News Articles

The University of Manchester's National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness found that mental health patients are at their highest risk of suicide in the first two weeks after leaving hospital.
Around 3,225 patients died by suicide in the UK within the first three months of their discharge from hospital – 18% of all patient suicides between 2002-2012 - and 526 patients died within the first week, the peak time of risk in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. In Wales, it is the first two weeks after leaving the hospital.  

What creates the two gigantic donuts of radiation surrounding Earth called the Van Allen radiation belts? The Van Allen Probes launched in 2012 want to find out.
The inner Van Allen radiation belt is fairly stable, but the outer one changes shape, size and composition in ways that scientists don't yet perfectly understand. Some of the particles within this belt zoom along at close to light speed, but just what accelerates these particles up to such velocities? Recent data from the Van Allen Probes suggests that it is a two-fold process: One mechanism gives the particles an initial boost and then a kind of electromagnetic wave called Whistlers does the final job to kick them up to such intense speeds.

Rainwater can penetrate below the Earth's fractured upper crust, according to a new study.
It had been thought that surface water could not penetrate the ductile crust, where temperatures of more than 300°C and high pressures cause rocks to flex and flow rather than fracture, but researchers have now found fluids derived from rainwater at these levels. 
Fluids in the Earth's crust can weaken rocks and may help to initiate earthquakes along locked fault lines. They also concentrate valuable metals such as gold. The new findings suggest that rainwater may be responsible for controlling these important processes, even deep in the Earth.

Donating a kidney is a selfless act and it is going to save a life. But even before the Affordable Care Act, it had pitfalls if you wanted to add or change health insurance. In the future, the only option could be state Medicare programs, which many doctors are refusing to accept now.   Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, insurance companies can no longer refuse health insurance to live kidney donors or charge them a higher insurance rate. But, as with 'If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor', the rules may change at any time, making donors stuck with nothing but government programs and the inability to get an appointment.And insurance companies clearly penalize donors and have done so for decades.

Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, Robert Harding Chair in global child health and policy and Co-Director of the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto says in BMJ that criminal sanctions are necessary to deter growing research misconduct.

ESA’s spaceplane is getting ready to showcase reentry technologies. Instead of heading north into a polar orbit, as on previous flights, Vega will head eastwards to release the spaceplane into a suborbital path reaching all the way to the Pacific Ocean.Final tests are being done on ESA’s Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle, IXV, launched in early November, to make sure that it can withstand the demanding conditions from liftoff to separation from Vega. IXV will flight test the technologies and critical systems for Europe’s future automated reentry vehicles returning from low orbit. IXV tests. Credit: ESA

Neuroscientists have created mutant worms that don't get intoxicated by alcohol, by inserting a modified human alcohol target into the worms.
An alcohol target is any neuronal molecule that binds alcohol, of which there are many.
One important aspect of this modified alcohol target, a neuronal channel called the BK channel, is that the mutation only affects its response to alcohol. The BK channel typically regulates many important functions including activity of neurons, blood vessels, the respiratory tract and bladder. The alcohol-insensitive mutation does not disrupt these functions at all.
The work that could lead to new drugs to treat the symptoms of people going through alcohol withdrawal.  

Education is in something a Catch-22. If they have standards, there will be dropouts among people who don't want to do the work to reach the minimum levels. If they don't have standards, they are just an assembly line and that is bad for teacher morale.
Because who is going to get blamed if students don't succeed? Teachers.

A new assay is inexpensive, simple, and can tell whether or not one of the primary drugs being used to treat malaria is genuine – an enormous and deadly problem in the developing world.
The World Health Organization has estimated that up to 200,000 lives a year may be lost due to the use of counterfeit anti-malarial drugs. When commercialized, the new technology may be able to help address that problem by testing drugs for efficacy at a cost of a few cents.

Teenage boys are often considered aloof and distant by parents and driven by desire by teenage girls, but they are not so simple, say scholars at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. 
Teenage boys desire intimacy and sex in the context of a meaningful relationship and value trust in their partnerships, providing a contradictory snapshot of masculine values in adolescence.

For nearly four decades, some have suspected that persistent organic pollutants -  a large group of man-made chemicals that, as their name indicates, persist in the environment - contributed to a green turtle's susceptibility to the virus that causes fibropapilomatosis, a disease that forms large benign tumors that can inhibit the animal's sight, mobility and feeding ability. 
A new paper by researchers from the Hollings Marine Laboratory (HML) and university and federal collaborators in Hawaii demonstrated these man-made chemicals are not a co-factor linked to the increasing number of green sea turtles afflicted with fibropapilomatosis.

Over 5 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer's disease. It is the most common form of dementia and is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. Desperate families latch onto just about any possible treatment, including supplements. Do they work? Not so far.
But in a retrospective study, older adults involved in the 
Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI)
study were assessed with neuropsychological tests and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) every six months.  The group included 229 older adults who were cognitively normal; 397 who were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment; and 193 with AD.