Business
Rob Vincent, an employee in the University of Rhode Island's Physics Department, proves the adage that necessity is the mother of invention. An amateur radio operator since he was 14, Vincent has always lived in houses situated on small lots. Because he couldn't erect a large antenna on a confined property, he has been continually challenged over the years to find a way to get better reception. "I was always tinkering in the basement. Thank goodness, my parents were tolerant. I can still remember my poor father driving up our driveway after a hard day's work to see wires wrapped around the house," Vincent recalls. "The Holy Grail of antenna technology is to create a small antenna with high efficiency and wide bandwidth," explains Vincent.
There are more than 200 known neuromuscular diseases affecting over 400,000 people in the United States alone. Among these are ''Lou Gehrig's Disease'' (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS), the inflammatory muscle diseases, and muscular dystrophy, which Jerry Lewis' annual Labor Day telethons have made known to many. And, if the telethons tell us anything (Lewis has done over 50), it's that finding suitable treatments for neuromuscular disease hasn't been easy. Part of the problem lies in the difficulty clinical researchers face in collecting accurate data on skeletal muscle.
With 40 percent of the American labor force working mostly during nonstandard hours--in the evenings, overnight, on rotating schedules, or on weekends--workers' family life and health are being adversely affected, according to research at the University of Maryland-College Park. ''Such schedules undermine the stability of marriages, increase the amount of housework to be done, reduce family cohesiveness, and require elaborate childcare arrangements,'' according to the study's lead researcher.
Physical rehabilitation has traditionally consisted of arduously retraining the body on weight machines and other resistance devices, but with the growing interest in ''smart fluids,'' engineers envision a simple brace that can increase the resistance on a healing joint with the turn of a dial. ''Smart fluids,'' is a generic term for any particle-filled, oil-based suspension which changes its consistency in a magnetic or electric field. Mavroidis is working with electro-rheological fluids (ERFs) which go from liquid to solid the instant an electric field is applied; remove the field and the paste-like substance reverts to liquid.
When the amount patients pay for prescription drugs doubles, patients cut their use of common drugs for chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma and gastric acid ailments by as much as 23 percent, according to a study issued today by RAND Corporation researchers.
Teenagers have long been regarded as the age group most vulnerable to the addictive lure of cigarettes, and a new report compiling five years of studies from a UC Irvine tobacco research program provides details why this is very likely true. The report, ''Closing the Gap on Youth Tobacco Use,'' determines that adolescents are more susceptible than adults to the rewarding effects of smoking, starting with their first exposure to nicotine.
Being jailed in federal or state prisons has become so common today that more young black men in the United States have done time than have served in the military or earned a college degree, according to new study. The paper, appearing this week in the American Sociological Review, estimates that 20 percent of all black men born from 1965 through 1969 had served time in prison by the time they reached their early 30s. By comparison, less than 3 percent of white males born in the same time period had been in prison.
Employees who lose their jobs in the years immediately preceding retirement have twice the risk of suffering a stroke when compared to peers who are still working, according to a study by a Yale researcher. "Our results suggest that late career involuntary job loss more than doubles the risk of subsequent stroke," said William Gallo, the senior author of the study and associate research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine.
Infantry soldiers suspicious that a truck or box may contain explosives or chemical weapons may soon be able to find out for sure by shooting the target with a sticky little projectile that can detect the danger and report it from afar. The crayon-sized sensor, which users fire from a standard paintball gun, was invented by a team of University of Florida undergraduate engineering students as part of a government- and corporate-supported engineering research and education program at UF. Lockheed Martin's Orlando-based Missiles and Fire Control, which sponsored the project, plans to refine the projectile and put it into production, and there is a chance it could be used in Iraq, Lockheed officials say.
Only about half the meat and poultry recalled in the United States because of suspected health hazards between 1998 and 2002 was actually recovered by the manufacturers, according to a new study. This and other results suggest new federal food safety regulations that took effect in the late 1990s have not done enough to ensure the safety of our food supply.
Surfing the beaches south of Los Angeles can make you sick to your stomach ? literally. According to a UC Irvine study of hundreds of surfers, urban beach water made surfers ill twice as often as did ocean surf in more rural areas. The findings suggest that widespread exposure to urban runoff at beaches in highly populated areas increases health risks to all swimmers, even when pollution levels are within current environmental monitoring guidelines.
Frederick Hawthorne and the history of boron chemistry go hand in hand. Hawthorne helped create the field in the 1950s, and has done more than anyone to show the fifth element's utility, for everything from rocket fuel to pharmaceuticals. Along the way he has garnered nearly every accolade a scientist can, including the 2003 King Faisal Award. It is medicine -- and cancer treatment specifically -- that has Hawthorne embarking now on a new venture in collaboration with his employer, UCLA. Together Hawthorne and the University are creating a foundation to develop an obscure, but potentially revolutionary way to treat tumors. Known as Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT), it puts to use decades-old theory to selectively destroy cancer through small nuclear explosions at the cellular level.
An extra beer or glass of wine during a workday lunch or happy hour may seem harmless. But a new Cornell University study shows that when alcohol consumption in and around the workplace increases, so does the risk of harassment of women by male co-workers. The study points to the dangers of workplace cultures that tolerate drinking and offers lessons to both workers and employers.
So how do you get soldiers and commanders speaking different languages in a theater of war to communicate effectively and not, for example, blow each other up mistakenly? Take off the shelf instant messaging software and throw in a dose of machine translation. So says the Office of Naval Research.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said today that it does not recommend using treadmill exercise testing, resting electrocardiograms, or electron beam computerized tomography to screen for heart disease in low-risk adults who don't have any symptoms of heart disease. For adults at increased risk for heart disease, the Task Force found insufficient evidence for or against using these three tests for screening.
