Maintaining aerobic fitness through middle age and beyond can delay biological ageing by up to 12 years and prolong independence during old age, concludes an analysis published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Aerobic exercise, such as jogging, improves the body’s oxygen consumption and its use in generating energy (metabolism).

But maximal aerobic power starts to fall steadily from middle age, decreasing by around 5 ml/[kg.min] every decade.

Inter-country adoptions are causing a rise in the number of children in orphanages in EU countries, say psychologists at the University of Liverpool.

More adoptions are leading to higher numbers of children in institutions, says the study, because in EU countries such as France and Spain, people are choosing to adopt healthy, white children from abroad rather than children in their own country who are mainly from ethnic minorities.

Researchers found that EU countries with high proportions of international adoptions also had the highest rates of children living in institutions. High adoption did not reduce the number of children in institutional care but they say instead attributed to an increase.

Aimed primarily at the increasing problem of terrorist acts by individuals affiliated with groups such as the Animal Liberation Front against investigators conducting research in non-human primates in the United States, an editorial in Biological Psychiatry goes after people who slam the integrity ("who does their funding?" and physical safety of medical researchers.

Collectively, the 87 authors of “It Is Time to Take a Stand for Medical Research and Against Terrorism Targeting Medical Scientists” say they wish to not only declare their stance against these acts, but also to emphasize the unique and vital role that non-human primate research plays in furthering our understanding of the neurobiology and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Open Knowledge, cyber-activism and social uses of technologies are some of the topics that Dutch Media theorist and activist Geert Lovink likes to tackle. He is Associate Professor in the Media & Culture department at the University of Amsterdam and holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He is founder and director of the Institute of Network Cultures and co-founder of Internet projects such as The Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture and Incommunicado. Lovink is also the author of "Dark Fiber", which has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Romanian, German and Japanese.

Lovink visited Spain this week to talk about ‘The politics of open knowledge production’ at El Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, and ‘About critic culture in the Internet’ in Seville at Zemos98 Festival and Enrique Sacristan from Servicio de Informacion y Noticias Cientificas(SINC) conducted this interview:

In mice, child neglect is a product of both nature and nurture, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison describe a strain of mice that exhibit unusually high rates of maternal neglect, with approximately one out of every five females failing to care for her offspring. By comparing the good mothers to their less attentive relatives, the group has found that negligent parenting seems to have both genetic and non-genetic influences, and may be linked to dysregulation of the brain signaling chemical dopamine.

As a possible model for human child neglect, these mice offer a valuable opportunity to investigate the biological and behavioral bases of naturally occurring maternal neglect, say UW-Madison zoology professor Stephen Gammie, who led the study, and co-author psychology professor Anthony Auger.

Suitors can tell a young person’s attitude toward sexual relationships by the look on their face, according to new research which researchers say gives deeper insight into mate attractiveness.

The study of 700 heterosexual participants also found that young men and women look for complete opposites when it comes to relationships with the other sex.

In no great shock to anyone who is now or has ever been young, men generally prefer women who they perceive are open to short-term sexual relationships whilst women are usually interested in men who appear to have potential to be long-term relationship material.

Everyone has heard of superconductors but a superinsulator is a newly-discovered fundamental state of matter created by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with several European institutions that opens new directions of inquiry in condensed matter physics and breaks ground for a new generation of microelectronics.

Led by Argonne senior scientist Valerii Vinokur and Russian scientist Tatyana Baturina, the international team fashioned a thin film of titanium nitride with they then chilled to near absolute zero.

When they tried to pass a current through the material, the researchers noticed that its resistance suddenly increased by a factor of 100,000 once the temperature dropped below a certain threshold. The same sudden change also occurred when the researchers decreased the external magnetic field.

Carbon dioxide removed from smokestack emissions in order to slow global warming could be used as a valuable raw material for the production of DVDs, beverage bottles and other products made from polycarbonate plastics, chemists are reporting.

In separate reports scheduled for presentation at the meeting of the American Chemical Society, Thomas E. Müller, Ph.D., and Toshiyasu Sakakura, Ph.D., described innovative ways of making polycarbonate plastics from CO2. Those processes offer consumers the potential for less expensive, safer and greener products compared to current production methods, the researchers agreed.

“Carbon dioxide is so readily available, especially from the smokestack of industries that burn coal and other fossil fuels,” Müller said. He is at the new research center for catalysis CAT, a joint 5-year project of RWTH Aachen and industrial giant Bayer Material Science AG and Bayer Technology Services GmbH. “And it’s a very cheap starting material. If we can replace more expensive starting materials with CO2, then you’ll have an economic driving force.”

Ethanol is not great. Even Al Gore had to eventually concede he had made a mistake in promoting it for almost two decades once it became common knowledge that driving food prices up for a costly, energy-negative alternative to gasoline that didn't improve the environment was a bad idea.

But what if it weren't energy negative or costly and used a lot less corn?

Cows, with help from bacteria, convert plant fibers, called cellulose, into energy, but this is a big, expensive step for biofuel production. In the commercial biofuel industry, only the kernels of corn plants can be used to make ethanol, but this new discovery would allow the entire corn plant to be used – so more fuel can be produced with less cost.