…Violent assaults in health care facilities occur four times as often as assaults in other U.S. workplaces. School of Medicine research by Gabor D. Kelen and Christina L. Catlett, professor and assistant professor, respectively, of emergency medicine, found a rate of eight assaults per 10,000 workers in health care settings, versus two per 10,000 in all other private-sector workplaces. The authors found that shootings, though heavily publicized, were rare. The findings appeared last December in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

…Charles Meneveau, professor of mechanical engineering in the Whiting School, and colleagues in Belgium have determined a new formula for the optimal layout of turbines in wind farms. At a recent meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics, Meneveau reported that spacing turbines at twice the distance called for by the standard layout results in more cost-efficient power generation.

…Children’s exposure to alcoholic beverage advertising on U.S. television increased 71 percent from 2001 to 2009, according to a recent report from the Bloomberg School’s Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth. The study also found that young people were 22 times more likely to see an ad for an alcohol product than a public service “responsibility” ad warning against underage drinking.

…A report in the January 4 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine found that researchers routinely ignore already published clinical trials of drugs, devices, and procedures, citing only 21 percent of relevant earlier studies. In a press release, co-author Karen Robinson, assistant professor of medicine in the School of Medicine, said, “We may be wasting resources when we fund trials for which we already know the answer. And we may be coming to incorrect conclusions about what works in medicine.”