news 2017

For the first time, five of Chicago's professional sports teams are joining together to work on a vital social issue, lending their broad reach and resources in support of solutions to decrease violence in the city. The Chicago Bears, Chicago Blackhawks, Chicago Bulls, Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox, operating collectively as the Chicago Sports Alliance, today announced they will be donating a total of $1 million in one-time grants to support three programs addressing this critical issue.

A new approach for reducing gender inequality in the workplace has shown promise in a pilot project at several companies. It combines existing tools and adds an evaluation of places where biases could creep in to a company's procedures. At a time when many companies are feeling pressured to report on and improve gender inequality within the workforce, a Stanford sociologist is finding success with a new method for reducing the kind of bias that leads to these inequalities.

Hot on the heels of the same-sex marriage bill, new research shows that gay and lesbian couples tend to have higher-quality relationships than their heterosexual counterparts. Professor Janeen Baxter, Director of the Life Course Centre (LCC) led by The University of Queensland, said the quality of intimate relationships of gay and lesbian people was high, if not higher than the quality of heterosexual couples' relationships.

A ground-breaking new pancreatic cancer trial, which aims to match patients with more targeted and effective treatment for their tumours, is to begin in Scotland. Run by Precision-Panc, a research programme and clinical trials project led by the University of Glasgow and majority-funded by Cancer Research UK, the trial will bring a precision medicine approach to pancreatic cancer treatment for the first time in the UK.

Retired professional footballers are far more prone to develop knee pain and osteoarthritis and face problems with their knees earlier in life than the average person, a study has revealed. The study reported that male ex-footballers were two to three times more likely to suffer from knee pain and knee osteoarthritis and require a total knee replacement, even after adjustment for other risk factors including significant knee injury.

Young or middle aged people with Atrial Fibrillation (AF), the most common heart rhythm abnormality, are at greater risk of death if they have other long term health conditions, according to a new study. The research, led by the University of Glasgow and published today in Europace , has suggested that AF patients, who also have other health conditions, should be prioritised for healthcare interventions.

Age-friendly workplaces, work flexibility, retraining and promotion of healthy lifestyles are vital to address the major causes of not working, enable people to have longer careers and enhance wellbeing in later life. Australians could have longer careers and be healthier in later life if workplaces were more age-friendly and promoted healthy lifestyles to their employees, a new ANU study has found.

Stereotypes suggest that women love to talk, with some studies even finding that women say three times as much as men. But, new research from a team from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, shows there is an exception to this rule: professional STEM events, which could be indicative of the wider problem of gender inequality in the field.

AUSTIN, Texas - Companies in the United States pay more than $100 billion in wages every year for time that employees spend idle, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. In a nationally representative survey across a variety of occupational categories, McCombs Assistant Professor Andrew Brodsky and co-author Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School found that 78.1 percent of employees experience idle time at work, with 21.7 percent of employees experiencing idle time on a daily basis.

A study has found a high number of women, who repeatedly appear before the family courts and lose many children into public care or adoption because of child protection concerns, have been in care themselves. 40% of the mothers had been in foster care or children's homes with a further 14% living in private or informal relationships away from their parents.

The middle-schoolers moved from mentor to mentor trying hands-on demonstrations, learning about how the scientists got their start, and finding out what they are currently working on. 'We hope that after today you will consider a career in science and engineering, and bring your great minds to Los Alamos.' - David Lyons, Los Alamos National Laboratory executive director LOS ALAMOS, N.M. Oct.

Failure to monitor outsourced recruitment is resulting in companies inadvertently employing victims of modern slavery, according to new research led by our School of Management. Interview The research, conducted with the University of Sheffield, suggests that layers of outsourcing, subcontracting and informal hiring of temporary staff are to blame.

What determines career success' This question has occupied career research, career counseling, organisations and private persons for decades. With the help of a new questionnaire, Bern researchers from the department of work and organisational psychology have now identified the important resources for a successful career.

Life scientists who have published papers that are retracted by journals subsequently suffer a 10 percent drop in citations of their remaining work, compared to similar but unaffected scientists, according to a new study by MIT researchers. Examining hundreds of cases over a 30-year period, the research quantifies the extent that one discredited study - whether an act of malfeasance or a sloppy piece of research - has on the overall reputation of academic scientists.

Working 24 hours non-stop on real-life problems set by companies and proving the power of innovation at the Alpbach Technology Symposium.

MIT Technology Review has named University of Washington professor Franziska Roesner one of 35 "Innovators Under 35” for 2017 . Roesner is a faculty member in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and co-director of the school's Security and Privacy Laboratory. Roesner's research spans a number of projects related to privacy and security in emerging technologies.

A call for more menopause-friendly workplaces is made in a new Government report prepared by a team from the Universities of Bristol and Leicester. In the most comprehensive study of its kind, the report reveals that 'many women tend to feel that they need to cope alone' because of a reluctance to speak up at work.

Researchers at Yale and the University of California-San Francisco have found that few medical devices are analyzed to consider the influence of their users' sex, age, or race on safety and effectiveness. The findings are published in JAMA Internal Medicine. " We know that women, the elderly, and minorities have been underrepresented in clinical trials for drugs and treatments of many diseases and conditions," said lead author Sanket S. Dhruva, M.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Yale School of Medicine.

People who take out an individual personal pension can expect lower returns than those who invest in a group personal pension plan, suggests new research from the University of Bath's School of Management. Individual investors are losing out The study finds that individual investors lose out by over 1 per cent a year in comparison with group personal pension plans negotiated by employers, even before differences in fees are taken into account.

Professor Adrian Smith and Dr Liam Campling write for Social Europe about strengthening labour rights in UK and EU trade agreements. Free trade agreements (FTAs) are growing in number and the inclusion in them of labour provisions seeking to improve working conditions are also increasing. A recent study by the ILO found that over 80 per cent of preferential trade agreements that have come into force since 2013 have included such provisions.