Moons outside our Solar System with the potential to support life have just become much easier to detect, thanks to research by an astronomer at University College London (UCL).

David Kipping has found that such moons can be revealed by looking at wobbles in the velocity of the planets they orbit. His calculations, which appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society today, not only allow us to confirm if a planet has a satellite but to calculate its mass and distance from its host planet ­ factors that determine the likely habitabiliity of a moon.

More than five million people die every year from infectious diseases, despite the availability of numerous antibiotics and vaccines. The discovery of penicillin to treat bacterial infections, along with the development of vaccines for previously incurable virus diseases such as polio and smallpox, achieved great reductions in mortality during the mid-20th century.

A new study from the psychology department at Tufts University shows that when dieters eliminate carbohydrates from their meals, they performed more poorly on memory-based tasks than when they reduce calories, but maintain carbohydrates. When carbohydrates were reintroduced, cognition skills returned to normal.

While the brain uses glucose as its primary fuel, it has no way of storing it. Rather, the body breaks down carbohydrates into glucose, which is carried to the brain through the blood stream and used immediately by nerve cells for energy. Reduced carbohydrate intake should thus reduce the brain's source of energy. Therefore, researchers hypothesized that diets low in carbohydrates would affect cognitive skills.

Women's magazines such as The Oprah Magazine and Cosmopolitan portray cosmetic surgery as a physically risky but overall worthwhile option for enhancing physical appearance but a University of British Columbia study has found they aren't really addressing possible emotional health risks.

The study, published in Women's Health Issues journal, is the first to examine how women's magazines portray cosmetic surgery to Canadians, and also found that male opinions on female attractiveness are routinely used to justify cosmetic surgery and that a disproportionate amount of articles are devoted to breast implants and cosmetic surgery among women aged 19-34.

Airline pilots who have flown for many years may be at risk of DNA damage from prolonged exposure to cosmic ionizing radiation, suggests a study in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The research team compared the rate of chromosomal (DNA) abnormalities in blood samples taken from 83 airline pilots and 50 university faculty members from the same US city.

The two groups were matched for age (35 to 56), sex (male), and smoking habit (light or non-smokers). Age and smoking are known risk factors for cumulative DNA damage.

Fifty eight of the pilots (70%) had served in the military, and they had undertaken significantly more personal air travel than the university staff. Both these factors would have exposed them to more ionising radiation.

Hospital-borne infections are a serious risk of a long-term hospital stay, and ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), a lung infection that develops in about 15% of all people who are ventilated, is among the most dangerous. With weakened immune systems and a higher resistance to antibiotics, patients who rely on a mechanical ventilator can easily develop serious infections — as 26,000 Americans do every year.

Thanks to a proven new clinical approach developed by Tel Aviv University nurses, though, there is a new tool for stopping the onset of VAP in hospitals.

This new high-tech tool? An ordinary toothbrush.

Three Times a Day Keeps Pneumonia Away

Chocolate toffee came to America from England in the 1920s with Heath, Hammond, and Jane Royce who made the treat from an old family recipe for family and friends. When her time came, Jane took the highly coveted recipe with her to her grave, and that would have been the end of the story had it not been for her daughter Betty Burns who became determined to revive the tradition and her great-granddaughter, Stephanie Rush, who decided to share the treat, though not the recipe, with the rest of us with the online and wholesale business Rushburn Toffee Company.

How can we share 98% of our DNA with a chimpanzee and still be so different? One of the biggest biological surprises found in our genomes is that chimps, mice, and even flies don't differ very much from us in either number or types of genes. What makes the many diverse animal groups different is not what genes they have; the secret is in how those genes are used.

Something similar takes place inside ourselves: nearly every one of our cells carries the exact same DNA, and yet some cells transmit electrical signals in the brain, while others break down toxic compounds in the liver. How do you get such different cells from the same DNA? Again, the secret lies in how genes are regulated.

It should be no surprise then that gene regulation has been the subject of intense study. Most of these studies have focused on taking known genes and describing how they are regulated, but what biologists would really like to do is predict how an unfamiliar gene is controlled, simply by analyzing that gene's regulatory DNA. Once we can predict how genes are regulated, we're not far away from being able to design new regulatory DNA, which we can use to control the fate of stem cells, manipulate dosing in gene therapy, and design microbes that make better biofuels or degrade toxic waste.  A new report in Nature describes an innovative new way to learn the logic of gene regulation.

TORTOLA, British Virgin Islands, December 10 /PRNewswire/ -- BSG Resources Guinea (BSGR Guinea) is pleased to announce that it has been awarded Simandou Block 1 and Block 2. BSGR Guinea welcomes this opportunity to work together with the Government and the people of the Republic of Guinea to create a world class iron ore mine in Guinea.

RISI today through its Wood Biomass Market Report, indicated that woodfiber will play a major role in any new green energy spending plans in the U.S. The Report stated that as of Dec. 12, estimates from the ever-expanding federal stimulus package suggest the green component (wood, wind, solar, etc.) will be a whopping US$50 billion over two years. If 20% falls to wood energy, that near term spending of US$10 billion would spur formidable growth, providing tens of thousands of new jobs -- and wood demand of perhaps 120 million green tons, long-term.