Tag: finds

How Humanity First Finds Extraterrestrial Life Could Be Signatures Of Alien Technology
IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE

How Humanity First Finds Extraterrestrial Life Could Be Signatures Of Alien Technology

If an alien were to look at Earth, many human technologies – from cell towers to fluorescent light bulbs – could be a beacon signifying the presence of life. We are two astronomers who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – or SETI. In our research, we try to characterize and detect signs of technology originating from beyond Earth. These are called technosignatures. While scanning the sky for a TV broadcast of some extraterrestrial Olympics may sound straightforward, searching for signs of distant, advanced civilizations is a much more nuanced and difficult task than it might seem. Saying ‘hello’ with radios and lasers A laser – like the one seen here – or beam of radio waves pointed intentionally at Earth would be a strong sign of extraterrestrial life. G. Hüdepohl/ESO, ...
Taking Care Of Kids Makes Balancing Work And Life Harder — Particularly For Moms, Poll Finds
SELF, WORK

Taking Care Of Kids Makes Balancing Work And Life Harder — Particularly For Moms, Poll Finds

At 4 a.m. each day, Pamela Hines wakes up to pack lunches for her two older sons, who are 9 and 7, and make sure their homework is in their backpacks. She gets breakfast for them and her youngest son, 2, as well as her husband. Kids in tow, she drives her husband to his workplace in Pennsylvania, 30 minutes from their home in Morgantown, W.Va., then takes the two older kids to school. Her husband lost his job at the start of the pandemic and is thrilled to be back at work now. He works from 5:45 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. each day, installing drainage systems and doing other manual work. After dropping the kids off, Hines cares for her 2-year-old while running the nonprofit she started to connect Americans who have extra travel miles with Ukrainian mothers and children who want to leave the coun...
Study Finds Browser Cookies Make People More Cautious Online
TECHNOLOGY

Study Finds Browser Cookies Make People More Cautious Online

Website cookies are online surveillance tools, and the commercial and government entities that use them would prefer people not read those notifications too closely. People who do read the notifications carefully will find that they have the option to say no to some or all cookies. The problem is, without careful attention those notifications become an annoyance and a subtle reminder that your online activity can be tracked. As a researcher who studies online surveillance, I’ve found that failing to read the notifications thoroughly can lead to negative emotions and affect what people do online. How cookies work Browser cookies are not new. They were developed in 1994 by a Netscape programmer in order to optimize browsing experiences by exchanging users’ data with specific websites. Th...
Poll Finds: A Record Number Of Americans Back Same-Sex Marriage
LGBTQ

Poll Finds: A Record Number Of Americans Back Same-Sex Marriage

Support for marriage equality remains high across the United States, with new Gallup polling published Wednesday finding that a record 71 percent of Americans are in favor of it. The results are slightly higher than last year’s, when 70 percent of respondents backed same-sex marriage. The findings, from telephone interviews conducted throughout May, carry extra significance in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. LGBTQ+ legal experts have warned that overturning Roe could endanger marriage equality by eroding the right to privacy typically protected by the 14th Amendment’s right to due process. The Gallup polling underlines how the court’s potential decision on Roe — and the potential consequences for Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that le...
A New Study Finds Youth Largely Underestimate The Risks Of Contracting STIs Through Oral Sex
LGBTQ

A New Study Finds Youth Largely Underestimate The Risks Of Contracting STIs Through Oral Sex

Young people are largely unaware of the risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, or STIs, through oral sex. That’s the finding of our recent study, published in Annals of Family Medicine. Research and education on oral sex are critical because it is a very common sexual practice. And many STIs are transmitted orally, including herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, HIV and human papillomavirus (HPV). Why it matters The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 85% of sexually active people ages 18 to 44 have engaged in oral sex at least once. A separate survey found that 41% of adolescents ages 15 to 19 reported having oral sex. Historically, research on reducing STI transmission among young people has focused primarily on heterosexual vaginal intercourse rathe...
A New Study Finds Gun Violence Soared During The COVID-19 Pandemic – But The Reasons Why Are Complex
IN OTHER NEWS

A New Study Finds Gun Violence Soared During The COVID-19 Pandemic – But The Reasons Why Are Complex

Paddy Ssentongo, Penn State and Jennifer McCall-Hosenfeld, Penn State In a new study, we found that the overall U.S. gun violence rate rose by 30% during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the year before. In 28 states, the rates were substantially higher between March 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, compared to the pre-pandemic period from Feb. 1, 2019, through Feb. 29, 2020. There were 51,063 incidents of gun violence events resulting in injury or death in the United States in the first 13 months of the pandemic compared to 38,919 incidents in the same time span pre-pandemic. CC BY-ND Early in the pandemic, gun sales in the United States surged, with more than 20% of these purchases by first-time buyers. And access to firearms is a well-established risk factor for gun-rel...
Study Finds – Students From Struggling Economic Backgrounds Sent Home With Food For The Weekend Have Improved Test Scores
EDUCATION

Study Finds – Students From Struggling Economic Backgrounds Sent Home With Food For The Weekend Have Improved Test Scores

Education Michael Kurtz, Lycoming College The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea When food banks work with schools to send children home with a backpack full of food over the weekend, they do better on reading and math tests, I found in a recent study. These effects are strongest for younger and low-performing students. In the peer-reviewed study published in December 2020, my co-authors – Karen Conway and Robert Mohr – and I explored how weekend feeding programs, also known as “backpack” programs, affected end-of-grade tests in reading and math for third, fourth and fifth graders in North Carolina. These types of programs began independently in 1995 in a single school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Since then, Feeding America – a national network of...
Study Finds Evidence Of Sex Trafficking In Trade Schools
IN OTHER NEWS

Study Finds Evidence Of Sex Trafficking In Trade Schools

Researchers identified at least 18 schools across five states that state certification boards suspected of forcing their students into the sex industry. Mariel Padilla Originally published by The 19th Researchers identified at least 18 state-authorized schools across five states suspected of engaging in sex trafficking operations, according to a report published on Wednesday by the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation (SHSF). And now a congressional committee is demanding that something be done. The report’s authors, Ellie Bruecker and Abigail Seldin, wrote that state certification boards suspected these vocational schools of facilitating environments that could be too easily used by traffickers to train their victims for more lucrative work — but Bruecker estimated that the problem is mu...
New Study Finds In One Urban School District Nearly 10% Of Youth Identify As Gender-Diverse
LIFESTYLE

New Study Finds In One Urban School District Nearly 10% Of Youth Identify As Gender-Diverse

It seems that more and more teens are identifying as transgender, gender-fluid or nonbinary. But because linguistic and cultural norms are always evolving, it’s been challenging to pin down an exact number.   CC BY-NC-ND The 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 1.8% of high school students identified as transgender. But my team – made up of pediatricians, adolescent medicine specialists and public health researchers – suspected that this study underrepresented the prevalence of gender-diverse youth. That’s because not all people who are gender-diverse – an umbrella term for those whose gender identity does not fully align with the sex they were assigned at birth – identify as “transgender.” So we put tog...
New Research Finds Narcissistic People Aren’t Just Full Of Themselves – They’re More Likely To Be Aggressive And Violent
LIFESTYLE

New Research Finds Narcissistic People Aren’t Just Full Of Themselves – They’re More Likely To Be Aggressive And Violent

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea We recently reviewed 437 studies of narcissism and aggression involving a total of over 123,000 participants and found narcissism is related to a 21% increase in aggression and an 18% increase in violence. Narcissism is defined as “entitled self-importance.” The term narcissism comes from the mythical Greek character Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image reflected in still water. Aggression is defined as any behavior intended to harm another person who does not want to be harmed, whereas violence is defined as aggression that involves extreme physical harm such as injury or death. Our review found that individuals high in narcissism are especially aggressive when provoked, but are also aggressive wh...