Culture | Page 1869 | Science Codex

Many arthritis patients don't take their medication regularly

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.

Health report cards for the condition of agricultural ecosystems

In order to provide farmers and anyone else involved in managing agricultural ecosystems with a tool enabling them to assess the impact of their farming practices on the health of their crops and soils, the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development NEIKER-Tecnalia has created its new TSEAs or ‘Agricultural Ecosystem Health Cards’.

How will Congressmen vote? Just look at their social circles

U.S. Congress members' social circles are more important in how they vote than their liberal or conservative beliefs or constituents' opinions, according to a new model of voting behavior created by Dartmouth College researchers.

The study appears in the journal Research & Politics. A PDF is available on request.

In Northern Ireland, sectarianism has become sextarianism

If you grew up in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s, sectarianism pervaded every aspect of your everyday life. In fact, such is the pervasiveness of sectarianism that it’s almost been normalised. These days, it’s sometimes not even recognised or regarded as a problem.

All sounds made equal in melancholy

The room is loud with chatter. Glasses clink. Soft music, perhaps light jazz or strings, fills the air. Amidst all of these background sounds, it can be difficult to understand what an adjacent person is saying. A depressed individual, brought to this cocktail party by a well-meaning friend, can slide further into himself, his inability to hear and communicate compounding his sense of isolation.

Anticipating temptation may reduce unethical behavior

Why do good people do bad things? It's a question that has been pondered for centuries, and new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology may offer some insights about when people succumb to versus resist ethical temptations.

American Indian students disproportionately disciplined compared to white students

School disciplinary actions handed down to students at Utah public schools disproportionately impact American Indian children over all other ethnicities enrolled in the state's public education system, new research from the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law Public Policy Clinic reveals.

What's the best, most effective way to take notes?

If it feels like you forget new information almost as quickly as you hear it, even if you write it down, that’s because we tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. If we take notes effectively, however, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive.

Our bond with dogs may go back more than 30,000 years

Dogs' special relationship to humans may go back 27,000 to 40,000 years, according to genomic analysis of an ancient Taimyr wolf bone reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 21. Earlier genome-based estimates have suggested that the ancestors of modern-day dogs diverged from wolves no more than 16,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age.

The genome from this ancient specimen, which has been radiocarbon dated to 35,000 years ago, reveals that the Taimyr wolf represents the most recent common ancestor of modern wolves and dogs.

Memories influence choice of food

The stronger our memory is of a certain food, the more likely we are to choose it - even if it is the more unattractive option. Psychologists at the University of Basel conducted a study on how memory influences our choices by offering various foods and using scans to track brain activity. The researchers were able to show that the influence of memory is mediated by increasing communication between the relevant brain areas. The study has been published in the scientific journal Neuron.

Go thin? Think again

Here's the skinny: Not all women will buy products because the models in the advertisements are thin, according to a new study of a diverse group of 239 women by a Baylor University marketing professor.

In fact, marketers and advertisers who default to the "thin ideal" -- the belief that thinner is better -- could be alienating up to 70 percent of their audience, said James Roberts, Ph.D., The Ben H. Williams Professor of Marketing in Baylor's Hankamer School of Business.

Illegal immigration due to globalization desperation

Many undocumented workers from Latin America risk migrating to the United States to take jobs in which they will be exploited because they are fleeing from desperate situations and see opportunities to help their families.

That scenario, says Gerardo F. Sandoval of the University of Oregon, emerged from a long-running case study in which under-the-radar networks driven by economic and political pressures were documented. These shadow networks tie workers to low-paying, labor-intensive jobs in new communities and to the towns they left.

Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather

Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzng over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings in The Lancet also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.

The countries involved were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, and USA.

Chamomile tea decreases risk of death in older Mexican-American women

Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have found that drinking chamomile tea was associated with a decreased risk of death from all causes in Mexican-American American women over 65. The findings were recently published online in The Gerontologist.

Chamomile is one of the oldest, most-widely used and well-documented medicinal plants in the world and has been recommended for a variety of healing applications. It is currently widely used as an herbal remedy in Mexico and among Mexican-Americans.

Discovery of world's oldest stone tools

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.