Bragging of sexual conquests, suggestive jokes and innuendo, and sexual one-upmanship can all be a part of demonstrating one's manhood, especially for young men eager to exert their masculinity. But how does masculinity manifest itself among young men who have pledged sexual abstinence before marriage? How do they handle sexual temptation, and what sorts of challenges crop up once they're married? "Sexual purity and pledging abstinence are most commonly thought of as feminine, something girls and young women promise before marriage," said Sarah Diefendorf, a sociology ...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Pressure to meet national education standards may be the reason states with significant populations of African-American students and those with larger class sizes often require children to learn fewer skills, finds a University of Kansas researcher. "The skills students are expected to learn in schools are not necessarily universal," said Argun Saatcioglu, a KU associate professor of education and courtesy professor of sociology. In effort to increase their test scores and, therefore, avoid the negative consequences of failing to meet the federal standards ...

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal law enacted to combat the use of "club drugs" such as Ecstasy — and today's variation known as Molly — has failed to reduce the drugs' popularity and, instead, has further endangered users by hampering the use of measures to protect them. University of Delaware sociology professor Tammy L. Anderson makes that case in a paper she will present at the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The paper, which has been accepted for publication this fall in the American Sociological Association journal Contexts, examines the unintended ...

SAN FRANCISCO — Risky situations increase anxiety for women but not for men, leading women to perform worse under these circumstances, finds a study to be presented at the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. "On the surface, risky situations may not appear to be particularly disadvantageous to women, but these findings suggest otherwise," said study author Susan R. Fisk, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Stanford University, who defines a risky situation as any setting with an uncertain outcome in which there can be both positive or negative ...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Many politicians see the temporary worker program in the U.S. as a solution to undocumented immigration from Mexico. But an Indiana University study finds that these legal workers earn no more than undocumented immigrants, who unlike their legal counterparts can improve their situation by changing jobs or negotiating for better pay. "Just because temporary workers are legally present in the country does not mean that they will have better jobs or wages than undocumented workers," said Lauren Apgar, lead researcher of the study "Temporary Worker Advantages? ...

Oxford, August 17, 2014 - A recent study by the British Geological Survey, in association with researchers at the University of Leicester, has delved into the bone and tooth chemistry of King Richard III and uncovered fascinating new details about the life and diet of Britain's last Plantagenet king. The study, published in Elsevier's Journal of Archaeological Science indicates a change in diet and location in his early childhood, and in later life, a diet filled with expensive, high status food and drink. This forensic study, the most complete to have been conducted on ...

Everyone notices the academic superstars and failures, but what about the tens of millions of American teens straddling these two extremes? A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, has spotlighted a high school subculture that has made an art of slacking – even with ample educational resources – and may be destined to perpetuate the nation's struggling lower-middle class. UC Berkeley sociologist Michele Rossi studied white teenage girls in their last year of a well-funded high school. What she found was a group she dubbed "getting-by girls," whose coping ...

ANN ARBOR---They're not your father's lowbrow roach coaches serving up greasy burgers and bad dogs. Today's gourmet food trucks peddle sushi, hybrid Korean tacos and other dishes that combine different types of cuisine to create a highbrow dining experience for foodies in search of eclectic, local eats. That's the take of researchers from the University of Michigan and Northwestern University who harvested Twitter data to conduct a de facto census of up-scale U.S. food trucks, invented in Los Angeles in 2008. "Virtually all these trucks are online and use Twitter to ...

SAN FRANCISCO — When middle-aged women seek extra-marital affairs, they are looking for more romantic passion, which includes sex — and don't want to divorce their husbands, suggests new research to be presented at the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. "Being happy in marriage is far different than being happy in bed," said Eric Anderson, a professor of masculinity, sexuality, and sport at the University of Winchester in England and the chief science officer at AshleyMadison.com, a popular website for those interested in having extra-marital ...

SAN FRANCISCO — Is a man without a four-year college degree better off trying to land a well-paying but insecure job in traditionally male fields such as manufacturing or construction, or should he consider lower-paying but steadier employment in a female-dominated field? Janette Dill, a University of Akron sociology professor, and her colleagues try to answer that question in a new study she will present at the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. "It's such a hard labor market if you don't have a college degree," Dill says. "You're just ...

SAN FRANCISCO — With more than 2 million people behind bars, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This mass incarceration has serious implications for not only the inmates, but their children, finds a new University of California-Irvine study. The study found significant health problems, including behavioral issues, in children of incarcerated parents and also that, for some types of health outcomes, parental incarceration can be more detrimental to a child's well-being than divorce or the death of a parent. "We know that poor people and racial minorities ...

SAN FRANCISCO — Current efforts to prevent prescription drug misuse among young adults need to consider peers — but not peer pressure — according to a Purdue University study. "With the 18-29 age group we may be spending unnecessary effort working a peer pressure angle in prevention and intervention efforts. That does not appear to be an issue for this age group," said study co-author Brian Kelly, a professor of sociology and anthropology who studies drug use and youth cultures. "Rather, we found more subtle components of the peer context as influential. These include ...

SAN FRANCISCO — Some working parents are carrying more psychological baggage than others — and the reason has nothing to do with demands on their time and energy. The cause is their occupation. According to University of Iowa researchers, parents who hold jobs viewed by society as aggressive, weak, or impersonal are likely to be more stressed out than parents whose occupations are seen in a light similar to parenting — good, strong, and caring. "We know that one source of stress for parents is the time and energy bind," says Mark Walker, a doctoral student in sociology ...

White flight does not end when residents move from poor urban neighborhoods to the suburbs. An Indiana University study found that white flight from one suburban neighborhood to another occurs when white residents move away from "ethnoburbs," suburban neighborhoods that attract a growing number of middle-class minority residents. "The sheer force of immigration and suburbanization has resulted in the unmistakable rise of middle-class yet ethnic suburban communities. However, my research shows that despite their distinct middle-class character, ethnoburbs have lost a steady ...

SAN FRANCISCO -- An Indiana University study found that how "in love" a romantic couple appears to be is interpreted differently based on the couple's sexual orientation, affecting what formal and informal rights people think that couple deserves. Long Doan, a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at IU Bloomington's College of Arts and Sciences, said the study was created to understand how people's attitudes differ based on sexual orientation. "If you ask what someone thinks of a same-sex couple or what they think of a straight couple, they usually have different ...

Magpies are not attracted to shiny objects and don't routinely steal small trinkets such as jewellery, according to a new study. In European culture, it is widely accepted that magpies (Pica pica) are the pilferers of the bird kingdom, unconditionally attracted to sparkly things and prone to pinching them for their nests, almost as a compulsion. But psychologists at the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour (CRAB) at the University of Exeter are now countering this folklore, having shown that the species is actually frightened of new and unfamiliar objects, rather ...

Boston, MA— Bivalirudin and heparin are two anticoagulant options for patients undergoing coronary stenting for ischemic heart disease. Bivalirudin, a newer anticoagulant, has been touted as being as effective as generic heparin, but with nearly half the rate of bleeding. However, several studies have hinted that, compared with heparin, bivalirudin-based regimens might not protect as well against recurrent heart attacks and might increase the risk of stents clotting off. Moreover, newer studies have questioned whether the reduction in bleeding holds up when tested on more ...

(PHILADELPHIA) – New Penn Medicine research shows that neuropsychiatric symptoms such as depression, anxiety and fatigue are more common in newly diagnosed Parkinson's disease (PD) patients compared to the general population. The study also found that initiation of dopamine replacement therapy, the most common treatment for PD, was associated with increasing frequency of impulse control disorders and excessive daytime sleepiness. The new findings, the first longitudinal study to come out of the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), are published in the August ...

Today, many ecological and evolutionary studies depend on a wide range of molecular tools to infer phylogenetic relationships, uncover population structure within species, and track quantitative traits. Agricultural studies use these same tools to improve crop yield and increase resistance to pests and disease. However, many of these methods—such as amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLP), inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR), and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)—have technical limitations. These include issues of reproducibility, ambiguity in determining ...

Depression is known to be a common symptom of Parkinson's disease, but remains untreated for many patients, according to a new study by Northwestern Medicine investigators in collaboration with the National Parkinson's Foundation (NPF). In fact, depression is the most prevalent non-motor symptom of Parkinson's, a chronic neurodegenerative disorder typically associated with movement dysfunction. "We confirmed suspicion that depression is a very common symptom in Parkinson's disease. Nearly a quarter of the people in the study reported symptoms consistent with depression," ...

We may joke about looking for a needle in a haystack, but that's nothing compared to searching for stardust in a foil! A new paper published in Science reveals that such work has led to the discovery of seven dust particles that are not only out of this world, they're out of this solar system. The Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector was launched in 1999 in an effort to collect contemporary interstellar dust—dust that has travelled to our solar system from another. The Collector returned in 2006; since then scientists have been combing through blue aerogel and aluminum ...

A new algorithm developed at Northeastern's Center for Complex Network Research helps sheds light on how to properly allocate credit. The research was published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in a paper co-​​authored by Hua-​​Wei Shen, a visiting scholar at Northeastern and associate professor at the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Albert-​​László Barabási, the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern. Using ...

Scientists have developed an x-ray imaging system that enables researchers to see 'live' how effective treatments are for cystic fibrosis. Published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, the imaging method allows researchers to monitor the effectiveness of a treatment for the life-threatening genetic disorder. Cystic fibrosis affects many of the body's systems, but most severely the lungs, and currently it can take several months to measure how effective treatment is for the early-fatal lung disease. Dr Kaye Morgan, lead researcher on ...

DETROIT – The Aug. 15 edition of the prestigious journal Science features a major article about the most important problem in obstetrics: preterm labor. The article, "Preterm labor: one syndrome, many causes," delivers a powerful message: preterm birth is not one condition, but many, and provides a framework for meeting this challenge. "There are 15 million preterm babies born annually, and the condition affects 5 percent to 15 percent of all pregnancies, with the highest rates in North America and Africa. Prematurity is the leading cause of infant death up to age 1and ...

New UC San Francisco research shows significant price differences for ten common blood tests in California hospitals, with some patients charged as little as $10 for one test while others were charged $10,169 for the identical test. The analysis of charges at more than 150 California hospitals looked at blood tests that are often required of patients, such as lipid panel, basic metabolic panel, and complete blood cell count with differential white cell count. Hospital ownership and teaching status help explain a portion of the variation – prices generally were lower ...