Tiny mealworms may hold part of the solution to our giant plastics problem. Not only are they able to consume various forms of plastic, as previous Stanford research has shown, they can eat Styrofoam containing a common toxic chemical additive and still be safely used as protein-rich feedstock for other animals, according to a new...
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that digital storybooks that animate upon a child’s vocalization offer beneficial learning opportunities, especially for children with less developed attention regulation. “Digital platforms have exploded in popularity, and a huge proportion of the top-selling apps are educational interfaces for children,” said Erik Thiessen, associate professor of Psychology at CMU’s Dietrich...
The number of e-cigarette users who began vaping at age 14 or younger has more than tripled in the last five years, say University of Michigan researchers. Last year, 28% of e-cigarette users said they started no later than age 14, compared to about 9% in 2014. The findings appear online in the American Journal...
A new assessment of the Medicare Part D program based on a proposal from the West Health Policy Center finds that Medicare beneficiaries would save $29 billion if drug manufacturer rebates were used to reduce their out-of-pocket costs at the pharmacy counter through the Part D benefit – as long as these rebate savings are not also used to...
Knowing a company’s true sales can help determine its value. Investors, for instance, often employ financial analysts to predict a company’s upcoming earnings using various public data, computational tools, and their own intuition. Now MIT researchers have developed an automated model that significantly outperforms humans in predicting business sales using very limited, “noisy” data. In...
Ten years after the publication of their first plan for powering the world with wind, water, and solar, researchers offer an updated vision of the steps that 143 countries around the world can take to attain 100% clean, renewable energy by the year 2050. The new roadmaps, published December 20 in the journal One Earth,...
Purchasing luxury goods can affirm buyers’ sense of status and enjoyment of items like fancy cars or fine jewelry. However, for many consumers, luxury purchases can fail to ring true, sparking feelings of inauthenticity that fuel what researchers have labeled the “impostor syndrome” among luxury consumers. “Luxury can be a double-edged sword,” write Boston College...
Increasing access to clean and affordable energy and improving gender equality are two major sustainable development goals (SDGs) that are believed to be strongly linked. With electricity access, less time and effort in the developing world is needed for tasks related to cooking, water collection, and other housework, which are typically undertaken by women. “The...
The Social Determinants of Health and Demographic Change (OPIK) research group of the UPV/EHU is a multidisciplinary team in the field of social and health sciences and is devoted, among other things, to research into the social factors influencing health and disease in the population, social inequalities in health and the policies having the potential...
A research team led by Professor OHTSUBO Yohsuke of Kobe University’s Graduate School of Humanities has been investigating how group apologies are perceived. Their results revealed that apologies that are costly for the apologizing organization are deemed to be more genuine. This was similar to previous findings by Professor Ohtsubo et al. when they looked...
