Feeding the amino acid tryptophan to young female pigs as part of their regular diet makes them less aggressive and easier to manage, according to a study by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists and cooperators.
Culture
LAWRENCE, Kan. — The history of students who copy homework from classmates may be as old as school itself. But in today's age of lecture-hall laptops and online coursework, how prevalent and damaging to the education of students has such academic dishonesty become?
According to research published online today in Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Research, unnoticed student cheating is a significant cause of course failure nationally.
INDIANAPOLIS – Patients seen at private facilities reimbursed by Medicare were more than 550 percent more likely to have routine cataract surgery than those who received their care from the Department of Veterans Affairs, a strong indication that the frequency of cataract surgery may be responsive to financial incentives to either or both the medical facility and the physicians who perform the procedure.
These findings from a large eight-year study are reported in the March 2010 issue of the American Journal of Medical Quality.
An F1000 evaluation looks at a British study of how the six basic human emotions are universally recognized but other positive emotions are culturally specific
Humans use a wide range of different cues, both verbal and non-verbal, to share important information and particularly to warn others of danger. A team from University College London's psychology department studied a range of non-verbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs, in two very different cultural groups.
London (18th March 2010) – Social science is at the center of every major challenge the world faces, yet faces a tough future, according to a panel of senior academics and politicians speaking in London this week who were taking part in a debate hosted by the British Academy and SAGE to explore how social science research can strengthen its involvement in policymaking and therefore increase its impact and, of course, protect itself from government funding cuts.
For every woman who is a direct target of sexism, there are others who witness the event and are also affected. The actions of one sexist man affect how female bystanders feel and behave towards men in general. Stephenie Chaudoir and Diane Quinn, from the University of Connecticut in the US, publish their work1 on the effects of bystander sexism and group-level reactions to sexism in Springer's journal Sex Roles.
A 3,000-year record from 52 of the world's oldest trees shows that California's western Sierra Nevada was droughty and often fiery from 800 to 1300, according to new research.
Scientists reconstructed the 3,000-year history of fire by dating fire scars on ancient giant sequoia trees, Sequoiadendron giganteum, in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. Individual giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years.
The UChicago team found that making cells assume a star shape promotes a tense cytoskeleton, which provides structural support for cells, while a flower shape promotes a looser cytoskeleton. "On a flower shape you get the majority of cells turning to fat, and on a star shape you've got the majority of cells turning into bone," said Kris Kilian, a National Institutes of Health Fellow in Mrksich's research group. The UChicago team published its findings in the March 1 Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Jennifer Smith, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was belly crawling her way to the end of a long, narrow tunnel carved in the rock at a desert oasis by Egyptians who lived in the time of the pharaohs.
They would love to be perfect mothers. Instead, they feel ashamed and inadequate, and fearful that their children might inherit their eating difficulties.
Imagine an ordinary Norwegian home, where Mum is having dinner with her three-year-old son. Underneath the surface of this seemingly idyllic scene, the woman is fighting a fierce battle with herself, thinking: "I wish he could finish eating, so I can go to the bathroom and throw up."
This is just one of many real-life stories Kristine Rørtveit has listened to while working on her thesis.
Providing emergency contraception to women in advance of need does not reduce pregnancy rates, despite increased use and faster use after unprotected sexual intercourse. These are the findings according to a new review published in The Cochrane Library.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer also may protect females from post-surgical recurrence of the disease, according to researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
A new study shows that the Gardasil vaccine reduces the likelihood of human papillomavirus (HPV)-related disease recurring after teen and adult women already have had surgery to remove cancer or certain pre-cancerous changes, said Warner Huh, M.D., an associate professor in the UAB Division of Gynecologic Oncology and lead presenter on the study.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Questionable lending helped sink the U.S. economy, but also provided a lifeline that kept countless firms afloat and averted an even deeper recession, according to research by a University of Illinois finance expert.
Boosting the radiation dose given to prostate cancer patients to a level that cut tumor recurrence in half did not increase the severity of side effects reported by patients up to a decade later. The study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center researchers also found that patients characterized the impact of continuing side effects on their quality of life as considerably less bothersome than would be expected, based on earlier studies. The article appears in the March 17 cancer issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
ATLANTA – New chemotherapy agents appear associated with improvements in survival time for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer but at substantial cost.