Culture

It costs 8 percent more on average than it did two years ago for Washington residents to make ends meet, according to a new report from a University of Washington research group.

A single parent with one preschooler and one school-age child living in Seattle needs an annual income of $56,904 – up 13 percent from $50,268 two years ago – to meet the family's most basic requirements, according to the Self-Sufficiency Standard for Washington State 2011 released today. A similar family living in Spokane County needs $41,750, up 8 percent from $38,562 two years ago.

A University of Michigan Health System-led team of researchers has found a biomarker they believe can help rapidly identify one of the most serious complications in patients with leukemia, lymphoma and other blood disorders who have received a transplant of new, blood-forming cells.

Known as a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, these patients receive bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cells from a matched donor who is either a family member or an unrelated volunteer.

University of British Columbia researchers have identified three major patterns that emerge among couples dealing with male depression. These can be described as "trading places," "business as usual" and "edgy tensions."

Finding innovative, minimally invasive ways to treat liver cancer—and being able to tailor that treatment individually to patients—are hallmarks of interventional radiologists. Advances in yttrium-90 (Y-90) radioembolization for liver cancer, a leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, are reported in studies in the October Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology.

Whole communities in Africa could be protected from pneumococcus by immunising young children

A study led by the Medical Research Council in The Gambia in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and published in this week's PLoS Medicine shows for the first time in Africa, that vaccinating young children against the pneumococcus (a bacterium that can cause fatal infections) causes a herd effect in which the entire community is protected against this infection.

Contrary to common belief, men age 75 and older are diagnosed with late-stage and more aggressive prostate cancer and thus die from the disease more often than younger men, according to a University of Rochester analysis published online this week by the journal, Cancer.

Using a simple, single-step process, engineers and scientists at the University of California at Berkeley recently developed a technique to direct benign, filamentous viruses called M13 phages to serve as structural building blocks for materials with a wide range of properties.

Alexandria, VA — The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 mandates a national comparative outcomes research project agenda for pragmatic and clinical trials that provide optimal evidence-based medicine, according to an article published in the October 2011 issue of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.

Men are funnier than women, but only just barely and mostly to other men. So says a psychology study from the University of California, San Diego Division of Social Sciences.

You've heard of the history of science, the philosophy of science, maybe even the sociology of science. But how about the psychology of science? In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science,, San Jose State University psychologist Gregory J. Feist argues that the field has been quietly taking shape over the past decade.

Berkeley — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have turned a benign virus into an engineering tool for assembling structures that mimic collagen, one of the most important structural proteins in nature. The process they developed could eventually be used to manufacture materials with tunable optical, biomedical and mechanical properties.

Using a simple, single-step process, engineers and scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a technique to direct benign, filamentous viruses called M13 phages to serve as structural building blocks for materials with a wide range of properties.

AUSTIN, Texas — Pesticides and pollutants are related to an alarming 450 percent increase in the risk of spina bifida and anencephaly in rural China, according to scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and Peking University.

In a new camera trap survey in the world's most biologically diverse landscape, researchers for the Wildlife Conservation Society have identified more individual jaguars than ever before.

DALLAS (SMU) -- An archaeological excavation at Poggio Colla, the site of a 2,700-year-old Etruscan settlement in Italy's Mugello Valley, has turned up a surprising and unique find: two images of a woman giving birth to a child.

Researchers from the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project, which oversees the Poggio Colla excavation site some 20 miles northeast of Florence, discovered the images on a small fragment from a ceramic vessel that is more than 2,600 years old.