Online science news...
'Closing the gap' for people with mental illness
Mentally ill Australians are dying an average of 16 years earlier than the general population, and the gap is widening.
Mentally ill people most commonly die early from physical causes such as cardiovascular disease and cancer, rather than from suicide or accidents, according to a study from The University of Queensland and The University of Western Australia.
“Suicide was the cause of only about 14 per cent of the early deaths,” said researcher Dr Steve Kisely from UQ's School of Population Health and School of Medicine.
Depression Common Among Children with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy
A new study has determined that children and adolescents with seizures involving the temporal lobe are likely to have clinically significant behavioral problems and psychiatric illness, especially depression.
Findings published in the journal Epilepsia highlight the importance of routine psychiatric evaluation for pediatric epilepsy patients—particularly for those who do not respond to anti-seizure medications and require epilepsy surgery.
Astronomers team up with the public to solve decade old puzzle
An extremely precise measurement of the distance to a star system has finally allowed astronomers to solve a decade-old puzzle, confirming understanding of the way exotic objects like black holes interact with nearby stars.
Published in the journal Science, a team of astronomers headed by Dr James Miller-Jones from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have measured the distance to star system SS Cygni to be 372 light years, much closer than a previous measurement made by the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1990s.
Liposuction Beats Bone Marrow for Stem Cell Therapies
Stem cells from fat outperform those from bone marrow in fighting disease
A new study appearing in the current issue of STEM CELLS Translational Medicine indicates that stem cells harvested from fat (adipose) are more potent than those collected from bone marrow in helping to modulate the body’s immune system.
Brains re-wire themselves after injury
Scientists have advanced our understanding of brain plasticity by showing that the brain forms complex new circuits after damage, often far from the damaged site, to compensate for lost function.
A new study by Drs Moriel Zelikowsky and Michael Fanselow from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), in collaboration with Dr Bryce Vissel from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, identified the exact regions of the brain that take over when a learning and memory centre, known as the ‘hippocampus’, is damaged.
Their breakthrough, the first demonstration of such circuit plasticity, is published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Science (PNAS), the journal of the United States National Academy of Sciences.
