Tai Chi Increases Balance in Parkinson’s Patients People with Parkinson’s disease often have problems with balance and can suffer life-threatening falls. For patients with mild to moderate cases, a new study suggests that the ancient art of tai chi may significantly improve balance and reduce falls. Parkinson’s disease, which affects up to 1.5 million Americans, […]

Iron man rebounds: With amputation averted, triathlete can now prepare for next big race Clifford Barnes heard the news in April: He might lose his left leg below the knee. The prospect was almost too much to bear for the 57-year-old triathlete, whose passion is competing in endurance races. A truck ran over triathlete Clifford […]

Get sloshed, have sex? Wine-making has promoted a frenzy of indiscriminate mating in baker’s yeast, according to Stanford researchers Baker’s yeast, or S. cerevisiae, usually leads a relatively chaste existence – reproduction is accomplished primarily through asexual budding, with an occasional genetic boost from a spontaneous coupling between two of the one-celled organisms. But now […]

Programs build support systems for local teens It was an ordinary afternoon at Palo Alto’s Gunn High School, when a cluster of freshmen gathered in the frosh quad for lunch. Then something remarkable happened. Shashank Joshi A wave of upperclassmen suddenly descended on the ninth-graders and proceeded to, well, be nice. They introduced themselves, asked […]

Understanding a woman’s heart means knowing what to look for Reyna Robles was always the first one up and the last one to bed: she possessed more than enough steam to come home from her full-time job, prepare a meal for her husband and children, take her dogs for walk and help her kids with […]

Model situation? Reduction in U.S. carbon emissions attributed to cheaper natural gas Changes in carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector in the nine census regions of the contiguous United States, 2008-09./ Image courtesy of Xi Lu In 2009, when the United States fell into economic recession, greenhouse gas emissions also fell, by 6.59 percent relative […]

Evolutionary question, answered Harvard researcher co-authors paper on peppered moth evolution Jim Mallet, Distinguished Lecturer on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, says new research is particularly noteworthy because it settles a decade-long controversy about whether the moths are a good example of natural selection at work./ Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer Anew paper published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters journal, shows that […]

Mock-ups help refine pre-construction plans for hospitals They’re the crash-test dummies of modern medicine: two sets of full-scale hospital rooms, including operating, recovery and patient rooms, built to the architectural specifications of the new Stanford Hospital and expansion of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. They include every fixture — from overhead booms and monitors to electrical outlets and hand-sanitizer […]

Population studies at heart of initiative to improve health Harry Greenberg In an era of personalized medicine, the idea of our collective health may seem a bit old-fashioned. But as our growing population ages and alarm bells sound about the appalling prevalence of serious health threats such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, physicians, […]

Using Autoinjectors to Treat Seizures Drug delivery into muscle using an autoinjector—akin to the EpiPen used to treat serious allergic reactions—can be a fast, effective way to stop prolonged epileptic seizures. The finding provides a safe tool to treat people quickly during an emergency.   Epilepsy is a brain disorder in which nerve cells in […]