Current measures which fail to significantly predict whether sexual offenders will repeat their crime could be improved by taking into account psychological and lifestyle factors. These factors could also enhance risk assessment for violent offenders.

This is the conclusion of Leam Craig, of Forensic Psychology Practice Ltd and Anthony Beech and Kevin Browne of the Psychology Department at Birmingham University, who will present their research today, Monday 22 March 2004, at the British Psy

Seemingly incidental emotions can influence the prices at which individuals buy and sell goods, according to a groundbreaking study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

While prior research has found that people set a higher price for objects they own than they themselves would be willing to pay—which economists call the endowment effect—the Carnegie Mellon study found that people who are sad actually are willing to accept less money to sell something than they would pay for the s

Don’t hit the snooze alarm too many times: Too many hours in bed can cause as many sleep problems as too few, according to a new study.

“Long” sleepers who slumber more than eight hours a night and “short” sleepers who get fewer than seven hours of shuteye both report more sleep complaints than people who sleep in the “just right” zone of seven to eight hours, say Michael A. Grandner, B.A., and Daniel F. Kripke, M.D., of the University of California, San Diego. Their study appears in the jo

Two researchers at Rockefeller University have put a controversial theory of smell to the sniff test and have found no evidence to support it.

They say their study, published in the April issue of Nature Neuroscience, should raise firm doubts about the validity of “vibration theory,” which states that molecules in each substance generate a specific vibration frequency that the nose can interpret as distinct smells.

The reigning theory of smell, which also is as yet unproven, is th

On 29-30 March the findings of ’Inside the Big Black Box’- a Europe-wide science and society project – will be revealed during a two-day seminar hosted by CERN 1 . The principle aim of Inside the Big Black Box (IN3B) is to determine whether a working scientific laboratory can capture the curiosity of the general public through visits.
IN3B was sponsored by the European Union to evaluate how effectively five laboratories – CERN in Switzerland, LNGS 2 in Italy, Demokri

In the way magic eye posters simultaneously hide and reveal the main point of the picture, new research suggests that children might well be asking more than their simply-worded questions seem to indicate.

Normally, adults assume that when children ask, “What is this?” in reference to an object, they are seeking merely a name–some kind of label to help differentiate the elements of their rapidly burgeoning universes. However, a new study explored the possibility that children posing such

Despite conventional wisdom, simply watching television is not related to a child’s weight, but playing video games may be, new research indicates.

“Children with higher weight status spent moderate amounts of time playing electronic games, while children with lower weight status spent either little or a lot of time playing electronic games,” say Elizabeth A. Vandewater, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Texas in the Journal of Adolescence. “Moderate” play, while it sounds benign,

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have come up with computational tools that serve as a virtual screening lab to help chemists weed through millions of possible drug candidates even before they dirty their first test tube.

Chemist Curt Breneman, mathematician Kristin Bennett, and computer scientist Mark Embrechts developed faster and more accurate techniques for describing molecules and combined them with next-generation neural networks and learning methods as part of the

The emotion control center of the brain, the amygdala, shows significantly higher levels of activation in males viewing sexual visual stimuli than females viewing the same images, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience study led by Emory University psychologists Stephan Hamann and Kim Wallen. The finding, which appears in the April edition of “Nature Neuroscience,” demonstrates how men and women process visual sexual stimuli differently, and it may explain gender variations in reproductiv

A new research study reveals that formation of the cells that build bone tissue, called osteoblasts, is suppressed by a complicated inhibitory signal and that formation of the skeleton proceeds only after relief of the inhibition. This inhibitory signal is part of normal development, and without it, bone formation proceeds prematurely and abnormally.

A gene called Runx2 is the earliest and most specific indicator of osteoblast formation. However, Runx2 expression precedes the actual appeara

While the health risks of tobacco are well known, several studies have shown that people with a history of cigarette smoking have lower rates of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. However, the explanations for nicotine’s neuroprotective effects continue to be debated.

Now a team of neuroscientists at the University of South Florida College of Medicine presents new evidence of an anti-inflammatory mechanism in the brain by which nicotine may p

Genetic test sought to identify patients most likely to respond

A new anti-cancer agent, gefinitib (Iressa), recently received FDA approval for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) after a series of clinical trials and an expanded access program led by researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). The compound is designed to target and block the activity of the tyrosine kinase enzyme that signals the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), tellin

Research at the University of Sheffield, published today in Nature, has solved the mystery of why women live so long after their reproductive years have ceased. Basically, grandmothers can ensure the success of their own family by helping to increase the reproductive success of their adult children, thus propagating their own genes.

Dr. Virpi Lummaa and her PhD student Mirkka lahdenperä, from the University of Sheffield and Turku in Finland, examined the family histories of women in Finland

Ordinary household activities, from dusting to dancing, can increase your exposure to particulate pollution, according to a new study. Whether you are cutting the rug or just vacuuming it, you may be inhaling tiny dust particles that could be harmful to your health.

The report, which quantifies some common indoor activities, appears in the March 15 edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific soc

Parents who lose a child have an increased risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS), according to a study published in the March 9 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The study found that parents whose child died were 50 percent more likely to develop MS than parents who did not lose a child.

The results show that psychological stress may play a role in the development of MS. Researchers have believed that stress plays a role in MS, b

It appears the brain builds a repertoire of rote responses to frequently encountered problems to save time and effort

New studies suggest that humans might prefer to switch their brains to automatic pilot whenever possible to conserve their cogitating resources.

For example, when learning skills such as arithmetic, the brain doesn’t necessarily reach back into its basic calculating skills for each problem, suggested the researchers who made the finding. Rather, the brain bui