Healthy older people living with a partner feel they have the highest quality of life, whilst those in residential homes are likely to report the poorest, according to new research funded by the Economic & Social Research Council as part of its Growing Older Programme.
A three-year-long study of residents aged between 65 and 98 in the London Borough of Wandsworth was carried out by a team led by Professor Graham Beaumont and Dr Pamela Kenealy of the University of Surrey Roehampton and the R
Earth’s youngest desert is shown in this July MERIS satellite image of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, over the last 40 years the Aral Sea has evaporated back to half its original surface area and a quarter its initial volume, leaving a 40,000 square kilometre zone of dry white-coloured salt terrain now called the Aralkum Desert.
As its water level has dropped 13 metres since the 1960s the Sea has actually split into two – the larger horseshoe-shaped
Females prefer burrows
The signal is an arched wall of sand called a hood which courting males of the fiddler crab Uca musica build at the entrances to their burrows on sand flats in Panama. Males have one very large claw that they wave to attract females to their burrows and females visit several males before choosing a mate by staying with a male in his burrow. These small crabs are at great risk of predation from ever-present shore birds. When moving between burrows they reduce th
A new technique allows radiologists to lower the radiation dose that computed tomography (CT) delivers by tailoring the dose based on a child’s size, according to a study appearing in the August issue of the journal Radiology.
“The purpose of our research was to provide the technologists who run CT scanners with a precise recipe for lowering the radiation dose levels for pediatric patients by matching radiation to body size, while still delivering a high-quality CT scan,” said th
People with heart failure and normal cholesterol may benefit from cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, researchers report in today’s rapid access issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
“This is the first prospective study to show that statins have beneficial effects in heart failure in the absence of coronary artery disease or high blood cholesterol,” says senior author James K. Liao, M.D., director of vascular medicine research at Brigham & Women&
Nitric Oxide regulates stem cell division in the adult brain; Strategy seen for repairing brain damage caused by neurodegenerative disease and stroke
Most neurons in the mammalian brain are produced during embryonic development. However, several regions of the adult brain continue to spawn large numbers of neurons through the proliferation of neural stem cells. Moreover, it is becoming clear that these new neurons are integrated into existing brain circuitry.
Now, researcher
A single gene, called PHANTASTICA (PHAN), controls whether a plant makes feathery leaves like a tomato or umbrella-like leaves like Oxalis. The same mechanism is shared by a wide group of flowering plants.
“It’s a very surprising finding, that modifying one gene in the tomato alters the leaf from one form to another,” said Neelima Sinha, a professor of plant biology at UC Davis who is senior author on the paper.
Plant leaves fall into two main groups: simple, single-bl
New data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will assist in the design of optics for liquid immersion lithography, an old idea that recently has attracted new interest as a possible means of improving image resolution and thereby shrinking feature sizes of computer chips.
Conventional optical lithography has advanced sufficiently to achieve a resolution of 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter), but there are physical and technical limits to how much better it can
Women who use estrogen replacement therapy to relieve menopausal symptoms are more likely to develop risk factors for potentially fatal irregular heartbeats (arrythmias) and heart attacks than women who take hormone therapy combining estrogen and progestin.
Prior to the early termination of the estrogen plus progestin arm of a nationwide women’s health study, postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy was the most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, based on its
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have discovered a way to inhibit a biochemical process that accompanies labor and to postpone delivery for one to two days in pregnant mice.
“Since the biochemical steps associated with labor are likely the same in both mice and humans, a similar treatment might someday help prevent pre-term labor in women,” said Dr. Carole Mendelson, professor of biochemistry and obstetrics and gynecology and senior author of the study, publish
Northwestern University researchers have found that caspases, a family of protein-cutting enzymes involved in programmed cell death (apoptosis), may be a missing link in the chain of molecular events leading to Alzheimer´s disease.
Alzheimer´s disease is a neurodegenerative condition affecting an estimated 4 million Americans that causes memory loss and, ultimately, dementia. Patients with this disease have abnormal deposits (plaques) of protein fragments called amyloid-beta surrounding
Wearing your necktie tight might look smart, but it could increase the risk of developing the serious eye disease glaucoma, reveals a study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
The researchers tested the internal blood pressure (intraocular pressure) of one eye in each of 20 healthy men and 20 male patients with glaucoma. They did this when participants wore an open shirt collar, three minutes after donning a tight necktie, and three minutes after loosening their ties. The healthy
Researchers from Imperial College London have developed a system using statistical control charts to help monitor mortality rates in general practice.
Although the system, details of which are published online today in The Lancet, was developed as a practical response to monitoring issues raised by the Harold Shipman case, it can also be used to monitor variations in the quality of care between GPs and practices.
Dr Paul Aylin, one of the paper’s authors, from Imperial Co
There are likely to have been over 92,500 fewer cancer deaths than expected in the European Union in the year 2000, according to research published today[1] (Tuesday 29 July) in Annals of Oncology – and at least part of the credit will be due to the Europe Against Cancer Programme.
Experts had calculated that EU cancer deaths would rise from just over 850,000 in 1985 to over 1.03 million in 2000 due to demographic reasons, but the new research shows that when final statistics are ava
Nanotechnology is an emerging range of technologies in which medicine and engineering meet physics and chemistry. Nanotechnology supporters claim that the machines and materials it may produce will mean faster computers, less pollution and cheaper energy, and longer and healthier lives.
Critics, however – from Prince Charles to Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton – fear that nanomachines could run amok and turn the surface of the Earth into an uninhabitable morass. Environmentalists
“Breathtaking” new maps of likely sites of water on Mars showcase their association with geologic features such as Vallis Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system.
The maps detail the distribution of water-equivalent hydrogen as revealed by Los Alamos National Laboratory-developed instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft. In an upcoming talk at the Sixth International Conference on Mars at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, Los Alamos space scienti
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