A new type of exercise equipment, first designed for actor Christopher Reeve, who played "Superman" in the 1977 film and its three sequels, can prevent serious lifestyle illnesses in paraplegic patients, according to a new exercise study.

In the study completed last year, patients who were paralyzed from the chest or waist down experienced an average increase in their oxygen uptake by 25 per cent and in their heart pumping volume by fully 37 per cent – after just eight weeks of training on the bike.

Patients who are unable to walk after a spinal injury have a poorer quality of life and shortened lifespan compared to non-paralyzed counterparts. Sitting passively in a chair makes people susceptible to weight and digestion problems, lower bone density, diabetes and heart/circulation problems.

States that perform local-level background checks for firearms purchases are more effective in reducing firearm suicide and homicide rates than states that rely only on a federal-level background check, according to a new study by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

There are three entities that perform background checks for firearm purchases. The FBI, a single state agency or a local law enforcement department such as a municipal police or sheriff's office are the bodies contacted to perform background checks.

The odds are poor that humanity will ever curtail CO2 emissions sufficiently fast against even the mid-case global warming scenarios forecast by climatologists. A possible near-term remedy, however, has been found in the form of a simple pollution abatement strategy in the mitigation of airborne soot. Airborne soot falls from the air in a matter of weeks, so its abatement is far more efficacious - in terms of tangible environmental benefits - than first migitating CO2 emissions.

Ramanathan has served on IPCC WG2 Panels, he headed the UN's INDOEX project and he's as solid a climate scientist as we have.

A black iceberg & melting snow
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=impure-as-the-driven-snow

An analysis of ongoing randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in diabetes finds that only about 20 percent have as primary outcomes results that patients consider important, such as illness, pain, effect on function and death, according to a new study.

Concerns about the safety and efficacy of diabetes interventions continue, in part because RCTs have not measured their effect on patient-important outcomes as quality of life and death, according to background information in the article. "Are future diabetes trials likely to be more informative to patients and clinicians?" the researchers ask.

Gunjan Y. Gandhi, M.D., M.Sc., and M. Hassan Murad, M.D., M.P.H., of Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., and colleagues examined large public clinical trial registries to systematically determine the extent to which ongoing and future registered RCTs plan to measure patient-important outcomes in patients with diabetes. The researchers identified phase 2 through 4 RCTs enrolling patients with diabetes.

The folding of paper or drops of water falling from a tap are two events which involve the creation of singularities requiring sophisticated mathematical techniques to describe, analyze and predict.

Singularities occur at a point of cut off, or sudden change, within a physical system, as in formation of cracks, lightning strikes, creation of ink drops in printers, and the breaking of a cup when it drops. Improved understanding of the underlying mathematics would have many benefits, for example in making materials of all kinds that are more resistant to cracking or breaking.

There is a lot in common between many such singular events across a whole range of scales, from microscopic interactions to the very formation of the universe itself during the Big Bang. In the past these seemingly unconnected events involving singularities have tended to be studied in isolation by different scientists with relatively little interaction or exchange of ideas between them.

A new study by Yan Zhang at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Management seeks to determine why CEOs leave the job after a short period. Of the 204 company leaders Zhang studied from 1993 to 1998, 55 (27 percent) left their jobs within three years.

Is it an alarming statistic? Not really. According to the 2005 Hudson report (1), 36 percent of employees expect to leave within three years, though most of them are likely unhappy with pay and benefits, something CEOs don't share.

Zhang doesn't factor in competition from other companies and the specific nature of Sarbanes-Oxley that make competition for risk-takers more prevalent, namely that signing a company document in today's business climate can send you to jail.

Getting an accurate picture of information and people is difficult. If you start counting people in China today, by the time you finish there are a lot more. Ditto with information. So you may get only a snapshot accurate to milliseconds.

But researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have announced a new study to quantify the amounts and kinds of information being produced worldwide by businesses and consumers alike.

The “How Much Information?” study will be completed by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university faculty team supported by corporate and foundation sponsorship. The program will be undertaken at the Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS), with support from the Jacobs School of Engineering and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Disinfectants are routinely used on hard surfaces in hospitals to kill bacteria, with antimicrobial containing wipes increasingly being employed for this purpose.

A study by the University's Welsh School of Pharmacy looked into the ability of antimicrobial-surface wipes to remove, kill and prevent the spread of such infections as MRSA. They found that current protocols utilized by hospital staff have the potential to spread pathogens, particularly due to the ineffectiveness of wipes to actually kill bacteria.

The team, led by microbiologist Dr Jean-Yves Maillard is now calling for a 'one wipe – one application – per surface' approach to infection control in healthcare environments.