Imperial College
An international clinical trial coordinated by Imperial suggests that patients over the age of 80 should receive medication to lower blood pressure. Previous smaller studies had suggested no benefit to lowering blood pressure in overall mortality in this age group. The Hypertension in the Very Elderly Trial (HYVET), headed by Chris Bulpitt from Imperial’s Care of the Elderly Department, overturns this idea. The trial has been wrapped up early after showing ‘significant reductions in overall mortality’ as well as a decrease in the incidence of stroke. Peer reviewed results have yet to be published.

Brian May, guitarist with Queen, finally handed in his PhD thesis in astrophysics, 36 years after beginning his write-up. The work, entitled Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, will be scrutinised by experts ahead of May’s viva.

King’s College London
Professor Sube Banerjee, head of Mental Health and Ageing at King’s Institute of Psychiatry, will lead a Department of Health initiative to tackle dementia. The disease is not only incurable, but also difficult to diagnose. It affects an estimated 600,000 people in England and is set to rise in step with longer life expectancies. The initiative will focus on disease awareness, early diagnosis and high quality treatment.

Professor Giovanni Mann and colleagues of King’s Cardiovascular division have announced potential dietary alternatives to hormone replacement therapy (HRT). At a recent Life Sciences Conference in Glasgow, they described how soy isoflavones can mimic oestrogen, increasing blood flow and reducing cardiovascular problems. The isoflavones, found in soya products, also promote antioxidant genes. The combined effects may have advantages over conventional HRT, which carries an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

UCL
New fossil finds from Kenya may lead to a tweaking of the human family tree. Fred Spoor and colleagues of UCL’s Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology recently uncovered partial skulls from Homo erectus and Homo habilis. Dating of the two fossils to roughly 1.5 million years ago suggests that the hominins were contemporary. This contradicts previous evidence, which placed habilis as an older ancestor of erectus. The discovery was announced in this week’s Nature. Further comment can be found on news@nature and the Nature podcast.

Zoological Society of London
The Yangtze river dolphin is almost certainly extinct, according to conservation biologist Sam Turvey and colleagues in the Journal of the Royal Society, Biology Letters. The presumed extinction is almost certainly caused by human activity, through shipping, pollution and fishing lines. If correct, this would be the first recorded case of humans causing the extinction of a cetacean species.