University of Minnesota Medical School researcher Iris Borowsky, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues found that one in seven adolescents believe that it is highly likely that they will die before age 35, and this belief corresponded to more adolescents engaging in risky behaviors.

Borowsky and colleagues analyzed data collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 youth in grades 7 through 12 during three separate study years. In the first set of interviews, nearly 15 percent of adolescents predicted they had a 50/50 chance or less of living to age 35.

Dolphins, whales and porpoises are perfectly adapted for maximum aquatic agility.  We know why that is - biologists expect that as a result of evolution - but to-date no one in physics had ever successfully analyzed how the animals' flippers interact with water; the hydrodynamic lift that they generate, the drag that they experience and their hydrodynamic efficiency.

Laurens Howle and Paul Weber from Duke University teamed up with Mark Murray from the United States Naval Academy and Frank Fish from West Chester University to find out more about the hydrodynamics of whale and dolphin flippers.   Their findings; some dolphins' fins generate lift in the same way as delta wing aircraft.

Research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Canada says that 4 percent of worldwide deaths are directly attributable to alcohol consumption and the rise is mainly due to increases in the number of women and Europeans drinking.

The president wants to transform healthcare with new laws and new technology, but once upon a time, a moral bond ruled between patient and physician.

Recently, I experienced something so rare in American medicine that it often catches people up short when I relate the story. A doctor actually apologized to me. Not only that, but he admitted that he caused harm, hurt feelings and inconvenience.

NASHVILLE, Tennessee, June 28 /PRNewswire/ --

In 1994, Kiwanis International made a pledge to help protect children from the scourges of Iodine Deficiency Disorders in its first Worldwide Service Project. Now, with the majority of the world's children protected against IDD, Kiwanis is inviting organizations, institutions and individuals to propose a project to become the global service organization's second worldwide service initiative.

We live today in a world of need, said Kiwanis International President Don Canaday, of Fishers, Ind. People suffer debilitating and deadly diseases that need treatment or cure. Children live in poverty and go hungry, absent access to education, help and hope.

If you have followed this blog for long enough, dear readers, the words "multi-muons", "anomalous muons", or even "lepton jets" are not foreign to you. They all refer to a paper appeared on the ArXiv on the evening of Halloween last year. In the paper the CDF collaboration published the results of a detailed analysis which described how a component of collider data containing two or more muons could not be explained by known Standard Model processes.

An interesting phenomenon in growing random networks:

The number of 3-node, 3-edge connected subgraphs in a random, scale-free network of N nodes scales as N⁰ (=1). No matter how big your network grows, you're going to have a roughly constant number of 3-node, 3-edge  subgraphs that depends only on the ratio of edges to nodes.

Let's back up a minute before we see why this counterintuitive result is so and what it means.  Imagine that we have a network made up of N nodes connected by E edges. You can start out with two nodes connected by one edge:

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, June 26 /PRNewswire/ --

As operators continue to exhaust the high-income consumer segments in Latin America, the bundling strategies with the best chance of success involve broadened offerings that will attract lower-income households to broadband and pay-TV, according to a new report from Pyramid Research (www.pyr.com), the telecom research arm of the Light Reading Communications Network (www.lightreading.com).

David Brooks takes on evolutionary psychology and gets it sort of right:

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.

    Part of the enjoyment of doing research is that ideas pop into your head all the time. Everyone has ideas, but the hard part is to choose which should be subjected to critical tests that have the primary aim of proving them wrong. That’s the most efficient way to discard bad ideas, because most of them in fact don’t work. Only after an idea survives the crucible of initial testing can it be taken more seriously and tested further. Then, if it still survives, you can publish.