Boston, MA— A comprehensive review of national opinion polls taken before and after Congressional voting and when President Obama signed into law a major healthcare reform bill last month has found that the law's signing did not lead the country to come together in support of this landmark legislation. Partisan differences are stark, according to researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) who analyzed 33 independent opinion polls in an effort to gauge public support for healthcare change.
Culture
Onlinecollege.org has compiled a list of 50 science blogs that can be enjoyed by anyone regardless of background.
They are not in order of 'best' 1 to 50 but rather are broken down into categories. Under the News grouping ScienceCodex is featured along with National Geographic, Wired and Discovery.
KINGSTON, ON – Researchers at Queen's University have discovered that toddlers as young as 21 months appreciate good intentions, and will do their best to reward the efforts of people who try to help them.
Psychology professor Valerie Kuhlmeier and PhD student Kristen Dunfield found that toddlers are more likely to help someone who has made an effort to help them, even if that person was unable to accomplish the toddler's desired outcome.
Pork-barrelling legislators who have spent today's social security funds knowing it will bankrupt the system in the future may have an out - an unprecedented upturn in the number of older Americans who delay retirement. That trend is likely to continue and even accelerate over the next two decades because fewer people will be able to retire and it could help ease the financial challenges facing both Social Security and Medicare, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
With scientific evidence linking high levels of copper and iron to Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, and other age-related disorders, a new report in ACS' Chemical Research in Toxicology suggests specific steps that older consumers can take to avoid build up of unhealthy amounts of these metals in their bodies. "This story of copper and iron toxicity, which I think is reaching the level of public health significance, is virtually unknown to the general medical community, to say nothing of complete unawareness of the public," George J. Brewer states in the report.
Private equity-backed buyouts are less likely to fail than non private equity-backed buyouts, according to a report published today by a team of academics.
Private Equity and Insolvency compares the failure rates of 140,000 private equity-backed and non-private equity backed businesses between 1995 and 2009.
The results show that buy-outs are more prone to failure than other types of companies, but that the risk of failure is significantly reduced if private equity companies are involved.
A new and relatively little-known scientific discipline called molecular gastronomy has quietly revolutionized the dining experience in some famous restaurants and promises to foster a wider revolution in other restaurant and home kitchens. That's the conclusion of an article in ACS' Chemical Reviews, a monthly journal.
WASHINGTON, April 7, 2010 -- "Rather than asking whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) does everything to improve access and lower costs, we should ask how it compares with the status quo," the American College of Physicians' (ACP) senior public policy adviser said in a paper published online today in Annals of Internal Medicine, the flagship journal of ACP. "By this measure, the PPACA is an extraordinary achievement."
After increasing during much of the 20th century, forest cover in the eastern United States in recent decades has resumed its previous decline, according to an exhaustive new analysis published in the April 2010 issue of BioScience. The work is described in an article by Mark A. Drummond and Thomas R. Loveland of the US Geological Survey (USGS).
The frequency of complex fusion procedures to treat spinal stenosis of the lower back increased between 2002-2007 among Medicare recipients, while the rates of decompression and simple fusion procedures decreased, according to a study in the April 7 issue of JAMA.
Higher rates of colorectal cancer incidence and mortality experienced by African-Americans may be driven largely by differences in health care utilization, and less by biology, according to a new study led by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.
In a study involving more than 60,000 people who were screened for colorectal cancer, researchers found that blacks and whites were equally likely to need a follow-up colonoscopy after a screening sigmoidoscopy, but blacks were less likely to actually receive the follow-up.
ST. LOUIS -- Vaccines likely would work better in protecting children from flu if they included both strains of influenza B instead of just one, Saint Louis University research has found.
"Adding a second influenza B virus strain to the seasonal influenza vaccine would take some of the guesswork out of strain selection and help improve the vaccine's ability to prevent influenza," said Robert Belshe, M.D., lead investigator and director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Saint Louis University.
CHICAGO – Rush University Medical Center is leading a nationwide Phase III clinical trial to determine whether a promising vaccine for advanced melanoma can effectively treat the deadly skin cancer.
An earlier Phase II trial of the experimental drug involving 50 patients with metastatic melanoma had stunning results. Eight patients recovered completely and four partially responded to the vaccine.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---The proportion of older middle-aged Americans who report disabilities related to mobility increased significantly from 1997 to 2007, in contrast to the disability decline that has been found among Americans ages 65 and over, according to a new study by the RAND Corporation and the University of Michigan.
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — African-American women have poorer survival rates than their white and Hispanic counterparts regardless of whether they receive radiation therapy following lumpectomy or mastectomy, UC Davis researchers have found.
Steve Martinez, assistant professor of surgery at UC Davis Cancer Center, determined that while Hispanic and African-American women with advanced breast cancer are less likely to receive radiation therapy than their white counterparts, only African Americans have poorer outcomes than white patients with the same stage disease.