cosmology

Galaxy may swarm with 100,000 times more ‘nomad planets’ than stars

February 24, 2012

There may be 100,000 times more wandering “nomad planets” in the Milky Way than stars, and some may carry bacterial life, according to a new study by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC). If any of these nomad planets are big enough to have a thick atmosphere, they could have trapped … more…

Climate Change Shrink the Species

Little People: Will Climate Change Shrink the Species?

By JEFFREY KLUGER | February 24, 2012 | 

ILLUSTRATION BY DANIELLE BYERLEY / UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

This artist reconstruction compares Sifrhippus sandrae, right, with a modern Morgan horse that stands about 5 feet tall at the shoulder and weighs about 1,000 pounds. Sifrhippus, the earliest known horse, was the size of a small house cat (about 8.5 pounds) at the beginning of the Eocene about 56 million years ago.

If you think there are no new reasons to get freaked out by climate change, try this: There’s at least a theoretical possibility that a warmer and warmer world could lead to tinier and tinier humans. That’s the inevitable conclusion of a just-published study of Siferhippus sandae, the littlest horse that ever lived.

The Siferhippus sandae first appeared about 56 million years ago, and it was never a terribly prepossessing creature, weighing no more than 12 lbs. (5.5 kg). While it was not exactly built for steeplechase running, its skeletal architecture — not to mention its unmistakably equine face — mark it as a great-great-granddaddy of the modern horse./.../

Diabetes, cardiologia e internet

http://jornal.cardiol.br/2012/janeiro/edicao/#/14/

Student's guide to health and fitness

Health and fitness

Via: Online Colleges Guide

Alzheimer

U.S. Drafts Plan to Fight Alzheimer’s Disease

By LAURAN NEERGAARD | AP | February 23, 2012 | +

PHOTO RESEARCHERS RM / GETTY IMAGES

An Alzheimer's patient shares a moment with her daughter.

The Obama administration declared Alzheimer’s “one of the most feared health conditions” on Wednesday as it issued a draft of a new national strategy to fight the ominous rise in this mind-destroying disease.

More than 5 million Americans already have Alzheimer’s or similar dementias, a toll expected to reach up to 16 million by 2050 — along with skyrocketing medical and nursing home bills — because the population is aging so rapidly.

The government’s top goal: Find some effective ways to treat Alzheimer’s by 2025. That’s an ambitious quest. Today’s treatments only temporarily ease symptoms. Scientists know that Alzheimer’s brews for years before symptoms appear, but work to find better medications or at least stall the disease’s emergence has been frustratingly slow.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/23/u-s-drafts-plan-to-fight-alzheimers-disease/?xid=newsletter-healthland#ixzz1nE2ewRMq

MI: Women

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Higher Mortality for Women With MI and No Chest Pain

By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

Published: February 21, 2012

Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.

Women more often have no chest pain with a myocardial infarction (MI) and have a greater risk of dying in hospital than men do, analysis of a large clinical registry showed.

Almost 40% more women had no chest pain at diagnosis, and they had a 42% higher inhospital mortality, researchers reported in the Feb. 22/29 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The disparities between men and women existed in all age groups, but the magnitude of the differences diminished with increasing age. The youngest women with MI were most likely to have no chest pain and also had the highest mortality./.../

Dineína: Mitose celular

 How Chromosomes Align Perfectly in a Dividing Cell

ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2012) — To solve a mystery, sometimes a great detective need only study the clues in front of him. Like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Tomomi Kiyomitsu used his keen powers of observation to solve a puzzle that had mystified researchers for years: in a cell undergoing mitotic cell division, what internal signals cause its chromosomes to align on a center axis?

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided byWhitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, viaNewswise. The original article was written by Nicole Giese Rura.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Tomomi Kiyomitsu, Iain M. Cheeseman. Chromosome- and spindle-pole-derived signals generate an intrinsic code for spindle position and orientation. Nature Cell Biology, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/ncb2440

Bisphenol: Urinary Concentration and Risk of Future Coronary Artery Disease

Urinary Bisphenol: A Concentration and Risk of Future Coronary Artery Disease in Apparently Healthy Men and Women

1. David Melzer1*; 
2. Nicholas J. Osborne2; 
3. William E. Henley3;
4. Ricardo Cipelli4; 
5. Anita Young5; 
6. Cathryn Money5; 
7. Paul McCormack5;
8. Robert Luben6; 
9. Kay-Tee Khaw6; 
10. Nicholas J. Wareham7;
11. Tamara S. Galloway4

+Author Affiliations

1. ¹ Peninsula Medical School, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom;
2. ² Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom;
3. ³ University of Plymouth, Plymouth, United Kingdom;
4. ⁴ University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom;
5. ⁵ Brixham Environmental Laboratory, Brixham, United Kingdom;
6. ⁶ University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;
7. ⁷ Medical Research Council Epidemiology Centre, London, United Kingdom

1. ↵* Corresponding author; email: david.melzer@pms.ac.uk

Abstract

Background—The endocrine disrupting chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) is widely used in food and beverage packaging. Higher urinary BPA concentrations (uBPA) were cross-sectionally associated with heart disease in NHANES 2003/04 and NHANES 2005/6, independent of traditional risk factors.

Methods and Results—We included 758 incident coronary artery disease (CAD) cases and 861 controls followed for 10.8 yrs from the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer - Norfolk UK. Respondents aged 40-74 yrs and free of CAD, stroke or diabetes provided baseline spot urine samples. uBPA concentrations (median value 1.3 ng/ml) were low. Per standard deviation (4.56ng/ml) increases in uBPA concentration were associated with incident CAD in age, sex and urinary creatinine adjusted models (n=1919, OR=1.13 95% CI 1.02 to 1.24, p=0.017). With CAD risk factor adjustment (including education, occupational social class, BMI category, systolic blood pressure, lipid concentrations and exercise) the estimate was similar but narrowly missed two-sided significance (n=1744 OR=1.11 95% CI: 1.00 to 1.23, p=0.058). Sensitivity analyses with the fully adjusted model, excluding early CAD (<3 year follow up); those with BMI>30; abnormal renal function; or adjusting additionally for vitamin C; C-reactive protein; or alcohol consumption, all produced similar estimates and all showed associations at p≤0.05.

Conclusions—Associations between higher BPA exposure (reflected in higher urinary concentrations) and incident CAD during over ten years of follow-up showed similar trends to previously reported cross-sectional findings in the more highly exposed NHANES respondents. Further work is needed to accurately estimate the prospective exposure response curve and to establish the underlying mechanisms.