Voice recognition dramatically decreases the turnaround time for radiology reports – referring physicians are often getting results the same day their patients have the radiologic examinations – but technical problems with these systems are reducing some radiologists to typing rather than dictating those reports, a new study shows.

“There are many benefits of voice recognition, but unfortunately we have been facing some technical problems that are impacting our productivity, ” s

A study by Italian researchers of motorway tollgate attendants has demonstrated that traffic pollution damages the quality of sperm in young and middle-aged men.

In research published today (Wednesday 30 April) in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction [1] the research team from the University of Naples say their work should prompt studies on other types of workers exposed to similar levels of pollution and alert health authorities to pollution’s insidious health e

A survey on contraception by French researchers has found that a third of the pregnancies among women in their study were unplanned and that two-thirds of these pregnancies occurred in contraception users.

A fifth of the unplanned pregnancies happened among women using the Pill and a tenth among women using the IUD (intra-uterine device) – both theoretically highly effective medical methods of contraception, said principal investigators Dr Nathalie Bajos and Dr Nadine Job-Spira of the INSERM

Drivers who are overweight or underweight are at greater risk of suffering an injury in a road accident than people of average size, according to a study of deaths and injuries from motor vehicle accidents in New Zealand.

The study appears in the current issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE), edited in the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol.

Dr Gary Whitlock and colleagues studied people who had been seriously injured or killed betwe

MENOPAUSAL WOMEN WITH DAYTIME SLEEPINESS SHOULD BE EVALUATED

Evaluation for sleep-disordered breathing should be a priority for menopausal women with complaints of snoring, daytime sleepiness, or unsatisfactory sleep. Researchers studied a population-based sample of 589 women enrolled in the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study. They tested the hypothesis that menopause is an independent risk factor for sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) using in-laboratory sleep testing (polysomnography). (SDB is a

A new study suggests that lead may be harmful even at very low blood concentrations. The study, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, will appear in the April 17 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The five-year study found that children who have blood lead concentration lower than 10 micrograms per deciliter suffer intellectual impairment from the exposure. The researchers also discovered that the amount of impai

Data compares blue collar workers and white collar workers

Men who work in female-dominated professions, such as clerks and classroom aides, are 47 percent more likely to lash out in violence against wives or live-in girlfriends than a control group of white-collar managers, according to a recent study by a sociologist at the University of California, Riverside.

That is just one of the surprises found by Scott Melzer, a postgraduate researcher, who used a national data set

People who live in neighborhoods where stores, schools and homes are within walking or cycling distance from each other make almost twice as many weekly trips on foot as residents of less “walkable” neighborhoods, according to new research.

And all that car-free traveling can add up to better health: One or two extra walking trips a week can burn off enough calories to drop nearly two pounds in a year, which is about how much weight American adults gain annually.

If a large propo

Timing of childbirth cited as key factor

Europe’s population has aged to such a degree that it will likely continue to shrink, even if birthrates rebound to a one-for-one replacement level, a new study suggests. A major part of this trend is due to the fact that women have been postponing childbirth for increasing lengths of time, the authors have found. Their research appears in the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Drivers talking on cell phones are nearly twice as likely as other drivers involved in crashes to have rear-end collisions, according to a new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study. Crashes involving cell phone use, however, are less likely to result in fatalities or serious injuries than crashes not involving the devices.

Almost 60 percent of licensed N.C. drivers have used a cell phone while behind the wheel, investigators from the UNC Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC) fo

A new generation of nanoscale devices are being developed based on inspiration found in nature. Grazyna Sroga, a postdoctoral researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is using DNA and related proteins to construct microscopic structures that may one day conduct electricity, deliver drugs, boost computer memory, or sense the presence or absence of chemicals. She is working in the laboratory of Jonathan S. Dordick, the Howard P. Isermann ’42 professor of chemical engineering.

Srog

Physicists and geoscientists join forces in a Dutch research centre.

Luminescence dating is a new technology for the determination of the age of sediments such as sand. At the Netherlands Centre for Luminescence Dating (NCL), physicists and geoscientists join forces to use and improve this new method. The foundation of the NCL will be celebrated on Thursday 20th of March in the form of an opening symposium in the auditorium of the TNO-NITG building in Utrecht. TU Delft will act as se

Women smile more than men, but differences disappear when they are in the same role, Yale researcher finds

Women do smile more than men, but when occupying similar work and social roles, the gender differences in the rate of smiling disappear, a Yale researcher has found.

Also, there are large differences in the degree to which men smile less than women depending on a person’s culture, ethnicity, age, or when people think they are being observed, according to the study fund

The phrase, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” has its roots in a passage of the Bible (Matthew 6:3). If there is truth to this old saying, the reasons may have as much to do with the way the brain obtains information from the arms as it does from the observations of ancient scribes.

Background

Most individuals are either left- or right-handed. How the skills they have learned from the dominant arm (or hand) are transferred to the non-dominant arm ha

A low-testosterone man newly married to a high-testosterone woman might seem destined to be henpecked but a Penn State study found that such a coupling actually produced a marriage where the wife provided better social support for her mate.

Dr. Catherine Cohan, assistant professor of human development and family studies, says, “It’s not necessarily the case that higher testosterone is all bad. Testosterone is related to assertiveness which can be good or bad depending on whether it is m

Study involving over 24,000 people finds general life satisfaction affects attitude toward marital happiness

In a large longitudinal study that sheds new light on the association between marital status and happiness, researchers have found that people get a boost in life satisfaction from marriage. But the increase in happiness is very small — approximately one tenth of one point on an 11-point scale — and is likely due to initial reactions to marriage and then a return to prior le