Iowa State University physicist Kerry Whisnant has developed a mathematical formula that he says predicts how well baseball teams will perform on the field.

The new formula is based on work of Bill James, the baseball author and statistician who inspired sabermetrics, the study of how statistics relate to success on the baseball diamond. James developed a basic formula, which has been tweaked over the years, that uses the number of runs scored per game (RPG) and runs given up per game to estimate a team's winning percentage.

Researchers from Chungnam National University in Daejeon, South Korea say that increasing dissolved oxygen concentrations in alcohol may reduce drinking-related side effects and accidents. The Results will be published in Alcoholism: Clinical&Experimental Research.

Scientists performed three experiments with 49 healthy volunteers (30 men, 19 women), with a mean age of 27.2 years. Experiment one compared 8 ppm and 20 ppm dissolved oxygen concentrations in 240 ml of 19.5 percent alcoholic beverage. The second compared 8 ppm and 20 ppm dissolved oxygen concentrations in 360 ml of 19.5 percent alcoholic beverage. The final experiment compared 8 ppm and 25 ppm dissolved oxygen concentrations in 360 ml of 19.5 percent alcoholic beverage.

Teens who spend more time watching television or using computers appear to have poorer relationships with their parents and peers, according to a report in the March issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Given the importance of healthy relationships with friends and family to adolescent development, the researchers suggest that "concern about high levels of screen time among adolescents is warranted" and that more research is needed to monitor the effects of new technologies on the well being of growing teenagers.

A new meta-analysis of 130 research reports on more than 130,000 subjects worldwide 'proves conclusively' that exposure to violent video games makes more aggressive, less caring kids, say researchers from Iowa State University and the City University of New York.

The team used meta-analytic procedures -- the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature -- to test the effects of violent video game play on the behaviors, thoughts and feelings of the individuals, ranging from elementary school-aged children to college undergraduates. The research also included new longitudinal data which provided further confirmation that playing violent video games is a causal risk factor for long-term harmful outcomes.

A new study in Nature Geoscience suggests that an asteroid strike may not only account for the demise of ocean and land life 65 million years ago; the resulting dust, darkness and toxic metal contamination may also explain the geographic unevenness of extinctions and recovery.

Using 823 samples from 17 drilling sites in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, researchers analyzed the community structure of calcareous nannoplankton. Included in their study were two sites -- one in the Pacific and one in the South Atlantic -- with reliable, accurate dating.

Geologists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) say the massive, 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Chile last week occurred in an offshore zone that was under increased stress caused by a 1960 magnitude 9.5 earthquake.

 Some 300-500 times more powerful than the magnitude 7.0 quake in Haiti Jan. 12,  the earthquake ruptured at the boundary between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates. The temblor was triggered when the "subducting" Nazca plate was thrust under the South American plate, uplifting a large patch of the seafloor and prompting tsunami warnings throughout the Pacific Ocean. The two plates are converging at a rate of 80 mm per year, says WHOI geologist Jian Lin, "which is one of the fastest rates on Earth."

MEDIEVAL MEDICINE