Studies that deliberately exclude older adults from their samples render older adults' sexuality invisible. shutterstock

By Sue Malta, University of Melbourne

Want more working memory? Then you need to expand your brain. Credit: Flickr/Elena Gatti, CC BY

By Joel Pearson

Before we had mobile phones, people had to use their own memory to store long phone numbers (or write them down). But getting those numbers into long-term memory could be a real pain.

-Low-income populations deserve basic energy rights to protect them from "energy insecurity" and the environmental and related health risks from living in "energy sacrifice zones" where energy is produced. The disproportionate burden these vulnerable communities bear across the continuum of energy supply and demand is discussed in Environmental Justice.

By Amanda Salis, University of Sydney

Dietary guidelines broadly recommend a daily intake of 10,000 kilojoules (2,400 calories) for men and 8,000 kilojoules (1,900 calories) for women. But what do these figures mean in the context of the number of kilojoules or calories you personally need to consume to attain and maintain a healthy body weight?

I’m going to stick with kilojoules in this article because kilojoules – not calories – are the metric unit for measuring energy, just as kilograms – not pounds – are the metric unit for measuring body weight.

A collaboration between more than 70 researchers across the globe has uncovered nine new genes on the X chromosome that, when knocked-out, lead to learning disabilities. The international team studied almost all X chromosome genes in 208 families with learning disabilities - the largest screen of this type ever reported. 

By Katy Bell, University of Sydney; Alexandra Barratt, University of Sydney, and Andrew Hayen, UNSW Australia

Cancer screening is beneficial when it’s able to prevent people dying from cancer. And it should clearly be adopted where there’s evidence showing this. But using cancer survival rates to promote screening, as is often done, is misleading.

Women are playing an increasing role in science today but there are still barriers that can prevent them from achieving success comparable to their male colleagues.

This feeds the argument that there is a gender pay gap in earnings in science, although that doesn’t tell the full story of the challenges facing women scientists.

The Institute of Public Affairs senior researcher Mikayla Novak took the opportunity on International Women’s Day to exhort us to “avoid sensationalist, but misleading average pay gap statistics”, and instead focus on individual choices.

She argued that:

Not many people would know the peculiar vocabulary used to evaluate scientists.

‘H index’, ‘impact factor’ and ‘citation number’ are some of the snazzy phrases that are now ubiquitous in the world of science. Not all scientific papers are born equal - some are ground-breaking, while most are an incremental advance – and these scales have been developed to help determine the ‘impact’ of the scientific articles that are published.

Cancer researchers say a large genome-wide association study (GWAS) that spanned three continents has identified four chromosome locations with genetic changes that are likely to alter a woman's risk of developing ovarian cancer. 

Researchers say that while more needs to be learned about the function of the specific chromosomal regions involved in susceptibility, the discoveries move them a major step closer to individualized risk assessments for ovarian cancer. In the future, women at greatest risk due to these and other inherited changes may be offered increased surveillance or preventive measures.

An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, have identified the genes encoding a molecule that famously defines Group A Streptococcus (strep), a pathogenic bacterial species responsible for more than 700 million infections worldwide each year.

The findings, published online in the June 11 issue of Cell Host&Microbe, shed new light on how strep bacteria resists the human immune system and provides a new strategy for developing a safe and broadly effective vaccine against strep throat, necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease) and rheumatic heart disease.