Culture

A new study published in Clinical & Experimental Allergy reveals that there is no association between a restaurant worker's knowledge of food allergy and his or her confidence in being able to provide a safe meal to a food allergic customer.

Food allergies are common, affecting 2% of adults and as much as 8% of children in the UK alone. Allergic reactions can cause a wide variety of symptoms, the most serious being anaphylaxis, which can cause death.

In tests of four different types of new refrigerators, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers found that ice makers increased rated energy consumption by 12 to 20 percent. About three-fourths of that additional energy cost is due to the electric heaters used to release the ice bits from the molds.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Treating high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and other vascular risk factors may help lower the risk of Alzheimer's disease in people who already show signs of declining thinking skills or memory problems. The research is published in the April 13, 2011, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

BOSTON/NEW YORK – April 12, 2011 –A study by Columbia Business School Professor Jonathan Levav, Class of 1967 Associate Professor of Business, Marketing and Professor Shai Danziger, Chairperson, Department of Management, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Liora Avnaim-Pesso , a graduate student of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, recently featured online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that a judge's willingness to grant parole can be influenced by the time between their latest break and t

Remote lochs along the west coast of Scotland are turning up new evidence about the origins of life on land.

A team of scientists exploring rocks around Loch Torridon have discovered the remarkably preserved remains of organisms that once lived on the bottom of ancient lake beds as long as a billion (1000 million) years ago.

These fossils illuminate a key moment in the history of evolution when life made the leap from tiny, simple bacterial (prokaryote) cells towards larger, more complex (eukaryotic) cells which would make photosynthesis and sexual reproduction possible.

The United States government is expanding a 20-year-old program to secure and help destroy Cold War-era nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to an unlikely area of the world —East Africa, according to an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS's weekly newsmagazine.

TORONTO, April 13, 2011 – The role of family in ending youth homelessness is largely ignored in Canada, according to a report released today by York University, though there is evidence that family reconnection works in Australia and the United Kingdom and in one exceptional program in Toronto.

Some 65,000 young people are homeless or at risk of homelessness across Canada. In Toronto, approximately 1,700 youth are on the streets on any given night, about half of them in emergency shelters.

If HIV-infected adults in San Francisco began taking antiretroviral treatments as soon as they were diagnosed, the rate of new HIV infections among men who have sex with men would be cut by almost 6o percent over five years, according to a new study by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Children were the victims in more than half of the emergency room visits for eye injuries related to aerosol cans between 1997 and 2009, according to a new study by researchers at Brown University. More could be done, they said, to prevent injury from the pressurized and often harsh chemical contents of the common products.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed software that helps Android smartphone users prevent their personal information from being stolen by hackers.

HUNTSVILLE -- Gang members are twice as likely to be crime victims than non-gang members and are more frequently subject to simple assault, aggravated assault and drive by shootings, according to a recently study by the Crime Victims' Institute at Sam Houston State University.

In addition, gang members report their neighborhoods are more dangerous, are of lower quality, and have greater problems with drugs compared to non-gang members.

While it is commonly believed that gang membership offers protection, the study found that gang members were more likely to be victimized.

What's the difference between stealing a CD from a music store and ripping off music online? The music industry and law enforcers say that there is none: Theft is theft, whether it's physical or digital.

College students participating in a newly published study, however, said that while they were unlikely to shoplift and viewed that behavior as immoral, they were not exactly motivated to follow the laws governing digital music piracy -- a finding that underscores the difficulties of enforcing such laws and to find new ways to discourage the theft of all types of digital content.

Bacterial genes that make urine less acidic could be good targets to prevent catheter blockage, according to research presented at the Society for General Microbiology's Spring Conference in Harrogate. The findings could lead to new strategies to prevent serious infections, particularly in long-term catheterization patients.

Buffalo, N.Y. – An electrical engineer at the University at Buffalo, who previously demonstrated experimentally the "rainbow trapping effect" -- a phenomenon that could boost optical data storage and communications -- is now working to capture all the colors of the rainbow.