability to create layers of hydroxyapatite (a component of bones) in body fluids, which can help their fixation on the healthy bone.

In this regard, researchers Universidad Rey Juan Carlos led by Santiago Gómez-Ruiz and Pérez-Quintanilla Damián work in the preparation of these new materials with antineoplastic properties for the treatment of bone tumors. It is biocompatible materials based on calcium phosphate and siliceous mesoporous materials used as supports for impregnation of metal complexes with high cytotoxic activities.

Cancer treatment by chemotherapy is associated with, usually, a high number of side effects to the body, which can sometimes even be fatal because of the comprehensiveness of such treatments. Moreover, in many cases and because a high number of tumors tend to grow back once removed, chemotherapy is often used for preventive treatment of tumors treated surgically playback. Thus, for certain tumors such as bone, the manufacture of prostheses or implants with chemotherapeutic action could be an excellent alternative for the preventive treatment of recurrence of the same.

For this reason much of the research of the scientific community is in search of new alternatives to chemotherapeutic on-site cancer using nanoparticles as nanostructured materials or vehicles carrying drugs with antineoplastic properties, later citotoxicológicos studies on cancer cells.

These investigations are in a very preliminary stage, and still need to be tested in laboratory animals and are a continuation of earlier work by researchers at the URJC Santiago Gómez-Ruiz and Sanjiv Prashad who still work in the preparation and application of metal compounds cancer treatments. Moreover, despite the preliminary nature of the materials prepared by the group of URJC, they have already achieved wide acceptance in the scientific community with the consequent publication of three articles in journals of high level within the field of chemistry as Chemistry – European Journal, Journal of Materials Chemistry and Dalton Transactions.

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Digital Reference:

URL: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122324869/abstract

DOI: 10.1002/chem.200900151

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/JM/article.asp?doi=b919269g

DOI: 10.1039/b919269g

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/DT/article.asp?doi=b920051g

DOI: 10.1039/b920051g

Source: URJC

A group of researchers led Hagai Perets, researcher at the Weizmann Insitute of Science (Israel) but now at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA), and a Japanese scientist led by Kawabata Koji published this week in Nature different conclusions about the nature of two supernovas or very faint stellar explosions.

One is the supernova SN 2005e, which is “almost imperceptible” to a light curve that fades quickly into a region that has not found any evidence of recent star formation. The other is SN 2005cz, originated by an elliptical galaxy and very similar to the previous.

Using spectroscopic data, Hagai Perets and his team argue that the SN 2005e is rich in helium, such as Type Ib supernovae, but originated in a region where there is the type of massive stars that normally produce these explosions of collapsing cores.

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This is precisely what has made the group of Dr. Ruben Martin in the Institut Catala d’Investigacio Quimica (ICIQ), who carried out the direct insertion of CO catalyzed₂ aryl bromide, thus opening an alternative route for obtaining carboxylic acids.

Many drug products and bioactive compounds containing carboxylic acids or their derivatives. Benzoic acid, for example, is one of the preservatives used (you will find it as E-210 in some canned products), and is widely used to synthesize many other compounds. Although industry-wide there are several processes for preparing benzoic acids, all have some drawback: the oxidation of aldehydes or alcohols requires the use of stoichiometric oxidants that are either very expensive or large amounts of waste generated, the carbonylation of aryl halides CO involves having to manipulate a highly toxic substance such as carbon monoxide CO carboxylation₂ behaved, so far, having to prepare stoichiometric amounts of organometallic compounds …

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“The 2.5-Dimethylfuran is not detectable in breath samples of non-smokers, so that only qualitative determination can tell if someone has smoked in the last 72 hours,” points out to SINC Juan Manuel Sanchez, a researcher Department of Chemistry, University of Girona (UdG) and coauthor of a study published in the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry.

The UdG team analyzed various volatile organic compounds (benzene, 2,5-Dimethylfuran, toluene, o-xylene and p-xylene) that could serve as biomarkers of smoking status and found that 2.5-Dimethylfuran is alone gives effective results for breath samples.

“Benzene, which is sometimes mentioned in the literature, it is only useful when snuff consumption is relatively high and in short time-to-1 or 2 hours after consuming a cigarette, so it is useless from a practical, “says Sanchez.

For its part, the levels of toluene and xylenes are significant only for those who smoke heavily and provided there has been too long since the last cigarette.

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This is the first step that shows a significant deviation from the theoretical predictions about differences in behavior between matter and antimatter, a study may be supplemented with experiments for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Explains Fermilab today through a statement, the dominance of matter seen in the universe is possible only if there are differences in behavior between particles and antiparticles (which have the same mass and spin and spin, but different electric charge) . Although physicists have spent decades observing these differences (called CP violation), they are too small to explain the predominance of matter over antimatter.

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