Culture

A child’s ability to succeed academically is one of the strongest determinants of his or her future quality of life. In particular, it has been directly linked to overall longevity and several other critical health outcomes. Ashaunta Anderson, MD, MPH, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Center for Healthy Communities in the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine, and a team of researchers have described the types of racial socialization in early childhood that may increase a child’s ability to flourish in school and ultimately lead a healthier life.

ESF has just published a report on a pilot study of the career paths of post-doctorates and doctorate alumni from five research funding and research performing organisations: AXA Research Fund (AXA RF), France, Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR), Luxembourg, Goethe Graduate Academy at the Goethe University Frankfurt (GRADE), Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland and TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, a co-sponsored programme of UNICEF, UNDP, the World Bank and WHO.

Teenage girls like and feel more similar to women in appearance-focused jobs such as models and actresses, though they find female CEOs and military pilots to be better role models, according to a new study by researchers at Oregon State University.

For the study, 100 girls and 76 boys ages 14 to 18 were shown photographs of model Heidi Klum, actress Jennifer Aniston, CEO Carly Fiorina and military pilot Sarah Deal Burrow. Klum and Aniston represented the appearance-focused careers and Fiorina and Deal Burrow represented the non-appearance focused careers.

Gaining that required qualification to put on your CV is what counts to win a job in today’s “graduate economy”. On current trends, perhaps everyone will have a degree by the end of this century. Already in Finland, a remarkable 80% of young people are now going to university.

A new cross-cultural study of social network site users in Japan (Facebook and Mixi) and the US (Facebook), shows that Japanese users are more concerned about Internet privacy than Americans, and suggests that Americans’ lower sense of concern is due to a higher level of general trust in strangers.

That is, Americans are less likely to believe a stranger would take advantage of their private information, should it be leaked online.

Earlier this year, police revealed that at least 22 young women and girls as young as 15 have traveled to join Isis in Syria in the last 12 months. Joining a terrorist organization is all the rage among young people seeking adventure, but they won't get what they hope. For that reason, a Birmingham City University criminologist is urging young muslim “thrillseekers" to ignore the escapist vision offered by Islamic State.

Do microbes grow differently on the International Space Station than they do on Earth? Results from the growth of microbes collected by citizen scientists in Project MERCCURI indicate that most behave similarly in both places.

"While this data is extremely preliminary, it is potentially encouraging for long-term manned spaceflight," said David Coil, Ppoject scientist in the microbiology lab of Jonathan Eisen at the University of California, Davis.

Lethal wounds identified on a human skull in the Sima de los Huesos, Spain, may indicate one of the first cases of murder in human history, some 430,000 years ago, according to a study published May 27 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Nohemi Sala from Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos, Spain, and colleagues.

A national regulatory framework designed to prevent and limit indoor tanning is needed to alleviate the cancer burden and reduce the billions in financial costs from preventable skin cancer, say two Georgetown University public health experts.

In their "Viewpoint" published online today in JAMA, Darren Mays, PhD, MPH, and John Kraemer, JD, MPH, explore a regulatory opportunity--similar to the way toy safety standards were achieved--that could help drive strong, national policies regarding indoor tanning.

Hallucinations and delusions in the general population are more common than previously thought.

An international study led by The University of Queensland and Harvard Medical School found that hearing voices and seeing things others cannot impacts about five per cent of the general population at some point in their lives.

Queensland Brain Institute researcher Professor John McGrath said the study, involving more than 31,000 people from 19 countries, was the most comprehensive ever completed.

A recent study has revealed a breakthrough in asthma research might be on the horizon. Following extensive research carried out across a number of institutions, it has been discovered that protein molecules - known as calcium-sensing receptors - have a vital role in asthma. Although they have not previously been used to treat asthma, there is already medication available (calcilytics) that could be used to block these proteins.

Racial stereotypes and expectations can impact the way we communicate and understand others, according to UBC research.

The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, highlights how non-verbal "social cues" - such as photographs of Chinese Canadians - can affect how we comprehend speech.

"This research brings to light our internal biases, and the role of experience and stereotypes, in how we listen to and hear each other," says Molly Babel, the paper's lead author and an assistant professor with UBC's Department of Linguistics.

I will start by asking two questions: at what age did you know your gender, and do you think someone else had to tell you what it was? I’m director of mental health at a leading gender clinic in the US. Our clinic is a half-decade old – and in that short period the number of families coming to us with questions about their child’s gender has grown astronomically every month.

Adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) is linked to lower death rates in a low-income population in southeastern US.

In a low-income population from the southeastern US, higher adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) was linked with 14%-23% lower mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other diseases, according to a study published by Wei Zheng and colleagues from Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

New UK research has challenged the assumption that people with rheumatoid arthritis always take their medication as prescribed.

Researchers from the Arthritis Research UK Centre for Epidemiology at The University of Manchester found that 40% of patients scored low on an adherence questionnaire at least once during their time in a recent study, indicating that they might not be taking their expensive biological therapies as regularly as prescribed.

Their research is published online in the journal Rheumatology.