More than 25 per cent of the world’s adult population are hypertensive, and it has been estimated that this figure will increase to 29 per cent by 2025. In addition, hypertension causes around 50 per cent of coronary heart disease, and approximately 75 per cent of strokes.

In demonstrating that nitrate is likely to underlie the cardio-protective effect of a vegetable-rich diet, researchers at Barts and The London School of Medicine have discovered that drinking just 500ml of beetroot juice a day can significantly reduce blood pressure.

Led by Professor Amrita Ahluwalia of the William Harvey Research Institute at Barts and The London School of Medicine, and Professor Ben Benjamin of Peninsula Medical School, the research reveals that it is the ingestion of dietary nitrate contained within beetroot juice - and similarly in green, leafy vegetables - which results ultimately in decreased blood pressure.

Previously the protective effects of vegetable-rich diets had been attributed to their antioxidant vitamin content.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed.

In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we talked about how even the most primitive components of the universe had a sort of retained memory; the culture of quarks, if you will.

An international team writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) say anthropogenic forcing could push the Earth’s climate system past critical thresholds, so that important components may “tip” into qualitatively different modes of operation. They say even small changes can have large long-term consequences on human and ecological systems.

“Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change,“ the researchers around Timothy Lenton from the British University of East Anglia in Norwich and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research report. Global change may appear to be a slow and gradual process on human scales. However, in some regions anthropogenic forcing on the climate system could kick start abrupt and potentially irreversible changes. For these sub-systems of the Earth system the researchers introduce the term “tipping element”.

Aerospace engineers are again looking to natural flyers to create the next generation in airplanes.

For example:

• A Blackbird jet flying nearly 2,000 miles per hour covers 32 body lengths per second but a common pigeon flying at 50 miles per hour covers 75.
• The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second.
• Select military aircraft can withstand gravitational forces of 8-10 G. Many birds routinely experience positive G-forces greater than 10 G and up to 14 G.

In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play.

More than 230 million video and computer games were sold in 2005, and polls show that 40 percent of Americans play games on a computer or a console. According to a 2007 Harris Interactive survey, young males are two to three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games, such as the Halo series so popular in recent years.

"These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on video games than females," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was recently published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

"T-rays", pulses of terahertz radiation, could let art historians see murals hidden beneath coats of plaster or paint in centuries-old buildings in much the same way X-rays let doctors see through skin and could also illuminate penciled sketches under paintings on canvas without harming the artwork, according to new research.

Current methods of imaging underdrawings can't detect certain art materials such as graphite or sanguine, a red chalk that some of the masters are believed to have used.

The team of researchers used terahertz imaging to detect colored paints and a graphite drawing of a butterfly through 4 mm of plaster. They believe their technique is capable of seeing even deeper. A paper on the research is published in the February edition of Optics Communications.

Patients with diabetes or high blood pressure could benefit from the development of new "smart" holograms which can detect changes in, among other things, glucose levels and make self-diagnosis much simpler, cheaper and more reliable, write Chris Lowe and Cynthia Larbey in February’s Physics World.

A hologram is a recording of an optical interference pattern created when laser light shone on an object is made to overlap with a separate beam of light that does not pass through the object. When light is shone onto the interference pattern, a 3D image of the original object is recreated.

Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that languages change and evolve in rapid bursts rather than in a steady pattern.

The research in Science investigates thousands of years of language evolution, and looks at the way in which languages split and evolve. It has long been accepted that the desire for a distinct social identity may cause languages to change quickly, but it has not previously been known whether such rapid bursts of change are a regular feature of the evolution of human language. The findings show that initially, the basic vocabulary of newly formed languages develops and changes quite quickly, and this is then followed by longer periods of slower and gradual change.

Drugs derived from cinchona bark, known as cinchona alkaloids, have been used in healing from ancient times. The most prominent representative of this group is quinine, a bitter substance contained in beverages such as tonic water and used in modern medicine to combat malaria.

As early as 1945, Robert Burns Woodward and William von Eggers Doering (Harvard University) described how to synthesize quinine in the laboratory. The last step of this “formal” total synthesis, a three-step reaction procedure previously described by Paul Rabe and Karl Kindler in 1918, has continued to be the subject of much controversy to this day.

Had they done it or not? That has been the question for decades. Woodward and Doering published the synthesis of d-quinotoxine in 1944. Based on the conversion of d-quinotoxine into quinine described by Rabe and Kindler in 1918, they claimed to have derived the total synthesis of quinine, though they had not actually completed this last step themselves before publishing. Their “formal” total synthesis was strongly challenged and was even dismissed as a “myth” by Gilbert Stork (Columbia University) in 2001.

A new approach to cleaning up digital photos has been developed by researchers in the UK and Jordan - they use a computer algorithm known as PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) to intelligently boost contrast and detail in images without distorting the underlying features.

Malik Braik and Alaa Sheta Al-Balqa Applied University, in Salt, Jordan, working with Aladdin Ayesh at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, explain that the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm represents an entirely new approach to solving all kinds of optimization problems. PSO has recently been used in computer science and electrical engineering.