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 ...

It sounds like science fiction, but it seems that bacteria within us — which outnumber our own cells about 100-fold — may very well be affecting both our cravings and moods to get us to eat what they want, and often are driving us toward obesity. In an article published this week in the journal BioEssays, researchers from UC San Francisco, Arizona State University and University of New Mexico concluded from a review of the recent scientific literature that microbes influence human eating behavior and dietary choices to favor consumption of the particular nutrients they ...

West Orange, NJ. August 15, 2014. Kessler stroke researchers and colleagues have identified an association between over-optimistic estimation of one's own ability to take medications accurately, and memory loss among stroke survivors. Results indicate that assessing patients for their ability to estimate medication skills accurately may predict memory disorder. The article, "Stroke survivors over-estimate their medication self-administration ability (MSA), predicting memory loss," was epublished ahead of print on May 28 by Brain Injury (doi:10.3109/02699052.2014.915984). ...

Following another person's gaze can reveal a wealth of information critical to social interactions and also to safety. Gaze following typically emerges in infancy, and new research looking at preterm infants suggests that it's visual experience, not maturational age, that underlies this critical ability. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study showing that some aspects of the early development of social cognition is influenced by experience, even ...

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Hurricane Karina before it weakened to a tropical storm early on August 15 and imagery showed the vertical wind shear was already taking its toll. NASA's Terra satellite passed over Karina on August 14 at 2:40 p.m. EDT when it was still clinging to hurricane status and noticed that wind shear was already having an effect on the storm's structure. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument captured an image that showed that the bulk of Karina's clouds were being pushed to the western side of the storm. That ...

Tropical Storm Julio doesn't have any strong thunderstorms or strong convection left in it according to infrared satellite imagery from NASA. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Julio on August 14 at 12:23 UTC (8:23 a.m. EDT), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder known as AIRS analyzed the clouds and temperatures of the storm. The AIRS data showed that cloud tops had warmed and dropped lower in the atmosphere. That indicates that the strength behind rising air had weakened and was not forming strong, high thunderstorms with cold cloud tops. There was a ...

People living in countries with governments that spend more on social services report being more contented, according to a Baylor University study. "The effect of state intervention into the economy equals or exceeds marriage or employment status — two traditional predictors of happiness — when it comes to satisfaction," said Patrick Flavin, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences. The study — "Assessing the Impact of the Size and Scope of Government on Human Well-Being" — is published in the journal Social Forces. The researchers ...

Tissue engineering technologies offer new treatment strategies for the repair of peripheral nerve injury, but cell loss between seeding and adhesion to the scaffold remains inevitable. In a study reported on the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 14, 2014), a thermosensitive collagen hydrogel remained as a liquid when kept at temperatures below 10°C and gelled when the temperature was increased to 37°C in an incubator for 30 minutes, which was used as an extracellular matrix and combined with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells to construct tissue-engineered peripheral ...