Culture

Montreal, December 22, 2010 – Obese people are more likely to report exercise as a trigger for asthma. Of 673 people evaluated in a new study whose results are published in the journal The Physician and Sportsmedicine, 71 percent of participants reported exercise-induced asthma (ETA).

The findings are important, since 2.3 million Canadians are affected by asthma according to Statistics Canada.

Earlier initiation of antiretroviral therapy should be the highest priority for global expansion of HIV patient care. This finding, from a paper published in this week's PLoS Medicine, should help resource-limited nations to phase in the implementation of the new 2010 WHO recommendations for HIV treatment. "Immediate scale-up of the entire WHO guideline package may be prohibitively expensive in some settings," said lead author Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA.

Washington, DC – The Science Coalition issued the following statement today from President Deborah Altenburg after the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 5116, the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21, 2010 — The American Chemical Society (ACS) applauds Congress for reauthorizing the America COMPETES Act today.

America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science), was originally enacted in 2007 and needed to be reauthorized this year in order to provide continued support for scientific research, technological development, science, technology, engineering and math education.

The number of workplace accidents in Spain will fall progressively over 2011 and 2012, according to the predictions made by a mathematical model developed by researchers from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. The biggest drop will be in the number of accidents that take place during travel between people's homes and places of work.

Menthol cigarettes may be harder to quit, particularly for some teens and African-Americans, who have the highest menthol cigarette use, according to a study by a team of researchers.

Recent studies have consistently found that racial/ethnic minority smokers of menthol cigarettes have a lower quit rate than comparable smokers of regular cigarettes, particularly among younger smokers.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (21 December, 2010) – Despite Cambodia's remarkable history in driving down HIV infections, a report released today on the future of AIDS in the country argues that future success is not guaranteed and the government needs to focus increasingly on wise prevention tactics and assume more of the financing of its AIDS program.

New software developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding (NGSB) may lead to a less expensive and less time consuming method to detect corrosion or other defects in a ship's pipes.

Awards have an impact on Spanish movie productivity, since they increase internal and external distribution demand, but subsidies have no effect whatsoever on the productivity of the Spanish film industry. This is the conclusion of researchers at the University of Granada (UGR), who have studied the production of films in Spain.

Our flawed understanding of how decisions in the present restrict our options in the future means that we may underestimate the risk associated with investment decisions, according to new research by Dr Ole Peters from Imperial College London. The research, published today in the journal Quantitative Finance, suggests how policy makers might reshape financial risk controls to reduce market instability and the risk of market collapse.

A new study from Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business finds that customers of eBay who participate in the company's online communities become more conservative buyers and more selective and efficient sellers.

GALVESTON, Texas — Underrepresented minority medical students, including Hispanics and particularly African Americans and women, show the greatest benefit from comprehensive medical education reform according to researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

In the first study to show system-wide outcomes of such reform, at UTMB Health reported that failure rates of the Step 1 licensing exam dropped dramatically among some students while significantly increasing graduation rates.

Without Social Security, research indicates that about half of women age 65 and older would be living in poverty. With the program in place, the poverty rate for women falls to 12 percent. These facts — paired with recommended future courses of action — are presented in the latest installment of the Public Policy & Aging Research Brief series from the National Academy on an Aging Society, the public policy branch of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA).