Society

Big trees provide shade and improve air quality. But new study insists that they can fight crime as well. Large trees in urban areas are associated with lower crime rates. Conversely, smaller trees around homes were associated with higher crime rates. The claim comes from a US Forest Service study. Geoffrey Donovan led the research for the US Forest Service's Pacific Northwest and Southern Research Stations. The results have been published in the journal Environment and Behavior. The study says...

Sleep can help both learn a new piece of information, as well as get the brain to file it away for later retrieval. Sleep helps people remember a newly learned word and incorporate new vocabulary into their mental lexicon, according to researchers. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers taught volunteers new words in the evening, followed by an immediate test. They slept...

The Al-Qaeda threat to Egypt's Coptic Christians has run into all-round opposition ― from the country's powerful Muslim Brotherhood political group to the press. The threat had been issued by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), an Al-Qaeda outfit in Iraq. The Opposition Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report, said Muslims must protect Christian houses of worship. "The Muslim Brotherhood is stressing to all, and primarily Muslims, that the protection of holy places of...

A dying mountain bear held captive at a cafe in Azerbaijan was forced to drink Coca-Cola for the amusement of customers. It died shortly, and was replaced by another bear. The incident came to light after a video of the cruel incident was released by Daryl Willard, a British sports coach who was working in the former Soviet republic. The pictures were taken last month in the city of Gabala. Willard told The Sun: "People cheered and shouted as they watched the starving bear drink from the cola...

Most teens who engage in oral sex for the first time will have vaginal intercourse within six months, and half the teens who initiate oral sex in ninth grade will have vaginal intercourse before the end of junior year, researchers have found. The three-year study of 600 high school students by researchers at the University of California - San Francisco and University of California, Merced has found that schools need to provide more comprehensive sex education to teens if they want to be more...

Google has announced the launch of a music service in India to help users search for legal online music streams and downloads. The move is being seen as as one meant to fight piracy which has been bleeding the music industry. The official Google India blog announced on Friday that the service is now currently in the labs stage. Using the Google Music Search India service, users in India (and even those outside) can search for Bollywood/Hindi songs from current hits to old classical numbers. The...

As the US establishment tries hard to project itself as a religiously diverse country, the conviction that America is a Christian nation is gaining currency and becoming more intensified, a study has found. "Though initially paradoxical, these trends are less mysterious if the idea of a Christian America is understood, not as a description of religious demography, but as a discursive practice that seeks to align the symbolic boundaries of national belonging with the boundaries of the dominant...

Some believe in love at first sight, some think it is nothing more than literary trope. But if you were looking for a scientific argument to believe in it, researchers have come up with numbers ― it takes a fraction of a second to fall in love. A team of researchers from Syracuse University has found that when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects...

India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has moved into his new home in Mumbai — a 27-storey mansion worth $1 billion. The house, named Antilia, has three helipads, a dance studio, a ball room, a 50-seat theatre and an underground car park for 160 cars. The 27-floor building (560 ft or 173 m) will be home to Ambani, the richest man in India and the fourth richest in the world, plus his wife Nita, their three children - daughter Isha and sons Akash and Anant - and mother Kokilaben. The family will...

Those who rely on Fox News are more inclined to believe rumours, a study looking at the behavioral patterns of viewers of reports pertaining to the Ground Zero mosque in has concluded. According to the study, a typical viewer who reported a low reliance on Fox News believed 0.9 rumors on average, while a similar respondent with a high reliance on Fox believed 1.5 rumors – an increase of 66 percent. On the contrary, people who relied heavily on CNN or NPR believed fewer false rumors. High...