Studies and Analyses

Firefighters face a high chance of injury or death whether on the scene of a fire, on the way to a fire or even during training–with an estimated 81,000 injuries and 100 deaths in 2002 alone. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently released a study* that estimates the cost in 2002 of addressing firefighter injuries and of efforts to prevent them to be $2.8 billion to $7.8 billion per year.

The study, conducted by the TriData Division of System Plannin

Join birds, bats and dolphins as vocal learners

Elephants learn to imitate sounds that are not typical of their species, the first known example after humans of vocal learning in a non-primate terrestrial mammal. The discovery, reported in today’s Nature, further supports the idea that vocal learning is important for maintaining individual social relationships among animals that separate and reunite over time, like dolphins and whales, some birds, and bats.

Researchers f

Two new studies present evidence that the virus causing severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) may spread through the air, not just through direct contact with contaminated water droplets as previous research had shown.

SARS coronavirus was detected in the air in a patient’s room during the 2003 outbreak in Toronto, according to a new study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Another study, from Hong Kong, shows patients in hospital bays near a SARS patient had a muc

Women who are HIV-positive or are abused are more likely to think about or attempt suicide, according to a new study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, George Washington University and St. Michael’s Hospital, in Toronto, Canada. The Hopkins study, consistent with previous research, sheds new light on the extent to which being in an abusive relationship compounds suicide risk for HIV-positive women in particular. This latest study is published in the March/Ap

In a study of 200 women, a group of physicians has found that a vast majority of women would be willing to take a cervical cancer vaccine themselves and would allow it to be administered to their children. The findings, which were presented at the Society of Gynecologic Oncologist’s (SGO) Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer in Miami, describes women’s attitudes toward a potential cervical cancer vaccine, focusing on their willingness to accept it for themselves, and their daughters and sons. It is the

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago have explained how a globe-encircling residue formed in the aftermath of the asteroid impact that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs. The study, which will be published in the April issue of the journal Geology, draws the most detailed picture yet of the complicated chemistry of the fireball produced in the impact.

The residue consists of sand-sized droplets of hot liquid that condensed from th