Culture

The Djehuty Project, led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has discovered on the hill of Dra Abu el-Naga in Luxor (ancient Thebes), the burials of four personages belonging to the elite of the 17th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, who lived about 3.550 years ago.

Scientists have shed light on a common bleeding disorder by growing and analysing stem cells from patients' blood to discover the cause of the disease in individual patients.

The technique may enable doctors to prescribe more effective treatments according to the defects identified in patients' cells.

In future, this approach could go much further: these same cells could be grown, manipulated, and applied as treatments for diseases of the heart, blood and circulation, including heart attacks and haemophilia.

Vitamin D is vital for making our muscles work efficiently and boosting energy levels, new research from Newcastle University has shown.

A study led by Dr Akash Sinha has shown that muscle function improves with Vitamin D supplements which are thought to enhance the activity of the mitochondria, the batteries of the cell.

A hormone normally produced in the skin using energy from sunlight, Vitamin D can also be found in a few foods – including fish, fish liver oils, egg yolks and fortified cereals but it can also be effectively boosted with Vitamin D supplements.

Remote reefs can be tougher than they lookWestern Australia's Scott Reef has recovered from mass bleaching in 1998.

Isolated coral reefs can recover from catastrophic damage as effectively as those with nearby undisturbed neighbours, a long-term study by marine biologists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) has shown.

Employment and health problems rather than the xenophobia in their new country, are the biggest reasons that migrants feel less happy than average, a new study says.

The British Sociological Association's annual conference in London heard today [Friday 5 April 2013] that economic factors such as unemployment and low income, and their own health problems were the most powerful causes of a lowered wellbeing.

Results from an anonymous survey of U.S. transplant providers report that incarceration, marijuana use, and psychiatric diagnoses, particularly suicide attempts, may lower patients' eligibility for liver transplantation. The study published in the April issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, also found that most providers would not offer transplants to patients with advanced age, those severely obese, or with lifetime imprisonment.

That males perform better than females in some fields of academic study has prompted a wealth of research hoping to shed light on whether this is attributable to nature or nurture.

Although there is no difference in general intelligence between the sexes, studies over the past 35 years have consistently found that overall men do much better in tests of spatial ability than women.

Professor of neurology, physician, and author Oliver Sacks M.D. has outlined case studies of hallucinations of musical notation, and commented on the neural basis of such hallucinations, in a new paper for the neurology journal Brain.

Researchers at the University of Montreal have found that the glycated hemoglobin levels of children with type 1 diabetes followed at its affiliated Sainte-Justine Mother and Child University Hospital (CHU Sainte-Justine) is correlated linearly and negatively with household income. Glycated hemoglobin is the binding of sugar to blood molecules – over time, high blood sugar levels lead to high levels of glycated hemoglobin, which means that it can be used to assess whether a patient properly controls his or her blood glucose level.

Washington–A new study from The Pew Charitable Trusts, "Making Hard Choices: Navigating the Economic Shock of Unemployment," examines how American families cope with unexpected financial setbacks and how those periods of economic uncertainty draw down financial resources. The report studies families across race and income levels, revealing different experiences resulting from unemployment and the difficult choices many of them face.

Consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) offer low premiums but high deductibles on the premise that patients who are faced with deductibles of $1,000 or more for individual coverage (or twice that for family coverage) will shop around for the best price for the health care.

In practice, however, that's not the case, according to a new study by the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and the RAND Corporation.

New research out of St. Michael's Hospital has found that multiple factors independently predict what makes youth more likely to make repeat suicide-related behaviour.

The study, led by Dr. Anne Rhodes, a research scientist at the hospital's Suicide Studies Research Unit, looked at whether factors such as permanent removal from the parental home by the courts due to maltreatment, neighbourhood size or income, gender, severity of first visit to an emergency department, age or having a mental disorder made youth significantly more likely to repeat suicide-related behavior.

Researchers led by scientists at Case Western Reserve University have turned to an unlikely model to make medical devices safer and more comfortable—a squid's beak.

Many medical implants require hard materials that have to connect to or pass through soft body tissue. This mechanical mismatch leads to problems such as skin breakdown at abdominal feeding tubes in stroke patients and where wires pass through the chest to power assistive heart pumps. Enter the squid.

Mention "high costs," "financing" and "safety" in the same sentence as "commercial nuclear power plants," and most people think of the multi-billion-dollar construction or operational phase of these facilities, which provide 20 percent of the domestic electric supply. Those concerns, however, are now emerging as aging nuclear power plants reach retirement age, and electric utilities confront the task of deconstruction, or decommissioning, nuclear power stations.

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Schizophrenia patients experiencing relapse are 29 times more likely than healthy individuals to have a urinary tract infection, researchers report.

Urinary tract infections, which can cause painful and frequent urination, are common but patients hospitalized for schizophrenia are even more likely to have a UTI than healthy individuals or even others whose illness is under control, said Dr. Brian J. Miller, psychiatrist and schizophrenia expert at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.