EAST LANSING, Mich. — In the wake of President Obama's "college scorecard," new research finds that government attempts to grade educational institutions can backfire when done for political or policy purposes. Rebecca Jacobsen of Michigan State University studied the effects of publicizing performance data for K-12 schools, which was mandated by No Child Left Behind in 2001. While Jacobsen believes school report cards are warranted to keep the public informed, she said too often the information presented is unclear or misleading to parents and can ultimately erode trust ...

In a breakthrough that could one day yield important clues about the nature of matter itself, a team of Harvard scientists have succeeding in measuring the magnetic charge of single particles of matter and antimatter more accurately than ever before. As described in a March 25 paper in Physical Review Letters, the ATRAP team, led by Gerald Gabrielse, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, and including post-doctoral fellows Stephan Ettenauer and Eric Tardiff and graduate students Jack DiSciacca, Mason Marshall, Kathryn Marable and Rita Kalra was able to capture ...

A new UBC study reveals that North American service workers are more likely to sabotage rude customers, while Chinese react by disengaging from customer service altogether. "Our research shows that culture plays a significant role in how frontline workers deal with customer abuse," says UBC Sauder School of Business Professor Daniel Skarlicki, a co-author of the study. "In North America, employees tend to retaliate against offensive customers – doing things like giving bad directions or serving cold food. In China, workers are more likely to reduce the general quality ...

When it comes to posting on social media, there are few areas of our lives that are off limits. We post about eating, working, playing, hunting, quilting – you name it. Just about everything is up for public consumption … except our health. A new study from BYU finds that while most of us go online regularly for help in diagnosing health issues, very few of us actually post information, questions or experiences on health topics. "Less than 15 percent of us are posting the health information that most of us are consuming," said Rosemary Thackeray, BYU professor of ...

The first multi-gene DNA sequencing test that can help predict cancer patients' responses to treatment has been launched in the National Health Service (NHS), thanks to a partnership between scientists at the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. The test uses the latest DNA sequencing techniques to detect mutations across 46 genes that may be driving cancer growth in patients with solid tumours. The presence of a mutation in a gene can potentially determine which treatment a patient should receive. The researchers say the number of genes ...

Each year, more than 35,000 patients in the United States are implanted with spinal cord stimulators to treat chronic pain. Unfortunately, up to half of such patients receive only very limited pain relief. To help more patients, scientists are developing a new device to deliver therapeutic stimulation in a more targeted way, reaching nerve fibers deep within the spinal cord. Standard devices, first introduced in 1967, work by delivering a low electrical current to the spinal cord that interferes with the body's pain signals. Such devices, however, are only able to deliver ...

Incorporating wind power into existing power grids is challenging because fluctuating wind speed and direction means turbines generate power inconsistently. Coupled with customers' varying power demand, many wind-farm managers end up wasting power-generation capacity and limiting the service life of turbines through active control – including fully stopping turbines – in order to avoid any possible damage to the power grid from spikes in supply. In a paper published in the American Institute of Physics' Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, researchers propose a ...

Ultra-precision positioning is required for the success of many scientific applications, including manufacturing semiconductors, aligning optics and manipulating cells. One of the challenges of ultra-precise positioning is providing sufficient torque through small, precise angles. In a paper accepted for publication in the Review of Scientific Instruments, a journal of the American Institute of Physics, researchers describe a new rotary actuator that accurately delivers more torque than previous devices. Like many other ultra-precise rotary actuators, the new device's ...

Alexandria, VA – When Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 19, 1972, it ended an era of manned spaceflight to the moon. The science, however, continues. Armed with analytical techniques not available in the 1970s, researchers around the country have been re-examining the more than 380 kilograms of lunar rocks collected four decades ago during the Apollo missions. Using new investigations, such as petrographic and chemical composition studies and updated solar radiation and engineering measurements, these "cold case" scientists, many of them young innovators, ...

Scientists at the Department of Physics of the University of Oulu have teamed up with scientists in France, Russia and Japan to propose a new experimental method for researching positively charged ions. The study, In the Finnish side carried out by postdoctoral researcher Saana-Maija Huttula and Professor Marko Huttula in Oulu, was published in Physical Review Letters on 12 March 2013. The study involved investigating the electronic structure of the argon ions using synchrotron radiation. The proposed theoretical simulations were done using methods developed by an electron ...

Women reaching the age of 40 tend to be less vigilant about birth control because they think the risk of pregnancy is low – or that birth control can cause health problems - but a review of the evidence by a team that includes a Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island physician recently underscored the need to be vigilant about contraception even in perimenopause. "Despite declining fertility, women over age 40 still require effective contraception if they want to avoid pregnancy," according to Rebecca H. Allen, MD, MPH, of Women & Infants' Department of Obstetrics and ...

Researchers at Aalto University, the University at Buffalo, and Texas A&M University have proven a link between customers' use of social media and higher revenue. Now there is proof that customers who engage with a business through social media contribute more to the bottom line than customers who do not, said Ashish Kumar, assistant professor of marketing at Aalto University. Our study showed that social media activities help strengthen the bond between the customer and the firm. Participating customers on a firm's social media site contribute 5.6% more revenue and ...

Well designed and planned exercises are essential to ensure that the UK can respond effectively to emergencies of all kinds, according to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The emergencies may take the form of a terrorist attack, flooding, pandemic flu, rail or air disaster - or any major disruptive event requiring an emergency response. The number of such exercises taking place across the UK each year within what the researchers call the 'resilience community' - including emergency services, local authorities, central government departments ...

An international team of plasma physicists has used one of the world's most powerful lasers to create highly unusual plasma composed of hollow atoms. The experimental work led by scientists from the University of York, UK and the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of Russian Academy of Sciences demonstrated that it is possible to remove the two most deeply bound electrons from atoms, emptying the inner most quantum shell and leading to a distinctive plasma state. The experiment was carried out using the petawatt laser at the Central Laser Facility at the Science and ...

Two forthcoming EPJ D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate. Meanwhile, in another study, Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light ...

Have you ever thrown into the fire - even if you shouldn't have - an empty packet of crisps? The outcome is striking: the plastic shrivels and bends into itself, until it turns into a small crumpled and blackened ball. This phenomenon is explained by the tendency of materials to pick up their original features in the presence of the right stimulus. Hence, this usually happens when heating materials that were originally shaped at high temperatures and cooled afterwards. EPFL researchers realized that this phenomenon occurred to ultrathin quartz tubes (capillary tubes) ...

Rutile is used in ceramics and paints, but is particularly useful for finding out about the history of a rock. Where mineral deposits are found, rutile is often also present. The new methods therefore bring opportunities for strategies to find other mineral deposits, such as gold. Until now, rutile has been a relatively unknown mineral, despite not being rare. For example, rutile can be found on most sandy beaches around the world, including in Sweden. "It's incredible to see how little attention was paid to rutile until around five years ago," says geologist and ...

The blood of young and old people differs. In an article published recently in the scientific journal Blood, a research group at Lund University in Sweden explain how they have succeeded in rejuvenating the blood of mice by reversing, or re-programming, the stem cells that produce blood. Stem cells form the origin of all the cells in the body and can divide an unlimited number of times. When stem cells divide, one cell remains a stem cell and the other matures into the type of cell needed by the body, for example a blood cell.* "Our ageing process is a consequence of ...

The more choices people have, the riskier the decisions they make, according to a new study which sheds light on how we behave when faced with large amounts of information. Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Lugano set up a gambling game in which they analysed how decision-making is affected when people are faced with a large number of potential gambles. They found that a bias in the way people gather information leads them to take more risks when they choose a gamble from a large set of options, a phenomenon which researchers have labelled ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that a protein found in the cells surrounding pancreatic cancers play a role in the spread of the disease to other parts of the body. In a finding to be published in the March 25 issue of Oncogene, researchers in the lab of Carol Otey, PhD, found that the protein palladin enhances the ability of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) to assemble organelles known as invadopodia to break down the barriers between cells and create pathways for tumors to spread throughout the ...

Adults in India are substantially more likely to abstain from smoking at home if they are prohibited from smoking at work, a new study has found. According to data from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey India, 2009/2010, 64 per cent of adults who work in smokefree environments live in a smokefree home, compared with 42 per cent of those who work where smoking is permitted. The proportion of smokefree homes is higher in states with higher proportions of smokefree workplaces. The authors of the study, from Imperial College London and the Public Health Foundation of India ...

WASHINGTON, DC – March 25, 2013 – Until now most experimental vaccines against the highly lethal H5N1 avian influenza virus have lacked effectiveness. But a new vaccine has proven highly effective against the virus when tested in both mice and ferrets. It is also effective against the H9 subtype of avian influenza. The research is published online ahead of print in the Journal of Virology. The strength of the new vaccine is that it uses attenuated, rather than "killed" virus. (Killed viruses are broken apart with chemicals or heat, and they are used because they are ...

Los Angeles, CA (March 25, 2012) While the media is replete with examples of "normal" men who seek out prostitutes regularly, how common are prostitute-seeking men and how much do they differ from men in the normal population? According to a new comparison study by Dr. Martin A. Monto, University of Portland, and Dr. Christine Milrod, only about 14% of men across the U.S. have ever paid for sex in their lives and only 1% of those men had done so in the previous year. In addition, the majority of these men do not possess any "peculiar" qualities that distinguish them from ...

A team of industrial and university researchers has shown that nanoparticles with sizes smaller than 10 nanometers – approximately the width of a cell membrane – can be successfully incorporated into scintillation devices capable of detecting and measuring a wide energy range of X-rays and gamma rays emitted by nuclear materials. The proof-of-concept study, described in the Journal of Applied Physics, suggests that "nanocrystals" – nanoparticles clustered together to mimic the densely-packed crystals traditionally used in scintillation devices – may one day yield radiation ...

Hybrid ribbons of vanadium oxide (VO2) and graphene may accelerate the development of high-power lithium-ion batteries suitable for electric cars and other demanding applications. The Rice University lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan determined that the well-studied material is a superior cathode for batteries that could supply both high energy density and significant power density. The research appears online this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. The ribbons created at Rice are thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper, ...