Culture

Ride-hailing trips increase the number of crashes for motorists and pedestrians at pick-up and drop-off locations, reports a new study from researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The research is the first to use data for individual ride-hailing trips, rather than comparing cities where ride-hailing is available to those where it is not available. The findings are published in the journal Injury Prevention.

A recent discovery by University of Arkansas physicists could help researchers establish the existence of quantum spin liquids, a new state of matter. They've been a mystery since they were first proposed in the 1970s. If proven to exist, quantum spin liquids would be a step toward much faster, next-generation quantum computing.

Washington, D.C., April 7, 2020 -- In states that have banned affirmative action, the share of underrepresented minorities among students admitted to and enrolling in public universities has steadily lost ground relative to changing demographic trends among those states' high school graduates, according to new research.

The study, by Mark Long at the University of Washington and Nicole Bateman at the Brookings Institution, was published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

Today, the Arabian Peninsula is one of the most arid regions in the world. But its climate has not always been the same, and the past has seen both greater aridity and more humidity at different points in time. As a region at risk of water stress in a heating world, Arabia is of significant interest to scientists studying climate change.

Almost half of apparently healthy people between the ages of 40 and 50 could be accumulating fatty plaques--atheromas--in their arteries at a much faster rate than was previously thought. The Journal of American College of Cardiology (JACC) has today published new data from the PESA-CNIC-Santander study demonstrating that atheroma plaques extend rapidly through the arteries of 40% of asymptomatic individuals aged between 40 and 50 years.

Apes in U.S. zoos host bacterial communities in their intestinal tracts that are more similar to those of people who eat a non-Western diet than to the gut makeup of their wild ape cousins, according to a new study from Washington University in St. Louis. Further, even wild apes that have never encountered antibiotics harbor microbes with antibiotic resistance genes.

What The Study Did: What combination of healthy lifestyle factors were associated with the most years lived without chronic diseases was the focus of this analysis that included data from more than 100,000 adults who were participants in 12 European studies. Participants' levels of smoking, weight, physical activity and alcohol consumption were compared with the number of years from age 40 to 75 that they were without chronic disease, including type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.