What would happen to all those millions of Snickers fans if their favorite chocolate bar was temporarily out of stock? Would they wait for it to be available again or would they quickly switch allegiance to Milky Way or Kit Kat? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when you can't get your favorite product, you'll quickly forget about it if you can find a good replacement. "We studied situations in which products are temporarily unavailable. We found that desire for a product depends on the amount of time that has passed since a consumer was able ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – One of the first-known oncogenes has a protein partner that helps breast cancer proliferate and when it's blocked, so is the cancer, scientists report. The gene ErbB2, commonly called HER2, is highly expressed in about 25 percent of breast cancers. Scientists have now found the protein Erbin, thought to be an anti-tumor factor, also is highly expressed in these cancers and essential to ErbB2's support of breast cancer. When scientists interfere with the interaction between the two in mice, it inhibits tumor development and the usual spread to the ...

Imagine you're dining out with a friend who insists on sharing some chocolate cake for dessert. Since the decision has already been made for you, you gladly join in without feeling any regret. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers are happier when someone else decides they can indulge in dessert or other guilty pleasures. "Most of us don't like being forced to do things. The freedom to make our own decisions generally energizes us and increases our sense of well-being. However, when it comes to purchasing and consuming products normally ...

Consumers worldwide associate France with fashion and luxury and are willing to pay a lot for French luxury products such as perfume and wine. But what about products made in countries with less favorable reputations? A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that consumers won't judge a country's products by its reputation if the products are well-made. "Positive feelings about a country don't always translate into more favorable opinions of its products. A positive opinion of a country may actually make consumers think more about whether or not the country ...

October 14, 2014 –Adolescents whose parents better understand their daily experiences have better psychological adjustment, suggests a study in the October issue of Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine, the official journal of the American Psychosomatic Society. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. Having parents who understand how their day went may even affect teens' cellular responses to stress—providing a possible link to improved physical health as well. "These results provide ...

It might not be obvious on the scales, but healthy eating and increased physical activity from walking during pregnancy is directly associated with a range of improved outcomes at birth, according to researchers from the University of Adelaide. Results of the world's biggest study of its kind – offering healthy eating and exercise advice to pregnant women who are overweight or obese – are published today in two papers in the journal BMC Medicine. "While it might have been expected that healthier eating and increased physical activity during pregnancy would ...

A Rice University study of tamper-resistant voting methods revealed that only 58 percent of ballots were successfully cast across three voting systems. The researchers concluded additional work is needed to make voting both secure and user-friendly. The study, "Usability of Voter Verifiable, End-to-End Voting Systems: Baseline Data for Helios, Prêt à Voter and Scantegrity II," examined three new end-to-end voting systems – systems that give voters the option to both verify the system is working properly and to check that their votes have been recorded ...

Extreme adaptations of species often cause such significant changes that their evolutionary history is difficult to reconstruct. Zoologists at the University of Basel in Switzerland have now discovered a new parasite species that represents the missing link between fungi and an extreme group of parasites. Researches are now able to understand for the first time the evolution of these parasites, causing disease in humans and animals. The study has been published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Parasites ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Oct. 13, 2014) – Two studies recently published in Cell Transplantation reveal that cell transplantation may be an effective treatment for spinal cord injury (SCI), a major cause of disability and paralysis with no current restorative therapies. Using laboratory rats modeled with SCI, researchers in Spain found in laboratory tests on cells harvested from rats - specifically ependymal progenitor cells (epSPCs), multipotent stem cells found in adult tissues surrounding the ependymal canal of the spinal cord - responded to a variety of compounds ...

The dirt in your backyard may hold the key to isolating cancerous tumors and to potential new treatments for a host of cancers. University of Iowa researchers have found a gene in a soil-dwelling amoeba that functions similarly to the main tumor-fighting gene found in humans, called PTEN. When healthy, PTEN suppresses tumor growth in humans. But the gene is prone to mutate, allowing cancerous cells to multiply and form tumors. PTEN mutations are believed to be involved in 40 percent of breast cancer cases, up to 70 percent of prostate cancer cases, and nearly half of ...

This news release is available in German. In order to invade healthy tissue, tumor cells must leave the actual tumor and enter the bloodstream or lymphatic system. For this purpose, they use certain enzymes, proteases that break down the tissue surrounding the tumor, thus opening the way for tumor cells to reach blood or lymphatic vessels. To keep the proteases in check, the body produces inhibitors such as the protein TIMP-1, which thwart the proteases in their work. But during development of metastases, the control function of this inhibitor appears not only to ...

HOUSTON – (Oct. 13, 2014) – New research from Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy found that states with a large minority population tend to incarcerate more people. According to lead author Katharine Neill, states with large African-American populations are more likely to have harsher incarceration practices, worse conditions of confinement and tougher policies toward juveniles compared with other states. She said these findings provide some support for long-standing arguments among sociology and criminal justice experts that the criminal ...

Recently, uncertainty has been getting a bad rap. Hundreds of articles have been printed over the last few years about how uncertainty brings negative effects to the markets and creates a drag on the economy at large. But a new study appearing in the February 2015 edition of the Journal of Consumer Research finds that uncertainty can be motivating. In "The Motivating-Uncertainty Effect: Uncertainty Increases Resource Investment in the Process of Reward Pursuit," Professors Ayelet Fishbach and Christopher K. Hsee of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and ...

Is matter falling into the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way or being ejected from it? No one knows for sure, but a UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist is searching for an answer. Carl Gwinn, a professor in UCSB's Department of Physics, and colleagues have analyzed images collected by the Russian spacecraft RadioAstron. Their findings appear in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. RadioAstron was launched into orbit from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in July 2011 with several missions, one of which was to investigate the scattering of pulsars ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a new fusion protein found in approximately 15 percent of secondary glioblastomas or brain tumors. The finding offers new insights into the cause of this cancer and provides a therapeutic target for personalized oncologic care. The findings were published this month in the online edition of Genome Research. Glioblastoma is the most common and deadliest form of brain cancer. The majority of these tumors – known as primary glioblastomas – occur in the elderly without evidence ...

HOUSTON, Oct. 13, 2014 – According to a pair of University of Houston (UH) professors and their Italian colleague, while science is increasingly moving in the direction of teamwork and interdisciplinary research, changes need to be made in academia to allow for a more collaborative model to flourish. Professors Ioannis T. Pavlidis and Ioanna Semendeferi from UH and Alexander M. Petersen from the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy published a commentary in the October 2014 issue of Nature Physics, articulating policies that will harmonize academic ...

Recent studies have found that crocodiles and their relatives are highly intelligent animals capable of sophisticated behavior such as advanced parental care, complex communication and use of tools for hunting. New University of Tennessee, Knoxville, research published in the journal Ethology Ecology and Evolution shows just how sophisticated their hunting techniques can be. Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor in UT's Department of Psychology, has found that crocodiles work as a team to hunt their prey. His research tapped into the power of social media ...

AUDIO: A study in The Journal of Cell Biology suggests that asynchronous regeneration of cells within muscle tissue leads to the development of fibrosis in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Listen... Click here for more information. Like a marching band falling out of step, muscle cells fail to perform in unison in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A new study in The Journal of Cell Biology reveals how this breakdown leads to the proliferation of stiff fibrotic ...

Researchers at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) and Southern Alberta Cancer Research Institute (SACRI) have made a discovery that could prolong the life of people living with glioblastoma – the most aggressive type of brain cancer. Samuel Weiss, PhD, Professor and Director of the HBI, and Research Assistant Professor Artee Luchman, PhD, and colleagues, published their work today in Clinical Cancer Research, which is leading researchers to start a human phase I/II clinical trial as early as Spring 2015. Researchers used tumour cells derived ...

CLIP2 serves as a radiation marker: After exposure to radiation from radioiodine, both the genetic activity and the protein expression are increased, as the scientists' studies were able to substantiate. CLIP2 appears to be particularly significant in the development of tumours in the thyroid gland after radiation exposure. The team around Martin Selmansberger, Dr. Julia Heß, Dr. Kristian Unger and Prof. Dr. Horst Zitzelsberger from the Radiation Cytogenetics Research Unit at the Helmholtz Zentrum München discovered a connection between high CLIP2 levels and ...

Substance abuse counselors and social workers often recommend recovering addicts establish new networks of non-using friends and supporters. But researchers at Case Western Reserve University's social work school found, for many women in poverty, it's not so easy to drop the users in their lives. Many are people that women depend on for childcare, transportation and other necessities to live. "People in the women's networks might be family members, parents or children, who also use drugs. It's hard to cut these people out of their lives," said Elizabeth M. Tracy, ...

Women who worry, cope poorly with stress and/or experience mood swings in middle age run a higher risk of developing Alzheimer disease later in life. This is the conclusion of a study carried out at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, that followed 800 women for nearly 40 years. The study, which will be published in the scientific journal Neurology, started in 1968 when 800 women in Gothenburg took a personality test that measured, among other things, their levels of neuroticism and extroversion. High Stress The women in the study stated whether they ...

Dental anxiety can be so extreme for some patients that a simple cotton swab on the gums makes them flinch. And others, fearful of pain, simply avoid seeing the dentist, according to a new study by Case Western Reserve University dental researchers on when and how to use sedatives during dental procedures. As a result, dentistry is responding with sedation techniques to make fearful and anxious patients more comfortable. For a master's thesis in endodontics, Madhavi Setty, DDS, MSD, set out to understand how dental specialties like endodontics for root canals, periodontics ...

The once-powerful Category 5 Typhoon Vongfong has fortunately weakened to a barely Category 1 typhoon as it approaches the big islands of Japan. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite and NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Vongfong on Oct. 11 and noticed the heaviest precipitation was north of the center. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over Vongfong on Oct. 11 at 17:23 UTC (1:23 p.m. EDT) and captured an infrared image of the storm from the VIIRS instrument. The VIIRS instrument showed that the strongest thunderstorms that stretched highest in the atmosphere were in the ...

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Cyclone Hudhud as it was nearing east-central India's coastline on Oct. 11. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard Aqua captured infrared data on the storm on Oct. 11 at 07:23 UTC (3:23 a.m. EDT) that showed cloud top temperatures had dropped, indicating stronger uplift and stronger thunderstorms. That's an indication that the storm has strengthened in the last day. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that animated infrared satellite imagery shows the eye feature has become cloud filled while the overall structure ...