Changes in pension and employment policies are making it increasingly necessary for older people in the UK to work beyond the age of 65. However, new research from the University of Surrey finds significant differences in the likelihood of employment and income levels of people beyond 65, depending on their gender and health.

Years of healthy life expectancy and the likelihood of disability in older age vary significantly, and as a result particular groups are going to find it hard to keep working beyond 65 and are more likely to be disadvantaged by a rise in the state pension age, than others.

Centrality and nodes are an important concept in the theory of social networks. Centrality of an individual - a "node" in network theory - measures its relative importance within a network, and a recent paper in Scientific Reports studies the problem of dynamics and evolution of node's centrality.

Nitesh Chawla, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame, and doctoral students Yang Yang and Yuxiao Dong point out that social networks are dynamic and evolve over time when new individuals (nodes) join a network, or new links form between nodes or old links diminish between nodes. A node's centrality may change over time.

Cats seem to use their eyes rather than follow their nose when it comes to finding the location of food, according to a new paper by animal behaviorists.

Felines have keen smell and vision, so a small study investigated which sense they prefer to use under test conditions – and suggests sight may be more important than smell.

A group of six cats were placed in a maze which had ‘decision’ points – and the cats had to choose which avenue they took based on their preference for using images or smell. They were simultaneously presented with two squares of paper, each containing a different visual and odour cue. One combination of stimuli indicated they would receive a food reward, whereas the other led to no reward.

In the most comprehensive review to date addressing the relative safety of hormone therapy for transgender persons, researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found that hormone therapy in transgender adults is safe. The findings, which appear in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Endocrinology, may help reduce the barriers for transgender individuals to receive medical care.

The world's national parks and nature reserves receive around eight billion visits every year, according to the first study into the global scale of nature-based tourism in protected areas. The paper, by researchers in Cambridge, UK, Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, published in the open access journal PLOS Biology, is the first global-scale attempt to answer the question of how many visits protected areas receive, and what they might be worth in terms of tourist dollars.

The authors of the study say that this number of visits could generate as much as US$600 billion of tourism expenditure annually - a huge economic benefit which vastly exceeds the less than US$10 billion spent safeguarding these sites each year.

Sewage sludge, green waste, even animal excrement can be utilized for energy recovery with  the biobattery modular concept. 

Biogas plants are an important element for decentralized energy supply. They produce electricity from renewable resources and can compensate for highly fluctuating wind and solar energy. There are already 8,000 plants in operation in Germany with an electrical output of 3.75 gigawatts in total, that is the equivalent to roughly three nuclear power plants. However, the plants have several disadvantages too: they only process a limited range of organic substances and are in competition with the cultivation of food plants.