Culture

(Garrison NY) A Hastings Center workshop examining moral issues in synthetic biology completed its third meeting as the J. Craig Venter Group announced that it had created the first viable cell with a synthetic genome.

RENO, Nev. – Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Researchers at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida have discovered a key gene that, when turned off, promotes the development of common kidney cancer. Their findings suggest that a combination of agents now being tested in other cancers may turn the gene back on, providing a much-needed therapy for the difficult-to-treat cancer.

WASHINGTON—May 20, 2010— Nearly three-quarters of Americans are confident in our system for reviewing the effectiveness and safety of new medicines and medical devices, yet 41% say it takes too long to approve a drug and allow it to be sold to consumers. These are among the findings in a new poll from Research!America.

So close and yet so wrong – you might love heavy metal like Metallica but your music platform suggests you should also like the Sixties sound of The Doors, simply because both bands are classified as rock.

New research published today, Thursday, 20 May, in New Journal of Physics says that searching for the temporal aspects of songs – their rhythm – might be better to find music you like than using current automatic genre classifications.

Ever since ancient times, scholars have puzzled over the reasons that some musical note combinations sound so sweet while others are just downright dreadful. The Greeks believed that simple ratios in the string lengths of musical instruments were the key, maintaining that the precise mathematical relationships endowed certain chords with a special, even divine, quality. Twentieth-century composers, on the other hand, have leaned toward the notion that musical tastes are really all in what you are used to hearing.

A new study released today by Rice University and the U.S. Department of State's (DOS) Office of eDiplomacy looks at the five-year history of creating and implementing Diplopedia, DOS' use of the Wikipedia-style diplomacy Web 2.0 tool.

Diplopedia is the U.S. State Department's internal knowledge-sharing platform – an unclassified, open-source wiki platform of "how-to" knowledge for America's diplomatic corps.

After Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the public school infrastructure in New Orleans, Louisiana embarked on a massive effort to rebuild the entire New Orleans public school system, launching the nation's most extensive charter school experiment. The goal was to provide a quality education to all New Orleans students, regardless of race, socioeconomic class, or where they live.

The concept of family-centered care for children with special health care needs is based on the understanding that a partnership among patients, families and health care professionals is essential to providing quality care.

Components of family-centered care include adequate time spent with the patient, attentive listening, care that is sensitive to the family's values and customs, the provision of necessary information, and helping the family feel like a partner in the child's care.

PHILADELPHIA, PA – Having a child with autism can put stress on the parents' marriage, and a frequently cited statistic leads to a common perception that the divorce rate among these families is as high as 80 percent. But a study released today by researchers from Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore found that a child's autism has no effect on the family structure.

A popular belief that specific dietary changes can improve the symptoms of children with autism was not supported by a tightly controlled University of Rochester study, which found that eliminating gluten and casein from the diets of children with autism had no impact on their behavior, sleep or bowel patterns.

WASHINGTON, DC – May 19, 2010 -- A five-year follow up study in Bangladesh finds that women are literally wearing the answer to better health for themselves, their families and even their neighbors. Using the simple sari to filter household water protects not only the household from cholera, but reduces the incidence of disease in neighboring households that do not filter. The results of this study appear in the inaugural issue of mBio™, the first online, open-access journal published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM).

It is difficult to imagine a depressed third-grader. It is even more difficult to imagine a depressed preschooler. Although childhood depression is a well-recognized and treated disorder, only recently have research studies begun looking at depression in children younger than six years old. In the new Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, child psychiatrist/researcher Joan Luby from Washington University in St.

Athens, Ga. – For centuries, ginger root has been used as a folk remedy for a variety of ailments such as colds and upset stomachs. But now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found that daily ginger consumption also reduces muscle pain caused by exercise.