In a materialistic culture, saving money is a challenge many of us face long before our retirement years. While many people think education, upbringing, and self-control are major contributors to a person's savings habits, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research reveals that people save more when they feel powerful. "We were interested in knowing whether the decision to save or not save money was affected by how someone was feeling during the time they were making a savings decision," write authors Emily N. Garbinsky (Stanford University), Anne-Kathrin Klesse ...

Scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) have proposed a set of standards aimed at developing a common "language" among investigators working to sequence viral genomes and characterize viral stocks. According to USAMRIID senior author Gustavo Palacios, Ph.D., the proposed system, published last week as an editorial in the journal mBio, is the result of a collaborative effort involving scientists from many of the world's leading institutions. Contributors include the Broad Institute, the J. Craig Venter Institute, Los Alamos ...

Consider the case of the adult student attending night school to earn a degree that will result in a better job with higher pay. From sacrificing time with friends and family to missing a relaxing evening watching TV, this type of long-term gain often comes with short-term pain. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, people are more likely to achieve their goals and avoid temptations when they are able to remove themselves from the big picture. "Past research on personal achievement has focused on whether someone sets nearsighted or farsighted ...

Activities like dieting, saving money, and studying require goal setting and self-control. But even the most disciplined person falls prey to temptation every once in a while. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, people who distort past memories of their indulgences are more likely to indulge in the future. "We investigated the possibility that individuals may distort memories of past behavior in order to allow for indulgence in the present. In other words, people may trick themselves into thinking something like, 'I've been good on my diet lately, ...

When it comes to asking a stranger for help, being young, pretty, and the opposite sex greatly improve your odds. But when it comes to children suffering from the likes of natural disaster, poverty, or homelessness, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research reveals that less attractive children receive more help than their cuter counterparts. "Many charitable organizations use children in advertising and promotional materials. Our research examines how the facial attractiveness of the children in these campaigns affects the empathy and help received from adults," ...

When professional athletes are found to be using performance-enhancing drugs, many people consider this an unfair advantage and say they are cheating. But when another person uses the same drug to overcome a disease or behavioral issue, society is more forgiving. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that people are more forgiving when the benefit is personal. "Our research shows that when people see others using ability-boosting products, they are more likely to see this behavior as morally unacceptable than if they were using the products themselves," ...

PITTSBURGH—The affairs of the heart may actually affect the affairs of the heart in ways previously not understood. "Growing evidence suggests that the quality and patterns of one's social relationships may be linked with a variety of health outcomes, including heart disease," says Thomas Kamarck, professor of psychology and Biological and Health Program Chair in the University of Pittsburgh Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. He is an author of a new study that correlates unhappy marital interaction with thicker carotid arteries and a higher risk of cardiovascular ...

For many people, the idea of purchasing a luxury product in a high-end boutique comes with the stigma of snobbery and rude salesclerks. But when they are rejected in real life, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research reveals that a person's desire for brand affiliation and willingness to purchase and display the item actually increases. "Our research highlights the fact that we are profoundly attuned to social threats and are driven to buy, wear, and use products from the very people who are disrespectful to us," write authors Morgan K. Ward (Southern Methodist ...

From hanging up our coats to organizing our bookshelves and kitchen cupboards, some people keep their homes tidy and others seem to live in complete chaos. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, understanding how we organize our homes can help us cope with contradictions and disruptions occurring in our daily lives. "Tidying a home is an activity that goes beyond moving objects from one place to another or putting them in specific places. Rather, it is a process of building a meaningful domestic environment. Through their tidying activities, people ...

Scientists at USC have developed a water-based organic battery that is long lasting, built from cheap, eco-friendly components. The new battery – which uses no metals or toxic materials – is intended for use in power plants, where it can make the energy grid more resilient and efficient by creating a large-scale means to store energy for use as needed. "The batteries last for about 5,000 recharge cycles, giving them an estimated 15-year lifespan," said Sri Narayan, professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and corresponding author ...

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the ocean from a private balcony at a luxury resort? Self-imagery is a powerful marketing tactic and many ads use pictures that help you see yourself using a product or service. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, showing photos from multiple perspectives can have a negative effect on how a person processes the information in an ad. "The use of photos showing the advertised product or service from multiple perspectives is very common in ads. However, we show that these multiple perspective ads ...

Adding the novel MM-398 to standard treatment for metastatic pancreatic cancer patients who have already received gemcitabine improves survival, researchers said at the ESMO 16th World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer in Barcelona. "Patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer or pancreatic cancer in general have very limited options," said study author Andrea Wang-Gillam, assistant professor in the Division of Oncology at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. "These patients just simply don't do well. This was a positive trial and will provide a new treatment option ...

3,500 million years ago the Martian crater Gale, through which the NASA rover Curiosity is currently traversing, was covered with glaciers, mainly over its central mound. Very cold liquid water also flowed through its rivers and lakes on the lower-lying areas, forming landscapes similar to those which can be found in Iceland or Alaska. This is reflected in an analysis of the images taken by the spacecraft orbiting the red planet. NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover has completed a Martian year –687 Earth days– this week. The vehicle travels through an arid and reddish landscape ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It's a classic Catch-22: Medical researchers need to figure out if a promising new treatment is truly better than a current one, by randomly assigning half of a group of patients to get each treatment. But when they approach patients about taking part in the study, those 50-50 random odds don't sound good enough – and the study struggles to get enough volunteers. That slows down the effort to improve treatment for that condition. Now, new research shows the promise of an approach that takes some of the "random" out of the process, while preserving ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (June 25, 2014)—Women who had their children later in life will be happy to learn that a new study suggests an association between older maternal age at birth of the last child and greater odds for surviving to an unusually old age. That's according to a nested case-control study published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). In this study which used Long Life Family Study data, 311 women who survived past the oldest fifth percentile of survival (according to birth cohort-matched life tables) were identified ...

PITTSBURGH—Smartphones, GoPro cameras and Google Glass are making it easy for anyone to shoot video anywhere. But, they do not make it any easier to watch the tedious videos that can result. Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists, however, have invented a video highlighting technique that can automatically pick out the good parts. Called LiveLight, this method constantly evaluates action in the video, looking for visual novelty and ignoring repetitive or eventless sequences, to create a summary that enables a viewer to get the gist of what happened. What it produces ...

TORONTO, June 25, 2014–As the first people with HIV grow old, a new study from St. Michael's Hospital questions whether the health care system and other government policies are prepared to meet their complex medical and social needs. In high-income countries such as Canada, 30 per cent of people living with HIV are 50 or older, and many are living into their 60s and 70s. In San Francisco, more than half the people with HIV are over 50. "It's a positive thing that people are aging with HIV," said Dr. Sean B. Rourke, a neuropsychologist who heads the Neurobehavioural ...

Skyrmions, subatomic quasiparticles that could play a key role in future spintronic technologies, have been observed for the first time using x-rays. An international collaboration of researchers working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) observed skyrmions in copper selenite (Cu2SeO3) an insulator with multiferroic properties. The results not only hold promise for ultracompact data storage and processing, but may also open up entire new areas of study in the emerging field of quantum topology. "Using resonant x-ray scattering, we were able to gather unique ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—China's rapid socioeconomic growth continues to tax national water resources – especially in the agricultural sector – due to increasing demands for food. And, because of the country's climate and geography, irrigation is now widespread, burdening rivers and groundwater supplies. One solution to these growing problems, however, might be to reorganize the country's crop production and trade, especially in agricultural provinces such as Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Hebei, according to new report issued by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School ...

Machine learning, in which computers learn new skills by looking for patterns in training data, is the basis of most recent advances in artificial intelligence, from voice-recognition systems to self-parking cars. It's also the technique that autonomous robots typically use to build models of their environments. That type of model-building gets complicated, however, in cases in which clusters of robots work as teams. The robots may have gathered information that, collectively, would produce a good model but which, individually, is almost useless. If constraints on power, ...

"An end to seafood by 2050?" "Fish to disappear by 2050?" These sensational media headlines were the result of a 2010 report by the United Nations Environment Program, declaring that over-fishing and pollution had nearly emptied the world's fish stocks. That scarcity portends disaster for over a billion people around the world who are dependent on fish for their main source of protein. Now, a new study by Dr. Roi Holzman and Victor China of the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University's George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences has uncovered the reason why 90% of fish ...

Over the last two decades, nearly half of all initiatives that review and provide feedback to clinicians on healthcare practices show little to no impact on quality of care, according to a new study by Women's College Hospital's Dr. Noah Ivers. The study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found only 28 per cent of all studies showed an improvement of at least 10 per cent in quality of care over a 25-year period. "Research shows there is a gap between recommended practices and the care patients actually receive," said Dr. Noah Ivers, a family physician ...

VIDEO: This video visualizes the effects of hydrofracking flowback fluid on colloid mobilization in unsaturated sand. Included are the injection of the colloids into the sand column at the beginning of... Click here for more information. ITHACA, N.Y. – The chemical makeup of wastewater generated by "hydrofracking" could cause the release of tiny particles in soils that often strongly bind heavy metals and pollutants, exacerbating the environmental risks during accidental spills, ...

Researchers from LSTM have exploited a natural experiment created by insecticidal pressure to determine how the most important malaria vectors - A. gambiae s.s. and A. coluzzii – respond rapidly to environmental change. Working with genome analysis specialists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and field entomologists in Ghana, LSTM researchers sequenced the genomes of individual wild mosquitoes of each species from southern Ghana. The results, published in Nature Communications, reveal that transfer of a major insecticide resistance mutation (kdr) resulted in replacement ...

The magnetic hose designed by the researchers consists of a ferromagnetic cylinder covered by a superconductor material, a surprisingly simple design given the complicated theoretical calculations and numerous lab tests it had to undergo. A 14-centimeter prototype was built, which transports the magnetic field from one extreme to the other with a efficiency of 400% in comparison to current methods used to transport these fields. Even with the efficiency of the prototype, researchers theoretically demonstrated that the magnetic hose can be even more efficient if the ferromagnetic ...