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Exposure Of Youth To Images Of Tobacco Use
Tobacco advertising was banned from television in 1971, but tobacco use is still portrayed in a variety of forms on television, including movie advertisements or trailers. "Trailers pair tobacco use with popular movie stars and edgy action shots," the authors write. "These images translate into positive images of tobacco that are conveyed to a broad audience, including a large population younger than 18 years." Studies have shown that most movies released in the United States contain images of smoking, including about half of those with PG or G ratings, according to background information in the article. Surveys of children and adolescents indicate that they are more likely to smoke if their favorite movie stars do, and that watching movies in which characters smoke can have an immediate effect on their attitudes toward smoking. Cheryl G. Healton, Dr.P.H., American Legacy Foundation, Washington, D.C., and colleagues studied all 216 movie trailers that aired in the United States from August 2001 through July 2002. They first analyzed the full-length versions of all the trailers to determine whether they included images of tobacco use. They then obtained viewer information from Nielson Media Research, the primary source of U.S. television ratings, to determine the population exposed to each trailer......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Insights Into Lead Pollution
As well as providing important new information about the secretive otter species, post-mortems on otters killed by cars since 1992 gave an insight into the levels of lead pollution in the environment. The results have important implications for human health as lead can damage the central nervous system including the brain, as well as affecting the kidney and reducing growth, especially in children. Researcher Dr Liz Chadwick in the School of Biosciences at the University said: "We measured the level of lead in rib-bones taken from over 300 otters found dead in south-west England between 1992 and 2004 and collected by wildlife veterinary pathologist Vic Simpson. "We compared this with levels of lead found in stream sediment by the British Geological Society and airborne emissions recorded by the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory. While some variation correlation to geology, we found an extremely strong decline over time, reflecting declining emissions from car fuel: otter bone lead levels in 2004 were less than a quarter of those in 1992." Dr Chadwick stresses that the research highlights the importance of long-term monitoring and archiving of samples and shows that with help from the public, valuable use can be made of undesirable events such as wildlife road traffic accidents......... Posted by: Sarah Permalink Source Drazner To Lead Heart Program
Dr. Drazner, associate professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern, has been a key member of the heart transplant team for nine years, specializing in treating patients with congestive heart failure and caring for patients before and after transplantation. He also has been instrumental in achieving UT Southwestern's tremendous survival rates for heart-transplant patients, which consistently rank in the top 10 in the nation and are the best in Texas. Dr. Drazner succeeds Dr. Clyde Yancy, who served as medical director since 1993. The Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplantation program is a key component of UT Southwestern's Heart, Lung and Vascular Center, a collaborative effort between UT Southwestern faculty and community physicians who unite to bring their clinical and surgical expertise to patients needing cardiac, pulmonary or vascular care. "Dr. Drazner is a talented, compassionate and highly skilled clinician," said Dr. John Warner, assistant professor of internal medicine, director of the Heart, Lung and Vascular Center. "He has been an integral part of our team for almost a decade now and we are extremely pleased that he has accepted this position. We look forward to his leadership"......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Life of Stardust
The cosmic portrait shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy named after Ferdinand Magellan, the seafaring explorer who observed the murky object at night during his fleet's historic journey around Earth. Now, nearly 500 years after Magellan's voyage, astronomers are studying Spitzer's view of this galaxy to learn more about the circular journey of stardust, from stars to space and back again. The Large Magellanic Cloud is like an open book," said Dr. Margaret Meixner of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. "We can see the entire lifecycle of matter in a galaxy in this one snapshot." Meixner is lead author of a paper on the findings to appear in the November 2006 issue of the Astronomical Journal. The vibrant false-color image, a mosaic of approximately 300,000 individual frames, shows a central blue sea of stars amidst lots of colorful, choppy waves of dust. It can be viewed at: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2006-17/ssc2006-17b.shtml. Space dust is important for making stars, planets and even people. The tiny particles -- flecks of minerals, ices and carbon-rich molecules -- are everywhere in the universe. Developing stars and solar systems are constantly consuming dust, while older stars shed dust back into space, where it will one day provide the ingredients for new generations of stars......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink Source NASA Names Orion Contractor
Orion in lunar orbit. Image credit: Lockheed Martin Corp.
The vehicle is Orion, named for one of the brightest and most recognizable star formations in the sky. It will be a multi-purpose capsule -- the central member of a family of spacecraft and shuttle-derived launchers that NASA's Constellation Program is developing to carry astronauts back to the moon and later to Mars. The first flight with astronauts aboard is planned for no later than 2014. Orion's first flight to the moon is planned for no later than 2020. NASA has selected Lockheed Martin Corp. as the prime contractor to design, develop, and build Orion, America's spacecraft for a new generation of explorers. The Orion crew capsule will carry astronauts back to the moon and later to Mars. The first flight with astronauts aboard is planned for no later than 2014. Orion's first flight to the moon is planned for no later than 2020. In what amounts to one of the most significant NASA procurements in more than 30 years, two industry teams, Northrop Grumman/Boeing and Lockheed Martin, spent the past 13 months refining concepts, analyzing requirements and sketching designs for Orion. On Thursday, managers of NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate revealed that Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Md., has been chosen to build it......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink Source More Research Needed To Combat Killer Diseases
The report (The New Landscape of Neglected Disease Drug Development) by Mary Moran and colleagues at the Pharmaceutical Research and Development Policy Group, The George Institute, argues that drugs for neglected diseases are increasingly being developed partly due to the use of public-private partnership (PPPs) mechanisms that spread the financial and organisational risk of product development. Anne-Laure Ropars, from the George Institute will be discussing the rise of drug development for neglected diseases and the role of PPPs at a major international conference, organised by the ESRC Innogen Centre to be held in London on 5-6 September 2006. Steven Matlin, Executive Director of the Global Forum for Health Research, also speaking at the conference, does not believe that the increases in development of health products for neglected diseases (drugs, vaccines and diagnostics) is simply due to the rise of PPPs. Matlin also stresses the rise of a group of 'innovating developing countries' (IDCs) including Brazil, China, India and South Africa. He argues that these countries have "growing national capacity for high-quality manufacturing to convert the inventions into health products for both domestic and international markets"......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Genomics solve world hunger
A keynote speaker at the ESRC Innogen Centre's Annual Conference to be held on 5th-6th September at Regent's College, London warns of a caveat to this enthusiasm for the introduction of genomic technologies. Dr Simon Best, Chairman of the Board of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid tropics (ICRISAT) highlights the need for greater and more efficient collaboration between the public and private sectors involved in this research. The Director of Development Partnerships for the International Potato Centre (CIP), Dr. Roger Cortbaoui, echoes these arguments saying there is a need to construct, "useful partnerships and networks including with the private sector" in an industry where basic research is dominated by public funded research centres......... Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source Weeds In The Garden
A 15-year study of flixweed, a member of the mustard family, helps explain plant population oscillations and may be useful in crop protection.
Credit: Courtesy J.L. Gonzalez-Andujar "The failure to recognize the intrinsic nature of many weed population changes may result in over-application of control inputs, with subsequent negative economic and environmental effects," says Jose Gonzalez-Andujar, who co-authored the study, forthcoming in The American Naturalist, with Cesar Fernandez-Quintanilla and Luis Navarrete. Many populations exhibit cyclic oscillations. Everybody can recall a summer where mosquitoes hindered attempts at al fresco dining. These cycles can be produced by climatic conditions or by internal feedback mechanisms. However, in contrast with studies of insect and animal populations, little attention has been directed at the study of cycles in plants. What happens with your garden weeds? The researchers demonstrate that there are some intrinsic mechanisms that explain observed plant oscillations more specifically, evidence of cycles produced by delayed density dependence in a plant population growing under field conditions. This study can have a capital importance in crop protection......... Posted by: Jessica Permalink Source Equations That Model Interplanetary Gravity
Insects tend to transmit diseases in the course of feeding on plants, and their movement between plants is influenced by plant quality (how good of a meal they'll get) and the distance between plants, or, how far they'll have to travel to get to the next meal, explain Matthew Ferrari, Jessica Partain, Janis Antonovics, and Ottar Bjornstad. "It turns out insects are more likely to move shorter distances between better plants," write the authors. "Interestingly, then, the probability of disease being passed between two plants goes up if they are closer and/or better, which parallels the stronger gravity between closer and larger planets". The scientists tracked a fungal disease spread by bees and moths in the course of pollinating and feeding on nectar from white campion flowers at the University of Virginia's Mountain Lake Biological Station. As predicted by the behaviour of insects, the disease was more likely to spread shorter distances between plants that had a number of flowers......... Posted by: Ashley Permalink Source Power Structures Arising From Status Communication
"When building a society, it is of utemost importance that signals be informative and any sources of ambiguity minimized," says Krakauer. "This requirement is reflected in the structure and function of communication networks. A goal of this research has been to study communication at a group level rather than the more traditional communication we associate with pairs". Using information theory, the researchers show that power emerges through consensus. There is a high degree of consensus among group members that an individual is powerful if that individual has received multiple subordination signals from many individuals in the case of pigtailed macaque monkeys, a silent bared-teeth display. On the other hand, there is little consensus if signals come from just a few individuals......... Posted by: Ashley Permalink Source |
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