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SEATTLE - Improved health conditions and life expectancy over the past 20 years in the Eastern Mediterranean Region are being subverted by wars and civil unrest, according to a new scientific study.

An atomic level analysis has revealed how two classes of calcium channel blockers, widely prescribed for heart disease patients, produce separate therapeutic effects through their actions at different sites on the calcium channel molecule.

Millions of Americans, and an even larger number of patients worldwide, take calcium channel blockers to control cardiovascular problems.

The use of belts, bedrails and other devices to prevent patients from hurting themselves has increasingly come under fire. Within a hospital setting, the use of such restraints may be reduced by ensuring that the nursing staff includes a sufficient number of registered nurses, says Vincent Staggs of Children's Mercy Hospital and the University of Missouri-Kansas City in the US. He led a study¹ which appears in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer.

By assigning a barcode to stem cells, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have made it possible to monitor large blood cell populations as well as individual blood cells, and study the changes over time. Among other things, they discovered that stem cells go through different stages where their ability to restore immune cells varies. The new findings provide important information for the research and treatment of leukaemia and autoimmune diseases.

AMHERST, Mass. - In the first global analysis of environmental risk from invasive alien species, researchers say one sixth of the world's lands are "highly vulnerable" to invasion, including "substantial areas in developing countries and biodiversity hotspots."

The study by biogeographer Bethany Bradley at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Regan Early at the University of Exeter, U.K., with others, appears in the current issue of Nature Communications.

A University of Central Florida cancer researcher has discovered a way to kill spreading breast cancer cells and her new technology has generated a licensing agreement that will accelerate the therapy's path to clinical trials.

Metastatic cancer cells that spread from the original tumor to the brain, lungs and bones are the leading cause of death for most cancer patients, said Annette Khaled, the researcher at the university's College of Medicine who made the discovery. Her work is featured in the September edition of Clinical Cancer Research.

The link between sleep problems and suicidal thoughts and behaviours is made starkly clear in new research from The University of Manchester, published in the BMJ Open.

In this study, conducted by researchers from the University's School of Health Sciences alongside the University of Oxford, 18 participants were interviewed about the role sleep problems have on suicidal tendencies.

August 24, 2016 -- Why do some people want to live a very long time, while others would prefer to die relatively young? In a latest study, a team of researchers including Vegard Skirbekk, PhD, at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, investigated how long young and middle-aged adults in the United States say they want to live in relation to a number of personal characteristics. The results showed that more than one out of six people would prefer to die younger than age 80, before reaching average life expectancy.

Scientists from Harvard Medical School have identified a key instigator of nerve cell damage in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive and incurable neurodegenerative disorder.

Researchers say the findings of their study, published Aug. 5 in the journal Science, may lead to new therapies to halt the progression of the uniformly fatal disease that affects more than 30,000 Americans. One such treatment is already under development for testing in humans after the current study showed it stopped nerve cell damage in mice with ALS.

Sometimes the answers to our most persistent questions are found in the most unexpected places. Just ask Douglas Burbank.

After working in China for more than a decade, the UC Santa Barbara earth science professor and his graduate students finally confirmed how the Tarim Basin's unusual topography was formed. And they did it from 6,000 miles away, in a laboratory in Minnesota.

A powerful new material developed by Northwestern University chemist William Dichtel and his research team could one day speed up the charging process of electric cars and help increase their driving range.

An electric car currently relies on a complex interplay of both batteries and supercapacitors to provide the energy it needs to go places, but that could change.

A new editorial and corresponding virtual journal issue offer a look back at 20 of the most important studies impacting older adult care as published by the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) from 2000 to 2015.

KINGSTON, Ont. - Queen's University researchers Tom Hollenstein and Jessica Lougheed have published new research on the emotional bonds between mothers and adolescent daughters. The study examined how well mother-daughter pairs were able to manage rapid transitions between emotional states and the so-called "emotional rollercoaster" of adolescence.

DENVER - Analysis of a large non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patient cohort with stage IV M1a disease identified lymph node staging as having clinical significance and an impact on prognosis.

Cancer researchers have long observed the value of treating patients with combinations of anti-cancer drugs that work better than single drug treatments. Now, in a new study using laboratory-grown cells and mice, Johns Hopkins scientists report that a method they used to track metabolic pathways heavily favored by cancer cells provides scientific evidence for combining anti-cancer drugs, including one in a nanoparticle format developed at Johns Hopkins, that specifically target those pathways.