BUFFALO, N.Y. – New research findings from a study of 634 couples found that the more often they smoked marijuana, the less likely they were to engage in domestic violence. The study, conducted by researchers in the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions and Research Institute on Addictions (RIA), appeared in the online edition of Psychology of Addictive Behaviors in August. The study attempted to clarify inconsistent findings about domestic violence among pot-smoking couples that primarily has been based on cross-sectional data (i.e., ...

MANHATTAN, Kansas — Gender is often related to what type of severe or fatal crash a young male or young female driver will be involved in, according to a Kansas State University study. The university's Sunanda Dissanayake, professor of civil engineering, and Niranga Amarasingha, doctoral student in civil engineering, looked at the gender differences and similarities of young drivers involved in all motor vehicle crashes in Kansas across five years. Their findings may help reduce the number and severity of these crashes by improving educational material used in young driver ...

New Haven, Conn. – New national guidelines can improve the way statin drugs are prescribed to patients at risk for cardiovascular disease, a Yale University study has found. The research, published Aug. 25 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, also showed the new guidelines produce only a modest increase in the number of patients being given the drugs. Statins are a class of drugs that help lower cholesterol by blocking the enzyme HMG-CoA reductase, which the body needs in order to produce cholesterol. Common statin medications include Lipitor, Levacor, ...

Health care workers in some of the world's poorest countries lack basic equipment to shield them from HIV and other bloodborne infections during surgical and other procedures, new research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests. The findings underscore the lack of adequate protective supplies in nations at the center of the current Ebola outbreak. In Liberia, one of the countries most affected by Ebola, 56 percent of hospitals had protective eyewear for its doctors and nurses, while 63 percent had sterile gloves, the study found. In Sierra Leone, ...

Ask any parent raising kids in today's fast-paced society and chances are they would agree that there are only so many hours in the day. Recognizing a need for help, many businesses now offer traditional caregiving services ranging from planning birthday parties to teaching children how to ride a bike. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, by outsourcing traditional parental duties, modern-day parents feel they are ultimately protecting parenthood. "Parents are increasingly outsourcing caregiving activities. The expanding array of caregiving services ...

A unique experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory called the Holometer has started collecting data that will answer some mind-bending questions about our universe – including whether we live in a hologram. Much like characters on a television show would not know that their seemingly 3 - D world exists only on a 2 - D screen, we could be clueless that our 3 - D space is just an illusion. The information about everything in our universe could actually be encoded in tiny packets in two dimensions. Get close enough to your TV screen ...

Are environmental and social problems such as global warming and poverty the result of inadequate governmental regulations or does the burden fall on our failure as consumers to make better consumption choices? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, responsible consumption shifts the burden for solving global problems from governments to consumers and ultimately benefits corporations more than society. "When businesses convince politicians to encourage responsible consumption instead of implementing policy changes to solve environmental and social ...

From doing yard work to finishing up the last few classes required for a college degree, consumers struggle to get things done. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, the way consumers think about deadlines can determine whether or not they start tasks and accomplish their goals. "Our research shows that the way consumers think about the future influences whether they get started on tasks. In particular, if the deadline for a task is categorized as being similar to the present, they are more likely to initiate the task," write authors Yanping Tu ...

BOULDER -- Unregulated trash burning around the globe is pumping far more pollution into the atmosphere than shown by official records. A new study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimates that more than 40 percent of the world's garbage is burned in such fires, emitting gases and particles that can substantially affect human health and climate change. The new study provides the first rough estimates, on a country-by-country basis, of pollutants such as particulates, carbon monoxide, and mercury that are emitted by the fires. Such pollutants have ...

Do you feel sadder watching a documentary about war or a drama about a young person dying of cancer? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers mistakenly believe they will have stronger emotional reactions when stories are based on true events rather than fiction. "Consumers may choose to read a tragic fictional story because they assume that knowing it was fictional would make them less sad than reading a less dramatic, but true story," write authors Jane E. J. Ebert (Brandeis University) and Tom Meyvis (New York University). "However, the ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – You've probably seen – or even participated in – promotional contests offered by retailers in which they say "no purchase required to win." But if you're a loyal customer of that retailer, you don't necessarily believe that, a new study suggests. You figure you must have some secret advantage over other, less-devoted customers. In fact, the new research finds that loyal customers of a company feel that they are more likely and more deserving than others to win perks from the business – even those that are randomly given out. "This is driven by people's ...

A Fortune 500 company is redesigning a popular product using materials that are friendlier to the environment. How will consumers respond to the newly redesigned, "greener" product? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers are more likely to purchase a product if they think helping the environment is not the intended purpose of a product improvement. "When a company makes a product that is better for the environment, consumers are actually less likely to purchase it if the environmental benefit is perceived as intentional rather than the ...

As their moral perspectives change, disillusioned churchgoers find it increasingly difficult to remain associated with their church, yet many also find it difficult to leave. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, former churchgoers experience deep identity crises as their most important relationships and beliefs are put at risk. "Our research examines currently unsatisfied and former members of the Mormon Church, exploring the experiences of people who have lost their faith in the institution that structured both their morality and their day-to-day ...

26 August 2014 - A team of engineers from Singapore has successfully piloted the world's first ZigBee wireless sensor network (WSN) for satellite communications. With the weight of payloads being a major constraint in satellite design, constructing a lightweight, low power-consuming, wireless communication system to do away with cabling inside the satellite has always been a challenge for system designers. The engineering team at the Satellite Research Centre of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore launched VELOX-I, which consists of a nanosatellite weighing ...

VIDEO: The contemporary view of running mechanics has been heavily influenced by the simple spring-mass model, a theory first formulated in the late 1980s. The spring-mass model assumes the legs work... Click here for more information. The world's fastest sprinters have unique gait features that account for their ability to achieve fast speeds, according to two new studies from Southern Methodist University, Dallas. The new findings indicate that the secret to elite sprinting ...

Genetic changes that occur in patients with the bowel condition Crohn's disease could hold clues to fighting the illness. Scientists have identified chemical changes in the DNA of patients with Crohn's disease that could help to screen people for the disease. These changes can be detected in blood samples, opening the door to a simple test for Crohn's disease. The findings also offer clues to how the condition develops and reveal possible targets for new treatments. Several genes have been linked to Crohn's disease but not everybody who inherits these genes will ...

Big Data presents scientists with unfolding opportunities, including, for instance, the possibility of discovering heterogeneous characteristics in the population leading to the development of personalized treatments and highly individualized services. But ever-expanding data sets introduce new challenges in terms of statistical analysis, bias sampling, computational costs, noise accumulation, spurious correlations, and measurement errors. The era of Big Data – marked by a Big Bang-like explosion of information about everything from patterns of use of the World Wide ...

The illegal use of waste cooking oil in parts of the nationwide food system is threatening the public's health in China. Now scientists led by Professor Ding Hongbin at the Dalian University of Technology, in northeastern China, present a new means to confront this problem. In a study published in the Chinese Science Bulletin, Ding and fellow researchers at the university's School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering outline the potential use of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to rapidly distinguish between "gutter oil" and safe, edible oil. ...

By using the same-beam VLBI technology, differential phase delay successfully monitored the lunar rover's movement during the Chang'E-3 mission when rover and lander was carrying out the tasks of separation and took photos of each other. The sensitivity of rover motion monitoring was between 50-100mm.Furthermore, relative position between rover and lander was precisely measured by taking the use of the DPD's changing trend. Professor LIU Qing hui and his student ZHENG Xin from the Shanghai Astronomical of observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, obtained this result when ...

Quartz glass does not conduct electric current, it is a typical example of an insulator. With ultra-short laser pulses, however, the electronic properties of glass can be fundamentally changed within femtoseconds (1 fs = 10^-15 seconds). If the laser pulse is strong enough, the electrons in the material can move freely. For a brief moment, the quartz glass behaves like metal. It becomes opaque and conducts electricity. This change of material properties happens so quickly that it can be used for ultra-fast light based electronics. Scientists at the Vienna University of ...

Previous studies that have suggested an increased risk of autism among children of women who took antidepressants during pregnancy may actually reflect the known increased risk associated with severe maternal depression. In a study receiving advance online publication in Molecular Psychiatry, investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) report that – while a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder was more common in the children of mothers prescribed antidepressants during pregnancy than in those with no prenatal exposure – when the severity of the mother's depression ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new analysis suggests the planet can produce much more land-plant biomass – the total material in leaves, stems, roots, fruits, grains and other terrestrial plant parts – than previously thought. The study, reported in Environmental Science and Technology, recalculates the theoretical limit of terrestrial plant productivity, and finds that it is much higher than many current estimates allow. "When you try to estimate something over the whole planet, you have to make some simplifying assumptions," said University of Illinois plant biology professor ...

Scientists have shown how to better identify and measure vital molecules that control cell behaviour – paving the way for improved tools for diagnosis, prediction and monitoring of cancer. Researchers from the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute based at The University of Manchester – part of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre – and the Institute of Cancer Research, London, looked at protein kinases, molecules that control various aspects of cellular function. The study, funded by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)/Pfizer CASE studentship ...

For those affected, breast cancer is a dramatic diagnosis. Patients often have to endure chemotherapy and surgery, which, depending on the individual scenario, may mean breast conserving surgery or breast removal—mastectomy. In the aftermath, many women experience symptoms such as pain, fatigue/exhaustion, or sleep disturbances. However, the symptoms are highly individual, as Stefan Feiten and colleagues emphasize in a recent study reported in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2014; 111: 537-44). The authors state that it is crucial for good aftercare ...

A lack of education, an unhealthy diet, and unemployment go straight to the heart—quite literally, because all three range among the risks that cause ischemic heart disease or contribute to its development. According to a recent study reported by epidemiologists Andreas und Maximilian Stang in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2014; 111: 530-6), the risk factors for heart disease are higher in Saxony-Anhalt than in all other German states, and more persons die from heart disease in the state. Many of the risk factors could be treated in a more targeted ...