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 ...

The National Centre for Social Research today released its latest British Social Attitudes report, its landmark study of the public's attitudes and values, published annually for almost thirty years. This year's report delivers the public's verdict after thirteen years of Labour rule. It shows a nation at a political crossroads. On the one hand attitudes on welfare have hardened to the right. On the other, many think there were marked improvements in health and education under Labour, creating potential resistance to reform or cuts in these areas. A shift to the right ...

INDIANAPOLIS – Along with integrity and compassion, respect for patients, colleagues and other team members is an essential attribute of medical professionalism. A new study examines how medical students learn respectful or disrespectful professional behavior. "Exploring the Meaning of Respect in Medical Student Education: An Analysis of Student Narratives" appears in the December 2010 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine. From the observations and conclusions of third-year medical students, the article provides insight into how future physicians acquire ...

Researchers from the Peninsula Technology Assessment Group (PenTAG) at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry have contributed to new National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance on preventing unintentional injury to the under-15s. The public health guidance is based on reviews of research evidence produced by the team at PenTAG. There are three linked pieces of guidance on: home safety assessments and safety equipment; road design and modification; and broader strategies to prevent unintentional injuries to among children and young people ...

You can touch a functioning light bulb and know right away that it's hot. Ouch! But you can't touch a single molecule and get the same feedback. Rice University researchers say they have the next best thing -- a way to determine the temperature of a molecule or flowing electrons by using Raman spectroscopy combined with an optical antenna. A new paper from the lab of Douglas Natelson, a Rice professor of physics and astronomy, details a technique that measures the temperature of molecules set between two gold nanowires and heated either by current applied to the wires ...

For some years now, consumers have been making increasing use of wood as a fuel – and not only on account of the rising cost of heating oil and natural gas. "Comfort fireplaces" have become all the rage because open fires, tiled and wood-burning stoves give a room a snug and cozy feel. But using wood for heating has one distinct disadvantage. When pellets, logs or briquettes are burnt, fine dust particles that are hazardous to health are released into the atmosphere. These particles are known to cause coughs, place stress on the cardiovascular system, and are thought to ...

Every 15 months or so, an unfelt earthquake occurs in western Washington and travels northward to Canada's Vancouver Island. The episode typically releases as much energy as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake, but it does so gradually over a month. New technology is letting University of Washington researchers get a much better picture of how these episodic tremor events relate to potentially catastrophic earthquakes, perhaps as powerful as magnitude 9, that occur every 300 to 500 years in the Cascadia subduction zone in western Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. "Depending ...

Carsten Beier from the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT in Oberhausen, Germany does not believe that "anyone would burn a 50-dollar bill just to keep warm. It's obvious that it simply is too valuable for that." But, in contrast to dollar bills, most energy carriers are all too frequently burned for less than they are worth. Take wood, for example. Beier and his colleagues have analyzed the efficiency of heat supply systems and he explains that "wood is a high-quality fuel that can be compared to natural gas. With adequate technologies ...

Fog is a common feature along the West Coast during the summer, but a University of Washington scientist has found that summertime coastal fog has declined since 1950 while coastal temperatures have increased slightly. Fog formation appears to be controlled by a high-pressure system normally present off the West Coast throughout the summer, said James Johnstone, a postdoctoral researcher with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the UW. "The behavior of that high-pressure cell is responsible for a lot of the weather phenomena we see on ...

PITTSBURGH—How much is that new computer server contributing to your company's carbon footprint? What about the laptop you bought your child for Christmas? As it turns out, answering those questions may be more difficult than you might think. The results of a recent study by Carnegie Mellon's Christopher Weber found that the calculation of carbon footprints for products is often riddled with large uncertainties, particularly related to the use of electronic goods. Weber, an adjunct professor in the university's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A drug currently approved for osteoporosis treatment has been shown to reduce bone loss in a study of mice with oral cancer, suggesting it could serve as an important supplemental therapy in patients with head and neck cancers that erode bone. In this Ohio State University study, the drug treatment also was associated with smaller tumors – an unexpected result. The drug, zoledronic acid, is known by the brand name Zometa. It is designed to inhibit bone resorption, the breaking down of bone caused by the release of a specific kind of cell. Oral squamous ...

A remarkable discovery into how tumour cells invade normal tissue should lead to vital diagnostic tools and help develop strategies to stop the spread of cancer cells. A new study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University reveals that the surface of aggressive tumour cells lack the strong molecular 'glue' responsible for binding normal cells together. This allows tumour cells to break away, detach from their neighbors, and spread to other regions of the body. Certain proteins, called cadherins, are located on the surface of ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A key focus of the health care debate has involved immigrants and their impact on the U.S. health care system. A new study shows that Mexican Americans most integrated into the culture -- including those born in the United States -- are more likely to require resources to manage their health conditions than more recent immigrants to the U.S., according to researchers at Duke University, Rice University and the University of Colorado Denver. "The implications of these findings run counter to the popular belief that recent immigrant arrivals are taxing ...

HOUSTON -- (Dec. 13, 2010) -- European and U.S. physicists this week are offering up the strongest evidence yet that magnetism is the driving force behind unconventional superconductivity. The findings by researchers from Rice University, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI-CPfS) in Dresden, Germany, and other institutions were published online today in Nature Physics. The findings follow more than three decades of research by the team that discovered unconventional superconductivity in 1979. That breakthrough, which was led by MPI-CPfS Director ...

Boston, Mass. - In a paper that suggests a new strategy to prevent asthma, scientists at Children's Hospital Boston and their colleagues report that the influenza virus infection in young mice protected the mice as adults against the development of allergic asthma. The same protective effect was achieved by treating young mice with compound isolated from the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), a bacterium that colonizes the stomach and is best known for causing ulcers and increasing the risk of gastric cancers. The findings, published online December 13 in the ...

BOZEMAN, Mont. -- New research indicates that the speed of early forest clearance following human colonisation of the South Island of New Zealand was much faster and more intense than previously thought. Charcoal recovered from lake-bed sediment cores show that just a few large fires within 200 years of initial colonization destroyed much of the South Island's lowland forest. Grasslands and shrubland replaced the burnt forest and smaller fires prevented forests from returning. The findings - by an international team led by Dave McWethy and Cathy Whitlock from Montana ...

WASHINGTON – Losing a job is a profoundly distressing experience, but the unemployed may be more resilient than previously believed – the vast majority eventually end up as satisfied with life as they were before they lost their jobs, according to a new analysis published by the American Psychological Association. "Unemployment rates continue to be historically high in the United States and other countries," said the study's lead author, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, PhD, who is now at New York University School of Medicine. "There's a real concern that this will have long-term ...

For the first time ever, scientists have found a difference in the way males and females of the same species of vertebrate see things – and that sexes likely use that difference to select their mates. Queen's PhD candidate Shai Sabbah, a Vanier Scholar, led a team of researchers who found that male and female cichlid fishes not only see things differently, but detect light in different ways as well. "It is difficult to say what colour attracts the female the most, but we know that if we manipulate the colour of the fish by changing the light in the environment, the ...

Increased life expectancy in the United States has not been accompanied by more years of perfect health, reveals new research published in the December issue of the Journal of Gerontology. Indeed, a 20-year-old today can expect to live one less healthy year over his or her lifespan than a 20-year-old a decade ago, even though life expectancy has grown. From 1970 to 2005, the probability of a 65-year-old surviving to age 85 doubled, from about a 20 percent chance to a 40 percent chance. Many researchers presumed that the same forces allowing people to live longer, including ...