When it comes to cracking nuts, wild bearded capuchin monkeys are more skilled than anyone had given them credit for, according to researchers.
The monkeys are known to use stone "hammers" to crack nuts. The new study shows that the monkeys are quite careful about the amount of force delivered to those nuts. They adjust the force applied with each strike based on the condition of the nutshell, making it less likely that they'll end up smashing the tasty kernel inside.
A new study forecasting how life expectancy will change in England and Wales has predicted people will live longer than current estimates. The researchers say official forecasts underestimate how long people will live in the future, and therefore don't adequately anticipate the need for additional investments in health and social services and pensions for the elderly.
The drop in alcohol-related car crashes since the mid-1980s boosted US economic output by $20 billion, increased national income by $6.5 billion, and created 215,000 jobs in 2010, according to an estimate of the economic impact of drink-driving published in Injury Prevention.
By 2030, life expectancy in England and Wales is expected to reach 85·7 years for men and 87·6 years for women--closing the gap between male and female life expectancy from 6·0 years in 1981 to just 1·9 years by 2030, according to a new study published in The Lancet.
A survey of nearly 7,000 people has revealed that 98 percent want to be informed if researchers using their genetic data stumble upon indicators of a serious preventable or treatable disease. The study, which comes after the Government's announcement that Genomics England will sequence 100,000 genomes by 2017, begins an important and on-going conversation about how our genomic data is used.
Government policies that support UK pharmaceutical science and enhance export income are costing the NHS millions and undermine the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. In an essay published today by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, health economists Professor Alan Maynard and Professor Karen Bloor describe an inflationary regulatory system that lacks accountability, is not evidence-based and subverts the efficiency of the technology appraisal work carried out by NICE, a target of pharmaceutical industry hostility since it was established in 1999.
If you want to know the secrets of healthier eating, think of the kitchen fruit bowl. A fruit bowl makes fruit more convenient, attractive, and normal to eat than if the same fruit were in the bottom of the refrigerator.
Understanding extinct species diets may require a greater understanding of the relationship between skull biomechanics and the animals' ancestry than previously thought, according to a new study.
For more than 100 years, exposing students to basic and clinical research has been an essential component of a medical school education in the United States. However, today, new models of medical education in which research plays a minimal role are likely to create a two-tiered system of education, decrease the physician-scientist pipeline and diminish the application of scientific advances to patient care.
Improving access to public toilets in South African urban settlements may reduce both the incidence of sexual assaults by nearly 30% and the overall cost to society, a study by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Management found.Development and human rights organizations have pointed to inadequate local sanitation facilities as a key factor in a woman's risk for physical or sexual assault. Many women in South Africa must travel out of their homes to public toilets, where they are more vulnerable to attack from sexual predators.
Having a child diagnosed with epilepsy can be a frightening and confusing time and getting referrals for pediatric epilepsy surgery once their child’s disease stops responding to anti-seizure medications is "arduous", a UCLA study has found. The study sheds light on the difficulties parents face obtaining specialty and sub-specialty care for their children during an already stressful time and points to the need to develop interventions that target and remediate these barriers to comprehensive epilepsy care for children.
When consumers taste cheap wine and rate it highly because they believe it is expensive, is it because prejudice has blinded them to the actual taste, or has prejudice actually changed their brain function, causing them to experience the cheap wine in the same physical way as the expensive wine? Research in the Journal of Marketing Research has shown that preconceived beliefs may create a placebo effect so strong that the actual chemistry of the brain changes.
Psychology, biology, and mathematics have come together to show that the occurrence of altruism and spite - helping or harming others at a cost to oneself - depends on similarity not just between two interacting individuals but also to the rest of their neighbours.
The Senate’s Report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program (commonly known as the torture report) released in December 2014, confirmed that doctors and psychologists were complicit in the torture of detainees.
Two psychologists, unnamed in the report, but confirmed to be James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, designed some of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Other psychologists monitored interrogations.
Psychologists have long realized that blaming victims - 'you were in the wrong place at the wrong time' - is a defense mechanism that helps blamers feel better about the world, and see it as fair and just. But ways to prevent victim blaming have been elusive.