The tiny island of St Helena, 1,000 miles off the coast of south-west Africa, acted as the landing place for many of the slaves, captured by the Royal Navy during the suppression of the slave trade between 1840 and 1872. During this period a total of around 26,000 freed slaves were brought to the island, most of whom were landed at a depot in Rupert's Bay. The appalling conditions aboard the slave ships meant that many did not survive their journey, whilst Rupert's Valley – arid, shadeless, and always windy – was poorly suited to act as a hospital and refugee camp for such large numbers.
Culture
BERKELEY, Calif. – March 8, 2012 – XOMA Corporation (Nasdaq: XOMA) announced that its study of XMetA, the company's fully-human allosteric monoclonal antibody to the insulin receptor, is available online and will be published in the May issue of the American Diabetes Association's journal Diabetes. XMetA is the first antibody specific for the insulin receptor shown to correct hyperglycemia in a mouse model of diabetes.
Sophia Antipolis, 5 March 2012: Women with chronic heart failure survive longer than their male counterparts, according to a large analysis of studies comprising data on more than 40,000 subjects.(1) The analysis represents the largest assessment of gender and mortality risk in heart failure - and provides evidence which many randomised trials have failed to do because they have been dominated by male patients.
BEIJING; BERKELEY, CA; and UPTON, NY – The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a multinational collaboration operating in the south of China, today reported the first results of its search for the last, most elusive piece of a long-standing puzzle: how is it that neutrinos can appear to vanish as they travel? The surprising answer opens a gateway to a new understanding of fundamental physics and may eventually solve the riddle of why there is far more ordinary matter than antimatter in the universe today.
A new investigational drug significantly reduced urinary cortisol levels and improved symptoms of Cushing's disease in the largest clinical study of this endocrine disorder ever conducted. Results of the clinical trial conducted at centers on four continents appear in the March 8 New England Journal of Medicine and show that treatment with pasireotide cut cortisol secretion an average of 50 percent and returned some patient's levels to normal.
Suicides among US army personnel rose 80 per cent between 2004 and 2008, finds research by US Army Public Health Command and published online in Injury Prevention.
Around 40% of these suicides might be associated with military events following US involvement in Iraq, say the authors.
The US committed a substantial number of troops to Iraq, starting in 2003, and it continues to be involved in military operations in Afghanistan.
A belief that the seasonal flu jab really works is far more likely to sway healthcare professionals to get vaccinated than the potential to protect at risk patients from infection, finds research published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Healthcare systems in many developed countries have struggled to persuade clinicians on the frontline to have the seasonal flu jab to prevent the spread of the virus to patients.
The dementia drug donepezil (Aricept), already widely used to treat mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, can also help in moderate to severe patients, according to a report funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Alzheimer's Society. The study suggests that extending treatment to this group could help treat twice as many sufferers worldwide. Encouragingly, the drug has greater positive benefits for patients more severely affected than for those in the earlier stages of dementia.
Doctors at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, working with Shriners Hospital for Children and other institutions, have identified a promising new treatment for a rare and sometimes life-threatening bone disorder that can affect infants and young children.
Known as hypophosphatasia, the condition upsets bone metabolism, blocking important minerals such as calcium from depositing in the skeleton.
Treatment with the common diabetes drug metformin appears to prevent progression of coronary atherosclerosis in patients infected with HIV. In a presentation today at the 19th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers reported that study participants receiving daily doses of metformin had essentially no progression of coronary artery calcification during the year-long study period, while participants receiving a placebo had calcium increases of up to 50 percent.
PUYALLUP, Wash.—A Washington State University toxicologist has found that three commonly used herbicides can dramatically reduce butterfly populations.
The research was aimed at possible effects on the Lange's metalmark, an endangered species in northern California, but it has implications for other at-risk and endangered butterflies wherever herbicides are used, says John Stark, an ecotoxicologist and director of the WSU Puyallup Research and Extension Center.
(Boston) – A new study conducted by Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) researchers shows that a majority of medical students in Yemen believe that chewing the plant khat is harmful to one's health but they would not advise their patients to quit.
Researchers at the University of Liverpool have found that that the opinions of young people in Argentina towards the Falklands/Malvinas Islands are varied and influenced by a number of factors including geographical location, family history and their views on domestic politics.
With its 1.7 billion square kilometres, an area equivalent to 5 times the size of Germany, the Congo Basin forest is the world's second largest tropical forest. The 'State of the Congo Basin Forests 2010' report launched in Douala, Cameroon, at the Annual meeting of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), provides a comprehensive and detailed assessment of the status of this crucial pool for climate regulation and natural resources. It looks at deforestation patterns, points to trends in sustainable forest management and highlights threats to biodiversity.
It is suitable as a kind of magnetic valve for data-storage units of the most recent generation and makes use of effects in the context of so-called spintronics, with which, in addition to the (re-)charging process, magnetic characteristics of the electrons can also be used for information-processing and -storage. The advantage of the new structure: data remain intact even after the electric current has been switched off and the memory can be re-written more or less indefinitely.