New research from Northwestern University finds that college students’ choice of social networking sites -- including Facebook, MySpace and Xanga -- is related to their race, ethnicity and parents’ education.

The findings challenge discourse about the democratic nature of online interaction and fly in the face of conventional wisdom suggesting that all college students communicate via Facebook, the popular social networking site (SNS) launched in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate.

“That race, ethnicity and the education level of one’s parents can predict which social network sites a student selects suggests there’s less intermingling of users from varying backgrounds on these sites than previously believed,” says Eszter Hargittai, author of

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new tool for quantitatively measuring elusive atmospheric chemicals that play a key role in the formation of photochemical smog.

Better measurements will improve scientists' understanding of the mechanisms of smog formation and their ability to select and predict the effectiveness of various mitigation strategies. The Brookhaven scientists have been issued a U.S. patent for their apparatus, which is available for licensing.

The device measures atmospheric hydroperoxyl radicals - short-lived, highly reactive intermediates involved in the formation of ozone, a component of photochemical smog - in the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere.

A multi-national team of biologists has concluded that developmental evolution is deterministic and orderly, rather than random, based on a study of different species of roundworms. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology.

The researchers were interested in how development evolves in organs which themselves do not change. To do so, they examined the vulva—the female's copulatory and egg-laying organ—in nearly 50 species of roundworms. Because the vulva does not significantly change across species, one might predict that there would be little variation in vulva development.

However, the researchers found an astonishing amount of developmental variation.

The number of “test tube babies” is growing year by year, and in highly developed countries it will soon make 1% to 3% of all new-borns. How safe are auxiliary reproductive technologies (ART)?

Specialists of the Research Institute of Medical Genetics (Tomsk Scientific Center, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences) recently examined one aspect of ART safety – the risk of genomic imprinting diseases.

Normal development in mammals requires that maternal and paternal gene sets differ functionally. In certain genes, only the maternal copy should work and, in others, only the paternal copy should.

Traditional roles of women in the home and a negative bias in workplace support result in less career success for women versus men at the same stage of their research careers, determined researchers at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in a study appearing in the November 2007 issue of EMBO reports.

Despite the fact that more than half the European student population is female, women hold less then 15% of full professorships in Europe, according to the She Figures 2006 from the European Commission. While the percentage of female university graduates and PhD holders has increased, the gender gap is not closing at the same rate as careers advance.

Patients taking anti-obesity drugs will only see “modest” weight loss and many will remain significantly obese or overweight, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal.

The study, which looked at the long-term effectiveness of anti-obesity medications, found that three drugs recommended for long-term use - orlistat, sibutramine and rimonabant, reduced weight by less than 11 pounds (5 kg). This equated to a loss of less than 5% of total body weight. Guidelines from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence recommend stopping the use of anti-obesity drugs if 5% of total body weight is not lost after three months.

While making changes to lifestyle and diet are recommended as the initial treatment for obesity, the use of anti-obesity drugs is common.

The Indonesian archipelago contains about 10% of the world’s tropical rainforest, which plays a critical role in regional watershed protection as well as in global efforts to conserve biodiversity and to sequester carbon. However, Indonesia currently experiences one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.

Indonesia also supports the world’s largest population of Muslims, whose religion has a strong influence on their daily life.

To combat deforestation, a new project led by Stuart Harrop and Matthew Linkie from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent is aiming to improve conservation by raising awareness of Islamic teachings about conservation.

On Wednesday 21 November, TU Delft will demonstrate how improved control techniques can reduce the risk of aircraft crashes. The demonstration involves reconstructing troubled flights – such as the El Al flight which crashed in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam in 1992 – in a flight simulator and adding the newly developed technology.

The presentation in Delft forms the final phase of a research project involving the GARTEUR international research partnership (participants include TU Delft and the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR) into Fault Tolerant Control. This involves techniques for keeping damaged aircraft in the air for longer and enabling continuing flight control.

The key to this is to improve control techniques which enable the aircraft to continue to be controlled.

Mothers who reported sleeping five hours or less per day when their babies were six months old had a threefold higher risk for substantial weight retention (11 pounds or more) at their baby’s first birthday than moms who slept seven hours per day, according to a new study by Kaiser Permanente and Harvard Medical School / Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

The study, published in the November issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, is the first to look at the impact of sleep deprivation on postpartum weight retention. Previous studies have looked at the effect of early postpartum sleep deprivation on mothers’ cognitive and emotional health but never associated weight gain.