Culture

HealthSpace, the internet-accessible personal health organiser developed as part of the National Programme for IT in the National Health Service, was significantly less popular than anticipated, a research team from the University of London has found.

Instead of the predicted 5-10% of the population signing up, only 0.13% of those invited got as far as activating the full functionality of their personal health record, according to the study published on bmj.com today.

  • Energy drinks are commonly consumed by teens and college students
  • A new study shows that energy drink consumption is strongly associated with increased risks for heavy drinking and alcohol dependence
  • These results call for more scrutiny regarding the possible negative health effects of energy drinks and public education about the risks of consuming energy drinks with alcohol

Among the findings of an analysis of previous studies regarding ear infections in children are that results from otoscopic exams (an instrument for examining the interior of the ear) are critical to accurate diagnosis and antibiotics are modestly more effective than no treatment, with most antibiotics demonstrating similar rates of clinical success among children at normal risk, according to an article in the November 17 issue of JAMA.

How you think about your goals—whether it's to improve yourself or to do better than others—can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

WASHINGTON — The United States is missing significant opportunities to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries, and could save lives by implementing a more rigorous, comprehensive program that adopts successful safety practices from other countries, says a new report by the National Research Council.

Published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development, the investigation was the first to follow boys and girls over three decades to examine whether childhood aggression, social withdrawal and low socio-economic status could impact adult wellbeing.

"Low socioeconomic status appears to have long-term detrimental effects – even when childhood behavior, education and other variables are factored in," says lead author Lisa A. Serbin, a psychology professor at Concordia University.

For Immediate Release – November 16, 2010 – (Toronto) – A new study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has found that 29,000 Ontario students from grades 7-12 report behaviours indicating that they are gambling problematically. The study also found that more than two-thirds of these students reported problems with substance use and/or alcohol use, and 25% reported a suicide attempt in the past year.

The impact a specific schoolteacher has on students' math and reading scores – whether bad or good – fades quite fast, according to a new study by researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of Michigan.

A recent trend in public education is to measure teacher quality based on how the students fared on standardized tests compared to previous years. If most of Mr. Green's current 5th grade students score at a higher percentile than they did as 4th graders, then Mr. Green gets what's called a high "value-added" rating.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—U.S. policymakers must focus more closely on developing new energy storage technologies as they consider a national renewable electricity standard, according to one of the principal recommendations in a newly released report, Integrating Renewable Electricity on the Grid, by the American Physical Society's Panel on Public Affairs (POPA). Establishing a national renewable electricity standard will help to unify the fragmented U.S. grid system—an important step in the wider adoption of using more wind and solar for energy generation.

The increase in the legal age of sexual consent from 14 to 16 years in 2008 may not be protecting those at greatest risk, according to researchers who have analyzed British Columbia population-based data and recommend additional strategies to safeguard vulnerable children and teens.

In the first study of its kind in Canada, researchers from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University tested the government's reasons for changing the law. Their findings are published in the current issue the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.

State-funded preschool programs have historically enrolled low-income children, aiming to help them start school on a footing closer to nonpoor youngsters. Today, more and more states are expanding access to preschool programs, and some are making them universally available. How will this affect states' efforts to narrow achievement gaps? A new study concludes that while the benefits of preschool are greatest for children living in poverty, nonpoor children, particularly Black youngsters, also experience positive gains from preschool participation.

US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies, published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Fraudsters are also more likely to be "repeat offenders," the study shows.

The study author searched the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn—and therefore officially expunged from the public record—between 2000 and 2010.

A major obstacle to achieving the health-related Millennium Development Goals is the weakness of the health systems in many low and middle income countries, and their struggle to effectively provide health care to populations in need. Research into health systems aims to improve health care delivery; however, multiple definitions of this type of research exist and this lack of clarity is negatively affecting the credibility, and hence progress, of this research.