The more affluent the area in which she lives, the more dissatisfied a woman is likely to be with her body image, indicates research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The researchers carried out a random telephone survey of 895 women aged 25 to 56. The women lived in 52 neighbourhoods in the provinces of Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec in Canada. The survey was designed to cover differing social and income brackets. National census data were then used to track the overall af

Injectable “suicide gene” therapy may be a highly effective way of preventing colon cancer from spreading (metastasising), finds research in Gut. Human colon cancer carries a high risk of death because it is often not found in the early stages and readily spreads to the liver, but also the lungs and throughout the abdominal cavity (peritoneum).

And the suicide gene treatment seems to be just as effective when injected beneath the skin as it is when introduced directly into the tumour site, t

The world`s oldest fossilised vomit, believed to have come from a large marine reptile that lived 160 million years ago, has been discovered in a clay quarry in Peterborough by the University of Greenwich`s Professor Peter Doyle and Dr Jason Wood of the Open University.

The vomit contains the remains of dozens of belemnites – squid-like shellfish that lived in abundance in the seas around what is now Britain. The belemnites were eaten in great numbers by ichthyosaurs, large marine reptiles (

New research by economists at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford has provided surprising information on just how much people hate a winner. It also shows what lengths human beings are prepared to go to damage a winner out of a sense of envy or fairness.

The researchers, Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick and Dr Daniel Zizzo of Oxford, designed a new kind of experiment, played with real cash, where subjects could anonymously “burn” away other people’s money – but only a

A supernova may have caused mass extinction two million years ago.

The explosion of a dying star could have ended much of marine life on Earth two million years ago. The supernova could have strafed the Earth’s atmosphere with cosmic rays, severely damaging the ozone layer and exposing living organisms to high levels of the Sun’s hazardous ultraviolet rays, US researchers propose 1 .

This idea dates back to the 1950s, but now Narciso Benítez of Johns Hopkins

Underwater video reveals lobsters behaving badly.

A lobster-pot is more like a Wild West saloon than a cunningly laid snare. Lobsters show up for food and a fight, and only the unlucky few get reeled in, underwater video footage is revealing.

Camera recordings show that lobster traps catch a mere 6% of the animals that enter them. The result suggests that lobsters’ rowdy behaviour could be confusing attempts to count and size them, and so to manage the fishery 1