ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Satiric news coverage—a format seen on programs such as “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”—decreases Arab American prejudice and bias against Al Jazeera English.
A new University of Michigan study finds that Americans can change their views about Al Jazeera English, a global news network, depending on how it is covered by other media.
AJE has not been welcomed in the United States, in part, because many people associate it with Al Qaeda and other American adversaries. Many Americans presume the network is biased and driven by an anti-American agenda. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Globalization is a benefit to U.S. scientific achievement, not a threat. That’s the conclusion of a new book that weighs the evidence from a number of recent surveys to answer its title question: “Is American Science in Decline?”
American science is in good health, according to the book’s authors, sociologists Yu Xie of the University of Michigan and Alexandra Achen Killewald of Harvard University.
Although there are areas of concern, they maintain that traditional American values will help the nation maintain its strength in science for the foreseeable future, and that globalization will promote efficiency in science through knowledge sharing. (more…)
One of the largest and longest studies in a traditional African society sheds light on religious practices and cuckoldry. Genetic data suggest religious patriarchy is directly analogous to the mate-guarding tactics used by animals to ensure paternity.
Religious practices that strongly control female sexuality are more successful at promoting certainty about paternity, according to a study published in the June 4, 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In an interdisciplinary collaboration, a group of researchers around biological anthropologist Beverly Strassmann from the University of Michigan and University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer analyzed genetic data on 1,706 father-son pairs in a traditional African population – the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa – in which Islam, two types of Christianity and an indigenous, monotheistic religion are practiced in the same families and villages. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A new study of rabies in vampire bats in Peru has found that culling bats—a common rabies control strategy—does not reduce rates of rabies exposure in bat colonies, and may even be counterproductive.
The findings may eventually help public health and agriculture officials in Peru develop more effective methods for preventing rabies infections in humans and livestock, according to a team of scientists from the United States and Peru led by Daniel Streicker, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology.
The study was published online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The research team includes University of Michigan population ecologist Pejman Rohani. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Women in their 70s had a longer life expectancy when they exercised and regularly ate fruits and vegetables, a new University of Michigan study found.
“This is the first study to show that the combination of a healthy diet and greater physical activity predict greater survival and that the combination of both positive factors confers lower mortality risk than either factor alone,” said Emily Nicklett, U-M assistant professor of social work.
Nicklett and researchers at The Johns Hopkins University studied the results from 713 women ages 70 to 79 years who participated in the Women’s Health and Aging Studies. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— The U.S. had the second-lowest proportion of students who used tobacco and alcohol compared to their counterparts in 36 European countries, a new report indicates.
The results originate from coordinated school surveys about substance use from more than 100,000 students in some of the largest countries in Europe like Germany, France and Italy, as well as many smaller ones from both Eastern and Western Europe.
Because the methods and measures are largely modeled after the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future surveys in this country, comparisons are possible between the U.S. and European results. The 15- and 16-year-old students, who were drawn in nationally representative samples in almost all of the 36 countries, were surveyed last spring. American 10th graders in the 2011 Monitoring the Future studies are of the same age, so comparisons are possible. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Whether the Higgs boson exists could be settled by the end of summer, say University of Michigan physicists involved in the search for the missing piece of particle physics’ Standard Model.
“We’re zooming in,” said Jianming Qian, physics professor in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts. “We are increasing the data set and improving our search algorithms. With certain luck, we may be able to discover it this summer, but it depends on nature.”
Qian is one of the 28 U-M researchers involved in experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. He’ll spend most of his time through August in Geneva, where more than 1,000 scientists from around the world have been looking for Higgs since the collider turned on about four years ago. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Popular firewall technology designed to boost security on cellular networks can backfire, unwittingly revealing data that could help a hacker break into Facebook and Twitter accounts, a new study from the University of Michigan shows.
The researchers also developed an Android app that tells phone users when they’re on a vulnerable network. They will present their work May 22 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco. (more…)
