Like sports, want to play into old age without the injury risk? Walking football - or basketball, or lots of other things - might be the answer.

Football - soccer in the United States - is running and kicking. If you change the running to walking, the skill is the same but the injury risk is reduced. Although coaches have long forced players to walk, the same way guitar teachers force players to play a fast piece slowly, as a popular movement Walking Football began in 2011, as a way  to help keep older players involved in football for longer. Players can walk, they can even walk fast, just not run. 

The health benefits of walking are well-established and Walking Football just makes it more fun. 

Though women are 20 percent of full-time faculty in medical schools, they are not rising to senior leadership positions in similar numbers, a situation strikingly different from the corporate world, where women have choices about how high they want to rise.

Mindfulness meditation practices resulted in improved sleep quality for older adults with moderate sleep disturbance in a clinical trial comparing meditation to a more structured program focusing on changing poor sleep habits and establishing a bedtime routine, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Sleep disturbances are a medical and public health concern for our nation's aging population. An estimated 50 percent of individuals 55 years and older have some sort of sleep problem. Moderate sleep disturbances in older adults are associated with higher levels of fatigue, disturbed mood, such as depressive symptoms, and a reduced quality of life, according to the study background.

Valium, one of the best known antianxiety drugs, produces its calming effects by binding with a particular protein in the brain. But the drug has an almost equally strong affinity for a completely different protein. Understanding this secondary interaction might offer clues about Valium's side effects and point the way to more effective drugs.

The paper to read today is one from the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider -my competitors, as I work for the other experiment across the ring, CMS. ATLAS has just produced a new article which describes the search for the CP-odd A boson, a particle which arises in Supersymmetry as well as in more generic extensions of the Standard Model called "two-higgs doublet models". What are these ?

Tobacco use has plummeted in the past few decades, due to high taxes, bans on advertising and generous contracts for public relations companies to vilify smokers - but there are still more than a billion people worldwide who regularly use tobacco, including many who purchase the products illicitly.

Tens of thousands of pounds of methane leak per hour from equipment in three major natural gas basins that span Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, according to airborne measurements published today. But the overall leak rate from those basins is only about one percent of gas production there--lower than leak rates measured in other gas fields, and in line with federal estimates.

Cancer vaccines are designed to turn the body's own immune system specifically against tumor cells. Particularly promising are vaccines that are directed against so-called neoantigens: These are proteins that have undergone a genetic mutation in tumor cells and, therefore, differ from their counterparts in healthy cells. The tiny alteration - sometimes only a single protein building block has been changed - gives the protein on the tumor cell surface novel immunological characteristics that can be recognized as "foreign" by the immune system's T cells. Therapeutic vaccines using a short protein fragment, or peptide, specifically containing the mutated site can then direct immune cells specifically to the tumor.

Potatoes are an essential food for humans and now two new varieties produced by the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development have been added to the Registry of Commercial Varieties. 

Health marketing materials used to promote measles vaccine during the 1960s. CDC

The news on the current measles outbreak contains plenty of reminders that measles causes brain damage, pneumonia, hearing loss and death. A few lone voices have spoken up to say measles isn’t that serious, including an Arizona doctor who said it’s “really just a fever and a rash” – and soon found himself under investigation by his state’s medical board.