Culture

A warning issued by the Food and Drug Administration regarding the use of atypical antipsychotics for the treatment of dementia was associated with a significant decline in the use of these medications for treating dementia symptoms in elderly patients, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

ITHACA, N.Y. – It's an incendiary topic in academia – the pervasive belief that women are underrepresented in science, math and engineering fields because they face sex discrimination in the interviewing, hiring, and grant and manuscript review processes.

A new article in the February issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology provides a roadmap for imaging manufacturers to navigate the unique and increasingly complex U.S. regulatory and reimbursement environment. "Evidence Requirements for Innovative Imaging Devices: From Concept to Adoption," identifies and addresses the five phases of an imaging procedure's lifecycle and the distinct clinical evidence needs for each phase.

Dengue illness, the most common mosquito-borne viral disease in the world, has expanded from its Southeast Asian origins and is resurgent in countries such as Argentina, Chile and the continental United States.

Why in the United States are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer?

Part of the answer lies in the unique economies of our larger cities, finds a study by Ronni Pavan of the University of Rochester and Nathaniel Baum-Snow of Brown University and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

"Our results show that overall up to one-third of the growth in the wage gap between the rich and the poor is driven by city size independent of workers' skills," says Pavan.

The same has been found with regard to exposure to music and fashion on the Internet, and to harmful programs on TV. The study also reveals that the risk of developing eating disorders in adolescent girls is moderated when there is more parental supervision over viewing habits.

The more time adolescent girls spend in front of Facebook, the more their chances of developing a negative body image and various eating disorders, such as anorexia, bulimia and exaggerated dieting. This has been shown in a new study from the University of Haifa.

New drugs are too expensive, pharmaceutical companies are too greedy and don't care about people, say people in the UK. But declining progress in pharmaceuticals is also blamed on a failure of innovative drive in the industry, failure of the UK to support basic research, failure of venture capital to invest in early stage research, or failure of the Health Service to provide smart procurement.

A systematic review carried out by a team at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry has analysed existing studies and concluded that there are benefits to mental and physical well-being from taking exercise in the natural environment. Their findings are published in the leading research journal Environmental Science and Technology today, 4th February 2011.

In typical plasmonic devices, electromagnetic waves crowd into tiny metal structures, concentrating energy into nanoscale dimensions. Due to coupling of electronics and photonics in these metal nanostructures, plasmonic devices could be harnessed for high-speed data transmission or ultrafast detector arrays. However, studying plasmonic fields in nanoscale devices presents a real roadblock for scientists, as examining these structures inherently alters their behavior.

In their research, Gollner and his team are focusing on the most commonly used packaging material in warehouses – corrugated cardboard— which has been found to affect predictions of upward flame spread by current descriptions. As part of the study of the combustion of boxes of commodities, rates of upward flame spread during early-stage burning were observed during experiments on wide samples of corrugated cardboard.

While there is no doubt that the ethical controversy surrounding human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research has given rise to an uncertain policy environment, the true impact of years of frequent policy changes has not been fully assessed.

New discoveries on how underwater ridges impact the ocean's circulation system will help improve climate projections.

An underwater ridge can trap the flow of cold, dense water at the bottom of the ocean. Without the ridge, deepwater can flow freely and speed up the ocean circulation pattern, which generally increases the flow of warm surface water.

Warm water on the ocean's surface makes the formation of sea ice difficult. With less ice present to reflect the sun, surface water will absorb more sunlight and continue to warm.

The Child-Parent Center (CPC) early education program is a large-scale, federally funded intervention providing services for disadvantaged 3- to 9-year-olds in Chicago. A new cost-benefit analysis of the program has found that benefits exceeded costs in a number of areas, including increased earnings and savings.

The longitudinal analysis appears in the January/February issue of Child Development, the journal of the Society for Research in Child Development. It was done by researchers at the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

For every $1 invested in a Chicago early childhood education program, nearly $11 is projected to return to society over the children's lifetimes -- equivalent to an 18 percent annual return on program investment, according to a study led by University of Minnesota professor of child development Arthur Reynolds in the College of Education and Human Development.

The ability of some forms of plankton and bacteria to build an extra natural layer of nanoparticle-like armour has inspired chemists at the University of Warwick to devise a startlingly simple way to give drug bearing polymer vesicles (microscopic polymer based sacs of liquid) their own armoured protection.