The simple training exercise of catching a weighted medicine ball can improve balance and may help prevent falls in the elderly - and if you have a grandkid that wants to go out in the yard and toss a baseball, it will be good for both of them in many ways.

When someone is jostled by a bump or a stumble, the brain uses two strategies to maintain balance and prevent a fall, says Alexander Aruin, professor of physical therapy at University of Illinois at Chicago and principal investigator on the two studies.

"When the perturbation is predictable, for example, if when walking down the street you see someone about to bump into you, you brace yourself," Aruin said. The brain activates muscles in anticipation of the jolt.

Sepsis is a leading cause of death for patients in intensive care units. The excessive systemic inflammation in individuals with sepsis damages organs and can lead to death.

Therapeutic options for sepsis are limited and the factors that promote this excessive response to infection are poorly understood. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation identifies a metabolic pathway that underlies sepsis inflammation. Augustine Choi and colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College found that a mitochondrial uncoupling protein, UCP2, is elevated in patients with sepsis. In mouse model of sepsis, lack of this protein improved survival.

No one in the United States or foreign governments like that the Obama administration was caught spying on everyone at unprecedented levels - it was always a 'gentleman's agreement' to use some prudence and not get caught.

When mass murders happen in a place like the US, despite the fact that they are no more prevalent than most countries and murders have plummeted as gun ownership rose, the simplistic answer is 'guns' - when murders happen in Canada or France, where gun ownership is heavily restricted, the answer is not so convenient. 

It may not be guns forcing people to kill people, it may be attachment to an 'overvalued idea' - and it may become more common.

Zehaf-Bibeau, the Islamist convert who murdered a Canadian military reservist on duty in Ottawa, represents a type of attacker rarely discussed--a person so obsessed with an overvalued idea that it defines their identity and leads them to commit violence without regard for the consequences.

Air Force reservists based in the U.S. who worked after the Vietnam War in C-123 aircraft that sprayed Agent Orange during the war could have experienced adverse health effects from exposure to the herbicide, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. The reservists who served in the contaminated C-123s experienced some degree of exposure to the toxic chemical component of Agent Orange known as TCDD (2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin), and it is plausible, in some cases, that the reservists exceeded TCDD exposure guidelines for workers in enclosed settings.

Gine Roll Skjaervoe at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Biology has studied church records from the period 1750-1900 and looked at life history variables: how old were women when they had their first child, and their last? How many years passed between the birth of each child, and how many of these children survived? How many of these children were in turn married and had children?

All told, she studied information from more than 9,000 people listed in the church records she examined.