Culture

Scientists working in the desert badlands of northwestern Kenya have found stone tools dating back 3.3 million years, long before the advent of modern humans, and by far the oldest such artifacts yet discovered. The tools, whose makers may or may not have been some sort of human ancestor, push the known date of such tools back by 700,000 years; they also may challenge the notion that our own most direct ancestors were the first to bang two rocks together to create a new technology.

ew local government organizations in Colorado had policies on environmental controls, such as the provision of outdoor shade, or administrative procedures, including training and resource allocation, to improve sun protection for their workers and most policies addressed employees' use of personal protection practices, according to a new analysis.

Most people associate osteoporosis with women. But the truth is, one in four men over the age of 50 will break a bone as a result of this condition. That's more men than will have prostate cancer, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation.

Now a leading researcher at National Jewish Health is calling for men to be included in the screening guidelines for osteoporosis. Elizabeth Regan, MD, PhD, a researcher at National Jewish Health, studied more than 3,000 smokers and former smokers ages 45 to 80 and tested their bone density. What she found was surprising.

How the Victorians and how they sought to define and deal with negligent medical care in the wake of the poor law is the subject of a new book.

Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain is written by Dr Kim Price from the Centre for Medical Humanities and explores the hundreds of charges of neglect against doctors who were contracted to the 'new' poor law after the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. As well as its historical perspective, the book provides some insights into the welfare system today.

Many of those who should get it, don't. And many of those who shouldn't, do. That's the story of a common screening test for osteoporosis, according to new research.

Playing natural sounds such as flowing water in offices could boosts worker moods and improve cognitive abilities in addition to providing speech privacy, according to a new study from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They will present the results of their experiment at the 169th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held May 18-22, 2015 in Pittsburgh.

Children born since the 1980s are two to three times more likely than older generations to be overweight or obese by the age of 10, according to new research published in PLOS Medicine. The study, conducted by researchers from CLOSER, a consortium of UK longitudinal studies, characterized population shifts in body mass index (BMI) using data from more than 56,000 people born in Britain from 1946 to 2001.

HIV infections continue to rise in young gay and bisexual men despite three decades of outreach and HIV prevention as well as recent availability of biomedical technologies to prevent infection.

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research shows a new dimension to the marginalization of smokers: people who smoke are less likely to vote than their non-smoking peers.

Swedish clinicians recently reported the first live birth after uterus transplantation, which was followed by two more uneventful births and another pregnancy that is near term.

In recent years, the popularity of "electronic dance music" (EDM) and dance festivals has increased substantially throughout the US and worldwide.

Thousands of American health care providers are unprepared to provide quality end-of-life care to their patients, write the editors of Scientific American in this month’s Science Agenda column. The editors argue that every medical student should be more extensively trained—and evaluated on—the skills needed to help patients navigate life’s final stages.

There is a striking and statistically significant difference in how women and men are treated following a heart attack. These gender differences are reflected in the rate of risk factor control, which was lower in women, and in the rate of hospital readmission for a further heart attack, which was higher in women than in men.

A National Research Council paper concludes that scientific research is increasingly dominated by teams - a promising approach that is also rife with challenges.

Steve Kozlowski, professor of psychology at Michigan State University, said the book-length report is likely to have major public policy and research funding implications as academic and scientific research communities are still largely structured around an outdated concept of the independent solo investigator.

Today's academic medical centers need to embrace the changing healthcare marketplace or run the risk of becoming obsolete, according to a commentary published in Academic Medicine. The commentary is authored by Verdi DiSesa, MD, MBA, Chief Operating Officer of the Temple University Health System (TUHS) and Vice Dean for Clinical Affairs and Professor of Surgery at Temple University School of Medicine (TUSM), and Larry Kaiser, MD, President and CEO of TUHS, Senior Executive Vice President for Health Affairs at Temple University, and Dean and Professor of Surgery at TUSM.