The University of Bradford has conducted a study that reveals that mobile phone use can improve the short-term memory of men – but not women.
Dr Jim Smythe and Professor Brenda Costall of the University’’s School of Life Sciences carried out an experiment on both the long and short-term memory of people that were briefly exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMF) emitted from mobile telephones.
Thirty-three male and twenty-nine female students volunteered to be randomly assigne
The human brain combines motion and shape information to recognize faces and facial expressions, a new study suggests.
That new finding, part of an engineer’s quest to design computers that “see” faces the way humans do, provides more evidence concerning a controversy in cognitive psychology.
Were computers to become adept at recognizing faces and moods, they would be more user-friendly, said Aleix Martinez, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Ohio State University. T
Police should hand out more traffic tickets. While Robert Tibshirani, PhD, won’t win any popularity contests with that sentiment, the Stanford School of Medicine researcher and his colleagues at the University of Toronto report in a paper being published in the June 28 issue of The Lancet that vigilant traffic law enforcement may reduce fatal car crashes.
The team examined the records of drivers in Ontario, Canada, and found that receiving a traffic ticket reduces a driver’s risk of dying i
Biodiversity in urban/suburban yards correlates with household income
Biodiversity in urban and suburban yards directly correlates with household income, scientists have found.
Researchers at the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site found higher plant diversity in “upscale” neighborhoods. “The line flattens out, however, at about the $50,000 per year salary mark,” said scientist Charles Redman. “When inves
New study presented today at Image-guided Therapies media briefing
Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) combined with chemotherapy is currently being used to treat malignant liver tumors at a Boston hospital on the basis of results from a new study appearing in the July issue of the journal Radiology. The minimally invasive, outpatient procedure is performed on primary liver cancer or colon cancer tumors that have spread to the liver of patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The German health and fitness market is the second largest in Europe and it ’s still growing – but what does the future hold?
There are many different facets of the German health and fitness market. It has four different trade associations and generated total sales of just € 3.16bn in 2002 (Source: DSSV), which is less than Porsche AG’s annual turnover.
Until now, there hasn’t been any accurate data of the total size of this market. However, since 1999, Deloitte & Touche
A new method developed by a University of Toronto mathematician gives the most precise understanding yet of diffusion, a finding with potential applications to phenomena such as the spread of heat through materials, population modeling and fluid seepage through rock or soil. “We were able to get much more precise information than anticipated,” says Robert McCann, a professor in U of T’s Department of Mathematics and co-investigator of an article in the March 19-23 issue of the Proceedin
U-M study finds no relationship between backpack use, pain
Backpacks have gotten a bad rap. For years, specialists have urged school children to lighten their loads, wear their backpacks on both shoulders and avoid lugging around those heavy school bags whenever possible.
But new research from a University of Michigan Health System physiatrist indicates backpacks don’t cause the stress and strain on young backs that they’ve been linked to.
“There is no go
Trading through dealers on the London Stock Exchange could be obsolete in less than three years, according to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
A study led by Dr Nir Vulkan of the Saïd Business School and Worcester College, University of Oxford, investigated where traders would trade if they have the choice of either a dealers’ market or a computerised system. “Our study suggests that in a just a few years’ time the traditional dealing market on the London St
Scientists are not prepared to dismiss beliefs about aliens landing on Earth in the past or that some houses are haunted by ghosts.
Researchers from the University of Leicester, UK, and Waikato University, New Zealand, found scientists to be much more open-minded about ‘new age’ beliefs than might have been expected.
Water divining and the healing power of crystals were beliefs that some scientists were prepared to accept according to the findings which the researchers describe as ‘
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
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
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
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