Culture

With the share of married adults at an all-time low in the United States, new research by demographers at Cornell University and the University of Central Oklahoma unveils clues why couples don't get married – they fear divorce.

Among cohabitating couples, more than two-thirds of the study's respondents admitted to concerns about dealing with the social, legal, emotional and economic consequences of a possible divorce.

Most people remember listening to the official UK top 40 singles chart and watching the countdown on Top of the Pops, but can science work out which songs are more likely to 'make it' in the chart? New research has looked at whether a song can be predicted to be a 'hit'.

Among people recently infected with HIV, immediate antiretroviral therapy (ART) appears preferable to deferring treatment, according to a new study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases and now available online. Although the benefits of ART during early HIV-1 infection remain unproven, the findings support growing evidence favoring earlier ART initiation.

Alcohol use has often been linked to criminal activity on the part of both perpetrators as well as victims. While this relationship has been well documented among adults, fewer studies have explored this relationship among adolescents. A new study has found a strong relationship between drinking during adolescence and the commission of crimes, and criminal victimization, for both genders.

Results will be published in the March 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

Severely impaired stroke survivors could walk better when a robotic assist system was added to conventional rehabilitation, according to a study in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Italian researchers evaluated two-year mobility outcomes in 48 stroke survivors who had been discharged from a hospital and were unable to walk at the study's start. Half underwent conventional overground gait rehabilitation and half had conventional rehab plus electromechanical robotic gait training for several months.

America's heart and blood vessel health is far from ideal, according to data in the American Heart Association's "Heart Disease and Stroke Statistical Update 2012," published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Gay men are able to lead healthier, less stress-filled lives when states offer legal protections to same-sex couples, according to a new study examining the effects of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The study, "Effect of Same-Sex Marriage Laws on Health Care Use and Expenditures in Sexual Minority Men: A Quasi-Natural Experiment," is online in the American Journal of Public Health.

West Orange, NJ. December 14, 2011. Monitored by scientists at Kessler Foundation, six people with traumatic spinal cord injuries tested Ekso, the robotic exoskeleton from Ekso Bionics that enables wheelchair users to stand and walk. The six participated in one week of preliminary testing in October 2011. Five patients have paraplegia and one has quadriplegia; they ranged in age from 27 to 45 and had durations of injury from 4 months to 2 years.

Contrary to the ideal of a completely engaged electorate, individuals who have the least interest in a specific outcome can actually be vital to achieving a democratic consensus. These individuals dilute the influence of powerful minority factions who would otherwise dominate everyone else, according to new research published in the journal Science.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- North Americans and Western Europeans love a good mix of alpha-terpineol, 4-methylpentanoic acid and ethyl propionate for dinner, flavor compounds shared in popular ingredients like tomatoes, parmesan cheese and white wine. Authentic East Asian recipes, on the other hand, tend to avoid mixing ingredients with many shared flavor compounds, according to new complex networks research from Indiana, Harvard, Cambridge and Northeastern universities.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A patient's education level is not a fail-safe predictor of how well they will manage symptoms related to complicated chronic diseases, such as heart failure, according to a Purdue University study.

European PredictAD project, lead by Principal Scientist Jyrki Lötjönen from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, has developed a decision support tool for objective diagnostics of Alzheimer's disease. The tool compares measurements of a patient to measurements of other persons available in large databases and provides a simple index about the severity of the disease. The project has shown that the tool improves the accuracy of diagnosis and clinicians' confidence about their decision, making earlier diagnosis possible.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues today issued its report concerning federally-sponsored research involving human volunteers, concluding that current rules and regulations provide adequate safeguards to mitigate risk. In its report, "Moral Science: Protecting Participants in Human Subjects Research," the Commission also recommended 14 changes to current practices to better protect research subjects, and called on the federal government to improve its tracking of research programs supported with taxpayer dollars.

People with low levels of iron in the blood have a higher risk of dangerous blood clots, according to research published in the journal Thorax today. A study of clotting risk factors in patients with an inherited blood vessel disease suggests that treating iron deficiency might be important for preventing potentially lethal blood clots.

High hospital readmission rates in different regions of the U.S. may have more to do with the overall high use of hospital services in those regions than with the severity of patients' particular conditions or problems in the quality of care during and after hospital discharges, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).

The study appears in the December 15, 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.