The rate of smoking among nursing students is twice that of the general population, indicates a survey of over 800 new nursing students published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing. Busy bodies in the health community argue the results indicate that smoking cessation programs should be incorporated into nursing studies. They say that smoking among healthcare professionals undermines the credibility of anti-smoking campaigns aimed at the general public.

 The Tibetan Plateau—thought to be the primary source of heat that drives the South Asian monsoon—may have far less of an effect than moist, warm air insulated over continental India by the Himalayas and other surrounding mountains, say Harvard climate scientists writing this week in Nature.

The team says that understanding the monsoon's proper origin, especially in the context of global climate change, is crucial for the future sustainability of the region. The findings also have broad implications for how the Asian climate may have responded to mountain uplift in the past, and for how it might respond to surface changes in the coming decades, the researchers say.

Conservation efforts aimed at protecting Gorillas And Elephants in African parks and reserves  are well intentioned but are often based on incorrect assumptions about the local culture, say Purdue University anthropologists. In a new Conservation Biology paper, the team says that understanding local human communities is key to protecting the wildlife they live alongside.

While most researchers and policy makers are looking to new technologies to slow the pace of climate change, scientists from Cornell University and the University of New South Wales are reporting that "biochar" — a material that the Amazonian Indians used to enhance soil fertility centuries ago — has potential in the modern world to help slow global climate change. Mass production of biochar could capture and sock away carbon that otherwise would wind up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. .

Hey, I'm back! I went to a rockin' party and an awesome conference and now I am full of interesting tales. Also, I am full of determination to finish my thesis this year, and an unfortunate byproduct of that resolution is a need to cut down on my blogging. Therefore, as you can see from my mutilated banner, squid-a-day is temporarily squid-a-week, until I finish my degree.

So once a week I will be delivering a concentrated dose of squid! Are you ready for the first? It's extra concentrated, since I had to cover the first twelve days of the new year . . .

Scientists have just identified several molecules capable of reversing the brain abnormalities of Parkinson’s disease (PD), while also uncovering new clues for its origin in a study just published in the journal Disease Models and Mechanisms (1). PD is characterised by abnormal deposits of a brain protein called alpha-synuclein throughout the damaged brain regions, but exactly what they do there is not clear.

The more hands of online poker a player wins, the more money that person is likely to lose, concludes a study conducted by a Cornell sociology doctoral student. The likely reason being that multiple wins are common for small stakes poker, and the more someone plays, the more likely he or she will eventually be walloped by occasional – but significant – losses.

Drinking green tea could modulate the effects of smoking on lung cancer, suggests a hospital-based, randomized study presented at the AACR-IASLC Joint Conference on Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer.

Researchers enrolled 170 patients with lung cancer and 340 healthy patients as controls.  The team administered questionnaires to obtain demographic characteristics, cigarette smoking habits, green tea consumption, dietary intake of fruits and vegetables, cooking practices and family history of lung cancer. They also performed genotyping on insulin-like growth factors as polymorphisms on the following insulin-like growth factors: IGF1, IGF2 and IGFBP3, which have all been reported to be associated with cancer risk.

Blocking the function of an enzyme called cPLA2 with a specific kind of vitamin E can prevent nerve cells from dying after a stroke, new research published in the Journal of Neurochemistry suggests. Using mouse brain cells, scientists found that the tocotrienol (TCT) form of vitamin E stopped the enzyme from releasing fatty acids that eventually kill neurons.

Vitamin E occurs naturally in eight different forms. The best-known form of vitamin E belongs to a variety called tocopherols. The form of vitamin E in this study, tocotrienol or TCT, is not abundant in the American diet but is available as a nutritional supplement. It is a common component of a typical Southeast Asian diet.

No matter what you do for a living, you're likely to consistently feel better mentally and physically on the weekend, according to a study of daily mood variation in employed adults. Dubbed the 'weekend effect', this tendency to feel  better on your days off is largely associated with the freedom to choose how you spend your time, the study's authors suggest.