Men are more likely to die of heart disease compared with women of a similar age – and sex hormones are to blame, according to a new study.

The findings of a study by Dr. Maciej Tomaszewski, New Blood Lecturer in Cardiovascular Medicine in the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences at the University of Leicester, suggest that this "male disadvantage" may be related to the sex-specific effects of naturally occurring sex hormones.

The research in the journal Atherosclerosis involved 933 men aged, on average, 19 years, from the Young Men Cardiovascular Association study. The researchers looked at ways that the sex hormones - estradiol, estrone, testosterone and androstenedione - interacted with three major risk factors of heart disease (cholesterol, blood pressure and weight).

Tobacco companies have no restrictions or mandatory levels for some of the major carcinogens and toxicants in cigarettes. Tobacco manufacturers can, and do, add anything they want into their goods.

But other consumer products, even something like strawberry jam, is strictly regulated and labelled and required to pass stringent tests before it can be sold.

An editorial in Respirology called “Regulation of Consumer Products: The Bizarre Case of Strawberry Jam and Cigarettes” discusses the issues surrounding tobacco regulations and how the industry could be more effectively governed.

The widely-held perception that the influenza vaccination reduces overall mortality risk in the elderly does not withstand careful scrutiny, according to researchers in Alberta. The vaccine does confer protection against specific strains of influenza, but its overall benefit appears to have been exaggerated by a number of observational studies that found a very large reduction in all-cause mortality among elderly patients who had been vaccinated.

The study included more than 700 matched elderly subjects, half of whom had taken the vaccine and half of whom had not. After controlling for a wealth of variables that were largely not considered or simply not available in previous studies that reported the mortality benefit, the researchers concluded that any such benefit "if present at all, was very small and statistically non-significant and may simply be a healthy-user artifact that they were unable to identify."

Principal investigator Sumit Majumdar, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta said the findings are a reminder to researchers that "the healthy-user effect is everywhere you don't want it to be."

The hereditary disease ponto cerebellar hypoplasia (PCH) occurs when certain areas of the brain do not develop properly; this results in severe mental and physical developmental disorders. Life expectancy of those affected ranges from a few months to a few years.

Scientists from Cologne and Amsterdam have discovered the mutations in human genetics which cause PCH of the types 2 and 4.

“In the case of PCH, the protein complex – the so-called tRNA-Splicing-Endonuclease, is mutated. This complex in involved in the manufacture of proteins in the human body and was identified in connection with a disease for the first time,” reports Birgit Budde from the Cologne Center for Genomics and Institute for Genetics of the University of Cologne.

Researchers report the discovery of the first new living species of giant clam in two decades, according to a report in Current Biology. While fossil evidence reveals that the new species, called Tridacna costata, once accounted for more than 80 percent of giant clams in the Red Sea, it now represents less than one percent of giant clams living there.

The researchers said they cannot say for sure which factors contributed to the loss of this giant clam species in favor of others, but the overall decline in giant clam stocks and the striking loss of large specimens is a "smoking gun" for overharvesting by humans many thousands of years ago, said Claudio Richter of the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. The new species appears to live only in the shallowest waters, making it particularly vulnerable to overfishing.

Another piece of the jigsaw in understanding how neutron stars work has been put in place following the discovery by scientists of the origin of the high energy emission from rotation-powered pulsars.

Pulsar systems containing neutron stars accelerate particles to immense energies, typically one hundred times more than the most powerful accelerators on Earth. Scientists are still uncertain exactly how these systems work and where the particles are accelerated.

Now a team of researchers from the UK and Italy, led by Professor Tony Dean of the University of Southampton, has detected polarized gamma-ray emission from the vicinity of the Crab Nebula - one of the most dramatic sights in deep space. By using spectroscopic imaging and measuring the polarization - or the alignment - of the waves of high energy radiation in the gamma-ray band, they have shown that these energetic photons originate close to the pulsar.