The NHS and private healthcare are not providing good enough basic care to a large portion of the population in England, especially older and frailer people, according to a study published on bmj.com today.

Overall, only 62% of the care recommended for older adults is actually received, conclude the authors.

The large-scale independent study of quality of care involved 8 688 people aged 50 and over and looked at 13 different health conditions including heart disease, diabetes, stroke, depression and osteoarthritis.

All animals, plants and bacteria run the risk of being infected by specific viruses. For humans, such viruses include the flu virus, for the tobacco plant this is the tobacco mosaic virus and for the intestinal bacterium E. coli this is the enterobacteria phage lambda.

During the course of evolution, these organisms have developed systems to render viruses harmless. Viruses respond by adapting themselves in such a way that they avoid the defence mechanism, to which the bacteria respond in turn. In short, there is a continuous arms race between bacteria and viruses.

Researchers at Wageningen University, together with colleagues from England and the United States, have unravelled a mechanism with which bacteria can defend themselves for a longer period against threatening viruses.

Boys may be more apt than girls to have childhood asthma, but, when compared to girls, they are also more likely to grow out of it in adolescence and have a decreased incidence of asthma in the post-pubertal years. This indicates that there may be a buried mechanism in asthma development, according to a prospective study that analyzed airway responsiveness (AR) in more than 1,000 children with mild to moderate asthma over a period of about nine years.

"We wanted to investigate what was behind the observed sex differences in asthma rates and AR," says lead researcher, Kelan G. Tantisira, M.D., M.P.H., of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. "This is the first study to prospectively examine the natural history of sex differences in asthma in this manner."

If you live in Spain, you may have felt like some weather occurred on a predictable cycle, even a weekly one. And if you are below a certain age, you may even have been planning your seasonal activities around it your whole life.

You aren't alone. Arturo Sanchez-Lorenzo of the University of Barcelona and colleagues from the University of Girona, the University of Valencia and the University of Augsburg have thought the same thing.

Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they detail their study of Spain during the 1961–2004 period. To minimize the impact of local variables, they used 13 series from stations placed in different climatological and geographical areas.

Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have wondered why some lineages have diversified more than others. A classical explanation is that a higher rate of diversification reflects increased ecological opportunities that led to a rapid adaptive radiation of a clade. A textbook example is Darwin finches from Galapagos, whose ancestor colonized a competitors-free archipelago and rapidly radiated in 13 species, each one adapted to use the food resources in a different way.

This and other examples have led some to think that the progenitors of the major evolutionary radiations are those that happened to be in the right place and at the right time to take advantage of ecological opportunities.

The next generation of digital audio broadcasting has arrived: ROCK ANTENNE at the Fraunhofer stand (TWF 5.3, Stand 15) at IFA in Berlin will be the world's first radio station to broadcast its program in DAB Surround and mp3 Surround Internet radio.

DAB Surround will lend new quality to digital radio thanks to developments by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen. Researchers there have devised the necessary techniques for processing and compressing the audio data.

The special feature of DAB Surround is that it doesn't require a higher data rate than stereo DAB to achieve this noticeably better sound experience. This is because the new MPEG Surround standard, developed largely by Fraunhofer engineers, compresses the six channels of a surround music track to the extent that they require no more memory than a compressed stereo signal.