news 2014

Almost 31 million days of work were lost last year due to back, neck and muscle problems The University of Liverpool and the University of Southampton have announced a major new research centre to tackle the impact of musculoskeletal disorders on people's ability to work. Researchers at the £1.4m Arthritis Research UK/MRC Centre for Musculoskeletal  Health and Work aim to find cost-effective ways of reducing the impact of conditions that affect the muscles, joints and bones on people's employment and productivity.

Press release issued: 24 November 2014 Why are viruses such as Ebola so dangerous to humans yet do not appear to harm the bats which transmit them? A team of scientists from the University of Bristol, UK and CSIRO's Australian Animal Health Laboratories (AAHL) have used cutting edge techniques to comprehensively compare the response of bat and human cells to a highly dangerous bat virus.

Some studies on the relationship between microbes and human health may be producing incorrect results due to lab contamination, according to a study. Bacteria that live inside our bodies - known as the microbiome - are a hot topic in biomedical science, with many studies claiming they play central roles in health and disease.

Press release issued: 20 November 2014 Afforestation (planting trees) to mitigate climate change could cause warming rather than cooling globally due to non-carbon effects of land use change, according to new research from the University of Bristol. Global land use change and its interaction with the climate system is recognised as an important component of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s future climate scenarios.

The discovery of an ancient buried canyon in Tibet rules out a popular model used to explain how the massive and picturesque gorges of the Himalaya became so steep, so fast. It was amazing to see that the river once cut quite deeply into the Tibetan Plateau Jean-Philippe Avouac A team of researchers from the UK, USA, Germany and China have discovered an ancient, deep canyon buried along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in south Tibet, north of the eastern end of the Himalaya.

Pesticide residues in foods grown undercover - such as lettuce and strawberries - are higher than in those grown in open fields, new research has shown. Researchers writing in the journal Chemosphere this week found that crops typically grown under glasshouses and poly-tunnels had higher levels and numbers of different pesticides in them than those typically grown in the open.

Modern hand dryers are much worse than paper towels when it comes to spreading germs, according to new University of Leeds research. Scientists from the University of Leeds have found that high-powered ‘jet-air’ and warm air hand dryers can spread bacteria in public toilets. Airborne germ counts were 27 times higher around jet air dryers in comparison with the air around paper towel dispensers.

Regular consumption of olive oil can drastically improve heart health - especially in people who do not normally eat a Mediterranean diet. Researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Lisbon and Mosaiques Diagnostics in Germany teamed-up to study the effect of olive oil, an ingredient central to the Mediterranean diet, on heart health in a group of non-consumers.

An exciting new project to help monitor the spread of flu in the UK more accurately and earlier than ever before has been funded by i-sense, an £11m EPSRC-funded collaboration led by UCL. Flusurvey is the UK's biggest crowd-sourced study of influenza and through a new collaboration with  i-sense, will combine innovative mobile and big data technologies with an online participatory flu monitoring platform flusurvey.org.uk to map trends as soon as seasonal flu takes hold.

Our structure (research) Impact of our research Postgraduate research 19 Nov 2014 A new insight into immune cells by scientists at The University of Manchester could lead to more effective drug treatments. Professor Dan Davis and his team at the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research , working in collaboration with global healthcare company GSK , investigated how different types of immune cells communicate with each other - and how they kill cancerous or infected cells.

A new study led by researchers at King's College London in collaboration with the US Consortium of Food Allergy Research and the University of Dundee has found a strong link between environmental exposure to peanut protein during infancy (measured in household dust) and an allergic response to peanuts in children who have eczema early in life.

Researchers have measured the value of mounted police units in the UK. They have found that the high visibility of the police horses and riders on neighbourhood patrols boosts levels of public confidence in the police. In trials, the researchers from the University of Oxford and RAND Europe observed that mounted police units generated around six times more public interest than foot patrols over the same period although most of these interactions were brief (the number of longer conversations was similar for both mounted police and foot patrols).

o Findings play important role in understanding impact of oral health on heart o 35 extra cases of serious heart infection every month in the UK o Prescription of antibiotic prophylaxis has fallen by 89 per cent Scientists at the University of Sheffield have identified a significant rise in the number of people diagnosed with a serious heart infection alongside a large fall in the prescribing of antibiotic prophylaxis to dental patients.

Scientists have shown that earthquakes, not an ancient wetter climate as previously thought, are eroding the mountains in Peru. A team of geologists including an Imperial researcher have for the past several years been studying cobbles, which are stones that have been rounded as they bounce downstream, in the tributary system that feeds into the Pisco River in the Western Andes Mountains of Peru.

Scientists have revealed the mechanisms that enable certain brain cells to persuade others to create Mexican waves' linked with cognitive function. Ultimately, the team say their work may help researchers understand more about normal brain function and about neurocognitive disorders such as dementia.

The landmark discovery of a tiny defect in a vital heart protein has for the first time enabled heart specialists to accurately pinpoint a therapeutic target for future efforts in developing a drug-based cure for cardiovascular diseases. Scientists from Cardiff University and the Slovak Academy of Science have identified defects in a colossal heart protein which often leads to stroke and heart failure.

People are willing to sacrifice twice as much money to spare a stranger from pain than to avoid pain themselves. That's despite their decision being secret. The study, conducted by researchers from UCL and Oxford University and funded by the Wellcome Trust, is the first to experimentally compare how much pain people were willing to anonymously inflict on themselves or strangers in exchange for money.

A UCL-led experiment on 80 pairs of adults found that people were willing to sacrifice on average twice as much money to spare a stranger pain than to spare themselves, despite the decision being secret. The study, conducted by researchers from UCL and Oxford University and funded by the Wellcome Trust, was the first to experimentally compare how much pain people were willing to anonymously inflict on themselves or strangers in exchange for money.

11% of men in Britain report ever paying for sex and 3.6% report paying for sex in the past five years, finds a UCL-led study funded by the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council. The study of 6,108 men, published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections, found that single men aged 25-34, in managerial or professional occupations and those who reported high numbers of sexual partners, were the most likely to say that they had paid for sex.

Training can lead to synaesthetic experiences, study shows A new study has shown for the first time that people can be trained to "see" letters of the alphabet as colours in a way that simulates how those with synaesthesia experience their world. The University of Sussex research, published today (18 November 2014) in Scientific Reports , also found that the training might potentially boost IQ.