Smoke alarms with a personalized parent voice recording were significantly more effective in awaking sleeping children than standard residential tone alarms, according to a new study.
A new study links poor school performance among middle school students with television viewing time and content. In “Association Between Television, Movie and Video Game Exposure and School Performance,” researchers surveyed more than 4,500 middle school students (grades 5 through 8) about weekday and weekend television and video screen time, cable channel availability, parental R-movie and television content restriction, and school performance.
Ethnic pride can help teenagers maintain happiness when faced with stress, according to a new study by a Wake Forest University psychologist published in the October issue of Child Development. Adolescents with positive feelings toward their ethnic group say they are happier on a daily basis than those who have a more negative attitude about their ethnic identity, said Lisa Kiang, assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest and lead author of the study.
A new study that takes a rare look at the physiological, social and emotional dynamics of day-to-day experiences in real-life settings shows that when older adults go to bed lonely, sad or overwhelmed, they have elevated levels of cortisol shortly after waking the next morning.
Scientists have detected a new strain of H5N1 bird flu virus in China and warned it might have started another wave of outbreaks in poultry in Southeast Asia and move deeper into Eurasia. The development of highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses in poultry in Eurasia accompanied with the increase in human infection in 2006 suggests that the virus has not been effectively contained and that the pandemic threat persists.
The approach, called calorie restriction, involves eating about 30 percent fewer calories than normal while still getting adequate amounts of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Aside from direct genetic manipulation, calorie restriction is the only strategy known to extend life consistently in a variety of animal species, a report of study in a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, highlighted by Michael Mason in the New York Times.
Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited said that recently, in two separate rulings, the Spanish courts (the Mercantile Court of Barcelona, No. 2) found Spanish patent ES 2,167,306 (counterpart of Pfizer’s EP 409 281) to be invalid for lack of novelty. The two rulings made on September 26, 2006, in Lek Pharmaceuticals v. Warner Lambert Co. and in Laboratorios Cinfa et al. v. Warner Lambert, found claims 1 to 3 of Pfizer to be invalid. These decisions came after considering the views of the Spanish Patent Office (SPO), in addition to technical expert reports.
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have for the first time described how multiple copies of a gene are responsible for metastases in early-stage breast cancer and poor prognosis for patients. In a study published in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the gene, called uPAR, offers a promising target for therapeutic drugs to stop or slow the progression of the disease and could serve as a screening tool for assessing which types of drugs a patient will respond to.
It has sparked fierce debate on university campuses for decades: which degree subjects require the most work? But now researchers have conclusively proved what many have suspected for years – students of media studies, business and social studies do much less work than other undergraduates, reported by Sarah Cassidy in the Independent.
In the case of an outbreak of pandemic flu, large majority of Americans willing to make major changes in their lives. Survey also finds many people would face critical work-related problems. The latest national survey conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) Project on the Public and Biological Security finds that when faced with a serious outbreak of pandemic flu, a large majority of Americans are willing to make major changes in their lives and cooperate with public health officials’ recommendations.