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Peer pressure continues to prompt high school students to light up, new research suggests, because popular teens tend to smoke and they induce others to take up the habit in an effort to fit in and be liked. “Popularity is a strong predictor of smoking,” said study author Thomas Valente, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “We haven’t done enough to make it cool not to smoke.” The finding, published online Sept. 6 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, confirms trends Valente found in previous research studying smoking in students in...

Anyone using file-sharing service BitTorrent to download the latest film or music release is likely to be monitored, UK-based researchers suggest. A Birmingham University study indicates that an illegal file-sharer downloading popular content would be logged by a monitoring firm within three hours. The team said it was "surprised" by the scale of the monitoring. Copyright holders could use the data to crack down on illegal downloads. The three-year research was carried out by a team of computer scientists who developed software that acted like a BitTorrent file-sharing client and logged all the connections made to it. BitTorrent is a...

[bold added] Today, the University of Colorado released an analysis of “state-by-state factors leading to the Electoral College selection of every U.S. president since 1980” and found that these factors add up to a Romney victory in 2012 with an Obama loss in Colorado. When just the two major parties are considered, their analysis predicts that Romney will receive 51.9% of the vote compared to Obama’s predicted 48.1% nationally. According to the two political science professors Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, the “key is the economy”. The two explained their “prediction model”: “[The] prediction model stresses economic data from the...

Allegations of scientific misconduct have prompted the University of Texas to investigate a professor's study that found adults with gay parents reported significantly different life experiences than the children of married, heterosexual biological parents. The study, authored by associate professor of sociology Mark Regnerus, made a splash when it was published last month in the journal Social Science Research. It has since drawn criticism from scholars at UT and elsewhere. Bucking the consensus of the past decade of scholarship that the sexual orientation of parents does not negatively affect children in consequential ways Regnerus found that adults with gay parents...

MESSAGE TO BELIEVERS: In this world we study hard the books of this world in order to get a degree to be able to get a job in this life. As yourself today. The BIBLE is the book of life. Do we study the bible as hard as we studied these " worldly " books?? And if not, then what kind of " job" do we expect out of our spiritual lives?? We know from school to finish a book with notes in order to answer questions. How many have read the full bible in this way?? We are all...

The State Department confirmed this morning that it’s reached a deal with the Chinese government in the case of blind dissident Chen Guangcheng: The Chinese Government stated today that Mr. Chen Guangcheng has the same right to travel abroad as any other citizen of China. Mr. Chen has been offered a fellowship from an American university, where he can be accompanied by his wife and two children. The Chinese Government has indicated that it will accept Mr. Chen’s applications for appropriate travel documents.

Hardly a week passes, it seems, without yet another “scientific” study disparaging people of faith. This week’s study, ginned up by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, dubiously concludes that the “highly religious” are less compassionate toward the needful than non-believers. Published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the study defines “compassion” as an emotion felt when people see the sufferings of others which then motivates them to help, often at personal risk or cost. The study’s lead author, Laura Saslow, says she was inspired by an atheist friend who told her he donated to earthquake...

Gentlemen: on a scale of one to ten, how much do you value your relationship with your wife? Girlfriend? Mother? Sister? Female co-workers? If you answered more than, say, a five, you might want to skip this article entirely, because it could get you into a lot of trouble. You see, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently commissioned a study from the TransAnalytics research firm and the Highway Safety Research Center at the University of North Carolina. And that study found that women seem predisposed to hit the gas when they really mean to hit the brake. In fact,...

Energy: Small- and medium-size businesses serving Louisiana's energy industry are shedding employees, dipping into personal savings or moving elsewhere to stay afloat. The administration's war on fossil fuels is taking its toll. The federal six-month moratorium on drilling that was issued in May 2010, after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, has been officially lifted, but it might as well still be in effect. The glacial permitting process put in place in the aftermath in the name of public safety is killing an industry pledged to wean us from the "energy of the past" will not mourn. A...

LONDON (Reuters) - A weaker sun over the next 90 years is not likely to significantly delay a rise in global temperature caused by greenhouse gases, a report said Monday. The study, by Britain's Meteorological Office and the university of Reading, found that the Sun's output would decrease up until 2100 but this would only lead to a fall in global temperatures of 0.08 degrees Celsius. Scientists have warned that more extreme weather is likely across the globe this century as the Earth's climate warms. The world is expected to heat up by over 2 degrees Celsius this century due...

Many in U.S. Are Arrested by Age 23, Study FindsBy ERICA GOODE Published: December 19, 2011 By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life. The study, the first since the 1960s to look at the arrest histories of a national sample of adolescents and young adults over time, found that 30.2 percent of the 23-year-olds who participated reported having been arrested for an offense other than a minor traffic violation. That figure...

It did not take long for a new study finding a link between abortion and mental health to spark unfounded criticism of the paper and attacks against the author. The prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry (BJP) recently published “Abortion and Mental Health: Quantitative Synthesis and Analysis of Research Published 1995-2009.” The paper, a culmination of Dr. Priscilla Coleman’s extensive experience in the field of abortion and mental health, finds that women who have undergone abortion have an 81% increase in the risk of mental health problems, and an even greater risk for substance misuse and suicidal behaviour (230% and 155%...

Researchers at KTH say they have found further proof that the wolf ancestors of today’s domesticated dogs can be traced to southern East Asia — findings that run counter to theories placing the cradle of the canine line in the Middle East.Dr Peter Savolainen, KTH researcher in evolutionary genetics, says a new study released Nov. 23 confirms that an Asian region south of the Yangtze River was the principal and probably sole region where wolves were domesticated by humans. Data on genetics, morphology and behaviour show clearly that dogs are descended from wolves, but there’s never been scientific consensus on...

RALEIGH – Emergency room visits by North Carolinians experiencing heart attacks have declined by 21 percent since the January 2010 start of the state’s Smoke-Free Restaurants and Bars Law. State Health Director Dr. Jeffrey Engel reported the results to the Justus-Warren Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention Task Force this morning. “We pushed for passage of this law because we knew it would save lives,” said Governor Bev Perdue, who signed the law into effect. “Our goal was to protect workers and patrons from breathing secondhand smoke and we are seeing positive results.” The N.C. Division of Public Health report cites...

Posting the most flattering picture possible alongside one’s profile may seem a legitimate part of the internet dating game. But if new research is to be believed, those who try to level the playing field by using photos which disguise their worst features could be wasting their time. According to a university study, women can still identify a physically attractive man just by reading his profile. It found good-looking men were able to convey their confidence and attractiveness in their written self-description – and that women volunteers were able to recognise their beauty without being shown the lonely heart’s accompanying...

Is the way you study the Bible offensive to God? Did I get your attention? What!!? God can be offended when we study the Bible? As Christians gather together for a Bible study, often what happens is that the leader reads a verse or short passage of Scripture, and then he turns to each member of the group, asking for their comments. Starting with the man next to him on his right, he asks, "Bill, what do you feel this means to you?" Bill struggles to think of something to say, but stumbles through the ordeal, and relates an incident...

A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation underlines that many of the promises surrounding President Obama’s health care legislation remain unfulfilled, though the White House argues that change is coming. Workers at the Flora Venture flower shop in Newmarket, NH, remember when presidential candidate named Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., promised that their health care costs would go down if they elected him and his health care plan was enacted. On May 3, 2008, the president told voters that he had “a health care plan that would save the average family $2,500 on their premiums.”Last year workers at the flower...

Mitt Romney has tried to accomplish two tasks in his debate performances — defend his health-care overhaul in Massachusetts known as MassCare but often called RomneyCare, and tout his record as a governor whose policies fostered job creation in the state. A new study by a conservative think tank at Suffolk University will complicate both strategies. According to the Boston Herald, the study shows that MassCare cost the state more than 18,000 jobs since its enactment: The Bay State’s controversial 2006 universal health-care plan — also known as “Romneycare” — has cost Massachusetts more than 18,000 jobs, according to an...

t may have taken the largest wildfire in Arizona history, but for the first time in decades, environmentalists and government officials agree on a key element of future forest management. The U.S. Forest Service said in a report this month that “intense thinning treatments” can ease future wildfires, by removing trees between six and 18 inches in diameter to allow for additional space between trees. “Everyone agrees that a lot of the dry forest types need to be treated in terms of removing the vegetation,” said Morris Johnson, a research ecologist with the Forest Service and co-author of the report....

Study: 80 Percent of Lawmakers Lack Academic Background in Business, EconomicsFoxNews.com Published August 25, 2011 Congress might want to find some consultants as it tries anew to tackle the country's deep deficits. A report from the Employment Policies Institute finds that only one in five members of Congress has an academic background in business or economics. The organization looked at lawmakers' college degrees and found that most of them -- 55.5 percent -- majored in either a government-related field or "humanities." Just over 8 percent majored in economics, while almost 14 percent studied business or accounting. The numbers raise questions...