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 »

Giving up smoking can reduce the risk of dying from lung cancer by up to 70%, new research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology this week shows. 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 »

Whip spiders, considered by many to be creepy-crawly, are giving new meaning to the term touchy-feely. In two species of whip spiders, or amblypygids, mothers caress their young with long feelers and siblings stick together in social groups until they reach sexual maturity. This is surprising behavior for these arachnids, long-thought to be purely aggressive and anti-social, according to a Cornell researcher. 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 »

Male Anole lizards signal ownership of their territory by sitting up on a tree trunk, bobbing their heads up and down and extending a colorful throat pouch. 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 »

Sure you think about diet and exercise as key to heart disease prevention. But what about the neighborhood you live in? According to a new study from the School of Medicine, the incidence of heart disease and associated fatalities are statistically higher for people who live in poor neighborhoods vs. those who live in more affluent areas. 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 »

Just a few whiffs of a chemical found in male sweat is enough to raise levels of cortisol, a hormone commonly associated with alertness or stress, in heterosexual women, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, scientists. 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 »