Culture

Boston, MA – A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) finds that high body mass index (BMI) in developing countries remains primarily a problem of the rich. The findings suggest that the shift towards overweight and obesity among the poor that has already happened in wealthier countries has not yet happened in developing countries.

The study appears in an advance online edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and will appear in an upcoming print edition.

U.S. academic institutions awarded 49,562 research doctorate degrees in 2009, the highest number ever reported by the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), and a 1.6 percent increase over 2008's total of 48,802.

Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn't mean they're more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds surprisingly, that lower-class people are better at reading the emotions of others.

Children who experience a parental divorce are over twice as likely to suffer a stroke at some point in their lives, according to new research presented in New Orleans at The Gerontological Society of America's (GSA) 63rd Annual Scientific Meeting.

With the financial crisis still hanging over many countries, this year's World Health Report from the World Health Organization, "Health Systems Financing: The Path to Universal Coverage" is timely and relevant to the question of how to ensure that all people have access to health care services, without suffering financial hardship. This is the conclusion of a Perspective article on the 2010 World Health Report from Sara Bennett (Johns Hopkins University, USA) and colleagues, published in PLoS Medicine to coincide with the release of the Report.

Research shows that people with low incomes are more likely to develop kidney failure and less likely to receive a living donor kidney transplant than people of other socioeconomic classes. Because fewer individuals in the U.S. are donating kidneys, Jagbir Gill, MD (St. Paul's Hospital, University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada) and colleagues examined trends in kidney donation based on income.

Alcoholic drinks served in pubs should be taxed at a lower level than drinks bought from shops, says an expert in this week's BMJ.

This action would deliver the health benefits associated with introducing a minimum price on alcohol, increase tax revenue for the Treasury and save pubs says Dr Nick Sheron.

The author is head of clinical hepatology at the University of Southampton, a member of the Alcohol Health Alliance and an advisor for the 2010 House of Commons Select Committee Report on Alcohol.

What are borders these days? When travel was local, borders and communities were easy to define, but now our connectivity is more complex. It's time to think of borders differently, according to Northwestern University researchers.

To reflect today's reality, they have taken a look at human mobility and redrawn the borders within the United States, showing areas of the country that are most connected. Some of the borders in this new map are familiar, but many are not.

PITTSBURGH—Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, news about 20-somethings becoming billionaires from the sale of their software companies flooded the media, giving the impression that a good idea was all it took to succeed in the software industry. Jennifer Shang, an associate professor of business management in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, along with colleagues Shanling Li of McGill University and Sandra Slaughter of the Georgia Institute of Technology, investigated what caused software companies to succeed or fail. Their research study, titled "Why Do Software Firms Fail?

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Residents of the Middle East who are heavy viewers of Arab television news networks like Al Jazeera are more likely to view their primary identity as that of Muslims, rather than as citizens of their own country, a new study suggests.

Because networks like Al Jazeera are transnational – focusing on events of interest across the region rather than those in any one country – they may encourage viewers to see themselves in broader terms than simply residents of a particular nation, the researchers said.

The casting sessions aren't just for movie stars, but what is involved in casting decisions that can launch fashion models to fame – or at the very least – to land a job? Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, a University of Cincinnati assistant professor and socio-cultural anthropologist, spent 11 months of fieldwork at a premiere casting agency in New York to uncover the decisions that happen behind the scenes of the glossy photos and slick commercials.

Researchers have uncovered the genetic basis of remarkable broad-spectrum resistance to a viral infection that, in some parts of the world, is the most important pathogen affecting leafy and arable brassica crops including broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, swede and oilseed rape. They have tested resistant plants against a range of different strains of the virus taken from all over the world and so far, no strain has been able to overcome the resistance.

Retinitis pigmentosa is an inherited eye disorder characterized by progressive loss of vision that in many instances leads to legal blindness at the end stage.

Different techniques should be used to remove single stones that have become lodged in the distal ureter after being expelled by the kidney, depending on whether they are under or above one centimetre, according to the December issue of BJUI.

The video games industry is leading the overall trend of transformation of digital products into e-services, according to the report "Born digital/ Grown digital – Assessing the future competitiveness of the EU video games software industry" published today by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. Online games, for example, play a major role in the digital content convergence process based on digital distribution of different types of content and the diffusion of interactive capabilities for consumers.