Channel 42
Science is the answer to everything.

Health statistics fill today’s information environment, but even most doctors, who must make daily decisions and recommendations based on numerical data, lack the basic statistical literacy they require to make such decisions effectively. A major new report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest shows that statistical illiteracy is a significant problem having widespread negative impact on healthcare and society.

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Supercomputer simulations of dusty disks around sunlike stars show that planets nearly as small as Mars can create patterns that future telescopes may be able to detect. The research points to a new avenue in the search for habitable planets.

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The race to understand the latest superconducting iron-arsenic compounds has taken another step forward. Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and collaborators have used a brand new instrument that indicates the compound’s superconducting properties could be related to magnetic spins rather than lattice vibrations.

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“Is Barack Obama Black or Biracial?” a recent CNN.com headline asks. Should such racial characterizations of people like Obama — who have one black parent and one white parent — really matter? According to a new Northwestern University study, they do matter. When study participants knew of a person’s black-white ancestry, in comparison to not knowing of the parentage, they quickly adhered to the simplistic characterization of biracial people as black.

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NIH scientists have identified a protein that links two key types of white blood cells, T and B cells, letting them interact in a way that is crucial to establishing long-lasting immunity after an infection. Their finding may also explain why some individuals who have a genetic defect that prevents them from making this protein suffer from lethal infections with a common virus that otherwise is rarely fatal, while others have problems with B-cell lymphomas.

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Hiring temporary workers and machines for the harvest, sending soil samples to the laboratory for analysis, ordering seed: Farming today involves a great deal of administrative work. A new Internet-based platform will soon make this task easier.

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Sales of organic products are booming: Consumers want their food to be untainted. To avoid the use of fungicides yet nevertheless protect plants from disease, researchers have developed a method that involves bombarding seeds with electrons to kill fungal spores and viruses.

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Indiana University School of Medicine researchers are focusing on a family of blood proteins that they hope holds a key to decreasing the toxic effects of chemotherapy in children and adults. Their findings may one day help in the development of targeted therapies for leukemia, multiple myeloma and other cancers of the blood.

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Letters are warped, syllables left out — about four percent of the German population are dyslexics. Scientists seek to spot responsible genes and try to develop a genetic screening test to support affected children at an earlier age.

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Metal sheets are getting thinner and stronger all the time, and new production processes are called for. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU in Chemnitz are relying on predictive process monitoring to eliminate faults during production as far as possible. They will be presenting the new technique at the joint Fraunhofer stand, G34, in Hall 11 at the Euroblech trade fair in Hanover from Oct. 21-25, 2008.

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