Junk emails that greet people by name are far more likely to repel potential customers than endear them, according to a study led by Sunil Wattal of Temple's Fox School of Business. Ninety-five percent of people respond negatively when an advertisement sent by email uses their name. The fear of privacy invasion heavily outweighs the intended personal touch, says Wattal. "Given the high level of cyber security concerns about phishing, identity theft, and credit card fraud, many consumers (are) wary of e-mails."

The first FDA-approved, non-drug asthma treatment is being offered to patients at Temple University Hospital. A flexible tube containing a wire is passed to the source of an asthma attack, the bronchial tubes. Radio waves emitted by a device at the end of the tube shrink the tissue, making the airway bigger and less likely to constrict. "The procedure has been shown to improve quality of life, reduce asthma attacks and keep people out of the hospital," said Kartik Shenoy of Temple's Lung Center.

In an opinion piece, Robert Dujarric, director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University Japan says that fewer Japanese are capable of international communications. “The ascendency of the ‘domestic’ element over the ‘internationalized’ one in Japan is the product of incentives rooted in the educational and employment systems. Unless Japan wants to find itself even more isolated, this is an issue that needs to be addressed.”

Do babies remember their earliest years? They can learn language; sorting out words and syntax from the surrounding noise is a defining human use of memory. Nora Newcombe, a professor of psychology at Temple, points out that there may be evolutionary reasons that this kind of memory — semantic — is so strong in the early years, when babies are faced with learning so many facts about the world.