Women are now spending fewer years with cognitive impairment but more years with disability compared to 20 years ago. We're living longer but senior years are still marked by declines in physical well-being even as mental acumen remains better than in decades past. In most developed countries worldwide life expectancy is increasing at the rate of at least two years every decade, and, for life expectancy at age 60, shows no sign of slowing down. 

FROSTBURG, MD (December 9, 2015)--Emissions controls on coal-fired power plants are making a difference in reducing exposure of mercury to people, especially in the western Maryland community. A study of air quality from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science found that levels of mercury in the air from power plant emissions dropped more than half over a 10-year period, coinciding with stricter pollution controls.

"I was surprised when I first saw it," said the study's author Mark Castro, associate professor with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Appalachian Laboratory in Frostburg. "We've been measuring mercury for years. To see such a dramatic drop was exciting."

TORONTO, ON - A study led by researchers at the University of Toronto shows that when older adults feel negatively about aging, they may lack confidence in their abilities to hear and remember things, and perform poorly at both.

"People's feelings about getting older influence their sensory and cognitive functions," said Alison Chasteen, professor in U of T's Department of Psychology and lead author of the study published in Psychology and Aging. "Those feelings are often rooted in stereotypes about getting older and comments made by those around them that their hearing and memory are failing. So, we need to take a deeper and broader approach to understanding the factors that influence their daily lives."

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses seemed to be a relic of the 1990s, and it was believed impatient teachers, helicopter parents and the pediatricians that enable them had moved onto other things.

Not so, instead 12 percent of U.S. children and teens had an ADHD diagnosis in 2011, up 43 percent since 2003, The analysis by Sean D. Cleary, PhD, MPH, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at George Washington University suggests that 5.8 million U.S. children ages 5 to 17 now have this diagnosis. 

LA JOLLA--Chronic damage to the liver eventually creates a wound that never heals. This condition, called fibrosis, gradually replaces normal liver cells--which detoxify the food and liquid we consume--with more and more scar tissue until the organ no longer works.

Scientists at the Salk Institute have identified a drug that halts this unchecked accumulation of scar tissue in the liver. The small molecule, called JQ1, prevented as well as reversed fibrosis in animals and could help the millions of people worldwide affected by liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, caused by alcoholism and diseases like hepatitis. These results were published in PNAS the week of December 7, 2015.

Planetary scientists would be thrilled if they could peel the Earth like an orange and look at what lies beneath the thin crust. We live on the planet's cold surface, but the Earth is a solid body and the surface is continually deformed, split, wrinkled and ruptured by the roiling of warmer layers beneath it.

The contrast between the surface and the depth is nowhere starker -- or more important -- than in Antarctica. What is causing the mysterious line of volcanoes that emerge from the ice sheet there, and what does it mean for the future of the ice?