Body

University of Queensland research is showing the benefits of resistance training in keeping older Australians in tip top form.

Dr Tim Henwood, a postdoctoral research fellow with UQ and Blue Care, said his recently completed PhD research investigated how people over the age of 65 responded to resistance training.

"What we were looking at was how simple resistance training can improve muscle strength, power and functional performance." Dr Henwood said.

The Heads of the International Space Station (ISS) Agencies from Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States met today at ESA Headquarters in Paris, France, to review ISS cooperation.

As part of their discussions, they noted the significantly expanded capability the ISS now provides for on-orbit research and technology development activities and as an engineering test-bed for flight systems and operations critical to future space exploration initiatives. These activities improve the quality of life on Earth by expanding the frontiers of human knowledge.

WASHINGTON, July 18 - Without immediate action to develop an integrated, comprehensive, national health workforce policy, the U.S. is at risk of losing its status as the global health care leader, states a new report released by the Association of Academic Health Centers (AAHC, www.aahcdc.org). The report was funded in part by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.

Honolulu, HI – A new indicator of coral health has been discovered in a community of microscopic single-celled algae called dinoflagellates. The study, released in the July 8th edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that a particular type of these algae renders corals more susceptible to disease.

Standards in stem cell research help both scientists and regulators to manage uncertainty and the unknown, according to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Efforts to standardise practices across different labs is, however, a balancing act where the autonomy of scientists and fragility of living material need to be weighed against the need for comparable data.

DURHAM, N.C., and SINGAPORE – Scientists at a Duke University medical school in Singapore have found a new way to study cancer that could be very useful for developing targeted therapies against cancer and possibly many other diseases.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified the primary immune sensor that detects the presence of stomach viruses in the body. They show that the sensor – a protein called MDA-5 – triggers an immune response that revs up the body's defenses to fight off the infection. This knowledge may help develop a treatment that prevents or reduces infection, the researchers suggest in their study, published July 18th in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens.

Understanding how interactions between genes and the environment influence social behavior is a fundamental research goal. In a new study, researchers at the University of Lausanne and the University of Georgia have shed light on the numbers and types of genes that may control social organization in fire ant colonies.

"Survival of the fittest" is the catch phrase of evolution by natural selection. While natural selection favors the most fit organisms around, evolutionary biologists have long wondered whether this leads to the best possible organisms in the long run.

A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, led by Drs. Matthew Cowperthwaite and Lauren Ancel Meyers, has developed a new theory, which suggests that life may not always be optimal. The results of this study appear July 18th in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology.

The UK government may save up to £18.6 million a year by deciding to use the HPV vaccine Cervarix, given that it is equally effective as the more expensive Gardasil in preventing cervical abnormalities, according to a study published on BMJ.com today.

Every year in the UK nearly 3 000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer caused by human papillomaviruses (HPV). Some of these viruses also cause over 100 000 diagnosed cases of anogenital warts.

Every hospital emergency department should share information about violent incidents with local crime reduction agencies to tackle the problem of knife crime, says an expert in this week's BMJ.

Professor Jonathan Shepherd, Director of the Violence Research Group at Cardiff University, believes anonymous data should be collected by all emergency departments on the locations and times that violence occurs and the types of weapons used, and then shared with crime reduction partnerships, so that violence "hotspots" can be identified and targeted.

Drugs that have helped treat millions of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers may hold the key to many more medical conditions, including atherosclerosis – a leading cause of heart disease – says the researcher who jointly invented and developed them.

Professor Marc Feldmann will tell scientists attending the 2008 Congress of European Pharmacological Societies (EPHAR) – hosted by the British Pharmacological Society – that drugs he and colleagues helped develop have already proved successful against other autoimmune diseases.

Breast cancer research needs to investigate how a person's ethnicity influences their response to treatment and its outcome, according to a new Comment piece in today's Lancet (18 July) by researchers from Imperial College London.

Emerging evidence suggests that particular drugs may benefit people from one ethnic group more than others, because of differences in their genetic makeup. However, most key trials looking at treatments for breast cancer have been carried out in predominantly white populations in Europe, North America and Australasia.

In studying how animals change size as they evolve, biologists have unearthed several interesting patterns. For instance, most species are small, but the largest members of a taxonomic group -- such as the great white shark, the Komodo dragon, or the African elephant – are often thousands or millions of times bigger than the typical species. Now for the first time two SFI researchers explain these patterns within an elegant statistical framework.

CHICAGO — A recent study led by Rahul Khare, MD, emergency department physician and assistant director of operations at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, sought to determine the cost-effectiveness of utilizing a CT scanner to evaluate low-risk chest pain patients in the emergency room.