Renewable energy targets and other support policies now in place in 164 countries powered the growth of solar, wind and other green technologies to record-breaking energy generation capacity in 2014.
According to REN21's latest Renewables Global Status Report, policymakers continued to focus on adapting existing policies to keep pace with rapidly changing costs and circumstances.
The words 'yes' and 'no' may seem like two of the easiest expressions to understand in any language, but their actual behavior and interpretation are surprisingly difficult to pin down. In a paper published earlier today in the scholarly journal Language, two linguists examine the workings of 'yes' and 'no' and show that understanding them leads to new insights concerning the understanding of questions and statements more generally.
The prevalence of smoking among undergraduate nursing and physiotherapy students in Spain decreased from 29.3% in 2003 to 18.2% in 2013. Many of the students remained unaware of the link between smoking and diseases such as bladder cancer or the negative health effects of second-hand smoke, which points to a significant deficiency in undergraduate training.
The majority of nursing and physiotherapy students recognized that healthcare professionals were role models in society, noted Dr. Beatriz Ordás, lead author of the Journal of Advanced Nursing study.
Following a decade of steady growth, use of bisphosphonates—medications that are effective for treating osteoporosis—declined in the United States by more than 50% from 2008 to 2012.
New measures introduced by the UK government in April linking applications for residence permits to up-front payments for potential use of NHS hospital services, and proposals to further restrict access to NHS services for migrants, will not reduce the strain on NHS resources - and may end up costing more in the long run.
Writing in The BMJ this week, Lilana Keith and Ewout van Ginneken say such policies are "shortsighted and misleading."
In one of the first published studies using data from the Health eHeart Study, UCSF researchers have found that people are divided on the cardiovascular benefits of alcohol consumption. And, those who do perceive alcohol as "heart healthy" drink substantially more than their counterparts.
The study is in the Aug. 15 issue of American Journal of Cardiology.
Despite a prevalence of anonymous sperm donation in European countries, the use of the same sperm donor for subsequent conceptions is of paramount importance to those couples needing sperm donation to have children. "We found a marked tendency to favour full genetic bonds where possible," said midwife Sara Somers presenting study results today at the Annual Meeting of ESHRE.
Chimpanzees and bonobos are the two closest living relatives of the human species - the ultimate tool-using ape. Yet, despite being so closely related on the evolutionary tree, wild chimpanzees and bonobos differ hugely in the way they use tools.
Randomized controlled trials must be simplified to sustain innovation in cardiovascular diseases, which are still the biggest killer in Europe, according to the Cardiovascular Round Table (CRT).
The CRT is an independent forum established by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and comprised of cardiologists and representatives of the pharmaceutical, device and equipment industries. The group's views are published today in European Heart Journal 1*.
Using Twitter and Google search trend data in the wake of the very limited U.S. Ebola outbreak of October 2014, a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Purdue University and Oregon State University have found that news media is extraordinarily effective in creating public panic.
Because only five people were ultimately infected yet Ebola dominated the U.S. media in the weeks after the first imported case, the researchers set out to determine mass media's impact on people's behavior on social media.
The environmental movement is making a difference - nudging greenhouse gas emissions down in states with strong green voices, according to a Michigan State University (MSU) study.
Social scientist Thomas Dietz and Kenneth Frank, MSU Foundation professor of sociometrics, have teamed up to find a way to tell if a state jumping on the environmental bandwagon can mitigate other human factors - population growth and economic affluence - known to hurt the environment.
It's been around for decades and it's probably in your diet soda - for a little while longer anyway. PepsiCo announced recently it was removing the artificial sweetener aspartame from its Diet Pepsi products in the U.S. starting in August.
The company cited consumer concerns about the chemical's safety.
So this week, Reactions answers the question, "Is aspartame safe?"
Australia has been hugely successful in reducing the number of people who smoke. Today, 12.8% of people over age 14 smoke on a daily basis, which is nearly half the daily smoking rate in 1991 (24.3%).
African-American adults -- particularly women -- are much more likely to know or be related to someone behind bars than European-Americans, according to the first national estimates of Americans' ties to prisoners.
The research, led by Hedwig Lee, University of Washington associate professor of sociology, reveals the racial inequality wrought by the U.S. prison boom, with potentially harmful consequences to families and communities left lacking social supports for raising children and managing households.
The increasing use of video games is often blamed for children's lack of interest in physical activity, but a study by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, recently published in the Games for Health Journal suggests that active video games may actually be a source of moderate or intense physical activity in children five to eight years old.