After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
How will we know if the economy has really gotten better, rather than using bogus claims about employment or how well Wall Street executives are doing? When senior citizens stop killing themselves.
Suicide rates for adults between 40 and 64 years of age in the U.S. rose about 40% since 1999, with a sharp rise after in 2007 that continued during the economic downturn of 2008 and on, which led to disproportionate effects on house values, household finances, and retirement savings for that age group. In a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that external economic factors were present in 37.5% of all completed suicides in 2010, rising from 32.9% in 2005.
Enzymes are the workhorses of our bodies, they make biochemical reactions happen faster than they otherwise would and sometimes essential reactions would not happen at all without them. The Rubisco enzyme, the most abundant protein on the planet, has one of the most significant responsibilities in life on Earth - the conversion of carbon dioxide to organic compounds, the building blocks of all plant and animal cells.
People with diabetes are prone to anxiety and depression but others with chronic diseases that require similar levels of management suffer from anxiety and depression less. Why that might be is unclear but Joslin Diabetes Center researchers have offered an explanation, gleaned by genetically modifying mice to make their brains resistant to insulin. They found that the animals exhibited behaviors that suggest anxiety and depression, and then pinpointed a mechanism that lowers levels of the key neurotransmitter dopamine in areas of the brain associated with those conditions.
Want to lower your risk of dying from a heart attack? Go a little nuts.Peanuts are getting a modern rehabilitation. Except for severe cases, it has been found that peanut allergies will go away if kids eat them early, and when they reach adulthood they will have less likelihood of dying from heart disease - and be an equalizer across low-income and racially diverse populations.
A new paper based on a study of 4,219 people without any evidence of blood cancer nonetheless found that up to 20 percent of people aged 50-60 and more than 70 percent of people over 90 have blood cells with the same gene changes as found in leukemia. That means it is almost inevitable that we will develop genetic mutations associated with leukemia as we age, according to the authors investigating the earliest stages of cancer development used an exquisitely sensitive sequencing method capable of detecting DNA mutations present in as few as 1.6 percent of blood cells, to analyze 15 locations in the genome, which are known to be altered in leukemia.
An on-board air filtration system called
high-efficiency cabin air, or HECA,
developed specifically for school buses reduced exposure to vehicular pollutants by up to 88 percent, according to a new paper. study by researchers at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. The HECA system could help protect the 25 million American children who commute on school buses nearly every day, according to the authors from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Children are more susceptible to air pollution than adults because they breathe more quickly and their immune and cardiovascular systems are still developing, said Yifang Zhu, the study's senior author and an associate professor in the department of environmental health sciences.
The world's challenges demand science solutions - and fast - but it doesn't need the old style of detached experts, write a team of scientists in, ironically, one of America's most prominent and detached corporate science publications; Science magazine, a reputable legacy publication with a politician leading them. Segregated expertise, like segregated articles of taxpayer-funded science, is obsolete.
Amateur athletes are competitive and they are always looking for an advantage even if it isn't their careers, so it is no surprise that supplement stores are filled with promises of gains.Nitrate supplements, claiming to improve the efficiency at which muscles use oxygen, have been popular for years, but do they work? A new study says they may increase performance--they decrease the viscosity of blood, aiding in blood flow, while at the same time ensuring that tissue oxygen requirements are not compromised.
Researchers have shown that a strong electric field applied to a section of the Keystone pipeline can smooth oil flow and yield significant pump energy savings.
Traditionally, pipeline oil is heated over several miles in order to reduce the oil's thickness (which is also known as viscosity), but this requires a large amount of energy and counter-productively increases turbulence within the flow. In 2006 Rongjia Tao of Temple University in Pennsylvania proposed a more efficient way of improving flow rates by applying an electric field to the oil. The idea is to electrically align particles within the crude oil, which reduces viscosity and turbulence.
A newly characterized group of pharmacological compounds block both the inflammation and nerve cell damage seen in mouse models of multiple sclerosis, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Multiple sclerosis is a disease of the brain and spinal cord, where for unknown reasons, the body's immune system begins an inflammatory attack against myelin, the protective nerve coating that surrounds nerve fibers. Once myelin is stripped from these fibers, the nerve cells become highly susceptible to damage, which is believed to underlie their destruction, leading to the steady clinical decline seen in progressive forms of multiple sclerosis.
The number of seagulls in the Strait of Georgia is down by 50 per cent from the 1980s and University of British Columbia researchers say the decline reflects changes in the availability of food.
Researchers collected 100 years of data on population numbers of Glaucous-winged Gulls, the most common seagull species found in the Lower Mainland, Victoria, Nanaimo and elsewhere in the region. They found that the population increased rapidly beginning in the early 1900s, but started to drop after the mid-1980s, with their work pointing to diet as one factor in the decline of the bird's health.
A new species of algae has been discovered in reef corals of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf where it helps corals to survive seawater temperatures of up to 36 degrees Celsius - temperatures that would kill corals elsewhere.
Researchers from the University of Southampton and the New York University Abu Dhabi identified the symbiotic algae in corals from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the world's warmest coral reef habitat.
New type symbiotic alga lends its brown color to a Porites coral from Abu Dhabi reefs. Credit: Wiedenmann, Burt
