news 2014

Teenagers who have suffered a traumatic brain injury such as a concussion are at "significantly greater odds" of attempting suicide, being bullied and engaging in a variety of high risk behaviours, a new study has found. They are also more likely to become bullies themselves, to have sought counselling through a crisis help-line or to have been prescribed medication for anxiety, depression or both, said Assistant Professor Gabriela Ilie, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral fellow at St. Michael's Hospital.

Playing electronic games can make people feel aggressive, but new research finds that the reason has little to do with violent content. Researchers from the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Rochester in the US carried out lab tests in which volunteers played both violent and non-violent games.

Press release issued: 11 April 2014 With over one billion people in the world living on less than $1.25 per day, the World Bank aims to end 'extreme poverty' by 2030. But new research suggests that global poverty figures could be underestimated by up to a third, and calls for more robust measurement in the future.

11 Apr 2014 Residents of ethnically diverse neighbourhoods can expect to experience fewer assaults than residents of neighbourhoods with little or no ethnic diversity, according to a new way of measuring violence. Ian Warren, from The University of Manchester, says public health data on assaults give a more reliable picture of criminality than official police figures, criticised by the UK Statistics Authority earlier this year.

Understanding the roots of a global, contagious spread of online information may help better predict political revolutions, consumer behavior, box office revenues, public policy debates, and even public health epidemics, a new study co-led by Yale University reveals. The model devised for this study, which identifies those roots and analyzes common patterns of dissemination on a global scale, even predicted the rise of "#Obamacare" as a global Twitter trend.

Playing electronic games can make people feel aggressive, but new research finds that the reason has little to do with violent content. Researchers from the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Rochester in the US carried out lab tests in which volunteers played both violent and non-violent games.

A multiyear research project to develop methods of identifying covert social networks, originally funded with $797,000 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to principal investigator Matthew E. Brashears, has been extended with another $629,020. The assistant professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Science had begun the study - with the goal of developing techniques to detect networking activity among terrorists plotting attacks, human traffickers, drug smugglers and other groups - by analyzing social networks of American high school students.

This drawing illustrates how astronomers of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) used quasar light to trace the expansion of the universe. The expansion is shown by the circular disks of increasing area from left to right. From the Big Bang, the expansion occurs rapidly, then slows down, then speeds up again as dark energy pushes apart walls and filaments of galaxies at different distances (purple).

This drawing illustrates how astronomers of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) used quasar light to trace the expansion of the universe. The expansion is shown by the circular disks of increasing area from left to right. From the Big Bang, the expansion occurs rapidly, then slows down, then speeds up again as dark energy pushes apart walls and filaments of galaxies at different distances (purple).

Eating seven or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day reduces your risk of death at any point in time by 42% compared to eating less than one portion, reports a new UCL study. Researchers used the Health Survey for England to study the eating habits of 65,226 people representative of the English population between 2001 and 2013, and found that the more fruit and vegetables they ate, the less likely they were to die at any age.

What makes cities in India and China so frustrating to drive in-heavy traffic, aggressive driving style, few freeways-makes them ideal for saving fuel with hybrid vehicles, according to new research by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

26 Mar 2014 Patients who visited their GP more than twice per month over a year were 12 times more likely to die by suicide, new research by The University of Manchester has found. People who did not attend were also at increased risk, with those who did not consult their GPs at all in a year just under 70% more likely to die by suicide than those who did attend.

ANN ARBOR-Having adult family members in the home can buffer the risk of stress and depression for preschool children who witness domestic violence, a new University of Michigan study found. Children ages 4-6 exposed to male-to-female domestic violence can suffer from many psychological problems. The social support from stable in-home family members can help children cope with these stressful, violent matters, said Laura Miller, the study's lead author who conducted the research while in the University of Michigan Clinical Science program.

Social economists from the University of Melbourne have confirmed the age-old suspicion of a dip in human happiness during middle age. Past evidence for "mid-life crises" have come from cross sectional data. That is, by comparing surveys of different people's happiness at different ages. But now, for the first time, researchers have tracked the happiness levels of thousands of people across three countries over multiple decades.

New research has found that one in ten adolescents in Northern Ireland self-harm and that past exposure to the Northern Ireland conflict and social media are new associated risk factors. The findings were made during the first study of its kind to investigate the rate of self-harm among adolescents in Northern Ireland as well as the factors associated with self-harm.

Intelligent people are more likely to trust others, while those who score lower on measures of intelligence are less likely to do so, says a new study. Oxford University researchers based their finding on an analysis of the General Social Survey, a nationally representative public opinion survey carried out in the United States every one to two years.

o Study finds link between deprivation and not reading o Frequent readers are more likely to be satisfied with life, happier and more successful in their professional lives Britain's divided reading culture is a barrier to social mobility, according to new research from the University of Sheffield. The nationwide study, commissioned by Booktrust, reveals worrying indications that the UK is divided into two nations.

The specific developmental challenges facing bilingual children as they bid to become proficient in two languages is to be explored in a pioneering nationwide study. Led by Plymouth University’s BabyLab, in collaboration with five other UK universities, the research will examine the language skills of hundreds of toddlers growing up in bilingual families.

This chart shows what types of objects WISE can and cannot see at certain distances from our sun. Bodies with larger masses are brighter, and therefore can be seen at greater distances. For example, if a Jupiter-mass planet existed at 10,000 au, WISE would have easily seen it. But WISE would not have been able to see a Jupiter-mass planet residing at 100,000 au - it would have been too faint.

Transitioning frequently between social settings, such as from home to office or changing social roles from parent to employee, can be a particularly stressful daily hassle, says a new Cornell study published in the Social Psychology Quarterly. The study found "that the more switching you do, the more stressful life is," says Benjamin Cornwell, assistant professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences.