People with high blood pressure may find relief from Transcendental Meditation, a controversial alternative to medicine promoted by the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, where some of the co-authors sell their techniques.

Their meta-analysis was 107 published studies on stress reduction programs and high blood pressure and published in the December issue of Current Hypertension Reports.

A new study from the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that the presence of other people may enhance our movie-watching experiences. Over the course of the film, movie-watchers influence one another and gradually synchronize their emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant’s evaluation of the overall experience – the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie.

“When asked how much they had liked the film, participants reported higher ratings the more their assessments lined up with the other person,” explain Suresh Ramanathan and Ann L. McGill (both of the University of Chicago). “By mimicking expressions, people catch each other’s moods leading to a shared emotional experience.

Prominent claims from observational studies of the cardiovascular benefits of vitamin E often continue to be supported in medical literature despite strong contradictory evidence from randomized trials, according to a study in the December 5 issue of JAMA.

Similar findings were found for claims regarding the protective effects of beta-carotene on cancer and estrogen on Alzheimer disease.

“Some research findings that have received wide attention in the scientific community, as proven by the high citation counts of the respective articles, are eventually contradicted by subsequent evidence. A number of such high-profile contradictions pertain to differences between nonrandomized and randomized studies,” the authors write.

Elite athletes - often perceived as the epitome of health and fitness – may be more susceptible to common illness and are therefore proving useful in helping scientists understand more about the immune system.

Nic West, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, has enlisted elite rowers to help him study the role of salivary proteins that act as a barrier to infectious agents such as respiratory viruses.

He said salivary proteins such as lactoferrin and lysozyme act to prevent microbes from infecting the body and typically increase as the body fights off infection. They have a direct antimicrobial effect and also help modulate other aspects of the body’s immune response.

An international European research collaboration led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reports evidence for a rapid developmental pattern in a 100,000 year old Belgian Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis). The Scladina juvenile, which appears to be developmentally similar to a 10-12 year old human, was estimated to be in fact about 8 years old at death, according to the new research.

The report, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (online edition early December), details how the team used growth lines both inside and on the surfaces of the child's teeth to reconstruct tooth formation time and its age at death.

University of British Columbia astronomer Harvey Richer and UBC graduate student Saul Davis have discovered that white dwarf stars are born with a natal kick, explaining why these smoldering embers of Sun-like stars are found on the edge rather than at the centre of globular star clusters.

White dwarfs represent the third major stage of a star’s evolution. Like the Sun, each star begins its life with a long stable state where nuclear reactions take place in the core supplying the energy. After the core fuel is depleted, it swells up and turns into a huge red giant.