Around 20 per cent of girls from ethnic minority backgrounds are not being vaccinated against the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) because they feel they don't need it, according to a Cancer Research UK survey presented today at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference in Liverpool.

The authors say this is the first study done with an ethnically diverse group of girls to look at why they are not vaccinated, or do not complete the series of injections. Researchers found that 17 percent of girls from black backgrounds and 22 percent of girls from Asian backgrounds who hadn't been vaccinated said that they did not need the vaccination and the reasons they gave included that they did not expect to be sexually active before marriage. 

It seems as though no other substance occupies so much of the world’s land, for so little benefit to humanity, as sugar. According to the latest data, sugarcane is the world’s third most valuable crop after cereals and rice, and occupies 26,942,686 hectares of land across the globe. Its main output – apart from commercial profits – is a global public health crisis, which has been centuries in the making.

Diet diversity may be linked to lower diet quality and worse metabolic health, according to survey data from 6,814 participants in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, a study of whites, blacks, Hispanic-Americans and Chinese-Americans in the United States.

The authors looked at diet diversity through different measures. These included the total count (number of different foods eaten in a week), evenness (the distribution of calories across different foods consumed), and dissimilarity (the differences in food attributes relevant to metabolic health, such as fiber, sodium or trans-fat content). 

Major League Baseball can help understand why maps used to predict shaking in future earthquakes often do poorly. 

Earthquake hazard maps use assumptions about where, when, and how big future earthquakes will be to predict the level of shaking. The results are used in designing earthquake-resistant buildings. However, as the study's lead author, earth science and statistics graduate student Edward Brooks, explains "sometimes the maps do well, and sometimes they do poorly. In particular, the shaking and thus damage in some recent large earthquakes was much larger than expected."

University of Adelaide researchers have uncovered the role played by a family of genes, which can suppress hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection within the liver.

The findings, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, shed light on the activity of these genes and how they produce a natural immune response to the virus.

HCV is a major health problem in Australia, with approximately 233,000 Australians having the disease that is transmitted through contaminated blood. Unchecked HCV infection can lead to chronic disease and liver cancer, and both diseases are increasing in frequency.

An astrophysics student at The Australian National University (ANU) has turned to artificial intelligence to help her to see into the hearts of galaxies.

PhD student Elise Hampton was inspired by neural networks to create a program to single out from thousands of galaxies the subjects of her study - the most turbulent and messy galaxies.

"I love artificial intelligence. It was actually a very simple program to write, once I learnt how," said Ms Hampton, who is studying at the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

An active galaxy. Credit: ESA_NASA_AVO_Paolo Padovani

In a recent study published in Nature Physics, ICFO researchers Ignacio Martínez, Édgar Roldán, the late Dmitri Petrov and Raúl Rica, in collaboration with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, have reported on the development of a microscopic motor operating between two thermal baths, that is, a micro Carnot engine.

Fifteen years ago, a study showed that the brains of London cab drivers had an enlargement in the hippocampus, a brain area associated with navigation. But questions remained: Did the experience of navigating London's complex system of streets change their brains, or did only the people with larger hippocampi succeed in becoming cab drivers?

Restoring testosterone production in men may be as effective as replacing it, without compromising their fertility. Two phase III clinical trials show that a drug that restores the body's natural production of testosterone has no negative effect on a man's sperm count while a topical testosterone gel causes a significant drop. The findings, which are published in BJU International, could change the way men are treated for low testosterone.

Science fiction stories often suggest that ETs, and our future selves also, would be expansionist, colonizing the galaxy, taking over worlds, and so forth. It's natural enough, because we are expansionist ourselves. But it's actually quite easy to see that ETs simply can't have expanding populations, at least not for very long. Not if they are anything like us. 

It's a simple calculation which I covered before. If their doubling time is once a century, say (for  ease of calculation) - then in a thousand years, their population multiples by a little over a thousand (two to the power ten). So after two thousand years it has multiplied by a million, by a billion after three thousand years and so on.