Analyzing every marijuana-related Twitter message sent during a one-month period in early 2014, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that the "Twitterverse" is a pot-friendly place. In that time, more than 7 million tweets referenced marijuana, with 15 times as many pro-pot tweets sent as anti-pot tweets.
The findings are reported online Jan. 22 in the Journal of Adolescent Health and will appear in February in the journal's print edition.
New research suggests pre-Homo human ancestral species, such as Australopithecus africanus, used human-like hand postures much earlier than was previously thought.
Anthropologists from the University of Kent, working with researchers from University College London, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) and the Vienna University of Technology (Austria), have produced the first research findings to support archaeological evidence for stone tool use among fossil australopiths 3-2 million years ago.
olitical conservatives in the United States are somewhat like East Asians in the way they think, categorize and perceive. Liberals in the U.S. could be categorized as extreme Americans in thought, categorization and perception. That is the gist of a new University of Virginia cultural psychology study, published recently in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Additionally, the study indicates that thought styles - whether analytical or holistic - can be changed through training, enough so to temporarily change political thought and the way a person might vote.
Visual distortions and hallucinations related to an elevated risk of psychosis are linked to self-destructive thought processes among adolescents with psychological symptoms, tells the recent study conducted at the Helsinki University Hospital, Finland. Early indications of the risk of psychosis can usually be detected long before the onset of a full-blown disorder.
A marketing study has raised concerns over the ethics of the marketing of skin-whitening products widely available in Australia.
Regardless, demand for the product is growing, with more than 60 percent of Indian women reportedly using one of the more than 240 brands of skin lightener available in that country.
Professor Lynne Eagle of James Cook University says skin whiteners are also easy to find in Australia. "I brought it from two different shops in Townsville within ten minutes' drive of my office," she said.
Microcredit--providing small loans to underserved entrepreneurs--has been both celebrated and vilified as a development tool. Six new studies from four continents bring rigorous evidence to this debate, finding that while microcredit has some benefits, it is not a viable poverty alleviation tool.
The amount of time children spend using screens, such as televisions and computers, on a daily basis exceeds recommended guidelines but those guidelines were drawn up at a time when tablets, cell phones and other mobile devices were not as present in everyday life. Unless you are Amish or a doomsday prepper, it is unlikely that the future will mean current screen time guidelines.
Too much sitting has been shown to increase the risk of chronic diseases, particularly diabetes, heart disease, and some types of cancer. Current guidelines suggest adults do 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week, but more than a third (35.6%) of adults worldwide are sufficiently inactive.
Furthermore, the proportion of time spent being inactive rises with age: from 55% (7.7 hours) at 20-29 years, to 67% (9.6 hours) in those aged 70-79 years.
Over the past 100 years, licensing and accrediting bodies have raised the quality of medical education and efforts have been made to ensure that medical schools meet a minimum standard for the curricula and clinical training they offer to students. However, comparing institutions and identifying which ones produce the physicians who provide the best patient care and conduct the best biomedical research remains challenging for prospective students. A popular method for comparing medical schools, the analysis performed by U.S.
In a large, national study of extremely premature infants, researchers found that death rates decreased from 2000 to 2011. An analysis of specific causes found that deaths attributed to immaturity or pulmonary causes and complicated by infection or central nervous system injury all decreased; however, deaths attributed to necrotizing enterocolitis increased. Necrotizing enterocolitis is an intestinal complication resulting from prematurity.
The study results are published in the Jan. 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Optimization algorithms, which try to find the minimum values of mathematical functions, are everywhere in engineering. Among other things, they're used to evaluate design tradeoffs, to assess control systems, and to find patterns in data.
One way to solve a difficult optimization problem is to first reduce it to a related but much simpler problem, then gradually add complexity back in, solving each new problem in turn and using its solution as a guide to solving the next one. This approach seems to work well in practice, but it's never been characterized theoretically.
Consumers usually look for the lowest price when shopping for a product. But can prices sometimes just feel right? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers are drawn to prices with rounded numbers when a purchase is motivated by feelings.
Product bundling is a common marketing strategy but retailers need to draw attention to the value of a package deal since consumers prefer products that are packaged individually.
Review articles in medical journals inform and enlighten physicians and other readers by summarizing the research on a given topic and setting the stage for further studies.
In an article in the journal Academic Medicine, William McGaghie, PhD, of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine identifies the five main strategies scholars use when writing review articles: narrative review, systematic review, scoping, critical-realist and open peer commentary.
Though American president Barack Obama talked about how he made fossil fuels cheaper and Wall Street executives richer in his State of the Union address, the lingering recession pushed an additional three million children into poverty, the highest rate in 50 years.