Women live longer than men but it may not be a great life.   In a study that included 5,888 people over 65, women suffered up to two and a half times more disabilities than men of the same age and the higher rates of obesity and arthritis among these women explained up to 48 percent of the gender gap in disability – above all other common chronic health conditions. 

Obesity and arthritis that take root during early and middle age significantly contribute to women's decreased quality of life during their senior years, according to researchers at Duke University Medical Center.

What happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang?  Super-sensitive microwave detectors, built at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), may soon help scientists find out.

The new sensors, described today at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Denver, were made for a potentially ground-breaking experiment by a collaboration involving NIST, Princeton University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Chicago.

Narcolepsy affects about one in 2,000 people and is characterized by daytime drowsiness, irregular sleep at night and cataplexy — a sudden loss of muscle tone and strength. Stanford University School of Medicine scientist Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD, and others showed in the late 1990s that the disease stems from a lack of hypocretin, a hormone that promotes wakefulness; they later showed that narcoleptics are missing brain cells that produce this hormone.

 Now Mignot and collaborators say that a specific immune cell is involved in the disorder — adding evidence that narcolepsy may be an autoimmune disease.

Most of the world's glaciers are retreating as the planet gets warmer but some, including glaciers south of the equator in South America and New Zealand, are growing.

At least for New Zealand glaciers, scientists have offered an explanation: for the last 7,000 years, they have often moved out of step with glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, pointing to strong regional variations in climate, the authors write in Science.

Conventional wisdom holds that during the era of human civilization, climate has been relatively stable. The new study is the latest to challenge this view, by showing that New Zealand's glaciers have gone through rapid periods of growth and decline during the current interglacial period known as the Holocene.
 

Triggered by a preprint appeared three days ago on the ArXiV -a fundamental resource for particle physicists willing to stay in touch with the latest developments of the theory and new experimental results-  this morning I was gearing up to write a post with a careful, didactical discussion of why we believe that the subnuclear world includes three generations of quarks and three generations of leptons, what is the evidence for this peculiar fact, and what would a fourth generation of matter imply for e.g. searches of the Higgs boson. Unfortunately, my memory is still good enough to let me remember that I did write about those things in my old blog, about one year ago.

MicroRNAs are single-stranded snippets that, not long ago, were given short shrift as genetic junk. Now that studies have shown they regulate genes involved in normal functioning as well as diseases such as cancer, everyone wants to know: What regulates microRNAs?

Scientists at Johns Hopkins were surprised to find an elegantly simple answer: touch.

In a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers discovered that cell-to-cell contact revs up the manufacture of these small but mighty molecules.

Ever miss your daily cup of coffee and subsequently get a pounding headache? According to reports from consumers of coffee and other caffeinated products, caffeine withdrawal is often characterized by a headache, fatigue, feeling less alert, less energetic and experiencing difficulty concentrating.  Caffeine withdrawal is at its worst between 24 to 48 hours and lasts up to a week.

In a recent study (that yielded some exceptionally interesting results), catalytic RNA molecules were used in order to advance the understanding of Darwinian evolution.  Researchers Dr. Sarah Voytek and Professor Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Kellogg School of Science and Technology, choose RNA molecules because they evolve rapidly and self-replicating RNA molecules are hypothesized to be the first organic “life forms” on earth.  With a trillion molecules in a test tube replicating every few minutes, such an approach permits evolution to occur over the course of just a few days.

Following the positive outcomes of shorter studies done on Multiple Sclerosis (MS) drug Betaseron(R), continued testing also yields compelling results.

Analysis from a 16 year follow up study examining long term effects of Betaseron(R) on MS patients showed that early and continued treatment with Betaseron were more likely to avoid negative clinical outcomes than MS patients on alternative treatment options.