Researchers have developed a score that predicts an individual's risk of dying within 5 years for people aged between 40 and 70 years old in the UK, according to new research published in The Lancet. The score, which uses measures that can be obtained by simple questionnaires without any need for physical examination, such as self-rated health and usual walking speed, could be used by individuals to improve awareness of their health status, and by doctors to identify high-risk individuals for further treatment, say the authors. Individuals can calculate their personalised ...

Women aged 50-69 years who attend mammography screening reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by 40 per cent compared to women who are not screened - according to a major international review of the latest evidence on breast cancer screening. Overall, women who are invited to attend mammography screening have a 23 per cent risk reduction in breast cancer death (owing to some attending and some not), compared with women not invited by routine screening programmes. In the UK, this relative risk translates to around eight deaths prevented per 1,000 women regularly ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Day in and day out, for years on end, millions of people with diabetes prick their fingers to test their blood sugar level. And many may wonder if all the careful eating, exercise and medication it takes to keep those levels under control is really worth it. A major new study should encourage them to keep going for the long haul, to protect their hearts from diabetes-related damage. But it should also prompt them to work with their doctors on other ways to reduce their cardiovascular risk. The key finding: that keeping blood sugar levels under good ...

Boston, MA - A new study by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that death rates among people over 65 are higher in zip codes with more fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) than in those with lower levels of PM2.5. It is the first study to examine the effect of soot particles in the air in the entire population of a region, including rural areas. The harmful effects from the particles were observed even in areas where concentrations were less than a third of the current standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). "Most of the ...

Operation IceBridge wrapped up its seventh Arctic deployment on May 21, when NASA's C-130 research aircraft with the mission's researchers and instruments on board departed Thule Air Base in Greenland and headed to NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. This Arctic field season, IceBridge, NASA's twice-yearly airborne survey of polar ice, carried out 33 eight-hour flights during ten weeks, collecting data over sea and land ice regions that have been evolving rapidly over the last decades. The mission also conducted over a dozen international research collaborations ...

Researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T) have uncovered new insights on the genetic causes of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. These findings could uncover a new way to detect a genetic predisposition to ALS before the disease strikes. A common mutation associated with ALS is an unstable repeated DNA sequence within the C9orf72 gene that could reach into the thousands. However, it is unknown how many repeats would be sufficient to cause the disease. A way to predict if the number of repeats increases to the damaging ...

In a paper published June 3, 2015 in the online journal PLOS ONE, University of Connecticut researchers Jan-Michael Hessenauer and Jason C. Vokoun, both in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, report on fisheries induced evolution (FIE) in recreational fisheries. Their research compared populations of largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) taken from unexploited reference populations in the state of Connecticut and compared their resting metabolic rates (RMR) with populations taken from popular inland recreational fisheries. Differences among ...

Each summer, Greenland's ice sheet -- the world's second-largest expanse of ice, measuring three times the size of Texas -- begins to melt. Pockets of melting ice form hundreds of large, 'supraglacial' lakes on the surface of the ice. Many of these lakes drain through cracks and crevasses in the ice sheet, creating a liquid layer over which massive chunks of ice can slide. This natural conveyor belt can speed ice toward the coast, where it eventually falls off into the sea. In recent years, scientists have observed more lakes forming toward the center of the ice sheet ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Sometimes even cells get tired. When the T cells of your immune system are forced to deal over time with cancer or a chronic infection such as HIV or hepatitis C, they can develop 'T cell exhaustion,' becoming less effective and losing their ability to attack and destroy the invaders of the body. While the PD-1 protein pathway has long been implicated as a primary player in T cell exhaustion, a major question has been whether PD-1 actually directly causes exhaustion. A new paper from the lab of E. John Wherry, Ph.D., a professor of microbiology and director ...

Researchers from the University of Exeter found that the severity of ranavirosis, a devastating disease that kills thousands of frogs each year, increases in the presence of exotic fish. The use of garden chemicals was also associated with increased severity of the disease. The study, which is published in the journal PLOS ONE, highlights the risks of releasing fish into garden ponds. Fish may amplify viral levels in the environment or cause stress hormone production that reduces immune function in wild frogs. Lead author Alexandra North from the Environment and Sustainability ...

PITTSBURGH, June 3, 2015 - Pregnant women living close to a high density of natural gas wells drilled with hydraulic fracturing were more likely to have babies with lower birth weights than women living farther from such wells, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analysis of southwestern Pennsylvania birth records. The finding does not prove that the proximity to the wells caused the lower birth weights, but it is a concerning association that warrants further investigation, the researchers concluded. The study was funded by The Heinz ...

PHILADELPHIA - Individuals with a higher level of moral reasoning skills showed increased gray matter in the areas of the brain implicated in complex social behavior, decision making, and conflict processing as compared to subjects at a lower level of moral reasoning, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with a researcher from Charité Universitätsmediz in Berlin, Germany. The team studied students in the Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program at the Wharton ...

Researchers have analysed the genomes of thousands of women in the UK and the Netherlands to measure the extent to which a woman's genes play a role for when she has her first baby and how many children she will have. Significantly, they have found that some women are genetically predisposed to have children earlier than others, and conclude that they have passed down their reproductive advantage to the next generation. They also find, however, that while modern women who were born in the 20th century might be expected to have babies even earlier than previous generations ...

WYNNEWOOD, PA--June 3, 2015--a study led by Ellen Heber-Katz, PhD, of the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR), part of Main Line Health (MLH), shows that a primordial form of energy production that still exists in mammals can be harnessed to achieve spontaneous tissue regeneration in mice, without the need for added stem cells. The study findings were reported in the June 3, 2015, issue of Science Translational Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Key collaborators in the study, which was supported by grants ...

A lot of problems, associated with the mixing of the liquid in the microchannels, could be solved via proper organization of the inhomogeneous slip on the walls of these channels. This is the conclusion made by the joint group of Russian and German scientists lead by Olga Vinogradova, who is a professor at the M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University and also a head of laboratory at the A.N. Frumkin Institute of Physical chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The article describing their theory was published in the latest issue of the journal ...

Scientists are beginning to unwrap the biology behind why some people are more prone to major depression and other psychiatric disorders than others when experiencing stressful life events. The researchers found that cellular activity in response to stress hormone receptor activation differs from individual to individual. The study, led by Janine Arloth, Ryan Bogdan, and Elisabeth Binder at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany, also shows that the genetic variations underlying this difference in stress response correlate with dysfunction in the amygdala, a ...

This news release is available in German. Scientists at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the University of Bonn led by Prof. Stefan Remy report on this in the journal "Neuron". Their investigations give new insights into the workings of spatial memory. Furthermore, they could also help improve our understanding of movement related symptoms associated with Parkinson's disease. In a familiar environment our movements are purposeful. For example, if we leave our office desk for a coffee break, we naturally follow a predefined route that has ...

This news release is available in German. Contaminated samples have evidently created some confusion in the timetable of life. On the basis of ultra-clean analyses, an international team, including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, has disproved supposed evidence that eukaryotes originated 2.5 to 2.8 billion years ago. In contrast to prokaryotes such as bacteria, eukaryotes have a nucleus. Some researchers thought they had discovered molecular remnants of living organisms in rock samples up to 2.8 billion years old. However, as the ...

A team of New York University neuroscientists has determined how a pair of growth factor molecules contributes to long-term memory formation, a finding that appears in the journal Neuron. "These results give us a better understanding of memory's architecture and, specifically, how molecules act as a network in creating long-term memories," explains the paper's senior author, Thomas Carew, a professor in NYU's Center for Neural Science and dean of NYU's Faculty of Arts and Science. "More importantly, this marks another step toward elucidating the intricacies of memory ...

DURHAM, N.C. - Scientists at Duke Medicine have produced a 3-D map of the human brain stem at an unprecedented level of detail using MRI technology. In a study to be published June 3 in Human Brain Mapping, the researchers unveil an ultra high-resolution brain stem model that could better guide brain surgeons treating conditions such as tremors and Parkinson's disease with deep brain stimulation (DBS). The new 3-D model could eliminate risky trial-and-error as surgeons implant electrodes -- a change akin to trading an outdated paper road atlas for a real-time GPS. "On ...

An international team of scientists led by Cardiff University researchers has provided the strongest evidence yet of what causes schizophrenia - a condition that affects around 1% of the global population. Published today (17:00BST, 03/06/2015) in the journal Neuron, their work presents strong evidence that disruption of a delicate chemical balance in the brain is heavily implicated in the disorder. In the largest ever study of its kind, the team found that disease-linked mutations disrupt specific sets of genes contributing to excitatory and inhibitory signalling, ...

A large majority of Americans--including gun owners--continue to support stronger policies to prevent gun violence than are present in current federal and most state law, according to a new national public opinion survey conducted by researchers with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. The survey is a follow-up to one conducted by the same researchers in early 2013, shortly after the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut that left 26 dead. The results are published online in Preventive ...

This news release is available in French. Professors Frederick Gosselin and Daniel Therriault, along with their master's student Renaud Passieux, are not related to Spiderman. Nevertheless, these Polytechnique Montreal researchers have produced an ultra-tough polymer fibre directly inspired by spider silk! They recently published an article about the project in the journal Advanced Materials. Spider silk: a thread with stunning properties Three to eight microns in diameter but five to ten times tougher than steel or Kevlar: despite its lightness, spider silk has ...

Love the opera? Hungry for hip hop? It turns out that your musical likes and dislikes may say more about you than you think, according to UBC research. Even in 2015, social class continues to inform our cultural attitudes and the way we listen to music, according to the study, which was recently published in the Canadian Review of Sociology. "Breadth of taste is not linked to class. But class filters into specific likes and dislikes," said Gerry Veenstra, study author and professor at UBC's Department of Sociology. The study involved nearly 1,600 telephone interviews ...

A NASA-generated animation of NOAA's GOES-West satellite imagery from June 1 to 3 showed Hurricane Andres' eye disappear as the storm weakened into a tropical storm. NOAA's GOES-West satellite has provided continuous visible and infrared imagery of the former hurricane since it was born. An animation created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland captured the storm as it made the transition from a hurricane, back into a tropical storm. Andres is located in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, south of Baja California, Mexico. ...