Imperial

Motion sensor helps athletes

Guang-Zhong Yang, an expert in body sensor networks, has been showing off a remarkable earpiece at the BA Festival of Science in York. A sensor, worn on the ear and shaped like the aural canals that aid balance, captures data about posture, motion and acceleration. This is fed back to a display, allowing athletes to monitor and improve their performance.

Sweet success on parasite

Dr Stuart Haslam and colleagues report new insights into schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease, in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics. The team used mass spectrometry to obtain detailed information about the sugars secreted by the parasite worm as it invades the body. The team hope this data will provide clues to the mechanism of infection.

UCL

Ban all cars, improve health

A report from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine suggests that London needs to eliminate all cars from central London by 2030 in order to meet the Mayor’s target of a 60% cut in CO2. The study, published in The Lancet, also predicts the positive effects on health the notional ban would bring.

Youngest more likely smallest

Here’s one for the tabloids to get their teeth into. Being the youngest sibling could stunt your growth. That’s the conclusion of David Lawson, who presented the preliminary findings at the BA Festival. “We show that, all else being equal, growth is significantly retarded by the presence of siblings,” he said. Nobody told my younger brother, who is built like Hagrid from Harry Potter.

Illness readable from face

Another announcement at the festival described a means of spotting genetic disease by looking at facial features. Down’s Syndrome is an obvious example, but some 700 other diseases are also detectable, according to a team led by Peter Hamilton. The technique compares an individual’s face in three dimensions with those from individuals with genetic illnesses. The method is not a substitute for DNA testing, but could help speed up diagnosis and save money.

Imperial College

New citation data place two Imperial researchers amongst the top in their fields. Thomson’s Essential Science Indicators essentially indicate that Prof Andre Balogh is the world’s fifth most cited geoscientist. Meanwhile, Prof Sir John Pendry’s 2006 Science paper _ Controlling electromagnetic fields_ lists in the top 0.01% of the world’s most cited papers.

A study published in PNAS explores the spread of HIV in Zimbabwe. A team led by Dr Simon Gregson of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology found that the impact had not been as severe as predicted in 1989, with the birth rate still outpacing the rate of death. Even so, around a third of town-dwellers aged 15–54 carry the disease.

King’s College

King’s are strengthening internal collaboration in neurobiology through a new initiative – the King’s Neuroscience Consortium. Headed by Prof Peter McGuffin, the consortium brings together the College’s Institute of Psychiatry, School of Medicine and School of Biomedical and Health Sciences.

A team from the Cardiovascular division headed by Dr Philip Eaton report a new mechanism for lowering blood pressure (Science). The study shows that protein kinase G can be regulated independently of nitric oxide, offering a potential alternative pathway for drug development.

UCL

Researchers in the Wellcome Trust centre for neuroimaging are learning about the fear response by getting volunteers to play a version of Pac-man. In a study published in Science gamers were wired up to receive an electric shock if an on-screen predator intercepted their game character. Using MRI, researchers headed by Dean Mobbs showed that different areas of the brain were activated, depending on the level of threat. When there was little danger of the virtual predator capturing its digital prey, the prefrontal cortex – used for complex planning tasks – was most active. As the danger closed in, the more primitive midbrain lit up on the scan.

UCL Advances, a new collaboration between industry, academia and investors, has appointed an Executive Director. Timothy Barnes joins the team from the private sector, where he ran LodestoneIP Ltd, a company that helps universities to spin out start-ups.

Imperial College

An international clinical trial coordinated by Imperial suggests that patients over the age of 80 should receive medication to lower blood pressure. Previous smaller studies had suggested no benefit to lowering blood pressure in overall mortality in this age group. The Hypertension in the Very Elderly Trial (HYVET), headed by Chris Bulpitt from Imperial’s Care of the Elderly Department, overturns this idea. The trial has been wrapped up early after showing ‘significant reductions in overall mortality’ as well as a decrease in the incidence of stroke. Peer reviewed results have yet to be published.

Brian May, guitarist with Queen, finally handed in his PhD thesis in astrophysics, 36 years after beginning his write-up. The work, entitled Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, will be scrutinised by experts ahead of May’s viva.

King’s College London

Professor Sube Banerjee, head of Mental Health and Ageing at King’s Institute of Psychiatry, will lead a Department of Health initiative to tackle dementia. The disease is not only incurable, but also difficult to diagnose. It affects an estimated 600,000 people in England and is set to rise in step with longer life expectancies. The initiative will focus on disease awareness, early diagnosis and high quality treatment.

Professor Giovanni Mann and colleagues of King’s Cardiovascular division have announced potential dietary alternatives to hormone replacement therapy (HRT). At a recent Life Sciences Conference in Glasgow, they described how soy isoflavones can mimic oestrogen, increasing blood flow and reducing cardiovascular problems. The isoflavones, found in soya products, also promote antioxidant genes. The combined effects may have advantages over conventional HRT, which carries an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

UCL

New fossil finds from Kenya may lead to a tweaking of the human family tree. Fred Spoor and colleagues of UCL’s Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology recently uncovered partial skulls from Homo erectus and Homo habilis. Dating of the two fossils to roughly 1.5 million years ago suggests that the hominins were contemporary. This contradicts previous evidence, which placed habilis as an older ancestor of erectus. The discovery was announced in this week’s Nature. Further comment can be found on news@nature and the Nature podcast.

Zoological Society of London

The Yangtze river dolphin is almost certainly extinct, according to conservation biologist Sam Turvey and colleagues in the Journal of the Royal Society, Biology Letters. The presumed extinction is almost certainly caused by human activity, through shipping, pollution and fishing lines. If correct, this would be the first recorded case of humans causing the extinction of a cetacean species.