Every day, millions of people - including senators, doctors, and teachers -- make consequential decisions that depend on predicting how other people will feel when they experience gains or setbacks. New research looking at events ranging from college football games to US elections shows that our predictions about others are less accurate when we have information about the groups they belong to, such as which political party or sports team they're rooting for. This research suggests that our reliance on stereotypes about social groups interferes with accurately predicting how others will feel.

The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Philadelphia, PA, September 9, 2016 - Many acute and chronic liver diseases, including alcoholic hepatitis, result from apoptotic (programmed) cell death mediated by the enzyme caspase. Caspase inhibitors have therapeutic potential to treat and prevent apoptosis-mediated liver injury, and some are currently in clinical trials. However, a new study published in The American Journal of Pathology raises serious safety concerns regarding the clinical use of caspase inhibitors by demonstrating the occurrence of delayed-onset necrotic, non-caspase-dependent liver cell injury.

Particle physics conferences are a place where you can listen to many different topics - not just news about the latest precision tests of the standard model or searches for new particles at the energy frontier. If we exclude the very small, workshop-like events where people gather to focus on a very precise topic, all other events do allow for the contamination from reports of parallel fields of research. The reason is of course that there is a significant cross-fertilization between these fields. 

Thanks to public shaming of wealthy progressive elites on the coast, and even pressuring the Governor of California to accept science the way he long claimed he does and ban the arbitrary exemptions that led to some schools with only 25 percent of kids - the ones with Republican parents - vaccinated, America's anti-vaccine movement is in decline.

That leaves France, where over 40 percent of its citizens believe vaccines are unsafe, as the world leader of the anti-science movement in general, and vaccines in particular, show results published in EBioMedicine.

Community characteristics play an important role in perpetuating teen suicide clusters and thwarting prevention efforts, according to a new study by sociologists at the University of Chicago and University of Memphis who examined clusters in a single town.

The study, published in the American Sociological Review, illustrates how the homogeneous culture and high degree of social connectedness of a community can increase suicide risk, particularly among teenagers. Such conditions contribute to clusters in which a series of suicides happen around the same time and in close proximity.

A University of Vermont-led team has successfully used social media images to measure the use and value of outdoor recreation on public lands.

The study analyzed more than 7,000 geotagged photos on Flickr to calculate that conserved lands contributed $1.8 billion to Vermont's tourism industry between 2007-2014.

The research is the first to measure of the value of outdoor recreation in Vermont public parks and other conserved lands during these years. The findings were published September 9 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Bacteria transfer to candy that has fallen on the floor no matter how fast you pick it up.  

Rutgers researchers have disproven the widely accepted notion that it's OK to scoop up food and eat it within a "safe" five-second window. Donald Schaffner, professor and extension specialist in food science, found that moisture, type of surface and contact time all contribute to cross-contamination. In some instances, the transfer begins in less than one second. Their findings appear online in the American Society for Microbiology's journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

A study by animal welfare specialists has provided new evidence that using electronic containment systems to restrict where pet cats venture does not result in long-term wellbeing problems.

The use of hand-held shock collars on dogs has previously led to concerns over the welfare of animals trained using so-called 'e-collars'. However, other forms of electronic training devices for pets have received relatively little attention from researchers. These include invisible or virtual fences which deliver a static electric pulse to deter animals from crossing a boundary, such as a garden perimeter.

You soon won't have to judge a book by its cover, you'll be able to judge through it. Researchers writing in Nature Communications describe a prototype of an imaging system that can read closed books. They tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets.