“Antarctica is the ultimate destination for anyone interested in natural history but it also challenges those people who visit to think broadly about our responsibilities to all life on Earth.”

That’s the view of Dr Robert Lambert, a lecturer on Tourism and the Environment at The University of Nottingham, who has just returned from the Antarctic in his role as an Observer for the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO).

Dr Lambert, who is a member of the Business School’s Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Institute, says the relationship between nature and people is complex and constantly changing and great positives can come from tourism in Antarctica. He believes those lucky enough to experience it could become ambassadors for the region to help develop a ‘constituency’ of support for Antarctica.

American adults have a higher prevalence of stroke than their European counterparts, due in part to a higher rate of stroke risk factors among Americans and barriers to care in the United States, according to a study presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference 2008.

Compared to European men, U.S. men had 61 percent higher odds of having a stroke and U.S. women had almost twice the odds of stroke as European women.

“Most of this gap is among relatively poor Americans who were, in our data, much more likely to have a stroke than poor Europeans, whereas the gap in stroke prevalence is less marked between rich Americans and rich Europeans,” said Mauricio Avendano, Ph.D., author of the study. “Risk factors alone do not account for the differences we found, which points to the role of broader healthcare and structural policies.”

Solar cells are constructed of layers that absorb sunlight and convert it to electrical current. Thinner solar cells can yield both cheaper and more plentiful electricity than today's cells, if their capacity to absorb sunlight is optimized.

Electricity-generating solar cells are one of the most attractive alternatives for creating a long-term sustainable energy system, but thus far solar cells have not been able to compete economically with fossil fuels. Researchers are now looking at how nanotechnology can contribute in bringing down the cost.

Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden say the electrons in nanoparticles of noble metal oscillate together apace with the frequency of the light. This phenomenon can be exploited to produce better and cheaper solar cells.

Drug treatments for depression can take many weeks for the beneficial effects to emerge. The excruciating and disabling nature of depression highlights the urgency of developing treatments that act more rapidly.

Ketamine, a drug used in general medicine as an anesthetic, has recently been shown to produce improvements in depressed patients within hours of administration. A new study being published in the February 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry provides some new insight into the mechanisms by which ketamine exerts its effects.

The downside? It's in the same class of drugs as PCP (phencyclidine).

University of Sussex astronomers predict that the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun unless the Earth’s orbit can be altered - but we have about 7.6 billion years to do it.

Dr Robert Smith, Emeritus Reader in Astronomy, said his team previously calculated that the Earth would escape ultimate destruction, although be battered and burnt to a cinder, but they did not take into account the effect of the drag caused by the outer atmosphere of the dying Sun.

He says: "We showed previously that, as the Sun expanded, it would lose mass in the form of a strong wind, much more powerful than the current solar wind. This would reduce the gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth, allowing the Earth's orbit to move outwards, ahead of the expanding Sun.

An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers —the first was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the art. They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers would perform a million trillion calculations per second.

Ten years ago, people worldwide were astounded at the emergence of a teraflop supercomputer, Sandia’s ASCI Red, able in one second to perform a trillion mathematical operations. More recently, bloggers seem stunned that a machine capable of petaflop computing — a thousand times faster than a teraflop — could soon break the next barrier of a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second.

NUREMBERG, Germany, February 22 /PRNewswire/ --

- Eco-Experts Call for Clear Climate Concepts for Organic Farming

All consumers and experts would agree that, whenever a person eats organic products, they are also doing something for the environment. But does an organic apple from Argentina protect the climate more or better than a conventional apple from a nearby orchard? This seems to be an area, in which the organic sector still has some catching up to do, if one is to believe the experts that came together last Thursday to discuss issues affecting the organic sector.

A paper by Professor Fabrizio Schifano at the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Pharmacy, which has been published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, indicates that 1,022 people died between 1990 and 2004 in instances where the presence of cocaine/crack cocaine was detected.

In this descriptive and correlational study, Professor Schifano reviewed the number of mentions on death certificates during the specified period, last year use of cocaine; treatment demand, number of drug offenders; seizures, prices and average purity levels.

Expressive writing --writing about one’s deepest thoughts and feelings—may help change the way cancer patients think and feel about their disease.

In one of the first studies published in an oncology journal about the benefits of writing therapy, researchers say those who immediately reported changes in thoughts about their illness also reported a better physical quality of life three weeks later.

“Previous research suggests expressive writing may enhance physical and psychological well-being,” said Nancy P. Morgan, M.A., writing clinician and director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Arts and Humanities Program. “But most of those studies involved three to five writing sessions that were conducted in a controlled laboratory setting. Here, we found that just one writing session in a busy cancer clinic where the patients are frequently interrupted can still have a positive impact on patients.”

Scientists at the University of Michigan have shown that their new metabolic imaging instrument can accurately detect eye disease at a very early stage. Such a device would be vision-saving because many severe eye diseases do not exhibit early warning signals before they begin to diminish vision. The testing is noninvasive and takes less than 6 minutes to administer to a patient.

Victor M. Elner, M.D., Ph.D., and Howard R. Petty, Ph.D., report their findings in the February issue of Archives of Ophthalmology. The women had been recently diagnosed with pseudotumor cerebri (PTC), a condition that mimics a brain tumor and often causes increased pressure on the optic nerve that can lead to vision loss.

The study grew out of Petty and Elner’s observation that metabolic stress at the onset of disease causes certain proteins to become fluorescent. To measure the intensity of this flavoprotein autofluorescence (FA), they designed a unique imaging system equipped with state-of-the art cameras, filters, and electronic switching, together with customized imaging software and a computer interface.