COS in the Press

"A team of scientists from the USA and Italy say they have developed a urine test that detects human growth hormone. The finding is a potential breakthrough in efforts to find a non-invasive way to screen for the performance-enhancing drug that is banned throughout the athletic world."

"George Mason University professors have spun off a second life sciences company, and this time, Prince William County officials are vowing not to let a GMU offspring get away."

Mason's Potomac Environmental Research and Education Center helping to save the bay.

"Combining computer technology and neurological expertise, doctors from Inova Fairfax Hospital and George Mason University are on track to improve treatment for millions of people around the world suffering from brain aneurysms."

"Virologist Dr. Yuntao Wu of George Mason University may be able to stop HIV, he just needs the funding."

"Molecularly targeted cancer drugs have begun to usher in the promise of personalized medicine, where genetic tests determine whether a therapy is prescribed."

"Thermo Fisher Scientific and researchers from George Mason University led by Lance Liotta and Emanuel Petricoin will try to develop a new workflow that could eventually validate protein biomarkers to where they can play in the clinical setting, the partners said this week."

"Using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft like a pair of eyes, each staring at the sun from a different perspective, researchers have constructed the first 3-D image of a jet of gas zooming out of the sun's outer atmosphere. The jet's helical shape provides strong evidence that the outburst was generated by twisted magnetic fields anchored in the sun's visible surface, or photosphere, Spiros Patsourakos of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and his colleagues report ...."

"The effort is part of an aggressive strategy ... to leapfrog the bureaucracies of better-known research institutions to speed discoveries and get personalized treatment to patients quickly. 'The blank slate we were given didn't exist anywhere else,' said Lance Liotta, former chief of pathology at the National Cancer Institute, who along with Emanuel Petricoin, a former senior researcher at the Food and Drug Administration, and an eight-person research group was recruited to George Mason in 2005. Their approach has been to build tools and relationships to understand what drives disease, concentrating on early cancer detection and late-stage treatment, ..."

"Scientists at George Mason University have developed a new technology to detect diseases such as cancer at an earlier stage than with standard testing methods."

Discussion of plans to build the world's largest computer to pinpoint weather predictions anywhere in the world. "Our aim is to revolutionise climate and weather prediction," said Jagadish Shukla, professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University in Virginia. "It would be a huge machine but would bring great benefits."

"The story of how a college student turned a laptop in suburban Virginia into a gateway to outer space is a marvel of modern technology and the result of a proejct designed to find and catalogue 25,000 galaxies."

"Previous observations had suggested that the more massive the bulge in a galaxy, the bigger the black hole. So it seemed reasonable to think that the formation and growth of galactic bulges must be intimately linked to their central black holes. Now, Shobita Satyapal, of George Mason University in Virginia, US, and her colleagues have discovered eight active supermassive black holes in skinny galaxies with minimal star bulges."

Yuntao Wu, assistant professor in the department of molecular and microbiology, has been named one of “Tomorrow’s PIs” in the current edition of Genome Technology magazine. He is cited for his HIV research, which seeks to prevent or slow down the progression of AIDS.

"Insects, one of the oldest biological weapons, could be a simple and cheap way for terrorists to inflict major damage on the U.S., .... A terrorist could easily introduce Rift Valley fever ... to the U.S. with only $100-worth of supplies and a plane ticket ..., says Charles Bailey, director of the National Center for Biodefense at George Mason University."