Sophia Antipolis, 14 December 2010: Today, heart failure is by far the single biggest reason for acute hospital admission. Around 30 million people in Europe have heart failure and its incidence is still increasing: more cases are being identified, more people are living to an old age, and more are surviving a heart attack but with damage to the heart muscle. Yet traditional risk-factor prediction models have only limited accuracy in this population to identify those at highest risk for worsening outcomes. So far, those risk prediction models have relied on measurements ...

A new UC Davis study contradicts earlier reports that salmon farms were responsible for the 2002 population crash of wild pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago of western Canada. The Broughton crash has become a rallying event for people concerned about the potential environmental effects of open-net salmon farming, which has become a $10 billion industry worldwide, producing nearly 1.5 million tons of fish annually. The new study, to be published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does not determine what caused the crash, but it ...

Researchers at King's College London have discovered that leukaemic stem cells can be reversed to a pre-leukaemic stage by suppressing a protein called beta-catenin found in the blood. They also found that advanced leukaemic stem cells that had become resistant to treatment could be 're-sensitised' to treatment by suppressing the same protein. Professor Eric So, who led the study at the Department of Haematology at King's College London, says the findings, published today in the journal Cancer Cell, represent a 'critical step forward' in the search for more effective ...

Deep sediment cores retrieved from the Bering Sea floor indicate that the region was ice-free all year and biological productivity was high during the last major warm period in Earth's climate history. Christina Ravelo, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present the new findings in a talk on December 13 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Ravelo and co-chief scientist Kozo Takahashi of Kyushu University, Japan, led a nine-week expedition of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) ...

DURHAM, N.C. – There are many mechanisms that alter the activity of genes – direct changes to the DNA code like mutations and deletions, or changes that control when genes are switched on and off, called epigenetic means. Tumor-suppressor genes are often inactivated through epigenetics, which provides an opening for the cancerous growth of cells. Researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute have found evidence of epigenetics at work on a genome-wide scale in cases of ovarian cancer. One major biological signaling pathway in particular was found to contain many genes influenced ...

Baltimore, MD – Dec. 13, 2010. African American patients and those with lower socioeconomic status have more advanced disease and greater disability when they seek treatment from Parkinson's disease specialists, according to a study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The researchers found that race, education and income were each significant and independent factors in determining a patient's level of disability. The disparities in health care are associated with greater disease severity and earlier loss of independence. The study is published in the December ...

Athens, Ga. – Water scarcity in the western U.S. has long been an issue of concern. Now, a team of researchers studying freshwater sustainability in the U.S. have found that the Southeast, with the exception of Florida, does not have enough water capacity to meet its own needs. Twenty-five years ago, environmentalist Marc Reisner published Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, which predicted that water resources in the West would be unable to support the growing demand of cities, agriculture and industry. A paper co-authored by a University ...

Harnessing the power of ocean tides has long been imagined, but countries are only now putting it into practice. A demonstration project planned for Puget Sound will be the first tidal energy project on the west coast of the United States, and the first array of large-scale turbines to feed power from ocean tides into an electrical grid. University of Washington researchers are devising ways to site the tidal turbines and measure their environmental effects. Brian Polagye, UW research assistant professor of mechanical engineering, will present recent findings this week ...

Cambridge, Mass., December 6, 2010 – Utilizing a century-old phenomenon discovered in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, applied scientists at Harvard University have demonstrated, for the first time, highly collimated unidirectional microlasers. The result of a collaboration with researchers from Hamamatsu Photonics in Hamamatsu City, Japan, and the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Magdeburg, Germany, the advance has a wide range of new applications in photonics such as sensing and communications. Published online this week in the Proceedings of the ...

VIDEO: This is a computer simulation of how sediment particles suspended in the water would change as they pass through a tidal turbine. Some particles speed up (turn red) as they... Click here for more information. The emerging tidal-energy industry is spawning another in its shadow: tidal-energy monitoring. Little is known about tidal turbines' environmental effects and environmentalists, regulators and turbine manufacturers all need more data to allow the industry ...

A study from New Delhi India has revealed high rates of vitamin D deficiency among hip fracture patients, confirming the conclusions of similar international studies which point to vitamin D deficiency as a risk factor for hip fracture. A group of 90 hip fracture patients was compared to a matched control group of similar age, sex and co-morbidity. Of the patients who had suffered hip fractures, 76.7% were shown to be vitamin D deficient as measured by serum 25(OH)D levels of less than 20 ng/ml. In addition, 68.9% had elevated PTH levels. In comparison, only 32.3% of ...

A new study presented today at the 1st Asia-Pacific Osteoporosis Meeting in Singapore confirms rising rates of hip fractures in Beijing, China. The research was based on hospital discharge data from all Beijing hospitals that treat hip fracture patients, collected from 1990-1992 and 2002-2006 and using official population census figures for 1990 and 2004. The researchers identified over- and under-reporting caused by changes in methods of reporting and in patterns of referral over these two time periods. After adjustments were made, it was found that the rate of hip ...

Bone health experts attending the 1st Asia-Pacific Osteoporosis Meeting in Singapore this week have flagged vitamin D deficiency as a major concern in the region, particularly in South Asia where the problem is especially severe and widespread across the entire population. Dr. Nikhil Tandon, Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences of New Delhi, India highlighted the results of various studies which show severe deficiency across India and Pakistan in all age groups, as well as insufficiency in populations of South-East and ...

Spanish researchers have found fossils of Ordovician conodonts dating to between 446 and 444 million years ago for the first time in the western Mediterranean. The discovery of these very primitive marine vertebrates has helped scientists to reconstruct the palaeogeography of the Cordillera Bética mountain range. Their study shows that the mountain system in the south of the Iberian Peninsula was located alongside the Alps at that time. In 2006, a group of Andalusian geologists found the oldest fossils in the Cordillera Bética, dating from the late Ordovician period between ...

Primary school children who don't like eating fruit and vegetables are 13 times more likely to develop functional constipation than children who do, according to a study in the December issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing. Drinking less than 400ml of fluid a day also significantly increases the risk. Dr Moon Fai Chan, assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, teamed up with Yuk Ling Chan, from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, to study the diet and toileting habits of 383 children aged from eight to ten from a school in Hong Kong. Fifty-one ...

A study carried out over 50 years by an international team, with the participation of the Balearic Oceanography Centre of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) has confirmed an increase in the size and intensity of proliferations of the jellyfish Pelagia noctiluca. There are several complex reasons for this - over-fishing and the current increase in sea water temperatures. "Since 2002, these organisms have become increasingly frequently found in the north east Atlantic in winter, since winters have been warmer, and they have tended to appear earlier and spend more ...

Like an overprotective parent on the first day of school, a targeting factor sometimes needs a little push to let go of its cargo. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Grenoble, France, have visualised one such hand-over. They were the first to determine the structure of a ribosome-protein complex involved in carrying nascent proteins out of the cell. Their work, published today in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, could increase understanding of illnesses such as cystic fibrosis and some forms of Parkinson's disease, in which improper ...

Smoking accounts for more than a third of cases of the most severe and common form of rheumatoid arthritis, indicates research published online in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. And it accounts for more than half of cases in people who are genetically susceptible to development of the disease, finds the study. The researchers base their findings on more than 1,200 people with rheumatoid arthritis and 871 people matched for age and sex, but free of the disease. The patients came from 19 health clinics in south and central Sweden, while their healthy peers were ...

The UK is poorly prepared for the forthcoming epidemic of degenerative valvular heart disease, prompted by a rapidly ageing population, say leading experts in the journal Heart. The prevalence of valvular heart disease, or VHD for short, rises with age. European and US data indicate that more than 13% of those aged 75 and above have the progressive condition. And by 2018, there will be an estimated 4 million people in the UK aged between 75 and 84. The exact causes of VHD have been poorly researched, but the condition is associated with a great deal of ill health, poor ...

UK medical schools are failing to comply with the recommended curriculum for ophthalmology, set out by the International Council of Ophthalmologists (ICO), suggests a survey published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. Amid concerns that the specialty was being squeezed out of undergraduate education, the council urged medical schools to make it a core subject and produced guidance to help them do this. But a questionnaire sent to 32 UK medical schools, which prompted 18 to complete returns, shows that while all include ophthalmology in the curriculum, ...

Although rare, the true incidence of neonaticides - the unlawful killing of a baby within the first 24 hours of its life - is more than five times as common as official estimates suggest, suggests research published online in the Fetal and Neonatal edition of the Archives of Disease in Childhood. Low maternal self esteem and emotional immaturity, rather than obvious mental illness or social disadvantage, are key drivers, the research indicates. The researchers reviewed the case records of 26 courts in three regions of France, involving the death of a child within the ...

What makes cancer cells so dangerous is that they grow in an unregulated way and proliferate much faster than other cells. The proteasome, a large protein complex, plays a key role in this process: By breaking down used proteins for recycling, it clears the way for the next cycle. New hope was spawned several years ago with the discovery that inhibiting proteasomes can be used as a means to put the brakes on cell growth. In the mean time, the first drug using this approach, Bortezomib, generates revenues in excess of one billion U.S. dollars per year. However, it also inhibits ...

The researchers decided to embark on this study in order to find out which mechanisms are used by plants when they extract water from very dry or somewhat inhospitable land. "In the case of mangrove swamps, for example, the plants are able to extract freshwater from a saltwater environment, despite the fact that the osmotic pressure should make quite the opposite happen", explains Professor José Luis Pérez Díaz, who studies this type of relatively unknown phenomenon as part of a new line of research that the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC3M has begun. The ...

Tel Aviv ― Will Rona and Sol kiss and seal their fate as a couple forever, or will Sol answer the ringing phone and change the course of history? A new movie format developed by Tel Aviv University lets the viewer decide. Utilizing complicated video coding procedures, the new format provides smooth interaction and transition between scenes as audience members watch ― and determine the plot of ― Turbulence, created by Prof. Nitzan Ben Shaul of Tel Aviv University's Department of Film and Television. Made with his unique scene-sequencing technique, Turbulence ...

Storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide underground in an effort to combat global warming may not be easy to do because of the potential for triggering small- to moderate-sized earthquakes, according to Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback. While those earthquakes are unlikely to be big enough to hurt people or property, they could still cause serious problems for the reservoirs containing the gas. "It is not the shaking an earthquake causes at the surface that creates the hazard in this instance, it is what it does at depth," Zoback said. "It may not take a very big ...