Culture
CLEVELAND-- Everyone knows that losing your job hurts, but the negative effects are not solely experienced by the displaced worker and his or her family. Newly published research by a Case Western Reserve University economist finds that involuntary job loss also causes a dramatic increase in criminal behavior.
The study, published in the journal Labour Economics, is one of the first to establish a causal link between individual job loss and subsequent criminal activity.
What drives people seek to high social status? A common evolutionary explanation suggests men do so because, in the past, they were able to leverage their social position into producing more children and propagating their genes.
Indeed, much evidence shows that high social status grants men a number of benefits, not the least of which is increased access to sexual partners. Consider Genghis Khan, who, according to some historical estimates, fathered upwards of 1,000 children with his numerous wives and over 500 concubines.
Same-sex marriage may have been given the green (or rainbow) light in many countries around the world, but it appears there are still some entrenched attitudes in society when it comes to same-sex parenting.
Misconceptions about the impact on children raised by same-sex parents are harmful both in a social and legal sense, says University of South Australia psychologist Dr Stephanie Webb.
Scientists in Australia have developed a new approach to reducing the errors that plague experimental quantum computers; a step that could remove a critical roadblock preventing them scaling up to full working machines.
How would you feel if a large carnivore roamed in your backyard?
Now what if this animal was a threatened species, and efforts to protect it were underway? This is the situation in Alberta, Canada, where conservation projects are helping the threatened grizzly bear population to recover, but not without local controversy. But is this controversy simply because people fear these bears, or is there more to it?
Populations of some common bird species, including the familiar Mourning Dove, have been on the decline for decades in North America. Agricultural lands can support bird populations, but agricultural intensification can also cause populations to decline -- so what role are changes in American agriculture playing for Mourning Doves? New research published in The Condor: Ornithological Applications shows that relatively small changes in the amount of land used for different types of agriculture may be related to big changes in how many young doves are produced.
Alcoholics Anonymous, the worldwide fellowship of sobriety seekers, is the most effective path to abstinence, according to a comprehensive analysis conducted by a Stanford School of Medicine researcher and his collaborators.
Could the ability of cancer cells to quickly alter their genome be used as a weapon against malignant tumours? Researchers at Uppsala University have succeeded in developing a substance that has demonstrated promising results in experiments on both animal models and human cancer cells. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Newly updated evidence published in the Cochrane Library today compares Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and clinically-related Twelve-Step Facilitation (TSF) programs with other treatments, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, to see if they help people who suffer from alcohol use disorders achieve sobriety or reduce the amount of alcohol that they consume.
The News in Brief:
Researchers visualized the first structure of a lipin enzyme - which helps make triglycerides - a first after 20 years of research.
Creating the structure enabled researchers to see how two regions (N-lip and C-lip) come together to form a functional enzyme and better understand how lipins regulate triglyceride production.
The structure is helping the team to understand how mutations in lipins lead to abnormal production of triglycerides central to diseases such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes.
An international team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has for the first time succeeded in demonstrating the ionization cooling of muons. Regarded as a major step in being able to create the world's most powerful particle accelerator, this new muon accelerator is expected to provide a better understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter.
Under our feet, in the soil, is a wealth of microbial activity. Just like humans have different metabolisms and food choices, so do those microbes. In fact, microbes play an important role in making nutrients available to plants.
A recent review paper from Xinda Lu and his team looks at different roles that various soil microbes have in soil's nitrogen cycle. Lu is a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
WHAT: Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and other institutions have devised a new strategy to stop tumors from developing the new blood vessels they need to grow. Once thought to be extremely promising for the treatment of cancer, blocking molecules that stimulate new blood vessel growth (angiogenesis) has proven ineffective because tumor cells respond by producing more stimulatory molecules. The new strategy involves disabling key enzymes that replenish the molecule that cells need for the reactions that sustain new vessel growth. The research team was led by Brant M.
You're at the office. You've typed up a report and press print. Walk over to the printer and retrieve the fresh, inkjet-printed paper. As you admire your work, were you aware that scientists consider the charge of the particles in the liquid ink for improved print quality? Were you aware that understanding charges of particles allows for engineers to make the paints aggregate (gather together) or disperse according to such particle interactions?
Researchers have explained how visual cortexes develop uniquely across the brains of different mammalian species. A KAIST research team led by Professor Se-Bum Paik from the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering has identified a single biological factor, the retino-cortical mapping ratio, that predicts distinct cortical organizations across mammalian species.