Culture

By Christopher Millett, Jeremy Gray, Sonia Saxena, Gopalakrishnan Netuveli and Azeem Majeed

Many people with diabetes continue to smoke despite being at high risk of cardiovascular disease. We examined the impact of a pay-for-performance incentive in the United Kingdom introduced in 2004 as part of the new general practitioner contract to improve support for smoking cessation and to reduce the prevalence of smoking among people with chronic diseases such as diabetes.

Large boards and store displays already exist as prototypes. They talk to you directly, using digital information embedded in the paper. You simply touch various parts of the display to get information to stream out of printed speakers.

Research teams at the Mid Sweden University forestry industry research program Fiber Science and Communication Network (FSCN) are working on the fourth generation of products that integrate paper with the digital world.

Scientists exploring the remote highlands of eastern Suriname discovered 24 species believed to be new to science, including an Atelopus frog with brilliant purple markings, four Eleutherodactylus frog species, six species of fish, 12 dung beetles and an ant species.

Why does foreign money often feel like play money to travelers" Just in time for summer vacation season, an important new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research examines why spending patterns abroad deviate so much from what we spend at home.

What you buy says a lot about you, according to a new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Consider this goal: to spend more time with your family. If you seek out products that expand the amount of quality time you have to share – say, a football to throw around in the yard – you’re a “promotion-focused” consumer. Alternatively, if you are “prevention-focused,” you’ll seek out timesavers, like a new dishwasher, that don’t reduce the amount of time you have to spend with your family.

University of Utah physicists developed small devices that turn heat into sound and then into electricity. The technology holds promise for changing waste heat into electricity, harnessing solar energy and cooling computers and radars.

The majority of doctors in North Carolina do not probe for signs of postpartum depression in new mothers, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Of the 228 physicians responding to the survey who said they had seen women for postpartum visits in the previous three months, 79 percent said they were unlikely to formally screen the patients for depression. An estimated 13 percent of new mothers are affected by postpartum depression.

Belgian mathematician hopes to use the science of chaos, the butterfly effect and strange attractors to help build a complete model of climate and resources that will lead to a new approach to sustainable development.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that humans’ ability to walk upright developed from ancestors foraging for food in forest tree tops and not from walking on all fours on open land.

It was traditionally thought that humans became upright walkers in a slow process which had its origins in ‘knuckle-walking’ – movement on all fours – just as chimpanzees and gorillas walk today. It was believed that this developed once human ancestors moved out of the forests into the savannahs of East Africa.

NASA and Columbia University Earth Institute research finds that human-made greenhouse gases have brought the Earth’s climate close to critical tipping points, with potentially dangerous consequences for the planet.

From a combination of climate models, satellite data, and paleoclimate records the scientists conclude that the West Antarctic ice sheet, Arctic ice cover, and regions providing fresh water sources and species habitat are under threat from continued global warming.

Scientists at Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Italy have discovered particles of cocaine and marijuana in the air around Rome, they revealed today.

Rome's atmosphere contained 0.1 nanograms per cubic meter of cocaine at its height during their analysis. Not a substantial impact but still a cause for concern. This was in addition to benzopyrene C20H12 and other types of emissions.

Evidence for an awesome upheaval in a massive galaxy cluster was discovered in an image made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The origin of a bright arc of ferociously hot gas extending over two million light years requires one of the most energetic events ever detected.

The cluster of galaxies is filled with tenuous gas at 170 million degree Celsius that is bound by the mass equivalent of a quadrillion, or 1,000 trillion, suns. The temperature and mass make this cluster a giant among giants.

In a night sky filled with hungry bats, good-tasting moths increase their chances of survival by mimicking the sounds of their bad-tasting cousins, according to a new Wake Forest University study.

The study is the first to definitively show how an animal species uses acoustic mimicry as a defensive strategy. The research was conducted by Jesse Barber, a doctoral student in biology at Wake Forest. William E. Conner, professor of biology at Wake Forest, co-authored the study.

It seems almost certain that San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds will pass Hank Aaron as baseball’s all-time home-run king sometime this summer, but his pursuit has generated little public interest.

There may be several reasons for this, ranging from Bonds’ prickly personality to the suspicion that he may have used performance-enhancing drugs later in his career, say two Duke University professors.Courtesy Orange County Register

A fascinating new paper from the June issue of Current Anthropology explores ancient multiple graves and raises the possibility that hunter gatherers in what is now Europe may have practiced ritual human sacrifice.

This practice – well-known in large, stratified societies – supports data emerging from different lines of research that the level of social complexity reached in the distant past by groups of hunter gatherers was well beyond that of many more recent small bands of modern foragers.