Stress hormone inhibitor may be key to hair growth

Baldness is an ailment that many would rather reverse or avoid completely. Stress and other life events can impact hair follicle growth and contribute to baldness, suggesting that stress hormones, including corticosteroids, are major contributors to the problem. Wang et al has shown in PLoS One by inhibiting corticosteroid releasing hormone 1 and 2 together, but not either one alone, synergized to regrow hair in mice.

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Geoengineering can save Greenland, model suggests

We recently witnessed a new Greenland melting record. And according to a new paleoclimate comparison by James Hansen we could be in for meters of sea level rise within this century, due to expected non-linearity of the melting process.

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Potential new method to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria

Antibiotic resistant bacteria infections are on the rise. Numbers of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) cases are skyrocketing and ways to treat them are limited. By using the proteins expressed in the bacteria itself, scientists have found a new way to eliminate such bacterial infections.

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Will moly be the end of Silicon Valley?

The discovery of the revolutionary material called graphene, made from simple pencil lead and the process of removing the atoms with scotch tape, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. It was not just the fact that this one atom thick material is a hundred times stronger than steel and widely available that did it. It was also that graphene can drastically increase for instance battery performance and computing speed. But for all its wondrous properties, the material apparently has a flaw: electrical leakage.

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Climate trend: weaker Atlantic trade winds?

Over the past 60 years the easterly trade winds over the tropical Atlantic Ocean have decreased in strength, say Hiroki Tokinaga and Shang-Ping Xie of the University of Hawai. The pattern suggests a permanent ‘Atlantic El Niño’, changed precipitation over the Sahel region of Africa and the Amazon basin and may even influence US hurricanes and European weather patterns.

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