People with high blood pressure are familiar with ACE inhibitors, drugs that widen blood vessels by limiting activity of ACE, angiotensin-converting enzyme, a naturally occurring protein found in tissues throughout the body.
But high activity of ACE may sometimes be a good thing. A study conducted by Cedars-Sinai scientists found that genetically targeting certain immune blood cells to overproduce the enzyme broke down defective proteins in the brain associated with Alzheimer's disease and prevented cognitive decline in laboratory mice bred to model the disease.
This build is a simplified Leeuwenhoek microscope made from CD-ROM drive parts and construction toys. My initial design was simply a rectangle of corrugated cardboard with a hole punched in it and one of the glass spheres from the
Chem C3000 kit, but the magnification was disappointing and the field of view surprisingly narrow. Another method would have been to demonstrate melting a glass rod, drawing it to a thin glass fiber and then heating the fiber into a glass sphere. Though this would have been historically appropriate, it might be difficult to find this type of glass rod and they might be expensive.
Added sugar during processing or preparing of foods remain at unhealthy levels, according to a study published by JAMA Internal Medicine.
What exactly are healthy levels? Well, there is no clear answer. Recommendations for added sugar consumption vary and there is no universally accepted threshold for unhealthy levels. For example, the Institute of Medicine recommends that added sugar make up less than 25 percent of total calories while the World Health Organization recommends less than 10 percent and the American Heart Association recommends limiting added sugars to less than 100 calories daily for women and 150 calories daily for men.
Don't count nature out yet.
Some aspects of climate change are natural. And some mitigation will be also, according to researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University in the US and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. As the globe warms, ocean temperatures rise, leading to increased water vapor escaping into the atmosphere. Water vapor is really the most important greenhouse gas and its impact on climate is amplified in the stratosphere.
Heat engines transform heat into mechanical energy with the corresponding efficiency of an Otto engine amounting to only about 25 percent, which is what your automobile gets.
The efficiency of heat engines powered by thermal heat reservoirs is determined by the second law of thermodynamics, one of the fundamental concepts in physics. It was as far back as 1824 that Frenchman Nicolas Carnot calculated the maximum possible efficiency limit of such engines, now known as the Carnot limit.
Agriculture in Finland is becoming more market driven.
What will that mean? Fluctuation in prices, more so than with current EU and Finland subsidies and quotas, but better efficiency. Competition will mean fewer farms. The reason for the changes is because profitability continues to be poor despite strong spending by the government. The return on investment for taxpayer spending has been negative on average for the last 10 years. In 2011 in Finland, it was the third weakest in the EU, at -1.1 per cent. The brunt of that inefficiency is small farms kept going only because of subsidies. Half of the farms in Finland produce only 5 percent of the food.
It looks more like a painting than a real-life event but this image from the Cassini orbiter shows the progress of a massive storm on Saturn.
The head of the storm is towards the left of the image, where the most turbulent activity is shown in white, but towards the center you can also see the trace of a spinning vortex in the wake of the storm.
The image is centered at about 0º longitude and 35º N latitude and has had its colors enhanced to help reveal the complex processes in Saturn’s weather. The white corresponds to the highest cloud tops, but to the human eye the storm would appear more as a bright area against a yellow background.
Survey results analyzed by psychologists at The Fenway Institute, an advocacy group for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, found that gay and bisexual boys use anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) at rates much higher than their straight counterparts - almost 6X higher.
Compact fluorescent bulbs save energy but they also contain mercury, a toxic metal.
While environmentalists have promoted them as safe, and the US government has given them a de factor mandate and subsidy by banning incandescent bulbs, there are still concerns among the public about the risks of having hazardous materials in their homes.
Mercury lamps, on the other hand, have been around since 1860. They were rarely used in the home, they are a big part of the reason why incandescent bulbs were invented in the first place, because they made human skin look 'green' and the risks in an enclosed space were too high but are more common in street lamps, because they have long life.
Babies delivered at home by midwives had a roughly four times higher risk of neonatal deaths than babies delivered in hospitals, also by midwives.
The paper is not out to indict the midwife delivery fad but suggests they aren't going to be qualified to deal with problems the way a hospital setting and doctors would be.
The authors link the increased neonatal mortality risk with the location of a planned birth, rather than the credentials of the person delivering the baby.
