Do wildfires influence the housing market? Is it a consideration when people buy or build?

Geoffrey Donovan, an economist at the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Ore., and his colleagues collaborated with the Colorado Springs Fire Department in Colorado to answer these questions.

The fire department developed a computer model to rate the wildfire risk of 35,000 parcels in the city’s wildland-urban interface. Each parcel

One of the country’s leading centres for social work research is launching a new BA in Social Work.

The new degree will be offered at the University of East Anglia from September 2006, helping to tackle the current national and local shortage of trained social workers.

There will be 27 places available on the full-time three-year course and each comes with an automatic, non-means tested bursary of £2500 per year, funded by the General Social Care Council.

The U

Rats given morphine show bigger biological and behavioral signs of stress-induced anxiety even after going off the drug

A new study has found that opiate drugs such as morphine leave animals more vulnerable to stress. This means that stress and opiates are in a vicious cycle: Not only does stress trigger drug use, but in return the drug leaves animals more vulnerable to stress. The study, conducted at the University of New South Wales, helps to explain why people who use opiates

While their friends enjoy the latest hit tunes, people who are tone deaf – in scientific terms, suffering from amusia – are excluded from the fun, unable to tell one note from another. The disorder can be congenital, present from birth, or acquired following injury to the brain. In an article published online August 29, 2005, in the Annals of Neurology (www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/ana), researchers now report the first objective measurement of the brain deficit in congenital amusia.

Hint: It’s not who you think!

In the first-ever research of its kind, a study conducted by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) details the people considering plastic surgery and their motivations, debunking many stereotypes. The study, published in the September issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the ASPS, found potential patients came from all economic levels and age ranges. Their motivations were personal but not va

Asteroid dust may influence weather, study finds

Dust from asteroids entering the atmosphere may influence Earth’s weather more than previously believed, researchers have found.

In a study to be published this week in the journal Nature, scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, the University of Western Ontario, the Aerospace Corporation, and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories found evidence that dust from an asteroid burning up as it descended

New research shows that people have greater difficultly maintaining a fixed speed, or keeping their car safe in a single lane when performing tasks that simulated conversing on a mobile phone, than if they were driving without the distraction. Contrary to expectation, the speaking and listening were equally distracting. The research was conducted at the University of Illinois and will be published in the next edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Almost 100 students took experiments in

New phage display technique successful in identifying compounds that show potential to overcome drug resistance

A simple, harmless virus might hold the key to the more effective and efficient development of HIV and anti-viral drugs, UCI chemical biologists have found. In order to better identify compounds that can outmaneuver a virus’ effort to mutate and multiply, Gregory Weiss and Allison Olszewski employed this virus, called a bacteriophage, to learn how a HIV protein could

The Government’s new Child Trust Fund, which helps children save a tax-free cash ‘nest egg’ for their 18th birthday, has broad support from political parties, state departments, think tanks and pressure groups alike, according to new research sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

However, today’s 18-year-olds want to see greater restrictions on how the money is eventually spent, says the study led by Professor Andrew Gamble of the University of Sheffield.

The rate of insulin-stimulated energy production is significantly reduced in the muscles of lean, healthy young adults who have already developed insulin resistance and are at increased risk of developing diabetes later in life, according to a Yale School of Medicine study.

The new research by Gerald Shulman, M.D., professor of internal medicine, endocrinology, and senior author of the study, indicates that a decreased ability to burn sugars and fats efficiently is an early and c

A study published in the August/October issue of Current Anthropology, reports on new archaeological evidence regarding the identities of human sacrifice victims of the Moche society of Peru.

The Moche was a complex society whose influence extended over most of the North coast of Peru between AD 200 and 650. They are widely known for their life-like mold-made ceramics, beautiful metallurgy, mud brick pyramids, and iconographic depictions of one-on-one combat between Moche warr

A new study examining whether patients with chronic Hepatitis C virus (HCV) were routinely vaccinated against Hepatitis A virus (HAV) found that vaccination rates were low, even though HAV vaccination is recommended for patients with chronic liver disease.

The results of this study appear in the September 2005 issue of Hepatology, the official journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hepatology is available onlin

Fibromyalgia patients treated with six sessions of acupuncture experienced significant symptomatic improvement compared to a group given simulated acupuncture sessions according to a new Mayo Clinic study. The findings will be presented at the 11th World Congress of the International Association for the Study of Pain in Sydney, Australia.

“This study shows there is something real about acupuncture and its effects on fibromyalgia,” says David Martin, M.D., Ph.D., Mayo Clinic anesthesio

Columbia University Medical Center and New York State Psychiatric Institute Researchers
Illustrate Severe Risk in Popular Procedure, Identify Safer Procedure

An increasingly common method of heroin detoxification under general anesthesia is ineffective and unsafe, according to a study by psychiatrists at Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia.

The study, published in the August 24 Journal of the American Medical

Virginia Commonwealth University immunologists studying mast cells, known to play a central role in asthma and allergic disease, have identified a hormone-like molecule that can kill these cells by programming them to die in studies with mice.

The findings move researchers another step closer to understanding the life cycle of mast cells, and may help researchers develop new treatments for allergy and inflammatory responses in arthritis, multiple sclerosis and heart disease.

UCI study helps identify one reason why women have lower stroke risk than men

Estrogen’s role as an inhibitor of toxic-free radicals in cerebral blood vessels may be a key reason why premenopausal women have a lower stroke risk than men.

According to UC Irvine School of Medicine researchers, estrogen has a powerful and positive influence on women’s health by increasing the energy production efficiency of mitochondria – the tiny power plants that provide cells the energy