Your Neighborhood Can Affect Your Health
Research carried out at the Peninsula Medical School, South West England, has found strong links between neighbourhood deprivation and the physical and intellectual health of older people.
Two studies were conducted, both using data on participants in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA).
Popularity: 49% [?]
April 10, 2008 | Filed Under Health | Leave a CommentHow Fast You’ll Age is Written in the Bones
Perhaps the aging process can’t be stopped. But it can be predicted, and new research from Tel Aviv University indicates that people may live longer and lead healthier lives as a result.
Researchers have developed a new biological marker that represents the age of a body’s bones. It reveals that the speed of physical aging is strongly influenced by genetics.
Popularity: 17% [?]
April 10, 2008 | Filed Under Humans | Leave a CommentResearchers Take Step Toward Creating Quantum Computers
For now, full-fledged quantum computers are the stuff of science fiction — in last summer’s blockbuster movie Transformers, the bad guys use quantum computing to break into the U.S. Army’s secure files in just 10 seconds flat.
But Prem Kumar, the AT&T Professor of Information Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the director of the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing, and his research group are one step closer to realizing that technology — though for far better purposes. The group recently demonstrated one of the basic building blocks for distributed quantum computing using entangled photons generated in optical fibers, and their research was published in the April 4 edition of Physical Review Letters.
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April 9, 2008 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a CommentInternet Black Holes
You’re trying to log on to a Web site and it’s not working. You try again and again. But persistence doesn’t pay off. The site you want is inexplicably, frustratingly, out of reach.
The other computer might just be turned off, but the causes could be more mysterious. At any given moment, a proportion of computer traffic ends up being routed into information black holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does exist, but messages — a request to visit a Web site, an outgoing e-mail — get lost along the way.
Popularity: 48% [?]
April 9, 2008 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a CommentMarijuana Increases Alcohol Toxicity
Marijuana is among the most frequently used illicit drugs by women during their childbearing years and there is growing concern that marijuana abuse during pregnancy, either alone or in combination with other drugs, may have serious effects on fetal brain development. There is strong evidence that THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana, crosses the placenta, that maternal marijuana abuse results in intrauterine growth retardation and that infants exposed to marijuana exhibit a temporary syndrome that includes lethargy and decreased muscle tone.
Fetal exposure to THC can also result in attention deficits, learning disabilities and behavioral problems. A new study using rats found that THC combined with mildly intoxicating doses of alcohol induced widespread nerve cell death in the brain. The study is published in the Annals of Neurology (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/ana), the official journal of the American Neurological Association.
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April 9, 2008 | Filed Under Medical | Leave a CommentScientists Create First Superinsulator
Superinsulation may sound like a marketing gimmick for a drafty attic or winter coat. But it is actually a newly discovered fundamental state of matter created by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with several European institutions. This discovery opens new directions of inquiry in condensed matter physics and breaks ground for a new generation of microelectronics.
Led by Argonne senior scientist Valerii Vinokur and Russian scientist Tatyana Baturina, an international team of scientists from Argonne, Germany, Russia and Belgium fashioned a thin film of titanium nitride which they then chilled to near absolute zero. When they tried to pass a current through the material, the researchers noticed that its resistance suddenly increased by a factor of 100,000 once the temperature dropped below a certain threshold. The same sudden change also occurred when the researchers decreased the external magnetic field.
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April 9, 2008 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a CommentSea Salt Worsens Coastal Air Pollution
Air pollution in the world’s busiest ports and shipping regions may be markedly worse than previously suspected, according to a new study showing that industrial and shipping pollution is exacerbated when it combines with sunshine and salty sea air.
In a paper published in this week’s advance online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers that included University of Calgary chemistry professor Hans Osthoff report that the disturbing phenomenon substantially raises the levels of ground-level ozone and other pollutants in coastal areas.
Popularity: 44% [?]
April 9, 2008 | Filed Under Chemistry | Leave a CommentBreakthrough in Creating Gasoline from Plant Matter
Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of “green gasoline,” a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.
Reporting in the cover article of the April 7, 2008 issue of Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials (ChemSusChem), chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components.
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April 8, 2008 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a CommentHouse Dust is a Rich Source of Bacteria
If you’ve always suspected there are unknown things living in the dark and dusty corners of your home and office, we are now one step closer to cataloguing exactly what might be lurking in your indoor environment. Buildings have their own pattern of bacteria in indoor dust, which includes species normally found in the human gut, according research published in BMC Microbiology.
The microbial flora from indoor dust samples from two buildings was complex and dominated by bacterial groups originating from users of the buildings. The Finnish-based research team investigated the species level diversity and seasonal dynamics of bacterial flora in indoor dust by sequencing DNA from the dust samples collected.
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April 8, 2008 | Filed Under Biology | Leave a CommentWar Between the Sexes Begins Before Twins’ Birth
The battle of the sexes may begin in the womb, researchers from Tel Aviv University believe. And it may have troubling consequences — a male twin can compromise the health of his twin sister before she is born.
In a new study recently published in the journal Pediatrics, the researchers analyzed the incidence of complications, such as respiratory distress syndrome, found in pre-term twins. When born premature, girls who share the womb with a boy twin lost the respiratory health advantage normally seen in premature girl infants, they discovered.
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April 8, 2008 | Filed Under Humans | Leave a Comment
