Culture

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 23, 2016 -- Musical styles and genres differ around the world, but the emotional power of music is universally felt. To understand this evocative force, researchers in many fields, including information science, neural perception, and signal processing, investigate music's underlying structure, examining features such as the tone, timbre, and auditory and rhythmic features of a piece.

A new study by researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin compares the true cost of treating patients with chronic inflammatory bowel disease with costs recoverable under the current German DRG-based system. The treatment of these conditions, which include Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, is usually complex, and generally requires the multidisciplinary care approach primarily offered by academic health care organizations. The study shows that the actual costs incurred are not currently reflected by the fixed-priced schedule used for cost recovery.

CHICAGO: A team of surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) has developed a program that utilizes its Shock Trauma Center (STC) model to direct critically ill non-trauma patients to the appropriate treatment location and get them into an operating room and hospital intensive care unit (ICU) bed as quickly as possible. Before this program was implemented, its fast intake and treatment strategy had existed only for patients critically injured in automobile crashes or catastrophic events.

For the first time experts have been able to eliminate external factors and specifically pinpoint television as having a direct link with female body ideals.

It is known that the perception of a woman's perfect body shape is influenced by images of celebrities and models seen in the media.

However, in the past, there has been little attempt to control variables in order to isolate the effects of media exposure from other cultural and ecological factors.

Drivers more than double their crash risk for more than half of their trips when they choose to engage in distracting activities, according to Virginia Tech Transportation Institute researchers writing in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The more expensive an item, the more likely it is to be targeted by thieves and stolen, a report by a University of Warwick academic has revealed.

Report author Mirko Draca undertook the work for the Social Market Foundation. Called It's prices, stupid: Explaining falling crime rates in the UK - the study analyses monthly data over a 10-year period from the Metropolitan Police and the Office for National Statistics to try to establish a link between prices and crime.

Members of the International Daya Bay Collaboration, who track the production and flavor-shifting behavior of electron antineutrinos generated at a nuclear power complex in China, have obtained the most precise measurement of these subatomic particles' energy spectrum ever recorded. The data generated from the world's largest sample of reactor antineutrinos indicate two intriguing discrepancies with theoretical predictions and provide an important measurement that will shape future reactor neutrino experiments. The results have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.