Culture

The UK coalition government's planned NHS and welfare reforms, and their use of 'nudge' theory, hark back to ideas on welfare and recession from the end of the nineteenth century, according to studies by a University of Leicester historian whose research paper has recently been published in the Lancet.

Dr Kim Price's article entitled, 'The crusade against out-relief: a nudge from history' is his second in the Lancet within a year drawing parallels between past and present medical negligence.

Calls to the police reporting men's assaults on their wives or intimate partners rose 10 percent in areas where the local National Football League team lost a game they were favored to win, according to an analysis of 900 regular-season NFL games reports researchers in a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Significant differences were observed between the overall survival curves for the two countries; compared with the Swiss curve, the Canadian curve showed a quicker drop at the early stages of burial and poorer survival associated with prolonged burial," writes Dr. Pascal Haegeli, Simon Fraser University, with coauthors. "Poorer survival probabilities in the Canadian sample were offset by significantly quicker extrication (median duration of burial 18 minutes v. 35 minutes in the Swiss sample)."

"There are two reasons why the Lameness Locator is better than the naked eye," Keegan said. "It samples motion at a higher frequency beyond the capability of the human eye and it removes the bias that frequently accompanies subjective evaluation."

A report into the legal risks associated with the use of social networking sites (eg. Facebook, myspace) has found that while 95 per cent of Victorian students in years 7 to 10 use social networking sites, nearly 30 per cent did not consider social networking held any risks.

The project was established to investigate the legal risks of social networking as experienced by Victorian secondary school students, teachers and parents. Survey and interview data was gathered from over 1000 Victorian middle school students (years 7-10), 200 teachers and 49 parents.

Monash University researchers are working on a vaccine that could completely cure asthma brought on by house dust mite allergies.

If successful, the vaccine would have the potential to cure sufferers in two to three doses.

Allergies to house dust mites is a leading cause of asthma and the respiratory condition affects more than 2 million Australians and costs more than $600 million in health expenditure each year.

The Transcendental Meditation® technique may be an effective approach to improve math and English academic achievement in low-performing students, according to a new study published in the journal Education.

The study was conducted at a California public middle school with 189 students who were below proficiency level in English and math. Change in academic achievement was evaluated using the California Standards Tests (CST).

Individuals with poorer health or psychological issues may be prone to developing chronic widespread pain following a traumatic event. This new research, published today in Arthritis Care & Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), found that the onset of chronic pain was more often reported following a traffic accident than from other physically traumatic triggers.

San Diego, Calif., USA – Today, during the 89th General Session & Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, held in conjunction with the 40th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 35th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research, lead researcher F. Cheni will hold an oral presentation on a research study titled "Biodegradable Tooth-binding Micelles Inhibit Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans) Biofilm Growth."

Chevy Chase, MD (March 18, 2011)--The growing concern surrounding the release of radiation from an earthquake and tsunami-stricken nuclear complex in Japan has raised fears of radiation exposure to populations in North America from the potential plume of radioactivity crossing the Pacific Ocean.

(Garrison, NY) When presented with different terms to describe a clinical trial, parents were far more likely to consent to enroll their child if it was called a "research study" than if it was called a "medical experiment" or a "research project."

The reason was in large part because they perceived the former as safer, even though that was not necessarily the case.

"The nation that controls magnetism will control the universe," famed fictional detective Dick Tracy predicted back in 1935. Probably an overstatement, but there's little doubt the nation that leads the development of advanced magnetoelectronic or "spintronic" devices is going to have a serious leg-up on its Information Age competition. A smaller, faster and cheaper way to store and transfer information is the spintronic grand prize and a key to winning this prize is understanding and controlling a multiferroic property known as "spontaneous magnetization."

In a recent study published in Animal Behavior, biology researchers Kristina Karlsson Green and Josefin Madjidian at Lund University in Sweden have shown that animals' and plants' traits and behavior in sexual conflicts are colored by a human viewpoint. They want to raise awareness of the issue and provoke discussion among their colleagues in order to promote objectivity and broaden the research field.

It's not just how free the market is. Some economists are looking at another factor that determines how much a country's economy flourishes: how smart its people are. For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies.

AUBURN, AL—Students at land-grant universities are a major source of educated, highly qualified employees for the U.S. nursery industry. To prepare future employees for work in "green" occupations, land-grant institutions have traditionally offered classes in nursery management and production, but availability of qualified faculty, integration of departments, and cutbacks in horticulture programs have contributed to a reduction in the number of nursery management and production (NMP) courses being offered.