Culture

Spring marks baseball season for more than 19 million children and adolescents who play each year as part of a team or in backyards throughout the United States. The good news for these players is that the number of injuries from the sport is on the decline.

Three University of Notre Dame researchers are among the authors of a new paper that describes a ground-breaking tool designed to help policy makers determine when and how to use an environmental strategy known as "managed relocation."

Driven by rising health care costs at home, nearly 1 million Californians cross the border each year to seek medical care in Mexico, according a new paper by UCLA researchers and colleagues published today in the journal Medical Care.

An estimated 952,000 California adults sought medical, dental or prescription services in Mexico annually, and of these, 488,000 were Mexican immigrants, according to the research paper, "Heading South: Why Mexican Immigrants in California Seek Health Services in Mexico."

ORLANDO (May 30, 2009)—When a cancer patient and his or her doctor discuss the value of a treatment option, the conversation usually centers on a consideration of the treatment's medical benefits versus its possible side effects for the patient. Increasingly, however, as the already high costs of cancer care continue to rise, a full view of the patient's welfare must also take into account the economic impact of the treatment on the patient and his or her family.

PROVIDENCE, RI – A new study published online in the journal Obesity provides further evidence that strict maternal control over eating habits – such as determining how much a child should eat and coaxing them to eat certain foods – during early childhood may not lead to significant future weight gain in boys or girls. Instead, this behavior may be a response to concerns over a child's increasing weight.

(Boston) - Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston University School of Public Health have found that no adjustment method fully resolves confounding by indication in observational studies, meaning when the validity of a study is threatened by unmeasured confounding, it is not straightforward to determine which method of adjustment, if any, is most effective in obtaining a valid and precise estimate of effect. The study appears online in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.

A new study from North Carolina State University indicates that regulators need to do more to ensure that banks are adequately computing their Value-at-Risk (VaR) to reflect fluctuations in financial markets. The study finds that the tests used by regulators do not detect when VaRs inaccurately account for significant swings in the market, which is significant because VaRs are key risk-assessment tools financial institutions use to determine the amount of capital they need to keep on hand to cover potential losses.

In the study of University of Helsinki and Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, the neurobiological basis of music in human evolution and communication was evaluated using candidate genes associated in the earlier studies with social bonding and cognitive functions. The data consisted of 343 family members from 19 Finnish families with at least some professional musicians and/or active amateurs. The musical aptitude was assessed using three music tests: the auditory structuring ability test (Karma Music test) and Carl Seashore's pitch and time discrimination subtests.

TORONTO, May 25, 2009 – Ontario has invested millions of dollars into the healthcare system in response to a serious doctor shortage. But despite improvements in primary care, a study out of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) has found Ontario's chronically sick and poor are the least likely to benefit from the investments.

Private well water should be tested yearly, and in some cases more often, according to new guidance offered by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health, took a lead role in working with the AAP to develop these recommendations and draft a new AAP policy statement about the things parents should do if their children drink well water.

A bird is making a hook to access food.

(Photo Credit: Chris Bird)

This bird is making a hook to access food.

(Photo Credit: Chris Bird)

Source: University of Cambridge

Faculty physicians at academic medical centers may be less likely to experience burnout if they spend at least one day per week on the aspect of their work that is most meaningful to them, according to a report in the May 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University Health Network's Centre for Innovation in Complex Care (CICC) have found that a wide array of health-related activity occurs in the 3 dimensional virtual world of Second Life. Second Life is free for users with basic accounts, and reported over 16 million registered users worldwide in 2008.

The Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) today announced proposals designed to assist directors in the inclusion of climate change-related information in companies' annual reports.

The pioneering proposals, unveiled at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen, take the form of a global framework that clarifies precisely which climate change data should be reported by corporations and provides management with a set of guidelines designed to streamline disclosure procedures.

Timothy McKinnon would cross an ocean, wade through a jungle, and climb a mountain to save an endangered language. In fact, that's what the University of Delaware doctoral student is doing on Sumatra, the largest island in Indonesia.

McKinnon, the recent recipient of a prestigious Fulbright Student Award, is working to document the Malay dialect known as Kerinci (“cur-in-chee”), which is spoken near the foot of Mount Kerinci, an active volcano that is the highest peak in Sumatra.