People who are lean for life have the lowest mortality, while those with a heavy body shape from childhood up to middle age have the highest mortality, reveal findings of a large study published in The BMJ today.
Obesity has become a public health crisis in most countries worldwide. While high body mass index in adulthood has been linked to increased mortality risk, uncertainty exists over any association between body size over the life course and mortality.
The NHS is far safer inside the European Union, argues a leading public health expert in The BMJ today.
Professor Martin McKee at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine argues that the EU's international trade agreements now protect public services and do not justify the United Kingdom withdrawing from the EU.
In fact, he warns that any threat to the NHS "comes from our own politicians and not from the EU."
Crossref will enable registration for preprints by August 2016. Crossref's original registration policy prevented its members from registering content and assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to "duplicative works." The new policy means that preprints will have separate DOIs from any later versions that may be registered, according to an announcement from the organization.
Aedes mosquitoes carrying the bacterium Wolbachia--found inside the cells of 60 percent of all insect species--are drastically less able to transmit Zika virus, say researchers at Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) in a study published May 4 in Cell Host & Microbe.
The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) feeds on insects. It attracts a meal with its flower-like reddish color and ripe fruity smell on leaves converted to ambush traps. Seeking nectar, an insect will inevitably touch the highly sensitive sensory hairs on the leaves. This causes the trap to snap shut at lightning speed, imprisoning the prey.
Putting surgery one step closer into the realm of self-driving cars and intelligent machines, researchers show for the first time that a supervised autonomous robot can successfully perform soft tissue surgery. The robot outperformed expert surgeons and current robot-assisted surgical techniques in open bowel surgery in pigs. By taking human intervention out of the equation, autonomous robots could potentially reduce complications and improve the safety and efficacy of soft tissue surgeries, about 45 million of which are performed in the U.S. each year.
University of Exeter academics have created an app which could help aid humanitarian rescue work in disaster-struck regions by using geographic data to map landscapes.
The android mobile phone application means for the first time a standard smart phone can be converted into a self-contained remote sensing device.
Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have grown and catalogued more than 130 bacteria from the human intestine according to a study published in Nature today (Wednesday May 4, 2016).
Children infected even just once with a certain type of waterborne parasite are nearly three times as likely to suffer from moderate or severe stunted growth by the age of two than those who are not - regardless of whether their infection made them feel sick, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health-led research suggests.
Three species of shark, tiger, lemon and Caribbean reef, all use deeper coral reefs in the Virgin Islands, but only lemon shark presence was associated with seasonal grouper spawning aggregations, according to a study published May 4, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alexandria Pickard from Nova Southeastern University, Florida, Bradley Wetherbee of the University of Rhode Island and colleagues.
Bioethicists from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and The Hastings Center, working with a research administrator at The Rockefeller University, are proposing a reexamination of an internationally recognized rule limiting in vitro research on human embryos to 14 days post-fertilization. Under the rule, such research is permitted before the cut-off date at 14 days and prohibited thereafter.
Porcelain connoisseurs have prized the traditional Japanese-style ceramics called akae, typically known for Kakiemon-style ware, for centuries. Its paintings feature a vivid red color against a milky white background. Artisans have passed on their techniques to produce this type of porcelain for generations, but these methods are poorly documented. Now scientists report in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces a practical method for preparing red paints for high-quality akae.
Two juveniles of Shiny Cowbird, a parasitic bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, were spotted in the Andean city of Quito, Ecuador, for the first time. This finding represents an altitudinal expansion of approximately 500 m.
All living cells are basically squishy balloons full of water, proteins and DNA, surrounded by oily membranes. Those membranes stand up to significant amounts of stretching and bending, but only recently have scientists started to fully appreciate the useful organization and functions that result from all that stress.
Corporate data breaches seem to be on the rise, rarely a week passes without a company revealing that its database has been hacked and regrettably usernames, passwords, credit card details and its customers' personal information has been leaked on to the open internet. A new protection, nicknamed Phoney, is reported in the International Journal of Embedded Systems.