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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2010/101207.html Peter Rothwell: In this new work, scientists from Oxford, Edinburgh, London and Japan used data on over 670 deaths from cancer in a range of randomised trials involving over 25,000 people. These trials compared daily use of aspirin against no aspirin and were done originally to look for any preventative effect against heart disease. The results, published in the Lancet, showed that aspirin reduced death due to any cancer by around 20% during the trials. But the benefits of aspirin only became apparent after taking the drug for 5 years or more, suggesting aspirin works by slowing or preventing the early stages of the disease so that the effect is only seen much later. After 5 years of taking aspirin, the data from patients in the trials showed that death rates were 34% less for all cancers and as much as 54% less for gastrointestinal cancers, such as oesophagus, stomach, bowel, pancreas and liver cancers.

"A team of scientists at Oxford University have printed - yes, printed - what could be the predecessors to usable synthetic human tissue. The researchers released a paper called A Tissue-Like Material, announcing that they created their own version of a 3D printer, saying the current ones on the market couldn't print what they were after, according to PhsyOrg. And what were they after? A protein sack of water that can mold itself into different shapes and perform similar functions to human cells. After developing the printer, the team was able to print out a series of droplets that formed a network of human-like cells that could act like nerves and send electrical signals across the network."

Droplet network printer ""We aren't trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues, but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues," said Professor Hagan Bayley of Oxford University's Department of Chemistry, who led the research. "We've shown that it is possible to create networks of tens of thousands of connected droplets. The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other.""

"The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican Library) have joined efforts in a landmark digitization project with the aim of opening up their repositories of ancient texts. Over the course of the next four years, 1.5 million pages from their remarkable collections will be made freely available online to researchers and to the general public."

"Eine irritierte innere Uhr schränkt die Leistungsfähigkeit ein. Beim Menschen sind die Folgen als Jetlag bekannt. Auch Malariaerreger bekommen Probleme, wenn sie ihren Lebensrhythmus nicht dem der infizierten Nagetiere angepasst haben. Darüber berichten Wissenschaftler von den Universitäten in Edinburgh und Oxford im Wissenschaftsblatt "Proceedings of the Royal Society B". Sie haben dann eine um die Hälfte verminderte Fähigkeit, die Krankheit zu übertragen. "

'Quantum information technology is a field of physics aimed at harnessing some of the deepest phenomena in physics to create wholly new forms of technology, such as computers and communication systems,' said Erik Gauger of Oxford University's Department of Materials, an author of the paper.

Apply the electrodes... Externally modulating the brain's activity can boost its performance. The easiest way to manipulate the brain is through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which involves applying electrodes directly to the head to influence neuron activity with an electric current. Roi Cohen Kadosh's team at the University of Oxford showed last year that targeting tDCS at the brain's right parietal lobe can boost a person's arithmetic ability - the effects were still apparent six months after the tDCS session (newscientist.com/article/dn19679). More recently, Richard Chi and Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney, Australia, demonstrated that tDCS can improve a person's insight. The pair applied tDCS to volunteers' anterior frontal lobes - regions known to play a role in how we perceive the world - and found the participants were three times as likely as normal to complete a problem-solving task (newscientist.com/article/dn20080). Brain stimulation can also boost a person's learning abilities, according to Agnes Flöel's team at the University of Münster in Germany. Twenty minutes of tDCS to a part of the brain called the left perisylvian area was enough to speed up and improve language learning in a group of 19 volunteers (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20098). Using the same technique to stimulate the brain's motor cortex, meanwhile, can enhance a person's ability to learn a movement-based skill (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805413106).

An international team of scientists has developed a novel X-ray technique for imaging atomic displacements in materials with unprecedented accuracy, using a recently discovered class of exotic materials - multiferroics - that can be simultaneously magnetically and electrically ordered. Multiferroics are also candidate materials for new classes of electronic devices. The researchers are from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble (France), the University of Oxford, and the University College London.

Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices. (Recorded at TEDGlobal University, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 5:47)

A new strain of mosquitoes in which females cannot fly may help curb the transmission of dengue fever, according to UC Irvine and British scientists. Great idea or frankensketter?