September 27, 2006, 9:25 PM CT

Finger Length Ratio May Predict Women's Sporting Prowess

The difference between the lengths of a woman's index and ring fingers may indicate her sporting prowess, suggests research published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The finding supports other research indicating a possible link between this ratio and fertility, vulnerability to serious disease, intellectual ability, certain personality traits, and musical talent.

Most of the sporting research in this area has so far focused exclusively on men.

The researchers base their findings on x ray pictures of the right and left hands of 607 female twins, whose average age was 53. Most were right handed.

The second to fourth finger ratio was calculated by dividing the length of the index (second) finger by that of the (fourth) ring finger.

Study participants were also asked to rank their highest achievement in a wide range of individual and team sports, since the age of 11.

Participation levels were highest for swimming, cycling, tennis and running in descending order.

The association with finger ratio was highest for running, soccer, and tennis. The highest achievement in any sport was strongly linked to a low second to fourth finger ratio. Running ability was particularly associated with a low (male pattern) ratio.........

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September 27, 2006, 9:18 PM CT

Controlling Gun Violence

Reforms to the sales practices of a licensed gun store-which prior to May 1999, sold more than half of the guns recovered from criminals in Milwaukee-resulted in a 44 percent decrease in the flow of new guns to criminals in the city, according to a new study from researchers with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Gun Policy and Research. The study appears in the September/October 2006 issue of The New York Academy of Medicine's Journal of Urban Health.

In May 1999, a highly-publicized government study revealed that a Milwaukee-area gun shop was the nation's leading seller of guns that were later recovered from criminals. Two days after the study was publicized, the dealer announced that his store would no longer sell small, inexpensive handguns, sometimes known as Saturday Night Specials, that are commonly used in crime.

In the Hopkins study, researchers tracked the number of guns that police recovered from criminals within one year of retail sale. This unusually short sale-to-crime interval is considered an indicator of illegal gun trafficking. The store's change in sales policy was associated with a 96 percent decrease in the number of small, inexpensive handguns that were recovered from criminals in Milwaukee that were recently sold by the store. There was also a 42 percent reduction in other types of guns sold by the gun dealer and soon recovered from a criminal. The reductions in Milwaukee occurred abruptly after the change in the dealer's sales practice and appear to be directly attributable to those reforms-a finding supported by the fact that the study authors saw no change in gun trafficking in three comparison cities in the Midwest.........

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September 27, 2006, 9:13 PM CT

Binge-drinking teenagers

Teenagers who drink alcohol are at higher risk of becoming victims of violence, a Cardiff University study has observed.

A team from the School of Dentistry's Violence Research Group studied drinking habits in children aged 11-16 in England. They found not only a link between drink and aggression but also that children who drank were more likely to be hit, even if they weren't violent themselves.

The scientists are now calling for measures to prevent alcohol misuse to reduce injury risk. Current policy focuses on reducing aggression but this research shows that there should be equal effort to reduce victimisation.

More than 4,000 children were surveyed at 13 schools at four local authorities in the North, the Midlands, London and the South. The study observed that 25% of 11-year-olds were drinking monthly and 3.6% daily, with 12.8% admitting to getting drunk three to five times a year. By the age of 16, 40% were drinking weekly and 6.2% were drinking every day. The research also showed 22.6% of 16-year-olds getting drunk more than 21 times a year.

The study, which has just been reported in the Journal of Adolescence, found a strong link between frequency of drinking and frequency of hitting other people.

However, children who reported drinking monthly were also three times more likely to be hit. Adolescents who drank but didn't get into fights were more likely to be hit than those who did fight.........

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September 27, 2006, 8:58 PM CT

Glue Made From Ethanol More Than The Fuel Itself

Mixing up a batch of ethanol from alfalfa or switchgrass isn't nearly as efficient as creating it from corn, but that doesn't mean growing grass crops for fuel won't pay, says Paul Weimer.

Rather than dwelling on finding ways to squeeze extra ethanol out of biomass from crops such as switchgrass, Weimer is concentrating his research on the leftovers. He thinks that the large heap of fermentation residue from the ethanol-making process - what many people consider a byproduct - could be far more valuable than the ethanol itself.

"A lot of people want to do the same thing with biomass material that we've been doing with corn," says Weimer, a research microbiologist at the USDA-ARS Dairy Forage Research Center and associate professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "They want to hit it with enzymes to break it down into sugars, and ferment those sugars into ethanol.

The problem with this, he explains, is that the enzymes needed to break down celluose biomass are very expensive, and they don't work nearly as effectively as the enzymes used to convert starch.

In fact, Weimer adds, both corn and cellulosic biomass must be subjected to costly pretreatment to maximize the ethanol yield.

"Our philosophy is a little bit different," Weimer says. "We think that the fermentation residue may actually be more valuable than the ethanol. And it may mean that we can do without pretreatment".........

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September 27, 2006, 8:43 PM CT

More Efficiency In Harvest And Handling

Kevin Shinners wants farmers to put less energy into harvesting and handling biofuel crops - less fuel, less time and less labor.

As a field machinery specialist, Shinners has worked to improve the efficiency of harvesting forage for animals. Harvesting biomass crops poses similar challenges, he says.

"The biggest problem is there are way too a number of operations in the field," says Shinners, a professor of biological systems engineering and mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Every time we handle this material, it costs real money".

Much of Shinners' research to date has focused on corn stover, the stalks and leaves left behind when grain is harvested. He has also embarked on a similar line of research on cost-effective harvesting of forage grasses, such as switchgrass, for both feed and fuel production.

Corn stover is commonly left in the field or used as animal fodder, but it has tremendous potential as a cellulosic source of ethanol - if the shredding, drying, raking, bailing and transporting can be made less costly and less labor-intensive.

The U.S. Department of Energy predicts that this type of biomass will sell for $30-$40 per ton. Eventhough this price is low in comparison to high-quality alfalfa, which can sell for $100-$120 per ton, the high-value corn grain provides stover with a valuable co-product, he notes.........

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September 27, 2006, 8:26 PM CT

Airbags, Antilock Brakes Do Not Reduce Accidents

Researchers have determined that airbags and antilock braking systems do not reduce the likelihood of accidents or injuries because they may encourage more aggressive driving, thwarting the potential benefits of such safety features.

The behavior responsible for this seeming paradox is called the offset hypotheses, which predicts that consumers adapt to innovations meant to improve safety by becoming less vigilant about safety, said Fred Mannering, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University.

"When antilock brakes were first introduced, insurance companies noticed that the accident rates for those cars increased," he said. "We decided to see whether the offset hypothesis could explain this phenomenon".

The researchers analyzed motor vehicle data from the state of Washington over a five-year period beginning in 1992.

"We used that time period because that's when airbags started getting introduced very rapidly, and we wanted to track the same drivers over that time frame to see whether the new safety features reduced their accident and injury rate," Mannering said. "Our findings suggest that the offset hypothesis is occurring and that it is sufficient to counter the modest technological benefits of airbags and antilock brakes".

A research paper detailing the study's findings was published earlier this year in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. The paper was authored by Clifford Winston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; Vikram Maheshri, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley; and Mannering.........

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September 27, 2006, 8:14 PM CT

Study Of Toxins In Houston Air

A new report recommends immediate action to reduce levels of four toxic air pollutants because exposure to them poses a high risk to community health. Released today by Rice University and funded by Houston Endowment, the study proposes a new set of air quality standards based on the underlying toxicology of the four pollutants investigated.

Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Southern University, University of Houston Law Center and The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston collaborated with Rice on the study, which focused on benzene, 1,3-butadiene, formaldehyde and diesel particulate matter.

"Based on the results of our study, we strongly recommend immediate action to lower the ambient concentrations of the four hazardous air pollutants we researched," said principal investigator Matt Fraser, associate professor in civil and environmental engineering at Rice. "The level of air toxics concentration that we're seeing in the Houston area poses a dangerously high risk of cancer and other health problems".

According to the report, the ultimate goal is the adoption of enforceable ambient air quality standards for which only one more person in a million would be expected to develop cancer from a lifetime of exposure to individual hazardous air pollutants.........

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September 27, 2006, 8:09 PM CT

Wealth During Second Temple Period

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Bar-Ilan University have discovered unusually high concentrations of silver in samples of many different types of pottery from excavations in Jerusalem of the late Second Temple period, the first century BCE (Before the Common Era) through 70 CE (Common Era). This is the first study ever conducted on silver in archaeological ceramics.

David Adan-Bayewitz, Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan in Ramat-Gan, Israel, and a guest at Berkeley Lab, and Frank Asaro and Robert D. Giauque of Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division made their discovery of performing measurements on 1,200 pottery vessels from 38 sites in Roman Judea (present-day Israel). They used high-precision X-ray fluorescence (HPXRF) and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). The Berkeley Lab team developed a variation of INAA, the INAA coincidence technique, specifically for measuring silver concentrations in archaeological samples, as a more accurate means of checking the results of HPXRF and conventional INAA.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation.

The major finding is that samples of pottery from Jerusalem during this era showed anomalously higher concentrations of silver, as compared to samples from all other non-urban sites dated to the same period of time. Many of the samples from Jerusalem and other sampled sites were otherwise indistinguishable in date, shape and chemical composition. High silver abundances were also detected in pottery found at other urban sites. But many of the Jerusalem samples had higher silver values than any of the samples from the other cities.........

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September 27, 2006, 6:39 PM CT

Improving Patient's Meal Experience

Anyone who had spent a day in the hospital knows about the quality of the hospital food. Now there is an innovative idea from the Rush University Medical Center.

Sometimes innovation in health care takes the form of advanced imaging technology or breakthroughs in drug treatments. Sometimes it takes the form of hamburgers cut into squares and soup served in a cup.

It may seem simple, but these innovations are making a big difference for geriatric psychiatry patients at Rush University Medical Center, which recently established a new meal service to increase patient nutrition and satisfaction.

"We totally changed the way we do business on our geriatric psychiatry unit. It is part of our effort to gear our food and nutrition services to the needs of our patients on the different floors," said Marcy Stone, RD/LDN, assistant director of Food Service Operations at Rush, who led the team that developed the new meal service.

The patients in the geriatric psychiatric unit, located in Rush's Johnson R. Bowman Health Center, range in age from 49 to 101 and suffer from Alzheimer's disease and/or clinical depression. The center that is adjacent to Rush's acute care hospital.provides medical and rehabilitative patient care services to older persons and to persons with short-term and long-term disabilities. These illnesses make it difficult to eat, because the patients become overwhelmed when they see too much food in front of them, and their reduced motor skills make it difficult for them to feed themselves.........

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September 26, 2006, 9:31 PM CT

Steps On The Accelerator Pedal

Two major research centres opened today (19th September), bringing the UK to the forefront of international efforts in Accelerator Science and Technology. The Cockcroft Institute and the John Adams Institute will both be national focal points for UK scientists and companies to develop cutting-edge accelerator technologies for major new projects such as the International Linear Collider and a Neutrino Factory.

Prof Keith Mason, Chief Executive of PPARC said "UK physicists carry the responsibility for key detector components and often hold leadership positions in most major experiments around the world. The establishment of these two centres of excellence will consolidate that position and ensure that the UK continues to make significant scientific and technological contributions to the next generation of frontline accelerators worldwide". Commenting on the technology transfer prospects Prof Mason added, "The new Accelerator Institutes will build strong links between the research community and high technology industry to ensure that knowledge transfer takes place between the two and that UK companies are well positioned to win future contracts for work in this sector".

The International Linear Collider is currently under design in a co-ordinated global effort. It will collide electrons with their antimatter partner, positrons, creating interactions which will reveal how the evolution of the Universe began in its earliest moments. It will provide answers to the most basic questions about the laws which govern this evolution.........

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