Culture

Acorn woodpeckers are cooperative breeders, meaning adult birds often join breeding groups and help raise young that are not their own.

Scientists have long thought that communal breeding may have evolved to help birds deal with food shortages and other difficult times, but a study by researchers from Cornell and Gonzaga shows that for acorn woodpeckers, the opposite seems to be true: Help contributed by other family members is beneficial only when the acorn crop is large.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — People with lower socioeconomic status are much more likely to develop heart disease than those who are wealthier or better educated, according to a recent UC Davis study. Published online in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders, the outcomes also show that this risk persists even with long-term progress in addressing traditional risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol.

It has long been known that hereditary factors play a role in coronary heart disease. However, it has been unclear whether the increased risk is transferred through the genes or through an unhealthy lifestyle in the family. A new study from the Center for Primary Health Care Research in Sweden, published in the American Heart Journal, shows that genes appear to be most important.

"It's not that the salmon are biting less, there are less of them," explained Eva García Vázquez, lead author and Functional Biology researcher at the University of Oviedo (Spain).

The study, published in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, shows a "very marked" decline in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) populations in the Narcea, Sella and Cares rivers (Asturias, northern Spain), especially during the last decade, almost simultaneously with the reduction in the amount caught by recreational fishermen.

Providing access to an outpatient clinic isn't enough to keep some trauma patients who have been discharged from the hospital from returning to the emergency department (ED) for follow-up care, even for such minor needs as pain medication refills and dressing changes, according to new Johns Hopkins research.

Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO's company performs is the width of his face, according to Elaine M. Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her colleagues.

MADISON - Globally, irrigation increases agricultural productivity by an amount roughly equivalent to the entire agricultural output of the U.S., according to a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study.

That adds up to a sizeable impact on carbon uptake from the atmosphere. It also means that water shortages - already forecasted to be a big problem as the world warms - could contribute to yet more warming through a positive feedback loop.

Temporary staff members working in a hospital's fast-paced emergency department are twice as likely as permanent employees to be involved in medication errors that harm patients, new Johns Hopkins research suggests.

San Diego, CA, August 30, 2011 – The benefits of physical activity accumulate across a lifetime, according to a new study published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Researchers in England and Australia examined the associations of leisure time physical activity across adulthood with physical performance and strength in midlife in a group of British men and women followed since birth in March 1946.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – At its public meeting on August 29 in Washington, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues will publicly discuss several key findings as it refines the conclusions of its historical investigation into the U.S. Public Health Service (U.S. PHS) studies done in Guatemala in the 1940s. The U.S. PHS research involved intentionally exposing and infecting vulnerable populations to sexually transmitted diseases. The Commission's historical investigation is due to President Obama in September.

Montreal, August 25, 2011 — Job-related stress is catching up with the Canadians. A new study by Concordia University economists, published in BMC Public Health, has found that increased job stress causes workers to increasingly seek help from health professionals for physical, mental and emotional ailments linked to job stress. Indeed, the number of visits to healthcare professionals is up to 26 per cent for workers in high stress jobs.

Researchers from The Netherlands report that patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who have higher levels of self-efficacy for physical activity are more likely to achieve their physical activity goals. According to the study now available in Arthritis Care & Research, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), achievement of physical activity goals is associated with lower self-reported arthritis pain and increased health-related quality of life (HRQOL).

Although Americans are increasingly tolerant of the open expression of a variety of views, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 have made most Americans reluctant to extend those freedoms to Muslim extremists, research released Aug. 25 by NORC at the University of Chicago shows.

The finding, reported in NORC's General Social Survey, illustrates a lingering impact of the horrific events from ten years ago, as well as the consequences on American public opinion of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Tom W. Smith, director of the survey.

The public should view crowd estimation with scepticism, say the authors of a study in Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association. They suggest more reliable alternatives to current estimating methods.

A study by researchers at the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California, San Diego finds that successful aging and positive quality of life indicators correlate with sexual satisfaction in older women. The report, published online in the August edition of the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, also shows that self-rated successful aging, quality of life and sexual satisfaction appear to be stable even in the face of declines in physical health of women between the ages of 60 and 89.