Fast-food taking toll on bears

The culprit, say the study’s authors, Dr Jon P Beckmann and Dr Joel Berger of the Wildlife Conservation Society, is the garbage found at fast-food restaurants and in residential neighbourhoods.

The researchers attached radio collars to 59 bears and tracked them. Country bears, forced to roam over wild lands searching for food spent more than 13 hours a day foraging. City bears, with all that rich garbage for the taking, clocked about 8.5 hours a day.

Beckmann said they often found city bears sleeping during the day. And they occasionally heard reports like one from a woman who opened her bedroom door in the morning to find that a bear had ransacked her kitchen and was sleeping off the rather substantial meal it had devoured in the hallway.

Alzheimer’s Risk Identified
Changes in the size of a small part of the brain can be used to predict mental decline in older people, a new study suggests.

In the study, published in the journal Radiology, researchers from New York University measured the size of a brain region called the medial temporal lobe in 45 healthy people older than 60. They also gave the subjects a battery of tests that measured overall mental ability over a period of six years. At the end of the six years, 13 of the 45 subjects had developed signs of mild mental impairment, a disorder that many researchers consider an early stage of Alzheimer’s, the study said.

Eleven of the 13 people who suffered mental impairment exhibited significant shrinking of the medial temporal lobe, while only four of the 32 who remained healthy had comparable shrinking, the study said.

Compiled from the New York Times News Service