Culture

Allowing teens to work too many hours in the wrong environment can be dangerous for their sexual health by fostering conditions that lead them to older sex partners, a new study shows.

This is just one of the findings in a University of Michigan study of youth on what predicts age of sex partners. Jose Bauermeister, one of the authors, says age difference of sex partners is important, because a larger age difference is associated with riskier sexual behavior and STDs, including HIV.

Disclosure of financial conflicts of interests to potential participants in research is important, but may have a limited role in managing these conflicts, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins, Duke and Wake Forest.

A new Web site, www.DeathRiskRankings.com, developed by researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University, allows users to query publicly available data from the United States and Europe, and compare mortality risks by gender, age, cause of death and geographic region. The DeathRiskRankings.com website not only gives the risk of dying within the next year, but it also ranks the probable causes and allows for quick side-by-side comparison between groups.

The European Union's REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical) legislation is intended as a comprehensive safety evaluation for commercial chemicals used in consumer products that are traded in Europe at amounts more than one ton per year.

LSU Professor and Chair of Environmental Sciences Nina Lam and Professor and Louisiana Real Estate Commission Chair Kelley Pace, along with colleagues from LSU, Tulane University and Texas State University, published the results of a study analyzing business return to New Orleans post-Katrina in the journal PLoS ONE.

If you're looking for reliable information, then you won't necessarily find it in the newspaper. According to Dr. Susan Glover from the University of California in the US, public information from both informal and written sources, like newspapers, leads entrepreneurs astray. In a study¹ just published online in Springer's journal Human Ecology, Dr. Glover took as an example how newspaper propaganda shaped the ore foraging strategies of the late nineteenth century Colorado silver prospectors.

In organizational settings, managers as well as others in leadership roles should perhaps think twice before ridiculing subordinate employees on their choice of lunch, attire, or habits, or generally acting disrespectfully towards them. Recent research from the Journal of Management Studies shows that when an employee believes that he or she has been treated unfairly, the employee is not likely to forgive and forget.

Environmentalists are just as fond of talking about it as are politicians, economists or marketing experts – "sustainability" has become a buzzword. The problem is that the term sustainability can refer to many things and have manifold interpretations. Agricultural scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen have shed light on the subject. Together with colleagues in theoretical and applied science they have managed to give the term "sustainability" a more definite meaning.

A nurse intervention program that helps sexually exploited runaway girls re-connect to family, school and health care reduces trauma and restores healthy behaviors, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researcher Elizabeth Saewyc and Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota nurse practitioner Laurel Edinburgh.

BATON ROUGE – LSU Professor and Chair of Environmental Sciences Nina Lam and Professor and Louisiana Real Estate Commission Chair Kelley Pace, along with colleagues from LSU, Tulane University and Texas State University, will publish the results of a study analyzing business return to New Orleans post-Katrina in a Public Library of Science publication, PLoS ONE, on Wednesday, Aug. 26.

Watermelon juice can be a valuable source of biofuel. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's journal Biotechnology for Biofuels have shown that the juice of reject watermelons can be efficiently fermented into ethanol.

Candomblé, a religion practiced primarily in South America and inspired by older African beliefs, makes much use of animal sacrifice. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine carried out interviews with priests, priestesses and adherents of the religion, documenting the role sacrifice plays in their beliefs.

Infection with an antimicrobial-resistant strain of typhoid fever among patients in the United States is associated with international travel, especially to the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), according to a study in JAMA. The study also shows an increase in certain strains of typhoid fever that are resistant to the most commonly used medications for treatment.

Standardized rates of hip fracture have steadily declined in Canada since 1985, with a more rapid decline between 1996 and 2005 and a more marked decrease among individuals age 55 to 64 years, according to a report in JAMA.

With efforts to improve patient safety gathering momentum, two Johns Hopkins experts in patient safety and bioethics urge policy makers to weigh in about which safety interventions deserve the most urgent attention when it's clear that resources are limited.

In a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), they suggest that health policy makers have yet to come to grips with the complexity of setting such priorities, and that time is of the essence.