A large study suggests that radiologists vary widely in their assessment of density, a risk factor for breast cancer. And density is just one factor in breast-cancer risk, the researchers underscore.
Federal and Utah health officials are investigating a case that may be the first instance of Zika spreading from one person to another in ways other than via mosquito bites, sex or the placenta.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Why do people sext? Why do they send racy or naked photos or videos and sexually loaded texts?
For a short-term hookup, sexting might seem like a direct way to get what you want - or at least try to. But according to my research, sexting is actually most likely to occur within a committed relationship. Some research suggests that people often engage in sexting after being coerced by romantic partners or to avoid an argument with their romantic partner. So perhaps anxiety and concern about what your romantic partner thinks about you promote behaviors like sexting.
As a human development researcher who studies how technology influences relationships, I wanted to understand if people who are anxious about dating or about what their partner thinks of them are more likely to sext.
One of the major theories regarding relationships is called attachment theory. It suggests that the way you related to your caregiver as an infant (and vice versa) shapes how you come to view relationships later in life.
If your caregiver was attuned to your needs and responsive, you will develop a secure attachment. That means you are comfortable with close relationships because your experience paid off - Mom or Dad was there when you were distressed or hungry or cold. From that experience, you learned that relationships are safe and reciprocal, and your attachment anxiety is low.
But if your caregiver was not so attuned to your needs, was intrusive or inattentive, you might develop what is called an insecure attachment. If something you wanted emotionally or physically (like comfort) went unfulfilled, you might end up anxious about relationships as an adult. You might realize that relationships may not be trustworthy, not invest in close relationships, and avoid intimacy all together.
My colleagues, Michelle Drouin and Rakel Delevi, and I hypothesized that people who were afraid of being single or had dating anxiety and who were, at the same time, anxious or insecure in their attachment style would be more likely to sext. We also thought these singles would be more likely to sext their romantic partners, even when their relationship wasn't very committed.
We gave 459 unmarried, heterosexual, undergraduate students an online questionnaire to learn more about how relational anxiety influences sexting behavior. It covered questions measuring their sexting behaviors, relationship commitment needed to engage in sexting, their fear of being single, their dating anxiety and their attachment style (secure or insecure). Half of the people who took the survey were single, and about 71 percent were female.
We found that people in romantic relationships -- whether of long or short duration - were more likely to have sexted than those who did not have romantic partners. There were no gender differences for engaging in sexting, except that males were more likely than females to have sent a text propositioning sexual activity.
We also found that, generally, dating anxiety from fear of negative evaluation from the romantic partner (basically, worrying about what your partner thinks of you) and having a more secure attachment style (i.e., comfort with intimacy and close relationships) predicted if someone had sent a sexually suggestive photo or video, a picture in underwear or lingerie, a nude photo or a sexually suggestive text.
We expected to find that anxiety would prompt people to sext but were surprised that comfort with intimacy related to sexting behaviors. We also expected to find that sexting would occur in relationships without a lot of commitment, meaning that we thought that sexting would be part of the wooing.
But it turns out that people who are comfortable with close relationships (a secure attachment style) and also worry about what their partner might think of them are more likely to engage in sexting, but only if there some level of commitment in the relationship.
So our hypothesis was only partially confirmed.
What this tells us is that people may be concerned with pleasing their partner's desire -- or perceived desire -- to engage in sexting and that it is the comfort with intimacy in relationships that may allow sexting to occur. And, when there is greater relationship commitment, this continues to be the case.
It appears that there is less stigma and greater comfort with sexting, provided that one perceives that his or her partner wants to sext and if there is a degree of relationship commitment.
So, a little sexting within a relationship might not be too bad.
Rob Weisskirch, Professor of Human Development, California State University, Monterey Bay
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Hollywood has already cast Jennifer Lawrence to star in a movie about the embattled biotech firm. How did founder Elizabeth Holmes go from self-made billionaire to an estimated worth of $0? Read on.
Nano-tech scientists have managed to create the world's smallest hard disk. The 500TB/inch2 disk can store a kilobyte of memory in a few tiny chlorine atoms, according to new research published in Nature Nanotechnology.…
Pomponius Mela Scientist of the Day
On July 18, 1482, the German printer Erhard Ratdolt published an edition of Pomponius Mela's De situ orbis libri III, Three Books on the Situation of the World.
Full Text:
When doctors hurl toxic death at cancer cells, often a few will survive and come back. A family of enzymes called KDM5 histone demethylases is emerging as important for this resilience and drugs that inhibit KDM5 enzymes could be active in treating several types of cancer. A team of investigators obtained detailed structural information, showing how inhibitors of the KDM5 family interact with their targets by building a molecular model of the KDM5A enzyme, along with an inhibitor bound in the active site. Their findings could inform efforts to design more potent and selective anticancer drugs.
Image credit: From Horton et al, Cell Chem Bio (2016)
Full Text:
This is the first image ever captured of blue jet lightning. It was taken at Arecibo Observatory in Chile. A team of researchers at Arecibo captured video evidence from the ground of this lightning phenomenon known as blue jet. The discovery is the first ground-based evidence linking the ionosphere with cloud tops in blue jet events. According to Victor Pasko of Penn State University, an electrical engineer working at Arecibo, pilots and others reported observations of red sprites and blue jets long before the first one was captured on video, and numerous undocumented reports of similar phenomena have appeared in scientific literature for over a century.
Image credit: Victor Pasko, Penn State University
All being well, NASA will launch the successor to Curiosity Rover in 2020. And this time the agency hopes to prepare samples for an as-yet-blue-sky manned mission that could one day return them to Earth for analysis.…
One of the seminal developments in modern telecommunications turns 50 years old this month: the paper that bootstrapped the world of optical fibre communications.…
The operators of the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have switched on its first 16 dishes and, pretty much immediately, spotted more than 1,200 new galaxies.…
In 2009, a chemist and his students stumbled across a blue pigment that had never before been seen. Now that it's been licensed for commercial use, you may start seeing it everywhere.
New studies prove that dinosaurs may not have roared in their days on the earth. NPR's Linda Wertheimer talks to paleontologist Julia Clarke about her new discovery — the cooing sounds of dinosaurs.
Une lectrice du @lemondefr nous envoie ce dessin après l'attaque de #Nice. Dire que l'été était arrivé... pic.twitter.com/mJdliTpDGX
-- Clément Martel (@martelclem) July 15, 2016
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.
CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
"This is the first study of the role of serious mental illness in all family homicides.
There are approximately 4,000 family homicides in the United States each year. Individuals with serious mental illness are responsible for 29% of these, or approximately 1,150 homicides. This is 7% of all homicides in the U.S.
The role of serious mental illness varies depending on the family relationships. Approximately 67% of children who kill their parents are seriously mentally ill, but only 10% of spouses who kill their spouses,
Although total homicides have decreased markedly in the US in recent years, there has been no decrease in the number of children killing parents or parents killing children, the two types of family homicides most closely associated with serious mental illness.
Women are responsible for 11% of all homicides in the US but 26% of family homicides.
Elderly family members, especially women, are disproportionately victimized. Among all homicides in the US, only 2.2% of victims are ages 75 and older. In a sample of 2015 family homicides, 9.2% of the victims were age 75 and older.
Guns are used as the weapon in less than half of family homicides.
The failure of individuals with serious mental illness to take their medication and their abuse of alcohol and drugs are risk factors for family homicides. The majority of family homicides are preceded by warnings and threats that are often ignored. The adequate treatment of individuals with serious mental illness would prevent the majority of family homicides associated with serious mental illness."
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
John Fowler - Scientist of the Day
Sir John Fowler, an English civil engineer, was born July 15, 1817.
John Fowler - Scientist of the Day
Sir John Fowler, an English civil engineer, was born July 15, 1817.
Scientists have long assumed that farming began among one group in the Mideast. But a new study suggests a more diverse origin story.