BACKGROUND Malnutrition is prevalent in elderly populations. Recommended methods of nutritional screening are often too complicated and time-consuming for routine application in frail, very old, hospitalized patients. OBJECTIVE Our aims were to identify risk factors for development of malnutrition in very old hospitalized patients and to evaluate the total Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) sc...

Europium isotopic abundance fractions are reported for the very metal-poor, neutron-capture-rich giant stars CS 22892-052, HD 115444, and BD +17◦3248. The abundance fractions, derived from analysis of several strong Eu II lines appearing in high-resolution spectra of these stars, are in excellent agreement with each other and with their values in the Solar System: fr(Eu)≃ fr(Eu) ≃ 0.5. Detailed...

I report on recent results from observations of stars with metallicities [Fe/H] ≤ −2.0. These include a substantial new sample of objects with high-resolution observations obtained as part of a follow-up of the HK Survey, The Hamburg/ESO Survey, and the ongoing survey SEGUE: Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration. Perspectives on the next directions are also provided.

Wediscuss some consequences for the determination of the surface gravity parameter of very metal-poor halo dwarfs in the new light shed upon these objects from the Hipparcos astrometry. Whereas it has become clear that standard spectroscopic LTE iron ionization equilibria are prone to systematic errors, in the sense, that stages of evolution are predicted that are actually not yet reached, the ...

1 Max Plack Institute for Astrophysics, Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 1, 857 41 Garching bei München, Germany 2 Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 0HA, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] 3 Departamento de Astronomia do IAG/USP, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão 1226, Cidade Universitària, 05508-900 São Paulo, SP, Brazil 4 Research School o...