UD economics doctoral graduates share their accomplishments
Graduates of the University of Delaware’s doctoral program in economics have been making great strides in their chosen fields since graduation.
Whether advising young entrepreneurs or improving methods for measuring important national statistics, these graduates have been impacting economics across the world and putting their UD doctorate degrees to good use. (more…)
Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. Pharmaceutical drugs are known for their potential side effects, and an important aspect of personalized medicine is to tailor therapies to individuals to reduce the chances of adverse events. Now researchers from North Carolina State University have updated an extensive toxicology database so that it can be used to track information about therapeutic drugs and their unintentional toxic effects.
“Environmental science actually shares a common goal with drug makers: to improve the prediction of chemical toxicity,” says Dr. Allan Peter Davis, lead author of a paper on the work and the biocuration project manager of the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) in NC State’s Department of Biological Sciences. (more…)
App also allows users to communicate with MU animal science experts
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Each year, overheated cattle cost farmers more than $1.2 billion. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have created a smartphone application that can detect when a cow is at risk for heat stress. The app also can offer the best methods for intervention.
“Cows are like the rest of us,” said Don Spiers, professor of animal sciences at MU’s College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, who led the team that developed the app. “They slow down in hot and humid weather. When stressed by too much heat, they stop eating, and thus, fail to grain weight or produce milk.” (more…)
Cell Phone Use Not Just Dangerous for Drivers, Study Finds
COLUMBUS, Ohio – More than 1,500 pedestrians were estimated to be treated in emergency rooms in 2010 for injuries related to using a cell phone while walking, according to a new nationwide study.
The number of such injuries has more than doubled since 2005, even though the total number of pedestrian injuries dropped during that time. And researchers believe that the actual number of injured pedestrians is actually much higher than these results suggest. (more…)
New basin-wide assessment of recoverable resources and reserves
The Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana contains about 162 billion short tons (BST) of recoverable coal from a total of 1.07 trillion short tons of in-place resources according to a new USGS assessment. This assessment also estimates that 25 BST of those resources are currently economical to recover, the first such estimate released by the USGS for coal for an entire basin.
The Powder River Basin—a large geologic feature located in northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana—contains the largest deposits of low-sulfur subbituminous coal in the world. This study is significant because it illustrates that only a relatively small percentage of in-place coal resources are technically and economically recoverable. (more…)
Twenty years ago, Calvin Hsia created a list of the “Most Verbose People” on a CompuServe forum that became Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional program.
REDMOND, Wash. – It’s 1993, and you need technical support. Who you gonna call?
Most techies at the time would plug in their modems and dial up CompuServe. In the days before Twitter, Facebook and broadband, CompuServe’s forums were a gathering place for geeks to talk shop and get answers to burning questions. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — Michigan health officials are using HIV surveillance technologies to assist in enforcing a “health threat” law that makes it illegal for HIV-positive people to have sex without disclosing their status.
A new University of Michigan study reveals that health officials employ the state’s names reporting database, alongside partner services referrals, for law enforcement purposes. However, this is bad social policy for a variety of reasons, says Trevor Hoppe, the study’s author and a doctoral candidate in sociology and women’s studies. (more…)
Better science communication could lead to a more informed American public.
Public acceptance of climate change’s reality may have been influenced by the rate at which words moved from scientific journals into the mainstream, according to anthropologist Michael O’Brien, dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri. A recent study of word usage in popular literature by O’Brien and his colleagues documented how the usage of certain words related to climate change has risen and fallen over the past two centuries. Understanding how word usage affects public acceptance of science could lead to better science communication and a more informed public.
“Scientists can learn from this study that the general public shouldn’t be expected to understand technical terms or be convinced by journal papers written in technical jargon,” O’Brien said. “Journalists must explain scientific terms in ways people can understand and thereby ease the movement of those terms into general speech. That can be a slow process. Several words related to climate change diffused into the popular vocabulary over a 30-50 year timeline.” (more…)
