A new study finds that 'good' cholesterol is damaged by a sugar-derived substance, methylglyoxal (MG), was found to damage the 'good' cholesterol High Density Lipoprotein - HDL - which removes excess levels of bad cholesterol from the body.
Methylglyoxal is formed from glucose in the body. It is 40,000 times more reactive than glucose and damages arginine residue (amino acid) in HDL at functionally important site causing the particle to become unstable.
Research that found links between abortion and breast cancer also found men who had 'much opportunity to participate in parties' were more likely to have stomach cancer. Credit:
burningmax/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
By Louise Keogh, University of Melbourne
New research on the treatment of 'hardcore' female Mau Mau prisoners by the British in the late 1950s sheds new light on how ideas about gender, deviancy and mental health shaped colonial practices of punishment.
The treatment of the Mau Mau by the British has led to compensation claims in the courts. Last year the British government agreed to pay out £19.9m in costs and compensation to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyans who suffered torture and abuse during the Mau Mau uprising in the 50s. Two of those involved in the recent case were women and further female compensation cases are pending.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas that is also responsible for destroying the ozone layer.
INRA researchers in Dijon have shown that the ability of soils to eliminate N2O can mainly be explained by the diversity and abundance of a new group of micro-organisms that are capable of transforming it into atmospheric nitrogen (N2). The results underline the importance of microbial diversity to the functioning of soils and the services they deliver.
Until the second half of the nineties, when the LEP collider started to be upgraded to investigate higher centre-of-mass energies of electron-positron collisions than those until then produced at the Z mass, the Higgs boson was not the main focus of experiments exploring the high-energy frontier. The reason is that the expected cross section of that particle was prohibitively small for the comparatively low luminosities provided by the facilities available at the time. Of course, one could still look for anomalously high-rate production of final states possessing the characteristics of a Higgs boson decay; but those searches had a limited appeal.
Jack The Ripper is famous - everyone in the Western world has heard of the unsolved case of the Whitechapel serial killer who preyed on prostitutes for a few months in 1888.
There were only five (or six) of those murders almost 130 years ago yet today there are 17 different grisly tours in London's East End about them.
While MOOCs are free, their value lies in providing information about how students. Credit: learnFlickr/Ilonka Talina, CC BY-SA
By Gregor Kennedy, University of Melbourne
George Clooney used to copy my haircuts.
People who knew me in the 1990s always marveled at my classic, parted-on-the-side, immaculately coiffed style. It was retro, just like the term "marvelous' is today. Prior to that, I had a classic Caesar no-part look. He showed up in the television show "E.R." sporting that and I dismissed it as coincidence but when he then jumped onto my "Mad Men without the goop" look, I became suspicious and switched again, to a slicked-back "1980s martial arts villain" look, before changing to what I have now; a random part, more California, less Northeast serious. When you are young, it is a struggle to be taken seriously in the physics and engineering world but I am older now, so it's all cowboy boots and casual.
More than 15 million miles of new roads will be built worldwide by 2050, pushing back the frontiers of progress. Of course, progress may mean a loss of wilderness if it is not managed carefully, and authors have created a ‘global roadmap’ for prioritizing road building across the planet, to try to balance the competing demands of development and environmental protection.
Even for experienced readers, mirror-image letters like b/d or p/q can be confusing. Why is it difficult for some to differentiate these letters?
