Culture

Over 10 percent of patients using aspirin therapy for primary cardiovascular disease prevention were likely either inappropriately prescribed it or do it over the counter, according to a new study that examined practice variations in aspirin therapy.

Physicians can refer patients for medical services to enterprises in which they have a financial stake, which has a logical basis - a wheezing smoker that needs a CT scan of his lungs can conveniently get one if that doctor happens to own a diagnostic imaging clinic in the same building.

Young children with disruptive behaviors do worse than their focused peers and have high maintenance temperaments, characterized by high physical activity, low ability to persist at tasks, and negative reactions to even minor situations.

A new study Early Childhood Research Quarterly finds that kindergartners and first graders with high maintenance temperaments showed less disruptive behavior and more active engagement and on-task behavior in the classroom, thanks to a program that helps teachers, parents, and students recognize and adapt to individual differences.

When it comes to youth violence, the perpetrators get the most attention while victims only make the news stories. But widespread violence among adolescents can place them on a lifelong trajectory of aggression -- either as victims or perpetrators -- endangering their sexual and reproductive health now and in the future.

Even decades after being cured, many cancer survivors face physical and mental challenges, from physical problems such as sexual dysfunction to anxiety about getting cancer again to financial hardships, resulting from their disease and its treatment.

20 years after the actual disease is defeated, survivors continue to fight its effects, concludes a study led by University of Central Florida social work professor Mary Ann Burg.

If you are a business owner or an architect or most of the public, graffiti is just a vain effort by amateur artists to have an impact they won't get in the real world of art - but a sociologist wants to rehabilitate that image.

Michigan State University sociologist Toby Ten Eyck argues that graffiti, which is commonly perceived as disenfranchised or troublemaking kids engaging in visual pollution, is instead art. And media needs to start portraying it that way.

Eliminating government subsidies for low- and moderate-income people who purchased coverage through federally run health insurance marketplaces would sharply boost costs and reduce enrollment in the individual market by more than 9.6 million, according to a new RAND Corporation study. If that sounds like more people than signed up for it, it is. But that is because some people switched to get better insurance using the subsidies and if the subsidies were eliminated they would lose it altogether and not be able to go back to their old plans, which are all older.

Results of a survey suggest that while teachers are well-tuned to student psychological distress following a crisis, support varies considerably. The study, led by researchers in the School of Education at Boston University and involving 72 schools, details the complex supportive role of teachers, and the importance of working with them to improve school response plans.

More communication among individuals is occurring online, and often between individuals who do not know each other offline. Researchers at York University are looking to understand the potential impressions and their limitations of those we meet in a digital context. In a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the researchers specifically looked at what personality traits are conveyed by a user's avatar.

Design of the study

In 1961, with memories of Holocaust atrocities and the prosecution of Nazi officials at Nuremburg still fresh, psychologist Stanley Milgram undertook a series of now infamous experiments on obedience and reprehensible behavior.

About two-thirds of Milgram's nearly 800 study subjects, pressed by an authoritative experimenter, were willing to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to an unseen stranger despite cries of agony and pleas to stop.

Gine Roll Skjaervoe at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Biology has studied church records from the period 1750-1900 and looked at life history variables: how old were women when they had their first child, and their last? How many years passed between the birth of each child, and how many of these children survived? How many of these children were in turn married and had children?

All told, she studied information from more than 9,000 people listed in the church records she examined.

Research published today by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine suggests that circumcised boys are more likely than intact boys to develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD) before the age of 10. Risk is particularly high for infantile autism before the age of five. The research was carried out in Denmark among a cohort of all children born between 1994 and 2003. During the study over 340,000 boys were followed up to the age of nine between 1994 and 2013 and almost 5,000 cases of ASD were diagnosed.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has opened the door to routine immunization of infants in sub-Saharan Africa by endorsing an affordable vaccine that has all but rid the meningitis belt of a major cause of deadly epidemics.

Cell phone use has become a common part of life as mobile devices have become one of the most popular ways to communicate. Even so, very little research exists on the impact of cell phone usage and specifically what happens when people are separated from their phones. Now, a paper from the University of Missouri has found that cell phone separation can have serious psychological and physiological effects on iPhone users, including poor performance on cognitive tests.

A new report released today by the National Research Council offers guidance to district and school leaders and teachers on necessary steps for putting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) into practice over the next decade and beyond. The committee that wrote the report drew on A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas, a 2011 Research Council report that served as the foundation for the Next Generation Science Standards.