Trading through dealers on the London Stock Exchange could be obsolete in less than three years, according to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
A study led by Dr Nir Vulkan of the Saïd Business School and Worcester College, University of Oxford, investigated where traders would trade if they have the choice of either a dealers’ market or a computerised system. “Our study suggests that in a just a few years’ time the traditional dealing market on the London St
Scientists are not prepared to dismiss beliefs about aliens landing on Earth in the past or that some houses are haunted by ghosts.
Researchers from the University of Leicester, UK, and Waikato University, New Zealand, found scientists to be much more open-minded about ‘new age’ beliefs than might have been expected.
Water divining and the healing power of crystals were beliefs that some scientists were prepared to accept according to the findings which the researchers describe as ‘
Voice recognition dramatically decreases the turnaround time for radiology reports – referring physicians are often getting results the same day their patients have the radiologic examinations – but technical problems with these systems are reducing some radiologists to typing rather than dictating those reports, a new study shows.
“There are many benefits of voice recognition, but unfortunately we have been facing some technical problems that are impacting our productivity, ” s
A study by Italian researchers of motorway tollgate attendants has demonstrated that traffic pollution damages the quality of sperm in young and middle-aged men.
In research published today (Wednesday 30 April) in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction [1] the research team from the University of Naples say their work should prompt studies on other types of workers exposed to similar levels of pollution and alert health authorities to pollution’s insidious health e
A survey on contraception by French researchers has found that a third of the pregnancies among women in their study were unplanned and that two-thirds of these pregnancies occurred in contraception users.
A fifth of the unplanned pregnancies happened among women using the Pill and a tenth among women using the IUD (intra-uterine device) – both theoretically highly effective medical methods of contraception, said principal investigators Dr Nathalie Bajos and Dr Nadine Job-Spira of the INSERM
Drivers who are overweight or underweight are at greater risk of suffering an injury in a road accident than people of average size, according to a study of deaths and injuries from motor vehicle accidents in New Zealand.
The study appears in the current issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE), edited in the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol.
Dr Gary Whitlock and colleagues studied people who had been seriously injured or killed betwe
A new study suggests that lead may be harmful even at very low blood concentrations. The study, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, will appear in the April 17 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.
The five-year study found that children who have blood lead concentration lower than 10 micrograms per deciliter suffer intellectual impairment from the exposure. The researchers also discovered that the amount of impai
Drivers talking on cell phones are nearly twice as likely as other drivers involved in crashes to have rear-end collisions, according to a new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study. Crashes involving cell phone use, however, are less likely to result in fatalities or serious injuries than crashes not involving the devices.
Almost 60 percent of licensed N.C. drivers have used a cell phone while behind the wheel, investigators from the UNC Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC) fo
The phrase, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” has its roots in a passage of the Bible (Matthew 6:3). If there is truth to this old saying, the reasons may have as much to do with the way the brain obtains information from the arms as it does from the observations of ancient scribes.
Background
Most individuals are either left- or right-handed. How the skills they have learned from the dominant arm (or hand) are transferred to the non-dominant arm ha
A low-testosterone man newly married to a high-testosterone woman might seem destined to be henpecked but a Penn State study found that such a coupling actually produced a marriage where the wife provided better social support for her mate.
Dr. Catherine Cohan, assistant professor of human development and family studies, says, “It’s not necessarily the case that higher testosterone is all bad. Testosterone is related to assertiveness which can be good or bad depending on whether it is m
Dartmouth research group has found a new and unexpected way our attention can be grabbed – by grabbable objects. Their study, which appears in the March 17 advance online issue of Nature Neuroscience, demonstrates that objects we typically associate with grasping, such as screwdrivers, forks or pens, automatically attract our visual attention, especially if these items are on a person’s right-hand side.
In the brain, there are two primary visual pathways, one for identifying objects (p
A long-term study of patients in Rochester, Minn., with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa found that their survival rates did not differ from the expected survival rates of others of the same age and sex.
The results, published in the March issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, add to the knowledge of anorexia nervosa and point to other areas that need greater study from researchers.
“Although our data suggest that overall mortality is not increased among community patients
It is natural to suppose that conducting the same tests, with the same strain of mice and the same protocols on identical equipment but in different labs will ensure similar results. A University of Alberta researcher and his team have found that assumption not to be true–fuelling the nature vs. nurture debate and shedding some light on the importance of environmental factors in experiments.
Dr. Douglas Wahlsten, from the Department of Psychology, is part of a research team that use mice w
Odour is an affective stimulus that elicits both positive as well as negative emotional responses. This has implications for the way consumers evaluate products. Odour as a marketing tool has received an increased amount of attention recently. Retailers are exploring the impact of scents on consumers’ purchase behaviour (think for example about the smell of fresh pastries when you enter a supermarket). Nowadays, technological developments enable the use of scent-patches on packaging and ads, which ma
When men make lame excuses for a poor test performance, women don’t buy it, according to research just published by Edward Hirt, a social psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington.
Hirt has spent the last 10 years conducting research on this aspect of social psychology that involves the term self-handicapping. The associate professor of psychology is the lead author of “I Know You Self-Handicapped Last Exam: Gender Differences in Reactions to Self-Handicapping” in the current issue of
Study is first link ’compensatory prefrontal network’ to better performance on memory tests
A group of Canadian researchers has found the most direct evidence to date that people with early-stage Alzheimer Disease can engage additional areas in the brain to perform successfully on memory tests.
Led by Dr. Cheryl Grady, a senior scientist with The Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, the study is published in the February 1, 2003 issue of
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