Astroturfers, Twitter-bombers and smear campaigners need beware this election season as a group of leading Indiana University information and computer scientists today unleashed Truthy.indiana.edu, a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections. Combing through thousands of tweets per hour in search of political keywords, the team based out of IU's School of Informatics and Computing will isolate patterns of interest ...

FORT WORTH, TEXAS, USA, September 28, 2010—The outbreak of whooping cough in Texas, California, and other states this year underscores the critical importance of widespread vaccination coverage, both locally as well as around the world, said a leading global health official attending conferences on world affairs and immunization in Fort Worth this week. Alex Palacios, a special representative of the GAVI Alliance, a public-private partnership aimed at increasing immunisation rates in poor countries, said that despite public health advances in the US and other wealthy countries ...

More than half of all people are hosts to Candida albicans in their bodies. This species might be located on their skin or mucous membranes or in the intestines – frequently without causing any symptoms. However, it can be dangerous to patients whose immunological system has been weakened such as after organ transplants or chemotherapy with cancer. Then, this fungus penetrates into deeper layers of tissue and uses the blood system to spread throughout the body. In Germany alone, several thousand people die from systemic candida infections every year. But why does Candida ...

Sept. 28, 2010 -- A new report from the National Research Council says that more organized and systematic procedures for gathering and evaluating data on Missouri River sediment are required to improve decisions and better manage the river's ecosystem, including protecting endangered species and developing water quality standards. In addition, the report finds that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' projects to restore habitats along the Missouri River are not significantly changing the size of the oxygen-depleted "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, nor will options for ...

Just imagine your car suddenly comes to a halt on a quiet country road, and it's only four years old. This is not a pleasant thought. A breakdown is expensive. Not to mention the safety risk to the occupants – because the breakdown was caused by the extremely light plastic wheels so highly praised by the car salesman. One of them has broken. »Such a scenario must, of course, never happen in reality,« states Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Büter from the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF in Darmstadt. The experts there specialize in operational ...

A Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) study on nesting birds in Argentina finds that increasing temperatures and rainfall—both side effects of climate change in some parts of the world—could be bad for birds of South America, but great for some of their parasites which thrive in warmer and wetter conditions. The study, which looked at nesting forest birds in Santa Fe, Argentina, found that increases in temperature and precipitation produce a bumper crop of parasitic fly larvae of the species Philornis torquans, parasites that burrow into the skin of baby birds to feed. ...

A new study by USC researchers reveals that stressed men looking at angry faces had diminished activity in the brain regions responsible for understanding others' feelings. Turns out the silent and stoic response to stress might be a guy thing after all. "These are the first findings to indicate that sex differences in the effects of stress on social behavior extend to one of the most basic social transactions — processing someone else's facial expression," said Mara Mather, director of the Emotion and Cognition Lab at USC. In an article appearing the October 6 issue ...

Sept. 28, 2010 — The National Research Council today released its assessment of U.S. doctoral programs, which includes data on over 5,000 programs in 62 fields at 212 universities nationwide. The assessment is designed to help universities evaluate and improve the quality of their programs and to provide prospective students with information on the nation's doctoral programs. (See Full Report) "This report and its large collection of quantitative data will become in our view an important and transparent instrument for strengthening doctoral education in the United States," ...

Being allergic to dogs or cats may worsen your ragweed allergies, according to a study from Queen's University. Researchers found that people with pet allergies often develop ragweed allergy symptoms more quickly than others. But the study also suggests that once allergy season is in full swing, those symptom differences subside. The team, led by Anne Ellis, an assistant professor in the departments of medicine and microbiology & immunology, exposed 123 participants to ragweed, and noted that pet allergy sufferers reported symptoms differently than their non-animal ...

PITTSBURGH—In the first population-based survey to indicate a racial disparity in the psychological abuse of senior citizens, University of Pittsburgh researchers found that African American seniors could be twice as likely to be mistreated than elders of other races. The survey also revealed that African American elders could be up to five times more susceptible to being swindled. Reporting the survey results in The Gerontologist, the researchers urged that health care and social service workers be especially vigilant for the possible mistreatment of African American seniors. Lead ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have created a computer model that predicts how a disaster's impact on critical infrastructure would affect a city's social and economic fabric, a potential tool to help reduce the severity of impacts, manage the aftermath of catastrophe and fortify infrastructure against future disasters. "The model works for any type of disaster that influences the infrastructure," said Makarand Hastak, head of construction engineering and management and a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University. "If we can identify in advance the most ...

In a recent keynote address before the Kavli Science Forum: 2010 in Oslo, Dr. John P. Holdren -- science advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama -- provided insight into why climate change is a priority to the Obama administration, and pressed the need for an international effort to mitigate, and adapt to, what he termed the effects of "global climate disruption." "We cannot solve the great problems of our time alone - any of us - as individual nations," he stated. "We need to solve them together, and science and technology pursued together are going to be immensely important ...

In a very large cohort of African-American women in the US, the association between the consumption of alcohol, tea, and coffee and the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (late onset diabetes) was studied for 12 years. Tea and decaffeinated coffee showed no relation with diabetes, but the regular moderate intake of both caffeinated coffee and alcohol appeared to reduce the risk of contracting late onset diabetes significantly. This paper is particularly important because some previous studies have not shown a strong association between alcohol and the risk of ...

(Boston) - Researchers from Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) have found that individuals who do not speak English at home are less likely to receive colorectal cancer screenings (CRC) as compared to those who do speak English at home. The findings, which currently appear on-line in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, suggest that patient-provider language barriers play a role in health-care disparities, and that providers should promote the importance of CRC screening to non-English speaking patients. The United States ...

AUDIO: A new University of Michigan study shows how fight styles affect marriage. Click here for more information. ANN ARBOR, Mich.---It's common knowledge that newlyweds who yell or call each other names have a higher chance of getting divorced. But a new University of Michigan study shows that other conflict patterns also predict divorce. A particularly toxic pattern is when one spouse deals with conflict constructively, by calmly discussing the situation, listening to their ...

Melbourne, Australia—September 28, 2010— In recent years, several guidelines in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder have been put into practice globally. Practice guidelines across the health sphere are very important in guiding the care people receive. Although there is a high level of consensus on these guidelines among practitioners, there are also differences that can lead to confusion among providers, patients, and purchasers of mental health services for people affected by trauma. A new article in the Journal of Traumatic Stress written by the international ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – As the U.S. economy continues to lag, many investors remain wary about taking risks with the stock market. Now, researchers at MU have concluded that this attitude toward investment risk-taking is more than just a recent trend. Rui Yao, a University of Missouri assistant professor in the Personal Financial Planning department in the College of Human Environmental Sciences, has found that during the past two decades, the risk tolerance of investors is positively correlated to the movements of the stock market, meaning that investors are likely to invest more ...

NASA's Aqua satellite has peered into the cloud tops of System 96L in the western Caribbean early this morning and noticed that they've become colder and higher, which indicated the storms was strengthening and organizing. Just over eight hours later, the new Tropical Depression 16 was born, and now has the potential to become a tropical storm before it merges with an elongated area of low pressure near the Florida late on Wednesday. Tropical Depression 16 was officially named this morning, Sept. 28 at 11 a.m. EDT by NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami, Fla. Many ...

Imagine building a car chassis without a blueprint or even a list of recommended construction materials. In a sense, that's precisely what a team of engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., did when they designed a one-of-a-kind structure that is one of 9 key new technology systems of the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM). Just as a chassis supports the engine and other components in a car, the ISIM will hold four highly sensitive instruments, electronics, and other shared instrument systems flying on the James Webb Space Telescope, ...

GREENBELT, Md. -- NASA engineers have created a unique engineering marvel called the ISIM structure that recently survived exposure to extreme cryogenic temperatures, proving that the structure will remain stable when exposed to the harsh environment of space. The material that comprises the structure, as well as the bonding techniques used to join its roughly 900 structural components, were all created from scratch. The ISIM, or the Integrated Science Instrument Module Flight Structure, will serve as the structural "heart" of the James Webb Space Telescope. The ISIM ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A study of employees at a west Michigan hospital showed some of the most unhealthy workers that University of Michigan researchers had ever seen. But in four years, the workplace wellness plan at Allegiance Health in Jackson, Mich. had fueled some of the biggest improvements in employee health that those same researchers had ever witnessed. The researchers were studying the hospital system to evaluate the health risk changes in employees in the four years after Allegiance implemented a workplace wellness program. The "It's Your Life" program was ...

Washington, D.C. (September 28, 2010) -- The second law of thermodynamics is a big hit with the beret-wearing college crowd because of its implicit existential crunch. The tendency of a closed systems to become increasingly disordered if no energy is added or removed is a popular, if not depressing, "things fall apart" sort-of-law that would seem to confirm the adolescent experience. Now a joint team of Ukrainian and American scientists has demanded more work and less poetry from the second law of thermodynamics, proposing a novel "pyroelectric" method to power tiny ...

Washington, D.C. (September 28, 2010) -- A new disposable device based on advances in microfluidics may help identify advanced breast cancer patients who are candidates for therapy with the drug trastuzumab (Herceptin). The device is described in the American Institute of Physics' journal Biomicrofluidics. Aggressive breast cancers with poor prognosis typically have abnormal levels of the protein HER2 (the tyrosine kinase human epidermal growth factor receptor 2). The new elastomeric, rubber-like device is designed to efficiently capture cancer cells overexpressing HER2 ...

Washington, D.C. (September 28, 2010) -- Polymer-based photovoltaic cells have some real advantages compared to the currently used semiconductor-based cells. They are easy to make and the materials are cheap. The challenge is to figure out how to make efficient cells while keeping the manufacturing cost low. One approach uses a light-absorbing polymer along with a derivative of a sixty-carbon fullerene molecule, commonly known as a buckyball. For maximum efficiency, the two materials must be present in thin layers near opposite electrodes but most analytical methods ...

Professor Sonia Ghumman from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Shidler College of Business has completed an intensive marketing research on the effects of Muslim women who wear hijabs (head scarves) in the U.S. Ghumman's research examined the expectations that women who wear hijabs have regarding their employment opportunities. "We surveyed 219 American Muslim women on their job seeking experience," said Ghumman. "The findings reveal that Hijabis are not only aware of their stigma of being Muslim, but also expect to be treated differently in the workplace as a result ...