Culture

Ever had to find your friend in a crowd? Imagine at a festival your mate saying: "I'll be wearing a yellow t-shirt by the hotdog stall behind the jazz stage." Using this information, you could walk around listening out for the romping double bass, and as you get closer and start to hear the trills of the trumpet, begin to sniff out the frying onions and sizzling sausages. Once you have located the hotdog stand, you only need to look for a bright yellow t-shirt and you will find your friend.

Entitlement to free health services will be curtailed by the Health and Social Care Bill currently before parliament, warn experts today.

In a paper published on bmj.com, Professor Allyson Pollock and David Price from Queen Mary, University of London analyse the key legal reforms in the bill and conclude that it provides a legal basis for charging and for providing fewer health services to fewer people in England.

People with rheumatoid arthritis are at a greater risk of irregular heart rhythm (known as atrial fibrillation) and stroke compared with the general population, finds a study published on bmj.com today.

Rheumatoid arthritis is already linked to an increased risk of heart attacks and heart failure, and is an important risk factor for stroke. But no study has yet examined whether it increases the risk of atrial fibrillation – a condition associated with an increased long term risk of stroke, heart failure, and death.

Highlights

Highlights

As the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor accident is marked on March 11, a new paper by Peter C. Burns, Henry Massman Professor of Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame and colleagues from the University of Michigan and the University of California, Davis, stresses that we need much more knowledge about how nuclear fuel interacts with the environment during and after an accident.

COLUMBIA, Mo. –Veterans are almost twice as likely as the general public to have chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and heart failure. Therefore, veterans may require more assistance from informal caregivers, especially as outpatient treatment becomes more common. A University of Missouri researcher evaluated strain and satisfaction among informal caregivers of veterans with chronic illnesses.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Though women are better represented in the workforce and in higher education institutions, they still face barriers in employment, education and health care access and are more likely to live in poverty. Now, a University of Missouri expert says new research highlighting current issues affecting Missouri women provides insights that could significantly improve the lives of women throughout the state.

Forty years ago, LSD was used in the treatment of alcoholics - with good results. Perhaps it's time to look at it again?

In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, researchers in many places in the world experimented with LSD in the treatment of various disorders, including alcoholism. Not all experiments were scientifically tenable by today's standards, but some were. Now Teri Krebs and Pål-Ørjan Johansen, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), have taken a closer look at these experiments.

The tiny island of St Helena, 1,000 miles off the coast of south-west Africa, acted as the landing place for many of the slaves, captured by the Royal Navy during the suppression of the slave trade between 1840 and 1872. During this period a total of around 26,000 freed slaves were brought to the island, most of whom were landed at a depot in Rupert's Bay. The appalling conditions aboard the slave ships meant that many did not survive their journey, whilst Rupert's Valley – arid, shadeless, and always windy – was poorly suited to act as a hospital and refugee camp for such large numbers.

BERKELEY, Calif. – March 8, 2012 – XOMA Corporation (Nasdaq: XOMA) announced that its study of XMetA, the company's fully-human allosteric monoclonal antibody to the insulin receptor, is available online and will be published in the May issue of the American Diabetes Association's journal Diabetes. XMetA is the first antibody specific for the insulin receptor shown to correct hyperglycemia in a mouse model of diabetes.

Sophia Antipolis, 5 March 2012: Women with chronic heart failure survive longer than their male counterparts, according to a large analysis of studies comprising data on more than 40,000 subjects.(1) The analysis represents the largest assessment of gender and mortality risk in heart failure - and provides evidence which many randomised trials have failed to do because they have been dominated by male patients.

BEIJING; BERKELEY, CA; and UPTON, NY – The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a multinational collaboration operating in the south of China, today reported the first results of its search for the last, most elusive piece of a long-standing puzzle: how is it that neutrinos can appear to vanish as they travel? The surprising answer opens a gateway to a new understanding of fundamental physics and may eventually solve the riddle of why there is far more ordinary matter than antimatter in the universe today.

A new investigational drug significantly reduced urinary cortisol levels and improved symptoms of Cushing's disease in the largest clinical study of this endocrine disorder ever conducted. Results of the clinical trial conducted at centers on four continents appear in the March 8 New England Journal of Medicine and show that treatment with pasireotide cut cortisol secretion an average of 50 percent and returned some patient's levels to normal.

Suicides among US army personnel rose 80 per cent between 2004 and 2008, finds research by US Army Public Health Command and published online in Injury Prevention.

Around 40% of these suicides might be associated with military events following US involvement in Iraq, say the authors.

The US committed a substantial number of troops to Iraq, starting in 2003, and it continues to be involved in military operations in Afghanistan.