Washington, Mar 6: After all of their admonitions about safe drinking, it turns out older adults can''t handle booze as well as they think. A new study has found elderly get tipsy quicker - and are less aware of it.

The report from a University of Florida research group in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs involved 68 nonsmokers - one group aged 50 to 74 and a comparison group aged 25 to 35 - who had at least one drink a month.

Within each group, some individuals were given alcohol while others were given a placebo beverage that did not elevate their breath alcohol levels. The groups were carefully matched by gender, body mass index, history of alcohol consumption and other demographic characteristics.

Washington, Mar 6 : Men who think size does matter have been offered a new hope - a magical gadget that claims to lengthen a man's willy by a third!

The extender - called Andro-Penis - uses a plastic ring, two rods and a silicon band.

Researchers from San Giovanni Battista Hospital at the University of Turin, Italy, suggest that the treatment could provide a viable alternative to surgery.

The independent clinical study published in the March issue of BJU International found that males who wore a penile extender every day for six months were able to increase the flaccid length of their penis by up to 32 percent and their erectile function by up to 36 percent.

New Delhi, Mar. 5 : Six years ago, the use of insulin pumps, a diabetes treatment device that promised to give insulin-dependent diabetics a normal lifestyle free from constant insulin injections, found few takers in India. The reason was the prohibitive cost.

As some doctors said then, each pump cost as much as a small car.

Washington, Mar 5 : Scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have discovered that T cells, or white blood cells, from patients with the autoimmune disease rheumatoid arthritis have prematurely aged chromosomes due to lack of structures called telomeres.

Telomeres are structures that cap the ends of cells'' chromosomes, grow shorter with each round of cell division unless a specialized enzyme replenishes them.

It is important to maintain telomeres as they are thought to be important for healthy aging and cancer prevention.

T cells from patients with rheumatoid arthritis were found to have trouble turning on the enzyme that replenishes telomeres, when compared with cells from healthy people.

London, March 5: University of Minnesota researchers in Minneapolis say that a microbicide gel made from glycerol monolaurate, an ingredient in some foods and cosmetics, has shown some promise in protecting female monkeys from contracting an HIV-like virus.

Ashley Haase, an immunologist at the university, has revealed that the compound may act by suppressing an unfortunate immune response that helps the virus rather than fights it.

He points out that other candidate microbicides cripple the virus itself, or its interactions with its favoured target - immune cells called CD4+ cells.

Washington, Mar 5: An Indian-origin scientist at McMaster University says that jabs of an antibody, mepolizumab, may benefit patients with a very severe asthma.

Dr. Param Nair and colleagues at The Firestone Institute for Respiratory Disease, St. Joseph''s Healthcare found that patients, who required a lot of medication like prednisone to control their disease, could benefit from the injections.

For the study, the researchers investigated asthmatics with a persisting type of airway inflammation with inflammatory cells called eosinophils.