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David Aaron, a veteran U.S. diplomat and director of the RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy, has compiled a wide range of writings by Islamic terrorists that offer an unusual window into their mentality. The book, “In Their Own Words: Voices of Jihad,” is a virtual encyclopedia of jihadist rhetoric written by the terrorists themselves.

Cleveland BioLabs, Inc. (NASDAQ: CBLI) announced that on October 14, the first healthy volunteer was dosed in the initial human safety study for Protectan CBLB502, a drug under development for the treatment for Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS).

Emergency room doctors and nurses around the nation worry that hospitals are not adequately prepared to handle casualties from a radioactive ‘dirty bomb,’ said researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). The finding underscores the need for better hospital preparedness training and clearer guidelines for managing radiological events, the researchers said.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded 25 new grants to develop new and better diagnostics and treatments for radiation exposure after a nuclear attack.

All U.S. agencies with counterterrorism programs that collect or “mine” personal data — such as phone, medical, and travel records or Web sites visited — should be required to systematically evaluate the programs’ effectiveness, lawfulness, and impacts on privacy, says a new report from the National Research Council.

Earlier this week the US government announced measures to boost the nation’s preparedness against a potentia outdoor anthrax attack: using letter carriers or mailmen on a voluntary basis to deliver supplies and medicines to residents in communities during an emergency.

Scientists are finding that particles that are barely there - tiny objects known as nanoparticles that have found a home in electronics, food containers, sunscreens, and a variety of applications - can breech our most personal protective barrier: The skin. The particles under scrutiny by Lisa DeLouise, Ph.D., are almost unfathomably tiny.

According to new research published in the October 1 issue of JAMA, changing administration and dosing of an anthrax vaccine gives favorable results and reduces side effects. Specifically, researchers found that fewer doses of intramuscularly injected of an anthrax vaccine results in similar levels of effectiveness and fewer adverse events than the current vaccination regimen.

A light-transmitting compound that could one day be used in high-efficiency fiber optics and in sensors to detect biological and chemical weapons at long distance almost went undiscovered by scientists because its structure was too difficult to examine. Luckily, scientists from U.S.

Genomic signature sequences used by clinical researchers to detect, quantify and diagnose nucleic acid sequences are not inclusive enough. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials shows that many published sequences are of unacceptably low sensitivity for most clinical applications.