Culture

Barcelona, Spain, 31 August: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) result from a negative interaction between genes, lifestyle and environment. To prevent CVD, it is necessary to influence the natural history of the disease development in an individual. While we cannot change our genes, we can do a lot to our lifestyles and environments. It is generally agreed that individuals alone should not be blamed for chronic diseases such as CVD, but that society also has its role and responsibilities.

Barcelona, Spain, 30 August: The anticoagulant dabigatran is more effective than warfarin in the prevention of stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation, according to results from the RE-LY study (Randomized Evaluation of Long-term anticoagulant therapY).

"Although researchers have been looking for a replacement for warfarin for several decades, nothing has been successful as an oral blood thinner," says Professor Stuart Connolly, Director of the Division of Cardiology at McMaster University, Canada, and one of the leading investigators of the study.

In one of the more dramatic moments of an underwater archaeological survey co-led by Mercyhurst College archaeologist James Adovasio along Florida's Gulf Coast this summer, Andy Hemmings stood on an inundated river's edge where man hasn't set foot in more than 13,000 years.

Donning full scuba gear, Hemmings stood in 130 feet of water on a peninsula at the intersection of two ancient rivers nearly 100 miles offshore from Tampa. The last time humans could have stood in that spot, mammoth and mastodon roamed the terrain.

It's been 40 years since man first landed on the Moon and almost 37 since Apollo 17, when people last stood on its dusty plains. Over the course of six landings from 1969 to 1972, twelve men explored, dune-buggy'ed, dug and hiked across the surface of Luna. Accounced by president George Bush a few years ago, NASA has plans for a seventh landing on the Moon, albeit taking a lot longer to get there the seventh time than it took the first.

But this time, they intend to stay.

If the new pandemic flu virus creates a surge of patients during the upcoming flu season, it will be critical to protect health care workers given their important role in treating sick people and lessening the pandemic's overall impact. Respiratory Protection for Healthcare Workers in the Workplace Against Novel H1N1 Influenza A, a new report from the Institute of Medicine, recommends the best means to guard health care workers against infection via respiratory transmission. Embargoed copies of the report will be available to reporters only starting at 9 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Sept. 2.

Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, a UCLA economist concludes in a new study.

"These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse — at a minimum — than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover," said Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – According to the "hardwired for news" theory, people devote more attention to information that is deviant or threatening. To test the theory, University of Missouri researchers examined the physiological effects of reading threatening health news online. The researchers found that news about local health threats increased attention and memory in readers more than news about distant, or non-local, health threats.