Due to Budget constraints, registered nurses in European countries are often confronted with difficult decisions: They have to decide which care activities they can offer to their patients and which to omit. 

What usually gets cut is patient comfort or talk with patients or educating patients and relatives.

An analysis by the Institute of Nursing Sciences at the University of Basel shows that all European countries are affected and revealed a correlation between omitted nursing care and increased patient mortality.

You often see demonstrations of titration using an expensive glass burette, but you can build titration lab ware using a disposable serological pipette, a solder sucker bulb, and a ring stand or support stand. For this build I’m using my erector set support stand (I sometimes call it my Bunsen burner stand). Titration is the process of determining the unknown concentration of a solution by adding a known amount of a solution with a known concentration. For example, in an acid-base titration, you can determine the unknown concentration of an acid in a solution by adding a base solution of known concentration.

Germans: ‘We’ve found second solar system’

This sounds like something from a science fiction comic when I was young, back in the days when Dan Dare was with Spacefleet, which was effectively the RAF in Space before the Russians and Americans took over.

However, this bit of news is quite contemporary.  According to one of my favourite online newspapers*, a team of German scientists claim to have discovered a “second solar system” made up of seven planets orbiting a star similar to our own.

Gastric bypass surgery has become one of the most commonly performed procedures in the treatment of obesity. In most patients, it quickly produces substantial body weight loss and improved glucose tolerance. However, the metabolic improvements vary considerably from patient to patient.

A hormone test may be able to predict the extent of metabolic improvement caused by the gastric bypass. These are the results of a study on a rodent model conducted by Prof. Dr. Matthias Tschöp and his colleagues from the Institute of Diabetes and Obesity (IDO), Helmholtz Diabetes Center at Helmholtz Zentrum München together with a team of researchers led by Dr. Kirk Habegger at the Metabolic Disease Institute of the University of Cincinnati.

Basic ocean conditions such as current directions and water temperature play a huge role in determining the behavior of young migrating salmon as they move from rivers and hit ocean waters for the first time -  and how the fish fare during their first few weeks in the ocean has a profound impact on species' ability to survive into adulthood.

Late nights are not great for most people and especially roe children, according to a new paper. 
Teenagers who go to bed late during the school year are more prone to academic and emotional difficulties in the long run, compared to their earlier-to-bed counterparts.

The scholars analyzed longitudinal data from a nationally representative cohort of 2,700 U.S. adolescents of whom 30 percent reported bedtimes later than 11:30 p.m. on school days and 1:30 a.m. in the summer in their middle and high school years. By the time they graduated from high school, the school-year night owls had lower GPA scores, and were more vulnerable to emotional problems than teens with earlier bedtimes

Even 20 minutes of moderate exercise a few times per week during pregnancy enhances the newborn child's brain development, according to a new paper.

In the past, obstetricians would tell women to take it easy and rest during their pregnancy. Now it is now commonly accepted that too much inactivity is more of a health concern and so for women not at risk of losing a pregnancy, some exercise is recommended.  And it may have a benefit for the baby as well.

"Given that exercise has been demonstrated to be beneficial for the adult's brain, we hypothesized that it could also be beneficial for the unborn child through the mother's actions," says study co-author Professor Daniel Curnier of the University of Montreal.

Tiny self-assembling transport networks, powered by nano-scale motors and controlled by DNA, have been developed. And the system can construct its own network of tracks spanning tens of micrometers in length, transport cargo across the network and even dismantle the tracks.

Researchers were inspired by the melanophore, used by fish cells to control their color. Tracks in the network all come from a central point, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Motor proteins transport pigment around the network, either concentrating it in the center or spreading it throughout the network. Concentrating pigment in the center makes the cells lighter, as the surrounding space is left empty and transparent.

Ever since the term 'junk DNA' was coined (1) - like the 'God particle' it quickly spun out of control due to colloquial misunderstanding of what it meant scientifically - and even more so when the human genome was decoded and it was discovered that only about 3 percent of the entire genome contains information that encodes for proteins, the question has been, 'what is happening in all that other stuff?'

Scientists have described a new species of scorpion, Euscorpius lycius, from  the regions of the Muğla and Antalya Provinces in Southwestern Turkey, what was once known as ancient Lycia, fought over by Persians and Greeks for centuries due to it being a good source of wheat and timber. The last remaining Greeks were forced to leave after the 1919-1922 war with Turkey.

Euscorpius is a genus of scorpions, commonly called small wood-scorpions. As their name suggest these scorpions don't impress with a large size, the biggest representative being around 5 cm long. The group is widespread in North Africa and across Europe. Euscorpius scorpions are relatively harmless, with poison that has effects similar to a mosquito bite.