African women in polygamous marriages or with alcoholic husbands have a significantly higher risk of being physically abused by their husbands than women in monogamous marriages or women whose husbands don't abuse alcohol, according to survey results presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. 

Stephen Hawking said something! And again the international media is all a'buzz.

The fourth edition of the International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics has ended yesterday evening, and it is time for a summary. However, this year I must say that I am not in a good position to give an overview of the most interesting physics discussion that have taken place here, as I was involved in the organization of events for the conference and I could only attend a relatively small fraction of the presentations.
ICNFP offers a broad view on the forefront topics of many areas of physics, with the main topics being nuclear and particle physics, yet with astrophysics and theoretical developments in quantum mechanics and related subjects also playing a major role. 

5 percent of the world's population accounted for a disproportionate 31 percent of public mass shooters globally from 1966-2012, according to new research presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

An analysis examined the years 1966-2012 using data from the New York City Police Department's 2012 active shooter report, the FBI's 2014 active shooter report, and multiple international sources. The author says it is the first quantitative analysis of all reported public mass shootings around the world that resulted in the deaths of four or more people. By definition, these shootings do not include incidents that occurred solely in domestic settings or were primarily gang-related, drive-by shootings, hostage taking incidents, or robberies. 

Domestic homicide is one of the most common and frequent types of murder in the U.S. but murderers who kill intimate partners and family members have a significantly different psychological and forensic profile from murderers who kill people they don't know.

One-third of all women murdered in the U.S. are killed by their male partners including husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends and ex-boyfriends. An estimated 25 percent of women will be victims of severe domestic violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes, according to a new paper which which examined the demographics, psychiatric history and neuropsychology of these individuals.

Individuals who received the flu vaccine were protected for up to 6 months post-vaccination, the duration of most flu seasons, according to a study presented at the 2015 International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Each flu season, researchers work to find out how effective the flu vaccine was in order to measure its value as a health intervention. Factors such as age and health of an individual, as well the level of similarity between the flu virus and the flu vaccine can play a role in how well an influenza vaccine works.

"Few studies have assessed how quickly protection against influenza declines within a year following vaccination, specifically among US populations," said Dr. Jennifer Radin, at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, CA.

If you suffer from seasonal allergies, you are probably sick of it. So are allergy sufferers around the world. We can make a phone that could land a man on the Moon and create potatoes that don't brown but allergy solutions eluse us. 

When members of the U.S. military leave the service, they tend to settle in neighborhoods with greater overall diversity than their civilian counterparts of the same race, according to a new study that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

"It's encouraging that having served in the military appears to have a long-term impact on how people choose their neighborhoods," said study co-author Mary J. Fischer, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. "According to the social contact hypothesis, racial attitudes are improved and stereotypes are broken when diverse groups come together under circumstances that promote meaningful cross-group interaction, such as in the military."

In several years - in perhaps decades, or maybe never - our computers, nanoantennas and other kinds of equipment could operate on the base of photons, rather than electrons. Even now we are practically prepared to accomplish this switch. If it happens, the spheres studied by an international group of Russian, French and Spanish scientists will definitely be able to become one of the elementary components of new photonic devices.

In human cells, shortened telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes, are both a sign of aging and contribute to it. Scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found that the dietary supplement alpha lipoic acid (ALA) can stimulate telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres, with positive effects in a mouse model of atherosclerosis.

"Alpha-lipoic acid has an essential role in mitochondria, the energy-generating elements of the cell," says senior author Wayne Alexander, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. "It is widely available and has been called a 'natural antioxidant'. Yet ALA's effects in human clinical studies have been a mixed bag."