Immigrants in the United States require less than half the health-care services than do native-born Americans, according to study findings published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Immigrant children get even lower levels of care, receiving 84 percent less than U.S.-born children, according to researchers at Harvard and Columbia universities and the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

During the evaluation of competitive athletes, a history or a documentation of cardiac arrhythmias has become particularly important because arrhythmias may be the initial expression of an underlying cardiac disease or of primary electrical disorders, sometimes early manifestations of potentially life-threatening events. Cardiac arrhythmias are among the most important causes of non-eligibility to sports activities, and some arrhythmogenic diseases are three times more frequent among athletes than among sedentary subjects of the same age.

Arrhythmias, in young competitive athletes and also the elite are usually "benign" or "paraphysiological" (duo to prolonged training).

Mechanical 'artificial hearts' can be used to return severely failing hearts to their normal function, potentially removing the need for heart transplantation, according to new research.

The mechanical devices, known as Left Ventricular Assist Devices (LVADs), are currently used in patients with very severe heart failure whilst they await transplantation. The new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that using an LVAD combined with certain drug therapies can shrink the enlarged heart and enable it to function normally once the LVAD is removed.

For the study, researchers from Imperial College London and the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust gave the full combination therapy to 15 severely ill patients. Of these 15, 11 recovered.

Astronomers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii have looked 60 million years further back in time than any other astronomers, to find the most distant known galaxy in the universe. In doing so, they are upholding Subaru's record for finding the most distant and earliest galaxies known. Their most recent discovery is of a galaxy called I0K-1 that lies so far away that astronomers are seeing it as it appeared 12.88 billion years ago.

How can space inspire fashion? Has it inspired fashion throughout history? These were questions put to participants of a fashion workshop in Stockholm, timed to coincide with Christer Fuglesang’s trip to the ISS.

A breast cancer treatment based on MIT research originally intended for detecting missiles is documented in a new book by Alan J. Fenn, an MIT researcher and inventor of the technique.

Image at left shows process of detecting and destroying an enemy missile using MIT targeted radar. Microwave energy is fixed on a missile while simultaneously nullifying enemy jammers. On right, microwave energy is aimed at a cancerous tumor with a deep focused beam while simultaneously nullifying any energy that would overheat surrounding healthy tissue. (Image courtesy of Lincoln Laboratory_

McMaster scientists are very close to defining small molecule drugs that should be able to redirect the huntingtin protein from accumulating in the wrong place within brain cells, which could potentially translate to a therapy for Huntington's Disease (HD).

Three proteins viewed in a live cell. (Image courtesy of McMaster University)

Russia's Federal Space Agency said Wednesday it hopes the Sea Launch project will be resumed despite the explosion of a Zenit-3SL rocket carrying a commercial communications satellite.

"A Sea Launch Zenit-3SL vehicle, carrying the NSS-8 satellite, experienced an anomaly today during launch operations. Sea Launch will establish a Failure Review Oversight Board to determine the root cause of this anomaly," said a statement issued by Sea Launch.

Probes designed to find life on Mars do not drill deep enough to find the living cells that scientists believe may exist well below the surface of Mars, according to research led by UCL (University College London). Although current drills may find essential tell-tale signs that life once existed on Mars, cellular life could not survive the radiation levels for long enough any closer to the surface of Mars than a few metres deep -- beyond the reach of even state-of-the-art drills.

Elysium's frozen sea may be one of the best places to look for life on Mars. (Credits: ESA/DLR/Berlin/Neukum)

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that microtubules – components responsible for shape, movement, and replication within cells – use proteins that act as molecular motors and brakes to organize into their correct structure. If microtubules are not formed properly such basic functions as cell division and transport can go wrong, which may have implications in such disease processes as cancer and dementia. The study, published in the January issue of Cell, is featured on the cover of that issue.

Daughter microtubule (red) being formed on mother microtubule (red), within yeast cell (dashed line).