It's a 500-pound gorilla that Robert Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, sees standing on the speaker's dais at political rallies, debates and campaigns. Its name is population growth.
Culture
WASHINGTON — All U.S. agencies with counterterrorism programs that collect or "mine" personal data -- such as phone, medical, and travel records or Web sites visited -- should be required to systematically evaluate the programs' effectiveness, lawfulness, and impacts on privacy, says a new report from the National Research Council. Both classified and unclassified programs should be evaluated before they are set in motion and regularly thereafter for as long as they are in use, says the report. It offers a framework agencies can use to assess programs, including existing ones.
Most glaciers in every mountain range and island group in Alaska are experiencing significant retreat, thinning or stagnation, especially glaciers at lower elevations, according to a new book published by the U.S. Geological Survey. In places, these changes began as early as the middle of the 18th century.
Although more than 99 percent of Alaska's large glaciers are retreating, a handful, surprisingly, are advancing.
INDIANAPOLIS -- The diagnosis of asthma in a young child may well be more challenging to pediatricians than previously appreciated, according to a review of research and clinical experience literature by Howard Eigen, M.D., of the Indiana University School of Medicine and Riley Hospital for Children appearing in the October 2008 issue of Clinical Pediatrics.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study reveals that the general appearance of a neighborhood is the single most important factor affecting how satisfied residents are about the area where they live.
But beyond general appearance, people living in different neighborhoods may be looking at distinct factors when making their overall evaluations.
What does a mixture of two different kinds of cells have in common with a mixture of oil and water? The same basic force causes both mixtures to separate into two distinct regions.
That is the conclusion of a new three-dimensional computer model of the cell sorting process produced by Shane Hutson, assistant professor of physics at Vanderbilt University, and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Canada that is described in the Oct. 3 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Most glaciers in every mountain range and island group in Alaska are experiencing significant retreat, thinning or stagnation, especially glaciers at lower elevations, according to a new book published by the U.S. Geological Survey. In places, these changes began as early as the middle of the 18th century.
Although more than 99 percent of Alaska's large glaciers are retreating, a handful, surprisingly, are advancing.
Leave it to hypothesized gravity to weigh down what physicists have thought for 30 years. If theoretical physicists, led by the University of Oregon's Stephen Hsu, are right, the idea that nature's forces merge under grand unification has grown fuzzy.
One of the smallest seals – the Caspian - has joined a growing list of mammal species in danger of extinction.
Scientists from the University of Leeds together with international partners have documented the disastrous decline of the seal - a species found only in the land-locked waters of the Caspian Sea – in a series of surveys which reveal a 90 per cent drop in numbers in the last 100 years.
Music therapy can reduce psychological stress among pregnant women, according to research just published in a special complementary and alternative therapy medicine issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing.
Researchers from the College of Nursing at Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan, randomly assigned 116 pregnant women to a music group and 120 to a control group.
Caswell et al.report in the Journal of Cell Biology how the altered behavior of integrins can prompt metastatic movement in tumor cells.
SALT LAKE CITY – Do you want to know the percentage of white women who support vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin? What about college-educated versus high school-educated white women? Or those who also hunt?
University of Utah computer scientists have written software they hope eventually will allow news reporters and citizens to easily, interactively and visually answer such questions when analyzing election results, political opinion polls or other surveys.
For arachnophobes, it's difficult to kill a spider as it scurries across the floor. Those who are scared to fly might not ever set foot on a plane. While nothing physically stops people with these aversions, a mental barrier can keep them from the task at hand.
The same could be said for obese women when it comes to physical activity, according to research presented at the Obesity Society's Annual Meeting on Oct. 5.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought.
The tracks -- two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter -- date back some 570 million years, to the Ediacaran period.
The Ediacaran preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved.
DURHAM, N.C. -- It's no secret that reading is beneficial. But can it help kids lose weight? In the first study to look at the impact of literature on obese adolescents, researchers at Duke Children's Hospital discovered that reading the right type of novel may make a difference.