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Improve investment in agriculture to meet growing demands

Extreme weather is forcing grain and meat prices to rise, and food production will have to increase about 60 percent over the next 40 years to meet a growing world population, but "there are solutions to these daunting problems," Catherine Bertini, former director of the U.N. World Food Programme and the 2003 World Food Prize laureate, and Dan Glickman, former secretary of agriculture, write in a Politico opinion piece.

8 Aug 2012

Preventing falls in older people through balance and strength training

Balance and strength training that is integrated into everyday activities can reduce the number of falls among older people by almost a third, finds a study published on bmj.com today.

8 Aug 2012

UCSB researcher hopes to find out contaminants in urban water environment

What contaminants lurk in the urban subsurface, and what happens to them once they're there? Do they make their way into storm drains and creeks to reach groundwater, or even oceans? Or do they naturally attenuate as they migrate through soils, somehow allowing them to self-cleanse as they travel? A UC Santa Barbara researcher hopes to find out, thanks to a generous new gift to fund her work.

8 Aug 2012

Organ donation wishes should not be allowed to be vetoed by families says ethicist

Families should not be allowed to veto dead relatives’ organ donation wishes, argues an ethicist on bmj.com today.

8 Aug 2012

Study looks at why and to whom people give souvenir gifts

Although it may not seem like much, the small wooden figurine Grandma brought back from the Holy Land has been blessed. She gives the souvenir to her grandchildren knowing she has done her job: deliver God into their lives.

8 Aug 2012

Study finds female athletes rarely and ineffectively used as ad spokespeople

Your best chance to see a female athlete endorsing a product will be during the next few weeks. The Olympics' commercial breaks may be littered with female swimmers, runners and gymnasts, but don't expect to see them much again until the next Olympics. American companies rarely employ female athletes as spokespeople and when they do, according to two University of Delaware professors, they most often do it poorly.

31 Jul 2012

Yeast gene can increase ethanol production yield by up to 34%

iDiverse announced that it has discovered a yeast gene that when inserted into yeast and properly modulated can increase ethanol production yield by up to 34%.

23 Jul 2012

Green plants in city streets can effectively reduce levels of air pollutants

Trees, bushes and other greenery growing in the concrete-and-glass canyons of cities can reduce levels of two of the most worrisome air pollutants by eight times more than previously believed, a new study has found. A report on the research appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.

19 Jul 2012

New report compares Gen X attitudes about climate change in 2009 and 2011

As the nation suffers through a summer of record-shattering heat, a University of Michigan report finds that Generation X is lukewarm about climate change-uninformed about the causes and unconcerned about the potential dangers.

19 Jul 2012

Lack of physical activity causes 1 in 10 deaths

A lack of physical activity, or people’s failure to spend 150 minutes a week doing moderate physical activity (eg, brisk walking for 30 minutes, 5 days a week), causes around 6–10% of four major non-communicable diseases (coronary heart disease [CHD], type 2 diabetes, and breast and colon cancer) worldwide, and was responsible for around 5.3 million of the 57 million deaths globally in 2008.

18 Jul 2012

Giving up smoking associated with weight gain

Giving up smoking is associated with an average weight gain of 4-5 kg after 12 months, most of which occurs within the first three months of quitting, finds a study published on bmj.com today.

11 Jul 2012

Euthanasia and assisted suicide rates in the Netherlands comparable to rates before legalisation

2010 rates of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands were comparable to levels before the practices were legalised in 2002, according to new research published Online First in The Lancet and conducted by a Dutch research team from Erasmus MC University Medical Centre, Rotterdam; VU University Medical Centre, Amsterdam; Statistics Netherlands, The Hague; and Utrecht’s University Medical Centre.

11 Jul 2012

Elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 accelerate soil carbon loss in forests

Elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide accelerate carbon cycling and soil carbon loss in forests, new research led by an Indiana University biologist has found.

11 Jul 2012

Injury at work more likely for overqualified recent immigrants

Men who are recent immigrants and over qualified for their jobs are more than three times as likely to sustain an injury at work as their appropriately qualified peers who have been in the country for some time, suggests Canadian research published online in Injury Prevention.

10 Jul 2012

Sitting down for less than 3 hours a day could extend life expectancy

Restricting the amount of time spent seated every day to less than 3 hours might boost the life expectancy of US adults by an extra 2 years, indicates an analysis of published research in the online journal BMJ Open.

10 Jul 2012

Does alcohol kill brain cells?

Several origins have been suggested for the idea that alcohol kills brain cells. Some link it to the temperance movement, which called for prohibition of alcohol.

9 Jul 2012

Sports medicine education lacking in UK undergraduate medical degrees

In a Comment published alongside The Lancet Series on sport and exercise medicine, Rod Jaques of the Faculty of Sport and Exercise Medicine UK, and Mike Loosemore of University College London, UK, highlight the lack of specialised training in sports medicine in undergraduate medical training.

6 Jul 2012

Exercise has clear benefits for physical and mental health according to current evidence

In the first Series paper, Sport and exercise as contributors to the health of nations, an international team of researchers set out to examine whether sport and exercise contribute to the health of nations. They argue that although country-wide data on participation in sports are too scarce to draw any firm conclusions in this respect, the existing evidence suggests that regular participation in sports and / or exercise has clear benefits for physical and mental health, and that health professionals need to pay more attention to their patients’ fitness.

6 Jul 2012

Performance-improvement index in sprint increases

In this month's Physics World, Steve Haake, director of the Centre for Sports Engineering at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, reveals that the men's 100 m sprint will be one event not to miss this summer.

2 Jul 2012

Amending U.S. farm bill could save money, help food aid reach millions more

In this post in the Huffington Post's "Impact" blog, one of a series "organized by the Huffington Post and the NGO alliance InterAction to call attention to the crisis in the Sahel," Kelly Hauser, agriculture policy manager at ONE, writes that an amendment to the U.S. farm bill "could save money and lives in Africa."

29 Jun 2012