Science & Society

Ilia Ivanov and Dave Geohegan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Nanomaterials Synthesis and Properties Group have been collaborating with John Simpson of the Superhydrophobic Materials Group and Cheol Park and Joycelyn Harrison of the National Institute of Aerospace in NASA's Langley Research Center to produce a Flexible, Integrated, Lightweight, Multifunctional skin, called FILMskin, for next-generation prosthetic hands and arms. Their challenge is to make a revolutionary skin using superhydrophobic material with thin layers of carbon nanotubes to mimic skin's properties, allowing the…

In Sweden the welfare system allows for generous maternity leave, long spells of sickness absence with almost full compensation and opportunities to work part time. The result: women on long term sick leave outnumber men two to one, reveals research published in the online open access journal BMC Public Health. Factors associated with taking long term sick leave among women in study were a self-reported lack of competence for work tasks, high physical and mental demands at work and not enough flexibility or influence over their working lives. 93% of women on sick leave wished to return to…

Expensive trainers are not worth the money, finds a study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Cheap and moderately priced running shoes are just as good, if not better, in terms of cushioning impact and overall comfort, it concludes. The research findings are based on a comparison of nine pairs of trainers, bought from three different manufacturers, in three different price ranges. The cheapest pairs were priced at £40 to £45, with the moderate range costing £60 to £65. The three most expensive pairs cost £70 to £75. The 43 participants were not told how much any of the shoes cost.…

Many consumers take precautions against identity theft, but what about medical identity theft? In addition to financial peril, victims can suffer physical danger if false entries in medical records lead to the wrong treatment. “The crime occurs when someone uses a person's name and sometimes other parts of their identity -- such as insurance information -- without the person's knowledge or consent to obtain medical services or goods,” said Laurinda B. Harman, PhD, RHIA, associate professor and chair of the health information management department at Temple University’s College of Health…

Correlation is not causation but a new study in the journal Fertility & Sterility found that mothers who experienced an increase in weight from the beginning of the first pregnancy to the beginning of the second pregnancy may be slightly more likely to give birth to a baby boy during their second pregnancy. A slightly greater number of males than females are born worldwide every year but in recent decades there has been a decline in the ratio of male to female newborns in several industrialized countries, including Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, Japan and the United States. That may…

'Word of mouth' advertising is valuable because marketing groups know that opinions of friends and associates count more than the paid endorsements of strangers. But what kind of opinions matter most? It turns out the negative ones do, even if someone had privately had a positive impression prior to the negative input. “Consumer attitudes toward products and services are frequently influenced by others around them. Social networks, such as those found on Myspace and Facebook suggest that these influences will continue to be significant drivers of individual consumer attitudes as society…

Tom Goetz wrote a thoughtful article "It's Time to Free the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments" in Wired this week. So what happens to all the research that doesn't yield a dramatic outcome —or, worse, the opposite of what researchers had hoped? It ends up stuffed in some lab drawer. The result is a vast body of squandered knowledge that represents a waste of resources and a drag on scientific progress. This information — call it dark data — must be set free. ... There are some islands of innovation. Since 2002, the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine has offered a peer-…

File sharing is taking its worst toll on smaller albums, “devastating” lower ranked titles on the Billboard Top 100, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science. The authors completed rigorous empirical analysis, using data on the performance of music albums on the Billboard Top 100 charts together with data on peer-to-peer file sharing. The analysis indicates that average survival time on the chart has decreased by 42%. The lower debut ranked albums bore the brunt of decreased survival times, with file sharing as a major contributing factor. “…

Researchers in California are reporting development of a fast, inexpensive test suitable for home use that could help millions of people avoid those ‘out of the blue’ headaches that may follow consumption of certain red wines, cheese, chocolate, and other aged or fermented foods. The test is designed to detect the presence of so-called biogenic amines, naturally occurring toxins that can trigger a wide range of symptoms in sensitive individuals —from nasty headaches to life-threatening episodes of high-blood pressure. Existing tests for biogenic amines can take several hours, are cumbersome…

We had about a dozen participants at the Open Notebook Science Case Studies SciFoo Lives On session yesterday. I talked about using a free and hosted blog (Blogger), wiki (Wikispaces), referral tracker (Sitemeter), mailing list (Google Groups), molecule database (ChemSpider) and raw data visualization (JSpecView) for managing UsefulChem. Cameron Neylon described the use of blogs to track research in his group. In his approach each post is an object with a unique ID. His system will probably be more amenable to being read by automated agents and ultimately I would like to see something similar…