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Low IQ scores in early adulthood are associated with an increased risk of attempted suicide in men, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust.

In the largest study of its kind, a team of researchers studied the medical records of over one million men in Sweden dating back over a period of twenty four years and compared rates of hospital admission for attempted suicide against IQ scores. The research is published today in the British Medical Journal.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) skin patches containing low doses of oestrogen carry less risk of stroke than oral therapy and may represent a safer alternative to tablets, suggests a study published on bmj.com today.

However, the risk increases significantly with high dose patches.

The multiple sclerosis risk sharing scheme is "a costly failure" and should not be continued, according to researchers on bmj.com today.

They argue that the biggest losers are the other NHS patients who would otherwise have benefited from the money spent on the scheme, estimated to be around £50m per year since it was set up in 2002.

They also point out that, if an assessment had been completed after the first two years, the NHS could have already saved around £250m.

A lack of skilled attendants at birth accounts for two million preventable maternal deaths, stillbirths and newborn deaths each year, according to the newly released Countdown to 2015 Decade Report (2000-2010).

The report shows that nearly 50 percent of women in the 68 countries carefully tracked in the Countdown report —most of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia— still give birth without the aid of a trained midwife, nurse, doctor, or other skilled birth attendant.

Infants with chronic renal failure (CRF) grow slowly, a problem that usually improves with aggressive nutritional therapy. When it doesn't, growth hormone is a safe and effective treatment to promote growth, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN).

"Early treatment with growth hormone improves growth retardation and bone mineral density without short-term undesirable effects," comments Fernando Santos, MD, PhD (Hospital Universitario Central de Asturias, Oviedo, Spain).

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have developed a new gene therapy that is safe and effective in reversing advanced heart failure. SERCA2a (produced as MYDICAR®) is a gene therapy designed to stimulate production of an enzyme that enables the failing heart to pump more effectively. In a Phase II study, SERCA2a injection through a routine minimally invasive cardiac catheterization was safe and showed clinical benefit in treating this patient population and decreasing the severity of heart failure.

EVANSTON, Ill. --- The hunting strategy of a slender fish from the Amazon is giving researchers more insight into how to balance the metabolic cost of information with the metabolic cost of moving around to get that information.

A new study from Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science answers the question: In behaviors in which you have to move to get information, when should the animal spend more energy on locomotion versus spending more energy on getting more information?

Every minute, 10,000 gallons of water mysteriously gush out of the desert floor at a place called Ash Meadows, an oasis that is home to 24 plant and animal species found nowhere else in the world.

A new Brigham Young University study indicates that the water arriving at Ash Meadows is completing a 15,000-year journey, flowing slowly underground from what is now the Nevada Test Site.

The U.S. government tested nuclear bombs there for four decades, and a crack in the Earth's crust known as the "Gravity Fault" connects its aquifer with Ash Meadows.

Hamilton, ON (June 3, 2010) – McMaster University researchers have discovered a central controller or processing unit (CPU) of a superbug's weaponry.

An article on the breakthrough appears in the high-impact journal Science today.

The team from the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research has revealed that a small chemical, made by the superbug Staphylococcus aureus and its drug-resistant forms, determines this disease's strength and ability to infect.

A new therapy mounts a double-barreled attack on leukemia, targeting not just the cancer cells but also the environment in which those cells live and grow, University of Florida researchers report.

Like striking an enemy camp directly as well as cutting off its source of food and other resources, the agent, called Oxi4503, poisons leukemia cells and destroys the blood vessels that supply them with oxygen and nutrients.

Professor Wang Yun Cai and his student Wang An Bang reported a new concept of optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR) based on a chaotic light correlation method. This will be useful for precise fault location in fiber links with high-density events. Their work is reported in Issue 53 (February, 2010) of SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences.

In recent years, the Internet has been evolving from a primarily publication platform to a user participatory platform. With the proliferation of services available on the Internet, millions of users are able to voluntarily participate in the development of their own interests and benefits by means of service composition. However, due to the ever increasing number of services, enabling users to rapidly select and access these services has become a challenging issue.

Tracing the success of individual wild insects in leaving descendants is now possible according to new research by University of Exeter biologists using a combination of digital video technology, tagging and DNA fingerprinting.

PASADENA, Calif.—Biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have pinpointed molecular changes that helped allow the global spread of resistance to the antiviral medication Tamiflu (oseltamivir) among strains of the seasonal H1N1 flu virus.

The study—led by David Baltimore, Caltech's Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and postdoctoral scholar Jesse D. Bloom—appears in the June 4 issue of the journal Science.