Nature Middle East | House of Wisdom

NME’s weekly science dose (April 5-11)

Refugees who have fled from Syria’s ongoing conflict are faced with a different crisis when they arrive in Lebanon: limited access to healthcare and a heightened risk of becoming ill in the overcrowded camps.

With some 40,000 Syrian refugees coming into Lebanon each month, a recently published survey found that only 32.6% of refugee children have been vaccinated against some of the most common diseases such as tetanus, polio and measles. The risk of communicable diseases spreading among the refugees is alarming. You can find the full story here.

A study of a consanguineous Egyptian family in which five siblings are affected by a rare epileptic condition has identified mutations in a particular gene called CNTN2 as the cause. Called cortical myoclonic tremor, the researchers compared the genomes of the siblings with 500 healthy controls and found these mutations present only in the affected siblings. More details here.

Finally, a research team from Cairo University and the University of California have come up with a flexible supercapacitator that promises to help realise the next generation of flexible electronic devices such as electronic paper, displays and health-monitoring kits. Their secret? Graphene. Read more here.

Beyond the hood

Researchers from the University of Granada have found another reason for our readers to get off their backsides and do some exercise: sporty folks seem to have significantly better cognitive capacities than those with more sedentary lifestyles.

These better brain muscles however appear to only highlight sporty people’s capacity to sustain their attention and react rapidly to external stimuli while engaged in monotonous tasks. The article was published in the latest edition of the journal PLOS ONE.

Sporty or not, however, it seems the adults of today are less “metabolically” healthy than their counterparts from previous generations. A large cohort study from the Netherlands compared a range of metabolic risk factors across generations. They found that more recently born generation are doing worse, despite having a greater life expectancy.

Their results show that while obesity and hypertension increase with age across all generations, more recently born generations have a higher prevalence of metabolic risk factors compared to those born ten years earlier. You can find more details here.

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