BioMed Central Blog

Science and technology news in the developing world

There's been a lot of focus on internet technology in the developing world recently. In late August Zunia Knowledge Exchange published a report which provides a detailed mapping of best practice for the implementation of sustainable local broadband access network.

Last month the BBC's dot.life blog explored how technology is shaping the developing world. In this series entitled 'Africa gets connected', Rory Cellan-Jones toured East Africa where a handful of commercial and government projects have been racing to give Africa the bandwidth it needs.  

Meanwhile, in Central Africa, many countries are set to benefit from a $215 million World Bank backbone programme to provide reliable, high-speed, low-cost internet access to the region for the first time. Cameroon, Chad and the Central African Republic will take part in the initial phase.

Finally, in other technology news, Africa Gathering, a popular tech/Africa organisation, is holding an event in Nairobi on the 21st and 22nd December 2009. The organisers are now calling for papers.

Posted by Charlotte Webber at 17:39    Comments (0)

A new home for experimental stroke research

Today has seen the launch of Experimental & Translational Stroke Medicine, a journal dedicated to the gathering and dissemination of new knowledge in the field of experimental stroke research, with the aim of improving the quality of stroke research and facilitating the successful translation of novel treatment strategies into clinical practice.

Amongst the first articles to be published in the journal are detailed reviews on potential new drug candidates currently nearing the end of development such as the hematopoietic factors G-CSF (Minnerup et al), and EPO (Byts and Siren). A detailed review is given by Dr Linker and Dr Lee on recent MS models which are more clinically relevant than the established experimental autoimmune encephalitis. In addition, Dr Gee and colleagues provide clear-cut evidence regarding the possible detrimental effects of the mucosal administration of antigen in terms of autoimmunity.

With their primary aim being to improve the quality of research in this field and reduce translational failure from bench to beside, Editor-in-Chief Wolf-Rüdiger Schäbitz and Deputy Editor Christoph Kleinschnitz explain in their launch editorial how they believe that the open access format BMC offers "is ideally suited to rapidly and broadly disseminating novel findings and promoting fruitful discussion amongst active stroke researchers" and how they would like to “encourage the stroke community to make full use of this very welcome resource”.

For further information about the journal, please visit the journal’s website or view the instructions for authors if you would like to submit a manuscript.

Posted by Sally Robertson at 13:45    Comments (0)