Washington, April 8: A leading new tuberculosis vaccine, called MVA85A, has been found to be safe in its Phase I trial.

Lead researcher Dr. Helen McShane, reader in vaccinology and Wellcome senior fellow at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute in England, studied the effects of the vaccine specifically in people who had latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI), which can cause full-blown disease when re-activated.

For the study, the researchers recruited 12 individuals with LTBI, who did not have other complicating factors like HIV or hepatitis.

Washington, April 7: Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found that the retina works like a multi-layered jigsaw puzzle of jagged windows called receptive fields, through which about 1.25 million neurons view the world.

The researchers have revealed that these receptive fields fit together like pieces of a puzzle, preventing "blind spots" and excessive overlap that could blur our perception of the world.

Washington, April 7: Mario Capecchi, Nobel Laureate for Medicine in 2007, has announced the invention of a technique to reveal the stem cells camouflaged in the pancreas.

The achievement made in collaboration with Eugenio Sangiorgi, a researcher from the Catholic University of Rome, is important because, to date, scientists don''t have a method to distinguish a priori between a stem cell and any other cell in the same tissue.

“We can only infer that a cell really is a stem cell by observing its behaviour," says Sangiorgi.

Washington, Apr 6: Scientists have successfully used the African frog Xenopus as a tool to identify important clues about the effects of maternal consumption of alcohol in early pregnancy.

As the Xenopus embryos are large, easy to work with and very responsive to environmental cues, they make for ideal instruments to understand early vertebrate development.

Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) and Foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) cause malformations in babies, including facial defects, short stature, and mental and behavioural abnormalities.

According to a study released on Thursday, Spanish researchers from the Complutense University in Madrid, together with scientists of other universities, found that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - the main chemical in the infamous narcotic agent, marijuana - likely helps the annihilation of brain cancer cells.

The research, which proposes to bring to improve the prospects of anti-cancer therapies, said that THC causes cancer cells to go through a process called autophagy - the breakdown that takes place when the cells fundamentally self-digest.