A genetic variation protects some people with heart failure, enabling them to live longer than expected, according to a research team led by investigators at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The researchers found that the genetic variation acts just like beta-blockers, a class of drugs used to treat chronic heart failure.

In the study, the researchers found that black heart failure patients with the genetic variation had a natural protection against death and the need for a heart transplant that is the same as the protection provided by beta-blocker therapy.

A 240 million year-old Ichthyosauria specimen went on display at Tromsø University Museum in northern Norway. The Botneheia ichthyosaur, presumably a new species, was the largest predator of its day.

A team from the University of Tromsø, the Norwegian Polar Institute, and the University of Tübingen discovered the exceptionally large specimen at Svalbard, Norway. The preparation and exhibition of the fossil was sponsored by the Norwegian oil company StatoilHydro.

What species is it?

The fossil from the Botneheia Formation at Sauriedalen, Svalbard belongs to the Ichthyosauria (meaning ”fish-lizards”), a large group of marine reptiles that roamed the oceans for most of the Mesozoic. It is among the more “primitive” and early ichthyosaurs of the Triassic that the new find from Svalbard finds its place.
As no large ichthyosaurs have so far been described from the Middle Triassic of Svalbard, there is a high probability that one is dealing with a genus and species new to science.

A Yale University senior named Aliza Shvarts ignited the blogosphere with outrage yesterday, April 17, when the Yale student newspaper announced that Shvarts had artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" over the past nine months and then periodically induced "miscarriages," all toward the goal of developing a "performance art" project in the School of Art at Yale. But there may be students on my campus who perform a similar type of "art" every week without much fuss.

It may all come down to the meaning of words.

The cost of providing a safety net for at-risk youth is $5,000 per year; the cost of housing a San Quentin inmate is $60,000 per year. Which would you prefer? -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- What's your reaction when you see a young person begging for money, living in a park or under a freeway? Do you think, "Why don't you just get a job? In and Out Burgers pays $11.00 an hour. I'm not buying your beer." I admit to my own uneasiness and temptation to judge, and I also wonder what has happened to this young person that made them drop out? Who crushed their spirit? In 2003, M. Wald and T. Martinez conducted the Stanford University study "Connected by 25: Improving the Life Chances of the Country's Most Vulnerable 14-24 year olds." In that mouthful of study, they concluded that, "In our society, almost all youth require support until they have connected successfully with the labor force, which generally does not occur until the mid-twenties." Stanford also found that high school dropouts, those in the juvenile justice system and incarcerated youth are unlikely to reach age 25 without becoming homeless.

Data from the ESA/NASA spacecraft SOHO shows clearly that powerful starquakes ripple around the Sun in the wake of mighty solar flares that explode above its surface. The observations give solar physicists new insight into a long-running solar mystery and may even provide a way of studying other stars.

The outermost quarter of the Sun’s interior is a constantly churning maelstrom of hot gas. Turbulence in this region causes ripples that criss-cross the solar surface, making it heave up and down in a patchwork pattern of peaks and troughs.

Your contact lenses of the future could be completely biodegradable. A soft contact lens is a hydrogel - a solid, gelatinous mass consisting of water incorporated in a polymer network.

Now Berkeley researchers have developed a technique for the formation of hybrid materials from synthetic polymers and proteins, fusing the biological functions of proteins with the processing properties of plastics.

Aaron P. Esser-Kahn and Matthew B. Francis say they have successfully synthesized a green-fluorescing biodegradable gel that responds to changes in pH value and temperature. These polymer-protein hybrid materials can also be used in sensors, nanomachine parts, or drug-delivery systems.

A connection between vitamin D level and the risk of developing breast cancer has been implicated for a long time, but its clinical relevance had not yet been proven.

Sascha Abbas and colleagues from the working group headed by Dr. Jenny Chang-Claude at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ), collaborating with researchers of the University Hospitals in Hamburg-Eppendorf, have now obtained clear results: While previous studies had concentrated chiefly on nutritional vitamin D, the researchers have now investigated the complete vitamin D status. To this end, they studied 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) as a marker for both endogenous vitamin D and vitamin D from food intake.

Supporters of legalizing euthanasia and those who wish to develop better palliative care services can help rather than combat each other, according to a study published on bmj.com.

Palliative care concerns itself with the relief of the pain, symptoms and stress of serious illness while improving the quality of life for patients and their families. Euthanasia is where a third party causes the death of a patient. But the traditional view that palliative care and euthanasia are two alternative and antagonistic causes is not necessarily the case, say researchers.

Jan Berheim and colleagues from the End-of-Life Care Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, reviewed historical, regulatory and epidemiological evidence from Belgium, which was the second country to legalise euthanasia in 2002, and has some of the best developed provisions for palliative care, third only to Iceland and the UK.

In recent decades, manufacturers have added more and more components onto integrated circuits. As a result, the number of transistors and the power of these circuits have roughly doubled every two years. This has become known as Moore’s Law.

But the ability to easily add more components is now noticeably decreasing and further miniaturization of electronics will experience a fundamental challenge in the next 10 years.

There's hope on the horizon. Researchers at The University of Manchesterhave used the world’s thinnest material to create the world’s smallest transistor, one atom thick and ten atoms wide. How small is that? You could fit 25 million of them in an inch.