Culture

Like ants, it is believed that the success of humans has been due to our ability to cooperate in large groups. Unlike other animals, people are able to work together in large groups and coordinate their actions to produce mutual benefits.

Few health care providers in rural India know the correct treatments for childhood diarrhea and pneumonia - two leading killers of young children worldwide. But even when they do, they rarely prescribe them properly, according to a new Duke University study. Medical practitioners typically fail to prescribe lifesaving treatments such as oral rehydration salts (ORS). Instead, they typically prescribe unnecessary antibiotics or other potentially harmful drugs, said Manoj Mohanan, a professor in Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy, and lead author of the study.

Most "risk calculators" used by clinicians to gauge a patient's chances of suffering a heart attack and guide treatment decisions appear to significantly overestimate the likelihood of a heart attack, according to results of a study by investigators at Johns Hopkins and other institutions.

A new study finds that small differences in institutional prestige have an enormous impact on the likelihood that a person who graduates with a doctoral degree will land a coveted faculty job.

The advantage of alma mater prestige in finding a job is so great that it cannot be explained solely by a difference in educational quality between the universities, according to the study, led by the University of Colorado Boulder and published today in the journal Science Advances.

Free inquiry is under serious threat in America, according to a new book by Alice Dreger, a Northwestern University historian of medicine and science.  

While people in the early years of marriage have sex more frequently, and their sexual activity tapers off over time, a slight rebound occurs for those whose marriages endure longer than half a century, according to new research.

The study also found that people who remain in their first marriages have sex more frequently than those who remarry. But frequency aside, marriage order made no difference when it came to actual physical pleasure and emotional satisfaction, said researchers from Louisiana State University, Florida State University and Baylor University.

So far any trace was missing of those modern humans (Homo sapiens) who took their way from Africa to the North, arriving in Europe around 45,000 years ago and replacing all other forms of hominins. Now a finding from the Manot-Cave in northern Israel is closing this gap in our knowledge about our own origin. The approximately 55,000 year old remains of a braincase were investigated with state-of-the-art methods by Israeli scientists and anthropologists from the University of Vienna and the Max Planck Institute Leipzig.

Half of parents surveyed say they would support later school start times, according to a new poll.

Want to drop a dress or pants size? Then losing five kilograms, or about 5% of your body weight will help that zipper start to close with ease. In case you need another reason, keeping a small amount of weight off in the long term can halve your risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

The challenge in shedding the excess kilos is how to minimize feelings of deprivation and suffering. One approach is to swap some of your usual food and drink choices to lower-kilojoule, but equally tasty, alternatives.

Last week the feminist organization White Ribbon came into disrepute after one of its ambassadors, psychiatrist and journalist Tanveer Ahmed, wrote an opinion piece in The

87% of American Association for the Advancement of Science members surveyed by Pew believe that scientists should take an active role in public policy debates. In addition, a sizable share believes that engaging with the public and news media can advance the careers of scientists, according to the new survey. The respondents were 3,748 American-based AAAS members and data find that 71% of those surveyed believe the public has either some or a lot of interest in their specialty area and 53% say there is a lot or some debate in the news about their field.

Using Twitter can help physicians be better prepared to answer questions from their patients, according to researchers from the University of British Columbia. This challenges common opinion that physicians are reluctant to jump on the social media bandwagon.

If you want to lose pounds using an online weight management program, don't be a wallflower. A new Northwestern University study shows that online dieters with high social embeddedness -- who logged in regularly, recorded their weigh-ins and 'friended' other members -- lost more than 8 percent of their body weight in six months.

The less users interacted in the community, the less weight they lost, the study found.

For chimpanzees, just like humans, teasing, taunting and bullying are familiar parts of playground politics. An analysis of 12 years of observations of playground fights between young chimpanzees in East Africa finds that chimps with higher-ranked moms are more likely to win.

Electronic cigarettes could be one of the biggest public health opportunities of our time, but that depends on who you talk to. They have been shown to be effective in helping smokers quit and many believe them to be much safer than cigarettes. But the debate rages on. Today at AAAS, a panel of global advocacy, ethical, policy, health, toxicology and industry experts from Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and USA debated: are electronic cigarettes killing me softly or our greatest public health opportunity?