Living close to overhead power lines may increase a child’s risk of getting leukemia, ananova.com reported.
Children living between 200 and 600 meters from high voltage lines are at around 20 per cent higher risk of catching the disease.
Oxford University’s Childhood Cancer Research Group admitted they had not been able to show power lines caused the increased risk, which could be due to other things or just pure chance.
Some 9,700 children with leukemia were studied over 33 years and those living within 200 meters of a power line were identified reports The Sun.
Most children have a one per cent chance of getting leukemia but near power lines the risk is estimated at 1.7 per cent.
Some experts believe magnetic fields produced by the electric currents can be harmful.
Only five of the 400 to 420 cases of childhood leukemia each year in England and Wales are thought possibly linked to power lines. And less than one per cent of houses are within 200 meters of power lines
Dr. Gerald Draper, who headed the research said the leukemia rate “may not be the effect of power lines at all.“
Professor John Toy, of Cancer Research UK added, “People who live, or have lived, near power lines, need not panic.“
Eddie O’Gorman, whose son Paul died of leukemia in North London aged 14, called for further research.

Red blood cells are scythe shaped in sickle cell anemia.

Scientists believe they have uncovered why people with a gene for a blood disorder are immune to malaria, BBC News website reported.
It is known that people with a single gene for sickle cell anemia, but not the full-blown condition, are somewhat resistant to the malaria parasite.
Some say the distorted red blood cells caused by the gene are broken down quicker than normal by the body so malaria has no home in which to thrive.
Now a Wellcome Trust team suggests the immune system also plays a big role.
By studying more than 1,000 children living on the coast of Kenya, where malaria is rife, they found many with the sickle cell trait developed increasing protection against malaria as they aged.
Between the ages of two and 10, immunity to the disease rose rapidly.
The protection against malaria was around 20% in the first two years of life compared with over 50% by the age of 10, the researchers report in the journal PLoS Medicine.
However, protection is not 100%, so people with the trait still need to be aware of the risks of malaria, they stressed.
Lead researcher Dr Tom Williams said, “It has been known for some time that sickle cell trait offers this protection, but the accelerated level of immunity in the first years of life has not been revealed before.“
He said there were several possible reasons why this happened, but that further research was needed to know for sure.
One explanation might be that although the bulk of blood cells carrying malaria are destroyed quickly, a few may escape destruction - but not enough to cause malaria symptoms.
This would allow the immune system time to gradually build up an effective defense against malaria, he suggested.

British scientists have discovered a gene defect which increases women’s chances of getting breast cancer before 50.
Scientists at Cambridge University tracked 200 women with mutation of the ATM gene - plus 1,000 of their relatives.
Those with the mutation were found to have an increased risk of breast cancer by middle-age.
Mutated ATM is already linked to other cancers reports The Sun.
The research, led by Dr. Douglas Easton, will help medics understand the disease in younger victims.

The degraded DNA of ancient cave bears has been sequenced, despite the fact that many considered the genetic information unrecoverable. The achievement leads researchers to think they might be able to perform the same trick with DNA from ancient human relatives, such as the Neanderthals.
According to nature.com, in the past, scientists have managed to retrieve genetic material for analysis from animals or humans that died in icy or desert environments, because these allow for good preservation. But the remains of animals and humans are mostly found in caves, and are heavily decomposed.
The DNA from such specimens is usually mixed up with DNA from soil microbes and later cave inhabitants, making it difficult to sequence.
The standard practice for sequencing genes involves making numerous copies of the initial sample through a process called a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR.
Subjecting ancient DNA to this does not produce good results because PCR picks up and duplicates the sequences of modern animals more efficiently. This means that bits of contaminating DNA often drown out samples from the prehistoric animal.

Animals use power laws to minimize the time they spend searching for hidden objects, according to a group of physicists in France.
Olivier BŽnichou and colleagues at the University of Paris 6 and the Curie Institute, also in Paris, came to their conclusion by developing a mathematical model of animal searching patterns.
They found that their model agrees with previous observations made by biologists and say that it could be used to speed up human searching.
BŽnichou and colleagues created the model by assuming that foraging animals exhibit two distinct phases of behavior.
In the first phase they move quickly on a single trajectory from one location to another. Then in the second phase they search the new location by moving around more slowly and randomly--akin to molecules undergoing diffusion. They carry on this two-phase process until they find the object. Pet owners routinely see this type of behavior in their dog, for example, when it looks for an object in the garden.
The physicists varied the time spent in each phase over a range of different search scenarios. They found that in order to minimize the search period, the time spent in the first phase is equal to the time spent in the second raised to a certain power. This relationship is also seen in actual animal behavior.
BŽnichou told PhysicsWeb that the results could be extended to human activities, such as searching for a lost object or perhaps even a victim in an avalanche. Doing so would require spending the appropriate amount of time carrying out each phase of the search.