Over the last 25 years, life expectancy in the U.S. has been rising at a slower rate than in many other high-income countries, such as Japan and Australia, despite our spending more on health care than any other nation. EXPLAINING DIVERGENT LEVELS OF LONGEVITY IN HIGH-INCOME COUNTRIES, a new report from the National Research Council, identifies factors that contribute to the U.S. shortfall in life expectancy. ###Reporters who wish to obtain copies should contact the Office of News and Public Information at 202-334-2138 or e-mail news@nas.edu. Advance copies will be available ...

A study published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases finds that methods to protect pregnant women from malaria are still underutilised in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A review of national control strategies by a team of international researchers, led by the Malaria in Pregnancy Consortium and funded by the Consortium and the Wellcome Trust, has concluded that despite major efforts, coverage is still inadequate in many areas and needs to be scaled up. Malaria infection in pregnancy can lead to devastating consequences for both mother and child. The World Health Organization's ...

AUSTIN, Texas—Young staghorn coral that fluoresce redder are less likely to settle and develop into coral polyps than their greener peers, University of Texas at Austin biologists have discovered. The finding may help scientists monitor how corals adapt to global warming because the less likely coral larvae are to settle, the more likely they will disperse from their reef of origin. "By simply looking at the color of a larval population, we may soon be able to say which larvae are going to be long-range dispersers and which will be short-range dispersers," says Mikhail ...

A workhorse of modern biology is sick, and scientists couldn't be happier. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Jacques Monod Institute in France and Cambridge University have found that the nematode C. elegans, a millimeter-long worm used extensively for decades to study many aspects of biology, can be targeted by naturally occurring viral infections. The discovery means C. elegans is likely to help scientists study the way viruses and their hosts interact. The findings will be published next week in the online, open access journal ...

Kyoto, Japan -- Certain types of pollution monitoring may soon become considerably easier. A group of researchers centered at Kyoto University has shown in a recent Nature Communications paper that a newly-formulated entangled framework of porous crystals (porous coordination polymers, or PCPs) can not only capture a variety of common air pollutants, but that the mixtures then glow in specific, easily-detected colors. Lead author for the paper was Dr. Yohei Takashima. Until now, chemical sensors have generally needed to be custom-designed to recognize specific compounds, ...

Certain strains of the food pathogen Listeria are uniquely adapted to infect heart tissues and may put people at a higher risk from serious cardiac disease, according to a new study published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology. Developing new diagnostic tests to identify these potentially fatal strains could protect those most at risk, such as those with heart valve replacements. Researchers from the University of Illinois, Chicago have shown that a sub-population of the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes display an enhanced ability to infect cardiac tissue. They found ...

Exposure to noise from road traffic can increase the risk of stroke, particularly in those aged 65 years and over, according to a study published online today (Wednesday 26 January) in the European Heart Journal [1]. The study, which is the first to investigate the links between road traffic noise and the risk of stroke, found that for every 10 decibels more noise the risk of having a stroke increased by 14% among the 51,485 study participants. When the Danish researchers looked at the data more closely, they found that for people aged less than 65 years there was no ...

January 25, 2011 (Toronto) – A workplace's key employees may be at the greatest risk of experiencing high levels of work stress, according to a new study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). In a survey of 2,737 workers, 18 per cent reported that their job was "highly stressful." The odds of having high stress were greater if workers were managers or professionals, if they thought their poor job performance could negatively affect others, or if they worked long or variable hours. The study was published in this month's International Journal of Occupational ...

Targets set for GPs to improve the care of patients with high blood pressure have had no impact, according to a new study published on bmj.com today. Researchers found that nationally set targets in the UK, that have financial rewards for GPs if they are met, have made no discernible difference to improving care and outcomes for patients with hypertension (high blood pressure). Around half of people aged over 50 have hypertension, which is one of the most treatable, but undertreated cardiovascular risk factors. The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) for general ...

The government's "nudge" approach to public health may struggle to make much impression on improving population health, warn experts on bmj.com today. An accompanying editorial argues that the notion of nudging adds nothing to existing approaches and risks wasting resources. Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at Cambridge University (the Department of Health Policy Research Unit on Behaviour and Health), and colleagues ask whether the concept stands up to scientific scrutiny as a basis for improving population health. Nudging involves ...

Superbugs are not just a problem in hospitals but could be also coming from our animal farms. Research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Microbiology indicates insects could be responsible for spreading antibiotic resistant bacteria from pigs to humans. Ludek Zurek and collaborators from Kansas and North Carolina State Universities isolated bacteria from farm pig feces and compared them to the bacteria present in the intestines of the house flies and German cockroaches caught on those farms. They subjected the bacteria to a range of different antibiotic ...

It can be hard to get noticed when you're a little chick in a big colony, but new research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology reveals that baby birds in need of a feed have individual ways of letting their parents know. German and Swiss ornithologists studied the calls of chicks in a population of Jackson's golden-backed weaver birds on the shores of Lake Baringo in Kenya. Already knowing that parent birds can distinguish their own chicks from others by unique pattern changes in the frequency of their call, the researchers wondered how the ...

A collection of 12 reviews, comprising three reflective pieces and nine research and development agendas, is published as part of a sponsored Supplement on 25 January 2011 in PLoS Medicine. This Collection highlights the outcomes of a series of consultations among more than 250 experts that were undertaken by the Malaria Eradication Research Agenda (malERA) initiative. The introductory article by Pedro L. Alonso, CRESIB-Hospital Clínic, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain and colleagues, "A Research Agenda to Underpin Malaria Eradication" sets the malERA program ...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Ian Sinha and colleagues from the Institute of Child Health, University of Liverpool, UK, make recommendations for the development of core outcome sets for clinical trials, based upon a review of the literature. They advise that when using the Delphi process to develop core outcome sets for clinical trials, patients and clinicians should be involved, researchers and facilitators should avoid imposing their views on participants, and the attrition of participants must be minimized. INFORMATION: Funding: IPS was funded by the NIHR Medicines ...

Most women in rural Zambia deliver their babies at home without skilled care because of the long distances involved in reaching emergency obstetric care, so it is crucial to address the geographic and quality barriers to health care use. These are the key findings from a study by Sabine Gabrysch from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg, Germany and colleagues at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine published in this week's PLoS Medicine. In sub-Saharan Africa, a woman's lifetime risk of dying during or following pregnancy is as high as 1 in 31 (compared ...

BOSTON, Mass. (Jan. 26, 2011)—As news outlets throughout Europe and the U.S. report on the plummeting health of Western adults and children, there is no shortage of culprits. One villain often bandied about is the "fee for service" system of incentives for physicians. Clearly, if doctors are financially rewarded for simply performing more procedures, costs will soar at the expense of patient health. Enter Pay-for-Performance, an emerging movement in which physicians are rewarded not for what they do, but for quality of care and patient outcomes. Under such a system, ...

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, January 25, 2011 – Sustained exposure to loud workplace noise may affect quality of sleep in workers with occupational-related hearing loss, according to a new study by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researchers. Published in the journal Sleep, the study compared the sleep quality of individuals at the same workplace, some with workplace noise-related hearing loss and some without. Workers with hearing loss had a higher average age and longer duration of exposure than those without hearing impairments. Also, 51 percent of those with hearing ...

If the U.S. military increases its use of alternative fuels, there will be no direct benefit to the nation's armed forces, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Any benefits from investment in alternative fuels by the U.S. Department of Defense will accrue to the nation as a whole rather than to mission-specific needs of the military, researchers found. The study is based on an examination of alternative jet and naval fuels that can be produced from coal or various renewable resources, including seed oils, waste oils and algae. In response to a congressional ...

Last summer's disastrous Pakistan floods that killed more than 2,000 people and left more than 20 million injured or homeless were caused by a rogue weather system that wandered hundreds of miles farther west than is normal for such systems, new research shows. Storm systems that bring widespread, long-lasting rain over eastern India and Bangladesh form over the Bay of Bengal, at the east edge of India, said Robert Houze, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor. But Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea west of India, is substantially more arid and its storms ...

Researchers from the University of Gothenburg and Sahlgrenska University Hospital are the first in the world to show that an operation can help patients with dementia caused by white matter changes and hydrocephalus. Presented in the American Journal of Neurosurgery, the results are based on the world's first study to demonstrate the effects of a shunt operation using a placebo control. 14 patients were followed for an average of three and a half years after the operation, with half being given a non-functioning shunt – in other words a sham operation – and the other ...

T.rex hunted like a lion, rather than regularly scavenging like a hyena, reveals new research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The findings end a long-running debate about the hunting behaviour of this awesome predator. Scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) used an ecological model based on predator relationships in the Serengeti to determine whether scavenging would have been an effective feeding strategy for T.rex. Previous attempts to answer the question about T.rex's hunting behaviour have focused on its morphology. ...

The previously unknown species of ribbon worm discovered in Kosterhavet National Park in 2007 has now been scientifically named using a new method. Pseudomicrura afzelii, a form of nemertean or ribbon worm, has been described and registered by researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, using DNA technology. "We've shown that it's possible to move away from the traditional, highly labour-intensive way of describing a new species. Developments in molecular biology have made it possible to determine the genetic code for selected parts of DNA both quickly and cheaply." ...

By adding information about the subsoil to an existing sedimentation and erosion model, researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) have obtained a clearer picture of how rivers and deltas develop over time. A better understanding of the interaction between the subsoil and flow processes in a river-delta system can play a key role in civil engineering (delta management), but also in geology (especially in the work of reservoir geologists). Nathanaël Geleynse et al. recently published in the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Earth and ...

Scientists studied the defences used by caterpillars that transform into large white butterflies, called Pieris brassicae. The insects regurgitate semi-digested cabbage leaves to make them smell and taste unpleasant to predators. The team found, however, that frequent use of this defence reduces the caterpillars' growth rate and the number of eggs they produce. It remains unclear why their defences affect them in this way, but the loss of nutrition from frequent regurgitation is thought to play a part. Caterpillars are a target of pest control, as they destroy food ...

The successful Swedish model of reducing the impact of students' different social, cultural and economic backgrounds on academic outcome is severely threatened after 20 years of educational reforms. This is the main point made by Docent (Reader) Girma Berhanu from the University of Gothenburg in International Journal of Special Education. Some of the previously very positive trends in the Swedish school system seem to have been put in reverse over the past 20 years, and students with special needs, immigrant students and socially disadvantaged students are getting the ...