Wearing your necktie tight might look smart, but it could increase the risk of developing the serious eye disease glaucoma, reveals a study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

The researchers tested the internal blood pressure (intraocular pressure) of one eye in each of 20 healthy men and 20 male patients with glaucoma. They did this when participants wore an open shirt collar, three minutes after donning a tight necktie, and three minutes after loosening their ties. The healthy

Northwestern University researchers have found that caspases, a family of protein-cutting enzymes involved in programmed cell death (apoptosis), may be a missing link in the chain of molecular events leading to Alzheimer´s disease.
Alzheimer´s disease is a neurodegenerative condition affecting an estimated 4 million Americans that causes memory loss and, ultimately, dementia. Patients with this disease have abnormal deposits (plaques) of protein fragments called amyloid-beta surrounding

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have discovered a way to inhibit a biochemical process that accompanies labor and to postpone delivery for one to two days in pregnant mice.

“Since the biochemical steps associated with labor are likely the same in both mice and humans, a similar treatment might someday help prevent pre-term labor in women,” said Dr. Carole Mendelson, professor of biochemistry and obstetrics and gynecology and senior author of the study, publish

Women who use estrogen replacement therapy to relieve menopausal symptoms are more likely to develop risk factors for potentially fatal irregular heartbeats (arrythmias) and heart attacks than women who take hormone therapy combining estrogen and progestin.

Prior to the early termination of the estrogen plus progestin arm of a nationwide women’s health study, postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy was the most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, based on its

New data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will assist in the design of optics for liquid immersion lithography, an old idea that recently has attracted new interest as a possible means of improving image resolution and thereby shrinking feature sizes of computer chips.

Conventional optical lithography has advanced sufficiently to achieve a resolution of 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter), but there are physical and technical limits to how much better it can

A single gene, called PHANTASTICA (PHAN), controls whether a plant makes feathery leaves like a tomato or umbrella-like leaves like Oxalis. The same mechanism is shared by a wide group of flowering plants.

“It’s a very surprising finding, that modifying one gene in the tomato alters the leaf from one form to another,” said Neelima Sinha, a professor of plant biology at UC Davis who is senior author on the paper.

Plant leaves fall into two main groups: simple, single-bl