Frank Furedi is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. During the past decade his research has been oriented towards the way that risk and uncertainty is managed by contemporary culture.

In recent years Professor Furedi has been exploring the way that fear has come to dominate public discussions in Western societies.

A study of 130 middle-aged and older men in the USA found that many of the 40 to 65 year-olds were engaging in high-risk sexual practices.

38 per cent didn’t use condoms during oral sex, with 25 per cent having unprotected vaginal sex and 22 per cent having unsafe anal sex. The research also showed that men who were single and displayed fewer HIV symptoms were least likely to use condoms during sex.

As many as four out of ten HIV positive African-American men could be putting their partners at risk by not using condoms, according to research in the latest UK-based Journal of Advanced Nursing.

A five-minute eye exam might prove to be an inexpensive and effective way to gauge and track the debilitating neurological disease multiple sclerosis, potentially complementing costly magnetic resonance imaging to detect brain shrinkage - a characteristic of the disease’s progression.

A Johns Hopkins-based study of a group of 40 multiple sclerosis (MS) patients used a process called optical coherence tomography (OCT) to scan the layers of nerve fibers of the retina in the back of the eye, which become the optic nerve. The process, which uses a desktop machine similar to a slit-lamp, is simple and painless.

In the latest issue of Materials Today, Dr. Gilles Dennler of Konarka Austria GmbH and twenty other experts warn that a race to report organic solar cells (OSCs) with world record efficiencies is leading to a significant number of published papers claiming unrealistic and scientifically questionable results and performances.

“World record efficiencies are popping up almost every month, leading the OSC community into an endless and dangerous tendency to outbid the last report,” stated Dennler et al. in the article. “The current outbidding phenomenon does a severe disservice to the whole community, damaging its reputation.

It is generally perceived that feminism and romance are in direct conflict yet according to a study by Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan of Rutgers University, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships.

They carried out both a laboratory survey of 242 American undergraduates and an online survey including 289 older adults, more likely to have had longer relationships and greater life experience.

Legislation targeting companies has the best of intentions - preventing another Enron by Sarbanes-Oxley is an example - yet the punishment clauses have made it difficult to attract anyone except risk takers and has pushed CEO salary costs through the roof.

The opposite of the salary-heavy CEO is the one who takes options instead. On the exterior, it may seem to make sense because companies are paying solely for performance. More often than not, companies are paying no matter what.

A new study by Donald Hambrick of Penn State and W. Gerard Sanders of Brigham Young finds that CEOs with stock option-heavy compensation packages tend to lead their companies to more extreme performance yet they are more big losses than big gains.