News Articles

Estimates say there are over 3,000,000 registered freelancers worldwide, competing for everything from computer programming and web design to finance and engineering.
How can you make yourself more attractive to potential employers?  

Does home field advantage matter? In baseball outfielders, the tricks and corners of a new baseball park might be meaningful but that effect should diminish over time. The Seattle Seahawks have a famously loud stadium and the team calls the audience "the twelfth man" but they didn't need it to rout the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl.
There are no athletes in the Olympics who are from Sochi, yet psychologists believe that Russian athletes will have a psychological edge, even though Russia covers 6,600,000 million square miles, because they have a home field advantage.

While there is a glut of PhDs in academia, to an extent where some post-doc jobs don't even pay anything, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said in 2012 that America will need an additional 1,000,000 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates in the United States over the next decade to meet corporate economic needs. In a speech last week he ridiculed art history majors. He loves scientists and wants more of them.

Organic farms support more biodiversity, supporting 34% more plant, insect and animal species than conventional farms, according to a new paper. For pollinators such as bees, the number of different species was 50% higher on organic farms, although the authors stress that the study only looked at 'species richness'.

A new survey finds that nearly half of HIV-infected teenagers and young adults don't seek treatment unless the disease advances, which can them at risk for dangerous infections and long-term complications. It is accepted that starting treatment as early as possible can go long way toward keeping the virus in check and prevent the cardiovascular, renal and neurological damage characteristic of poorly controlled HIV infection over time.
Those most likely to delay treatment until they had advanced infections were males, blacks and Hispanics, the paper in
JAMA Pediatrics

At 78 percent among people aged 50 and over, South Africa has the highest rate of high blood pressure reported for any country in the world, at any time in history. And less than 10 percent of people are effectively controlling their condition with medication, according to an analysis of data from the Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which surveyed more than 35,000 people aged 50 and over in South Africa, China, Ghana, India, Mexico and Russia. 

British people traveling abroad for medical treatment are often unaware of the potential health and financial consequences they could face - with sometimes catastrophic effects for individual patients.
More than 63,000 UK residents travel abroad for medical treatment each year but many are embarking on medical tourism without doing research about the risks involved. These include a lack of redress in many countries should things go wrong, and the costs of non-emergency care at home to rectify poor outcomes of treatments received overseas. Since the UK has government-controlled health care, individuals are personally liable for those costs.

Exposure to short wavelength, blue, light during the biological day directly and immediately improves alertness and performance.
In order to determine which wavelengths of light were most effective in warding off fatigue, the researchers teamed with George Brainard, PhD, a professor of neurology at Thomas Jefferson University, who developed the specialized light equipment used in the study. Researchers compared the effects of blue light with exposure to an equal amount of green light on alertness and performance in 16 study participants for 6.5 hours over a day. Participants then rated how sleepy they felt, had their reaction times measured and wore electrodes to assess changes in brain activity patterns during the light exposure.  

Women who take nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen, naproxen and diclofenac during pregnancy are not at increased risk of miscarriages.
NSAIDs are used by pregnant women in the first trimester to combat pain, fever and inflammation.  Previous studies on whether they increase the risk of pregnancy loss have shown inconsistent results.

People with high blood pressure are familiar with ACE inhibitors, drugs that widen blood vessels by limiting activity of ACE, angiotensin-converting enzyme, a naturally occurring protein found in tissues throughout the body. 
But high activity of ACE may sometimes be a good thing. A study conducted by Cedars-Sinai scientists found that genetically targeting certain immune blood cells to overproduce the enzyme broke down defective proteins in the brain associated with Alzheimer's disease and prevented cognitive decline in laboratory mice bred to model the disease.

Added sugar during processing or preparing of foods remain at unhealthy levels, according to a study published by JAMA Internal Medicine.What exactly are healthy levels? Well, there is no clear answer. Recommendations for added sugar consumption vary and there is no universally accepted threshold for unhealthy levels. For example, the Institute of Medicine recommends that added sugar make up less than 25 percent of total calories while the World Health Organization recommends less than 10 percent and the American Heart Association recommends limiting added sugars to less than 100 calories daily for women and 150 calories daily for men.

Don't count nature out yet.Some aspects of climate change are natural. And some mitigation will be also, according to researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University in the US and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. As the globe warms, ocean temperatures rise, leading to increased water vapor escaping into the atmosphere. Water vapor is really the most important greenhouse gas and its impact on climate is amplified in the stratosphere.