College Park, Md.—Nearly 5 million American children participate in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but until now no one has looked at the gender messages young people get when they start collecting those coveted badges.
Tech
PHILADELPHIA — The advancements of our electronic age rests on our ability to control how electric charge moves, from point A to point B, through circuitry. Doing so requires particular precision, for applications ranging from computers, image sensors and solar cells, and that task falls to semiconductors.
Now, a research team at the University of Pennsylvania's schools of Engineering and Applied Science and Arts and Sciences has shown how to control the characteristics of semiconductor nanowires made of a promising material: lead selenide.
ARLINGTON, Va. - Marking a milestone for the Navy, the Office of Naval Research and its industry partner on April 6 successfully tested a solid-state, high-energy laser (HEL) from a surface ship, which disabled a small target vessel.
The Navy and Northrop Grumman completed at-sea testing of the Maritime Laser Demonstrator (MLD), which validated the potential to provide advanced self-defense for surface ships and personnel by keeping small boat threats at a safe distance.
Mohammad Golabi, a soil science professor at the University of Guam, has put his years of research on vetiver grass to practical use in shielding the reefs in Pago Bay from the harmful effects of construction-induced run-off.
College Park, Md. (April 8, 2011) -- How to put more bang in your biofuels? Nanoparticles! A new study in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy shows that the addition of alumina nanoparticles can improve the performance and combustion of biodiesel, while producing fewer emissions.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's proposal to change Medicare for those under age 55 is nothing short of a complete reconceptualization of the health insurance program, says a University of Illinois elder law expert.
Richard L. Kaplan, a professor of law and expert on retirement issues, says the Ryan proposal would scrap Medicare's current defined-benefit program in favor of a defined-contribution arrangement in which the government would provide seniors with a stipulated amount of money to purchase health insurance from private insurers.
Doren in the Austrian Bregenzerwald, February 2007: a slope 650 meters long breaks, resulting in a massive slide into the valley below. The nearest residential buildings are very close to the 70-meter-high rim. This barely avoided catastrophe is not the only incident. Geologists have been monitoring increasingly unstable masses of earth over the past few years in the Alps and other Alpine regions, which have slipped down slopes and on slid unchecked down valleys to more stable substrates.
With a push to make hospitals and doctors more accountable for health care quality, more attention must be paid to the accuracy and reliability of measures used to evaluate caregivers, says a prominent Johns Hopkins patient safety expert.
SEATTLE—A video-based decision aid helped severely obese people to make more informed choices about bariatric surgery and reach more certainty about them, according to a trial involving 152 Group Health patients, e-published in Obesity in advance of print. This randomized controlled trial is the first to test shared decision making for weight-loss surgery.
Researchers in countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland study sand drift, but most of them are focusing on sand dunes along the coastline, not on the plains further inland.
"Sand dunes are dynamic. For all we know, they may have been formed last year. But sand plaines are much older and in periods more stable. Thin organic layers present in sands are interesting, when trying to understand sand drift in pre-historic times," says botanist Lisbeth Prøsch-Danielsen at the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — As recently as the 1990s, the Veterans Affairs health care system had a subpar reputation for quality, but two new studies of standard quality metrics, both led by Amal Trivedi, assistant professor of community health at Brown University and a physician at the Providence VA Medical Center, show that the system that cares for more than 5 million patients has improved markedly in the last decade.
New Orleans, LA – Dr. Howard Osofsky, Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Medicine, is an author of a review article published in the April 7, 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that urgently calls for the development of protocols to deal with the health effects of disasters – before the next one occurs.
ROCKVILLE, April 6, Maryland, 2011 – Neuralstem, Inc. (NYSE Amex: CUR) announced that the Phase I safety trial of its human spinal cord stem cells (HSSCs) in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) is the subject of three presentations at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Annual Meeting, April 9-16th, in Honolulu, HI (http://www.aan.com/go/am11).
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Communication researchers at four major universities have found that if you receive a lot of email, habitually respond to a good portion of it, maintain a lot of online relationships and conduct a large number of transactions online, you are more susceptible to email phishing expeditions than those who limit their online activity.
The study, "Why Do People Get Phished?" forthcoming in the journal Decision Support Systems and Electronic Commerce, uses an integrated information processing model to test individual differences in vulnerability to phishing.
Higher concentrations of the AIDS virus in genital secretions are linked to a greater risk of virus transmission between opposite-sex couples. The effect is independent of blood level of the virus.
These findings will be reported in the April 7 edition of Science Translational Medicine, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.