As many as 700,000 people in the UK suffer from a heart abnormality called arrhythmia, a potentially fatal condition, which the majority of Londoners have never heard of - according to a recent survey conducted by YouGov[1]. Many of the deaths associated with arrhythmias could be prevented due to advances in the identification and treatment of high risk patients.

A genetic link to caring about global warming?   Al Gore has truly jumped the shark, you may be thinking.    But humans may be programmed by evolution to care about their environment, suggests research published today, because it impacts reproduction and fitness.

Dr Peter Sozou of the University of Warwick suggests that individuals may have an innate tendency to care about the long-term future of their communities, over timescales much longer than an individual's lifespan. This in turn may help to explain people's wish to take action over long-term environmental problems.

A new study demonstrates that when faced with a difficult decision, the human brain calls upon multiple neural systems that code for different sorts of behaviors and strategies. The research in the May 28th issue of Neuron provides intriguing insight into the mechanisms that help the human brain rise to the formidable challenge of adaptive decision making in the real world.

Are parasites evolving to be more or less aggressive depending on whether they are closely connected to their hosts or scattered among more isolated clusters of hosts?  Research led by Geoff Wild, an NSERC-funded mathematician at the University of Western Ontario, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh.

They decided to move the arguments from words to harder science and developed a formal mathematical model that incorporated variable patch sizes and the host parasite population dynamics. It was then run to determine the underlying evolutionary mechanisms. 

Far from being geeky and exotic, virtual reality could be the key to a new range of innovative products. European researchers and industrialists have come together to build a world-leading community ready to exploit that promise.

Made famous by the ‘holodeck’ in Star Trek: The Next Generation, virtual reality (VR) has long had the reputation of being slightly frivolous. Yet Europe’s VR industry is emerging as a world leader thanks to new efforts to coordinate developments on a continental scale.

Studies of climate evolution and the ecology of past-times are often hampered by missing information – lost variables needed to complete the picture and thought untraceable have made too many assumptions necessary.   Scientists writing in in the June issue of New Journal of Physics have created a formula which they say will fill in the gaps in our knowledge and will help predict the future.

A new method of reconstructing missing data will shed new light on how and why our climate moved us on from ice ages to warmer periods as researchers will be able to calculate lost information and put together a more complete picture.