New US legislation granting the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) jurisdiction over tobacco products represents a serious compromise on the part of tobacco control advocates, argues a new essay in this week's open access journal PLoS Medicine.
Culture
A common food additive that gives M&Ms and Gatorade their blue tint may offer promise for preventing the additional – and serious – secondary damage that immediately follows a traumatic injury to the spinal cord.
Movement through tree tops in tropical forests can be particularly dangerous for large animals like orangutans where a fall of up to 30m could be fatal. Scientists found that dangerous tree vibrations can be countered by the orangutan's ability to move with an irregular rhythm.
A nation-wide estimate of the overall tiger population done by the Nepal Government's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC) shows the presence of 121 breeding tigers in the wild within the four protected areas of Nepal. The 2008 tiger population estimate was jointly implemented by the DNPWC, Department of Forests (DOF), WWF, National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC) with support from Save The Tiger Fund (STF), WWF-US, WWF-UK, WWF International and US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).
New York, N.Y., July 27, 2009—By a wide margin, health care leaders believe that individuals should have a choice of public and private health plans, and strongly support other central components of health reform such as innovative provider payment reform and a national insurance health exchange with strong standard-setting authority. In addition, two-thirds (68%) of opinion leaders feel it is urgent to enact comprehensive health care reform this year, according to the latest Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Health Care Opinion Leaders Survey.
EAST LANSING, Mich. – In an effort to improve worker health, researchers from Michigan State University and Portland State University have created an innovative training program that calls for supervisors to better support their employees' work and family demands.
The scientific-based program is featured in the upcoming August edition of the Journal of Management.
Why are so many students deep in debt before they finish college, only to take on more debt as they begin their careers? The answer may be found by looking at the social forces that shape the attitudes and behaviors of today's youth - forces influencing them in ways that will determine their financial success or failure as adults.
Human impact on one of the world's most threatened bird species can be beneficial rather than destructive - and could even save it from extinction - according to counterintuitive new findings by the University of East Anglia (UEA).
Published today in the peer-reviewed journal Animal Conservation, the study by UEA conservation experts explores the exact reasons behind the decline of the critically endangered white-shouldered ibis.
Psychopharmaceutical use has risen over recent years. This is fact, but what is not clear is the reason why. Researchers from four Madrid-based health centres have shown that family conflict is not a significant factor. However, the results published in the journal Atención Primaria are striking: in Spain, 24% of women take antidepressants and more than 30% take tranquillisers.
Approximately 1 in 6 public health workers said they would not report to work during a pandemic flu emergency regardless of its severity, according to a survey led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr Geoff Hayward from Oxford University funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, who led the research points out, a high proportion of those with combined academic and vocational qualifications gained their qualifications in state-school sixth forms and have importantly similar backgrounds to the traditional academic applicants. Therefore, the increasing proportion of students applying to higher education with combined academic and vocational qualifications may be widening participation but not substantially.
People with potentially 'stigmatizing' medical conditions are just as likely as those with less stigmatizing illnesses to allow their personal information to be used for health research. A new study, published in the open access journal BMC Medical Ethics, found that the purpose of the research and the type of information to be collected were more important in determining patients' consent choices. In particular, they were very wary of allowing their personal information to be put to commercial use.
Psychologists have been studying the interplay of social injustice, righteous anger, and group allegiance. It appears that loyalists are not simply apologists for anything and everything the group stands for. In fact, loyalty may be a predictable step toward taking a firm and principled stand.
Four policy briefs just released by the CSSReg project led by M. Granger Morgan, head of Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Engineering and Public Policy say that Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology needs new federal regulations for optimum success.
Social scientist and political economist Elinor Ostrom's Science essay presents an updated version of a multilevel, nested framework for analyzing outcomes achieved in social-ecological systems. In the writing, she provides an example identifying 10 variables that affect the likelihood of self-organization in efforts to achieve a sustainable social-ecological system.