Warm workers work better, an ergonomics study at Cornell University finds.

Chilly workers not only make more errors but cooler temperatures could increase a worker’s hourly labor cost by 10 percent, estimates Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory.

When the office temperature in a month-long study increased from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing ou

Telephone conference calls are widely used by business, but they also have great value for people outside work. New ESRC funded research, shows people such as the elderly, who may be socially isolated due to mobility problems, enjoy conference calls.

The study was led by Professor Andrew Monk of the Department of Psychology at the University of York. He argues the calls could be made more enjoyable by developing technologies that support electronic socialising, providing visual aids

Ductal lavage is not an effective method for detecting breast cancer, according to a new study in the October 20 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Ductal lavage–a method used to collect cells from the milk ducts of the breast–has been proposed as a screening tool for cancer detection because ducts that yield fluid were thought to be more likely to contain cancer cells. Interest in the procedure was spurred by a study in which ductal lavage detected cancer i

The Internet protocol private branch exchange (IP PBX) market offers a ray of hope in the otherwise depressed European telecommunications industry. Encouraging developments in this market have seen enterprises beginning to replace their time division multiplexing (TDM) voice networks with IP enabled/converged voice data networks.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.telecom. frost.com) reveals that the total enterprise IP PBX market (including IP enabled PBX) demonstrat

New studies by an international team of scientists led by Joslin Diabetes Center have found variations in a gene that help explain why people with type 2 diabetes are at much greater risk for coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death for this group.
“We now have potential gene markers to help identify diabetes patients at increased risk for heart disease,” said Alessandro Doria, M.D., Ph.D., Investigator in Joslin’s Genetics and Epidemiology research section, Director of Josli

Sinusitis and bronchitis take a significant toll on a person’s ability to participate in everyday life and have a sizable economic impact, accounting for more than 30 million missed workdays each year, according to survey results released by Berrylin J. Ferguson, M.D., F.A.C.S., F.A.A.O.A., associate professor of otolaryngology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Both of these bacterial infections occur most frequently during the cold and flu season – November through Januar

The first study of the patient’s perspective on errors in medicine may have health care professional rethinking what is important to their patients.

The study, published in the Annals of Family Medicine, suggests that patients are more disturbed with lack of access to and relationships with their physicians than technical errors in diagnosis and treatment.

Although much has been written about medical errors since the controversial To Err is Human: Building A Safer He

University of Illinois at Chicago researchers are comparing two drugs used to treat pediatric bipolar disorder patients to evaluate how the drugs affect brain function in children with the disorder.

“More and more clinicians are using second generation anti-psychotics to treat children with bipolar disorder, but there are no randomized controlled trials of these medications,” said Dr. Mani Pavuluri, director of the Pediatric Mood Disorders Clinic at UIC and principal investiga

A study conducted by researchers at Case Western Reserve University found that patients who used a relaxation technique, called “systematic relaxation,” experienced a substantial decrease in pain after undergoing surgery. The systemic relaxation technique, which consists of sequentially relaxing each major muscle group in the body, was shown to improve comfort by more than 50 percent compared to patients not using the technique. Patients in the study could also request pain medication.

A new study that will look at 50,000 sisters of women diagnosed with breast cancer opened today for enrollment across the United States. The Sister Study, conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health, will investigate environmental and genetic causes of breast cancer. The Sister Study is the largest study of its kind to look at breast cancer risk factors.

Women of all backgrounds and ethnic groups are elig

New study links possible role of ephedrine in the sudden cardiac death of people with asymptomatic heart disease

Each year 80 to 100,000 Americans die suddenly from heart attacks without ever having had any symptoms of heart disease. In some cases, the victims of these unheralded sudden cardiac deaths had been taking dietary supplements containing ephedrine. In a new study in the Oct. 26, 2004 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers show how ep

You and your fellow townspeople are hiding in a cellar from marauding soldiers. Your baby starts to cry, which would alert the soldiers to your presence. The only way to save yourself and the others is to smother your baby. What do you do?

Making such tough personal moral judgments involves not just abstract reasoning or emotion, as shown by the results of a new study by Joshua Greene and his colleagues. Rather, their brain scan studies of people making such judgments revealed th

The preference for Coke versus Pepsi is not only a matter for the tongue to decide, Samuel McClure and his colleagues have found. Brain scans of people tasting the soft drinks reveal that knowing which drink they’re tasting affects their preference and activates memory-related brain regions that recall cultural influences. Thus, say the researchers, they have shown neurologically how a culturally based brand image influences a behavioral choice.

These choices are affected

In two studies at McMaster University’s Department of Kinesiology, researchers demonstrated that doing isometric handgrip (IHG) contractions three times a week for eight weeks led to lower blood pressure in people who were already taking medication for high blood pressure (hypertension).

The studies looked at whether the flexibility of arteries and the function of blood vessels—both of which improve after IGH—were factors in reducing blood pressure in people taking anti-hypertensiv

Experiment at NYU find neurological underpinnings of economic game theory

In article in today’s issue of the journal Neuron, two neuroscientists – Paul Glimcher of New York University and Michael Dorris, a former NYU colleague currently at Queens University, Canada – offer evidence for the neurological basis for the theories of John Nash, the Nobel-winning economist who pioneered game theory. The findings in the Neuron article are a major advancement in the increasingly promi

Epilepsia, the official publication of the International League Against Epilepsy, recently published a one-year follow-up study that finds some post-surgical epilepsy patients have a significant decline in verbal memory. This type of memory loss is associated with learning, recall and recognition.

Three months after surgery, patients with surgery performed on either the left or right brain tissue showed signs of verbal memory loss. Initially, the resulting loss of memory was th