Low-dose aspirin use does not seem to reduce the overall risk for prostate cancer death at the population level. However, results for extended exposure periods suggest that low-dose aspirin might be inversely associated with prostate cancer mortality after 5 years from cancer diagnosis. Findings from a nationwide cohort study are published in Annals of Internal…
Incorporating the arts — rapping, dancing, drawing — into science lessons can help low-achieving students retain more knowledge and possibly help students of all ability levels be more creative in their learning, finds a new study by Johns Hopkins University. The findings were published on Feb. 7 in Trends in Neuroscience and Education and support…
More than 2 billion people worldwide are affected by water shortages, wildfires, crop losses, forest diebacks or other environmental or economic woes brought on by drought. A new monitoring method developed at Duke University allows scientists to identify the onset of drought sooner — meaning conservation or remediation measures might be put into place sooner…
A nationwide cohort study of all children born in Denmark to Danish-born mothers between 1999 through 2010 concluded that the mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR) vaccine does not increase the risk of autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases following vaccination. The findings are published…
Magnetic materials have a worldwide market share of some $50 billion per year. A new frontier in the study of these materials, femtomagnetism, could lead to ultrafast magnetic storage devices that would transform information processing technologies with storage devices several orders of magnitude faster. Now, researchers report a tabletop method to characterize such a faster…
Laws that require landlords to disclose bed bug infestations help combat the spread of the insects and protect the health of potential tenants. According to a new study, these laws also lead to cost savings, on average, for landlords within five years. Researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania published…
Stay overnight on an Antarctic ice shelf, and you may feel the shaking from thousands of tiny quakes as the ice re-forms after melting during the day. In a recent study, UChicago scientists placed seismometers on the McMurdo Ice Shelf and recorded hundreds of thousands of tiny “ice quakes” that appear to be caused by…
The force is strong not only in Star Wars lore but also as a fundamental property in physics. For example, scientists can put two uncharged metal plates close together in a vacuum, and “voila!” — they will attract each other. In 1948, Dutch theoretical physicist Hendrick Casimir first predicted an attractive force responsible for this…
Methane is not only a powerful greenhouse gas, but also a source of energy. Microorganisms therefore use it for their metabolism. They do so much more frequently and in more ways than was previously assumed. Methane is a very special molecule. It is the main component of natural gas and we heat our apartments with…
As Benjamin Franklin once joked, death and taxes are universal. Scale-free networks may not be, at least according to a new study from CU Boulder. The research challenges a popular, two-decade-old theory that networks of all kinds, from Facebook and Twitter to the interactions of genes in yeast cells, follow a common architecture that mathematicians…