People who stay mentally sharp into their 80s and beyond challenge the notion that brain changes linked to mental decline and Alzheimer's disease are a normal, inevitable part of aging, say scientists presenting at the ACS National Meeting.

The researchers say that elderly people with super-sharp memory — so-called "super-aged" individuals — somehow escaped formation of brain "tangles." The tangles consist of an abnormal form of a protein called "tau" that damages and eventually kills nerve cells. Named for their snarled, knotted appearance under a microscope, tangles increase with advancing age and peak in people with Alzheimer's disease.

Specially medicated contact lenses loaded with vitamin E can keep glaucoma medicine near the eye — where it can treat the disease — almost 100 times longer than possible with current commercial lenses, scientists reported today at the ACS National Meeting.

Glaucoma is second only to cataracts as the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in the world. It affects almost 67 million people. Eye drops that relieve the abnormal build-up of pressure inside the eye that occurs in glaucoma, are a mainstay treatment.

Protein phosphorylation, the process by which proteins are flipped from one activation state to another, is a crucial function for most living beings, since it controls nearly every cellular process, including metabolism and gene transcription.

Consumers could soon be paying a lot more for meat, milk, eggs and other farm staples
if bad weather withers a U.S. corn crop that is now tethered to grain-intensive renewable fuel mandates, a new University of Illinois study warns.

A corn shortage, coupled with surging demand to meet government-ordered ethanol standards, could push cash prices to $7 a bushel, the study found, squeezing livestock producers and spiking grocery prices. The study warns that federal policymakers need to forge solutions now to cushion the blow of a shortfall that history shows is a matter of when and how severe, not if.

A new study published in Neuron suggests that our ability to respond with outrage toward people who attempt to harm us is seated in a brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC).

Patients with damage to this brain area are unable to conjure a normal emotional response to hypothetical situations in which a person tries, but fails, to kill another person. Therefore, they judge the situation based only on the outcome, and do not hold the attempted murderer morally responsible.

The findings support the idea that making moral judgments requires at least two processes — a logical assessment of the intention, and an emotional reaction to it.

People in developed nations are living as much as a decade longer than their parents did as a result of staying healthy to a more advanced age, according to a new review published in Nature.

The better health in older age stems from public health efforts to improve living conditions and prevent disease, and from improved medical interventions, said author James Vaupel, who heads Duke University's Center on the Demography of Aging.

Over the past 170 years, in the countries with the highest life expectancies, the average life span has grown at a rate of 2.5 years per decade, or about 6 hours per day.