NewScITech

In the first nationally representative study to examine the relationship between survey measures of household firearm ownership and state-level rates of suicide in the United States, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) found that suicide rates among children, women, and men of all ages are higher in states where more households have guns. The study appears in the April 2007 issue of The Journal of Trauma. Read the rest of this entry »

Women who undergo breast enlargement often see a sizable boost in self-esteem and positive feelings about their sexuality, a University of Florida nurse researcher reports. Read the rest of this entry »

Quick response! What’s the best thing to do on a lifeboat with one too many people on board? Should one throw a mortally injured person overboard to ensure definite survival for everyone else, or refuse to act and ensure certain death for all individuals in the boat? Read the rest of this entry »

Teaching parents better ways of bringing up children is likely to improve the child’s behaviour, according to researchers from Oxford University and Bangor University. Read the rest of this entry »

For most of us, a mobile phone is an instrument to talk with other people. But for B. J. Fogg, it is a means to change people’s beliefs and behaviors. Fogg, who directs the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, says that in a decade, mobile phones and other portable devices like personal digital assistants (PDAs) will become a more important platform for persuasion than television is right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Too few girls are represented at the top of the corporate ladder in maths-related careers because too few aspire to be involved in maths, according to new research conducted at Monash University. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of people’s biggest problems with communication come in sharing new information with people they know well, newly published research at the University of Chicago shows. Because they already share quite a bit of common knowledge, people often use short, ambiguous messages in talking with co-workers and spouses, and accordingly unintentionally create misunderstandings, said Boaz Keysar, Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Talented people often choke under pressure because the distraction caused by stress consumes their working memory, research in Psychology has found. Read the rest of this entry »

Why do restaurants rely on tips instead of a flat wage to compensate waiters and waitresses? Why not build the cost of service into menu prices? Because restaurant customers don’t appear to take tips into account when they judge how expensive a restaurant is, finds a new study from the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research. Read the rest of this entry »

Harvard researchers have tracked fatigue’s footsteps on the human brain, showing that sleeplessness impairs the ability to learn new information and that abnormal brain function, not reduced alertness, is the cause. Read the rest of this entry »

Can’t recall the right word? People returning from immersion in a second language often report such confusion. University of Oregon scientists have found that such lapses reflect the successful inhibition of memory that allows one to quickly learn a new language. Read the rest of this entry »

Video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision. Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics. Read the rest of this entry »

Students who entered college when they were 12 to 14 years old don’t fit the stereotype of unhappy “nerds” who are humorless, isolated misfits, according to a new study. In fact, University of Washington research paints a different and much more positive and multi-faceted portrait of these gifted students. Read the rest of this entry »

A team of researchers led by McGill University psychologist Mark Baldwin has created a video game that it says is not only good for you – it makes you feel good about yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

Breast cancer patients who pray in online support groups can obtain mental health benefits, according to a new study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research that was funded by the National Cancer Institute. Read the rest of this entry »