Tech

INDIANAPOLIS – Failure to have a prescription filled can undermine medical treatment, result in increased health care costs and potentially have devastating results for the patient. An editorial in the Nov. 16 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine highlights the problem and issues a call to action.

Risø Energy Report 9 lists a wide range of energy technologies in the market with low or no emissions of greenhouse gases, describing how several of these will be made commercially available in the next decades.

Washington, D.C. (November 16, 2010) -- For more than 250 years, researchers have known that under certain conditions vapor bubbles can form in fluids moving swiftly over a surface. These bubbles soon collapse with such great force that they can poke holes in steel and damage objects such as ship propellers, turbine blades, nozzles and pump impellers.

Scientists have conducted extensive research for decades to try to understand this phenomenon -- called cavitation. But most experiments to date have been related to open-water objects like ship propellers.

Washington, D.C. (November 16, 2010) -- In a move that holds great significance for the semiconductor industry, a team of researchers has created an alternative to conventional logic gates, demonstrated them in silicon, and dubbed them "chaogates." The researchers present their findings in Chaos, a journal published by the American Institute of Physics.

SEATTLE – November 15, 2010 – Children with chronic health conditions such as cystic fibrosis, type 1 diabetes, sickle cell diseases and cerebral palsy represent less than two percent of the population but can consume more than 50 percent of resources at children's hospitals throughout the country. Coordinating care for these children has historically been difficult because hospitals have varying methods to identify them in their systems.

In many preschool classrooms, gender is very noticeable—think of the greeting, "Good morning, boys and girls" or the instruction, "Girls line up on this side, boys on that." A new study has found that when teachers call attention to gender in these simple ways, children are more likely to express stereotyped views of what activities are appropriate for boys and girls, and which gender they prefer to play with.

The study, by researchers at The Pennsylvania State University, is published in the November/December 2010 issue of Child Development.

Young children's helpfulness is tempered when they see that the person they intend to help has harmed another person. But it also diminishes when they see that the object of their attention meant to harm another, even if no harm was done.

That's the conclusion of two new studies of 3-year-olds conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The research appears in the November/December 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

Non-smokers who regularly breathe in others' tobacco smoke are at increased risk of some degree of hearing loss, reveals research published online in Tobacco Control.

Previous research indicates that former and current smokers are more likely to lose some of their full range of hearing, but it's not been known whether passive smokers are also prone to this.

Disruptive behaviour disorders in male teenagers, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder are associated with about a one-third increase in the risk of being seriously injured in a road traffic crash – either as driver or pedestrian. This increase is similar to the increased relative risk found for patients treated for epilepsy. These are the findings of a study by Donald Redelmeier and colleagues from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, and published in this week's PLoS Medicine.

The active involvement of health professionals in hygiene, sanitation, and water supply is absolutely crucial to accelerating and consolidating global health progress, says a new series of papers in PLoS Medicine by a leading group of public health academics and water advocates.

Professor Sandy Cairncross from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and colleagues show how water and sanitation issues are woefully neglected across the world and suggest that action could prevent more than 2 million children dying each year.

Computer imaging to predict how patients will look following plastic surgery involving the nose appears to be moderately accurate, and patients value its inclusion in the preoperative consultation, according to a report in the November/December issue of Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation levels may remain high during winter months, and conditions can change rapidly, suggesting that adults participating in outdoor sports should rely on the season and time of day when judging the need for protective clothing and sunscreen, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Dermatology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Ultra-short X-ray beams produced at the University of Michigan could one day serve as more sensitive medical diagnostic tools, and they could work like strobe lights to allow researchers to observe chemical reactions that happen in quadrillionths of a second.

What are the key characteristics that voters consider when they're choosing their candidate for president? New research led by Judith Trent, a professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati, yields some surprising findings from surveys from the 2008 primary campaign in New Hampshire – a historic campaign in itself because of the diverse demographic characteristics of some of the leading contenders. The top ideal quality picks are a candidate's honesty and willingness to talk about the challenges affecting the nation.

Consumers value goals they've chosen on their own more than those that are imposed on them, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"When people believe they have autonomously chosen to pursue a goal themselves, they feel the goal is increasingly valuable as they put in more effort, because they experience their own effort as signaling how much they care about it," write authors Ying Zhang (University of Texas at Austin), Jing Xu, Zixi Jiang (both Peking University), and Szu-chi Huang (University of Texas at Austin).