With American families contributing a growing proportion of their personal income to health care, researchers find patients are consequently experiencing a range of social, medical, financial and sometimes legal disruptions resulting from high out-of-pocket expenses.
Culture
A skilful negotiator can save a lot of money when shopping in his favourite store. This was found out by researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) in a large-scale study. An extra five percent discount is, on average, no problem - as long as you know how to use your customer loyalty as a trump.
The credo turned on its head
Children and adolescents who watch a lot of television are more likely to manifest antisocial and criminal behaviour when they become adults, according to a new University of Otago, New Zealand, study published online in the US journal Pediatrics.
Clinicians with higher levels of implicit ethnic or racial bias—bias that may not be consciously acknowledged but operates in more subtle ways—are rated less favorably by their black patients than are clinicians with lower levels of implicit bias.
Surveys of nearly 3,000 patients, randomly selected from patient panels of 134 clinicians who had previously completed tests of implicit ethnic or racial bias, found black patients rated clinicians who had greater implicit bias against blacks lower in patient-centered care than they did clinicians with little or no such implicit bias.
In the lab, rats with severe spinal cord injury are learning to walk—and run—again. Last June in the journalScience, Grégoire Courtine, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), reported that rats in hislab are not only voluntarily initiating a walking gait, but they were sprinting, climbing up stairs, and avoidingobstacles after a couple of weeks of neurorehabilitation with a combination of a robotic harness and electricalchemicalstimulation.
It has been more than 50 years since Rachel Carson published her groundbreaking book "Silent Spring". Derided by scientists at the time, she is now regarded as a hero by environmental progressives and a villain by many others, but Carson certainly changed how the public views environmentalism.
Hurricane Sandy was a fearsome reminder that coastal communities are highly vulnerable to extreme weather events and environmental variability, and that vulnerability is only expected to increase with climate change. Brown University scientists Heather Leslie and Leila Sievanen, members of an interdisciplinary research team focused on human-environment interactions in coastal regions, will discuss these challenges this month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.
DURHAM, N.H. – As our climate changes, the way we engineer our cities must, too. That's the message that University of New Hampshire professor Paul Kirshen, an author of a recent report that assessed Boston's vulnerability to coastal flooding, will deliver at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting February 14-18, 2013, in Boston.
BOSTON – Given the huge investment and power of science and technology in the U.S. it is surprising that more attention isn't paid to the policy decisions that drive the enterprise, said Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University. What appears to be missing from the equation, he added, is a focus on outcomes.
Sarewitz was speaking at the 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston.
With nearly 20 percent of the United States experiencing a drought, the damage from Hurricane Sandy estimated at $65 billion and farmers in Canada's Prairies struggling with the effects of 2011's devastating flooding, water security in North America is ia hot topic.
Evidence of a shift in U.S. demographics and importance of minorities took center stage during the Presidential election, but how do those growing toward majority acquire representation in our educational and technological communities?
For women in science and research, finding a network of colleagues in their specialized area might be difficult: relevant researchers and activists can be spread across generations, cultures and continents. Finding a mentor within this group proves particularly difficult for young women and minorities.
In a world of increasing global connections, predicting the spread of infectious diseases is more complicated than ever. Pandemics no longer follow the patterns they did centuries ago, when diseases swept through populations town by town; instead, they spread quickly and seemingly at random, spurred by the interactions of 3 billion air travelers per year.
Efforts to reduce lead pollution have paid off in many ways, yet the problem persists and will probably continue to affect the health of people and animals well into the future, according to experts speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston.
Evaluation of PEPFAR, a new report from the Institute of Medicine, presents the results of an assessment of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief as requested by Congress in its reauthorization of funding for the initiative in 2008. The report includes recommendations for how PEPFAR and its partner countries can most effectively sustain and advance gains made in preventing and treating the HIV/AIDS epidemic worldwide. Congress will review the initiative later this year.