A NASA researcher has developed a new method to anticipate food shortages brought on by drought. Molly Brown of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and her colleagues created a model using data from satellite remote sensing of crop growth and food prices.

Brown conceived the idea while working with organizations in Niger, West Africa, that provide information regarding failed crops and help address local farmers' worries about feeding their families. Brown's new approach could improve the ability for government and humanitarian aid officials to plan and respond to drought-induced food price increases in Niger and elsewhere.

Our experiences –the things we see, hear, or do—can trigger long-term changes in the strength of the connections between nerve cells in our brain, and these persistent changes are how the brain encodes information as memory. Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered a new biochemical mechanism for memory storage, one that may have a connection with addictive behavior.

Previously, the long-term changes in connection were thought to only involve a fast form of electrical signaling in the brain, electrical blips lasting about one-hundredth of a second. Now, neuroscience professor David Linden, Ph.D., and his colleagues have shown another, much slower form of electrical signaling lasting about a second can also be persistently changed by experience.

Alcoholism has traditionally been considered a male disease because there are many more alcoholic males than females.

But a new study by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center suggests that women are more prone to brain damage from alcohol abuse than men.

The study led by Kristine Wiren, Ph.D., associate professor of behavioral neuroscience and medicine, OHSU School of Medicine, and research biologist, PVAMC Research Service, found that female mice are more susceptible to neurotoxic effects of alcohol withdrawal, including significantly increased brain cell death, than male mice.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found that the statin, simvastatin, reduces the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease by almost 50 percent. This is the first study to suggest that statins might reduce the incidence of Parkinson’s disease. These findings, will be published in the July online open access journal BioMed Central (BMC) Medicine.

Alzheimer’s disease or dementia is one of the major public health threats that individuals face as they age. Statins are a class of medications that reduce cholesterol by inhibiting HMG-CoA reductase.

It's not often that people are concerned there aren't enough deaths, but it's happening in the UK.

Thanks to lifestyle changes and effective treatments, deaths from coronary heart disease have been steadily falling since the late 1960s, say the authors of a new study in the journal Heart.

But rising trends in obesity and diabetes threaten to halt or even reverse the “hard fought gains” in cutting deaths from heart disease, they warn. And these trends are much more likely to become apparent among younger Britons first, say the authors.

Very young babies are vulnerable to sudden death, when seated, warns a study published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Babies less than a month old are most at risk, the research indicates.

The researchers base their findings on an analysis of all sudden unexpected deaths occurring among babies up to 12 months of age in the Canadian Province of Quebec between 1991 and 2000.