School children as young as 11 can benefit from a daily exercise programme in reducing their levels of several known risk factors for cardiovascular disease. An ongoing study, which began four years ago in the German city of Leipzig, shows already that children assigned to daily exercise lessons reduced their overall prevalence of obesity, improved their exercise capacity, increased their levels of HDL-cholesterol, and reduced their systolic blood pressure.
Tech
Boston, Mass. – Tapping the Internet – including personal Web searches, news reports, blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites – is fast becoming a way to get a complete, up-to-the-minute view of public health threats, say researchers from the Informatics Program at Children's Hospital Boston (CHIP) in a Perspectives article published Online First by The New England Journal of Medicine on May 7, 2009.
CHICAGO (May 7, 2009) - Breast cancer patients, individuals at risk for osteoporosis and those undergoing certain types of bone cancer therapies often take drugs containing bisphosphonates. These drugs have been found to place people at risk for developing osteonecrosis of the jaws (a rotting of the jaw bones). Dentists, as well as oncologists, are now using X-rays to detect "ghost sockets" in patients that take these drugs and when these sockets are found, it signals that the jawbone is not healing the right way.
Nocturnal geckos are among the very few living creatures able to see colors at night, and scientists' discovery of series of distinct concentric zones may lead to insight into better cameras and contact lenses.
A $70 million instrument designed by the University of Colorado at Boulder to probe the evolution of galaxies, stars and intergalactic matter from its perch on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is on schedule for its slated May 11 launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard NASA's space shuttle Atlantis.
Stanford, CA— Biofuels such as ethanol offer an alternative to petroleum for powering our cars, but growing energy crops to produce them can compete with food crops for farmland, and clearing forests to expand farmland will aggravate the climate change problem. How can we maximize our "miles per acre" from biomass? Researchers writing in the online edition of the May 7 Science magazine say the best bet is to convert the biomass to electricity, rather than ethanol.
MERCED – Concerns over petroleum gas prices and long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the environment have prompted scientists to look for alternative renewable energy sources for transportation use. One of the questions at hand is determining what that preferred technology should be.
A fast, simple treatment option for patients too sick for surgery?
London, UK, 7 May 2009 – In a letter to the Editor of the Journal of Hospital Infection (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jhin), published by Elsevier, S. Lefebvre and J.S. Weese from the University of Guelph in Canada describe a study that investigated whether MRSA and C.difficile could be passed between pet therapy dogs and patients. The findings suggested that MRSA and C.
A new study has found that families in China face considerable economic hardship following stroke, and it is not uncommon for health care costs to push families below the poverty line. The large study shows over 70% of stroke survivors in China experience a catastrophic impact on their financial situation due to loss of income and cost of health care.
A study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine (May 7, 2009) (1), analysed the outcomes of 47,967 patients entered into the Swedish Coronary Angiography and Angioplasty Registry (SCAAR) between 2003 and 2006.
Commenting on the results, interventional cardiology specialist, Professor Franz Eberli from the University Hospital Zurich (Switzerland) and official spokesperson for the European Society of Cardiology, said:
BERKELEY, CA – Oceanographers Jim Bishop and Todd Wood of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have measured the fate of carbon particles originating in plankton blooms in the Southern Ocean, using data that deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats collected around the clock for well over a year. Their study reveals that most of the carbon from lush plankton blooms never reaches the deep ocean.
Desert environments are characterized by poor vegetative cover, strong winds, dry, non-cohesive sandy soils, and hyper-arid conditions. In this context, the land resources of Abu Dhabi Emirate in the United Arab Emirates are subjected to various land degradation stresses, including wind erosion, salinization, waterlogging, landfilling, and overgrazing. To sustain the land resources of Abu Dhabi Emirate, land degradation is a matter of urgency and must be accorded greater significance on the environmental agenda.
May 6, 2009 — (BRONX, NY) — Inappropriate use of camphor-containing products may be a common and underappreciated cause of seizures in young children, according to a new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The study, published in this month's issue of Pediatrics, calls for efforts to educate communities about the hazards of camphor and to crack down on illegally marketed camphor products.
Thousands of small electric scooters, bicycles and wheelchairs throughout Europe and Asia are powered by LifePO4 –- a material used in advanced lithium-ion batteries developed by Université de Montréal researchers.