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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF RETIRED PERSONS (AARP)
The First Step May Be the Hardest.  New knees can make you want to dance, but what's the best way to get them?  Read more  (Main article)
How Do You Know If its Time? Before you decide to have joint replacement surgery, consider the following points.  Read more (Sidebar)
[Nominated for the Media Orthopedic Research Excellence Award.]

AMERICAN FEDERATION FOR AGING RESEARCH
Duke doctors excited about therapeutic cancer vaccine
For almost a century, scientists have puzzled over how to develop clinically effective cancer vaccines that recognize and attack cancers. Today, however, at Duke University Medical Center, Johannes Vieweg, M.D., is in early phase clinical trials with one of the first studies that applies a vaccine strategy targeting a specific enzyme called telomerase. Vieweg, Associate Professor of Urology and Associate Professor of Immunology, has treated more than 200 patients with advanced prostate or kidney cancers thus far. He is encouraged by their response to this treatment.  Read more

Research links stress to biological aging for the first time
In a landmark research study published in the December 1, 2004 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, health psychologist Elissa Epel, Ph.D. and her colleagues found evidence to support the long suspected association between stress and cellular aging. According to Epel, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco (UCSF), both prolonged psychological stress and the perception of stress had a dramatic impact on oxidative stress, lower telomerase activity, and shorter telomere length, all of which are related to cell longevity and disease. Read more

Balancing Act
Keeping our balance. It sounds like such a simple task, but even in the act of standing quietly, we are actively defying gravity, says Fay Horak, Ph.D., Neurological Sciences Institute, Oregon Health and Science Center, Beaverton, OR. Horak, a neuroscientist and physical therapist, explains that controlling the body's center mass over our feet is a complicated sensorimotor skill requiring information from three main senses.  Read more

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
Horizons
University of Delaware Professor uncovering the secrets of root nodules
Dangling from the roots of legumes like berries on a bush are tiny pebble-like nodules, home to hundreds of rhizobia bacteria.  In one of the mysterious partnerships in the natural world, the plant protects the bacteria, providing them with sugars and other photosynthates, while the bacteria channel nitrogen to the plant from the atmosphere.  Read more

Outreach  -- University of Delaware
Sammelwitz Retires From Teaching After 40 Years at UDSammelwitz Retires From Teaching After 40 Years at UD
With all the grace that comes from 40 years of practice, Dr. Paul Sammelwitz, a professor in the University of Delaware College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, jabs his finger and squeezes a drop of blood into each of three small test tubes to teach a lesson in physiology. His audience is a single student who has missed the classroom lecture. Wide-eyed and intent, she watches as his fingers fly from one thing to another in a demonstration he has done hundreds of times before.
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