Many Americans need extraordinary willpower to avoid becoming obese – or to slim down if they already weigh too much. For members of minority groups, maintaining a healthy weight can be that much harder according to new research led by Luis Rivera, an experimental social psychologist at Rutgers University-Newark. Rivera says it is common for minorities in the United States to endure negative stereotypes, pervasive messages that suggest those groups are inferior, and that these attitudes can prevent people from doing what is needed to care for their health. "When you ...

URBANA, Ill. – Two University of Illinois scientists are contributing to World Health Organization (WHO) efforts to fortify condiments and seasonings for use in countries with widespread micronutrient deficiencies. "In some countries where these deficiencies are widespread, there is consistent use—almost a daily dose—of certain condiments and seasonings, such as soy sauce in Southeast Asia, at all socioeconomic levels, and there's a real opportunity to correct deficiencies by fortifying these food items," said Luis A. Mejia, a U of I adjunct professor in food science ...

NEW YORK—The keyword term a consumer uses in their search engine query can predict the likelihood that they will click on an organic or paid advertisement. That's according to new research by Columbia Business School that takes a unique look at a consumer's behavior between the keyword search and the point-of-click. The new information may give marketers the edge in converting even more consumer clicks on their sites. The research, "Consumer Click Behavior at a Search Engine: The Role of Keyword Popularity," published in this month's Journal of Marketing Research gives ...

Satellite data showed that Lowell had ceased its life as a tropical cyclone over the past weekend. By Saturday, August 23 at 11 p.m. EDT, the once mighty and huge Tropical Storm Lowell degenerated into a remnant low pressure area. At that time, the center of post-tropical cyclone Lowell was located near latitude 24.7 north and longitude 127.4 west. That's about 1,110 miles (1,790 km) west of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. The post-tropical cyclone was moving toward the northwest near 8 mph (13 kph) and maximum sustained winds decreased to 25 mph (55 kph). NOAA's ...

The National Hurricane Center expected Marie to become a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) and it did. On August 24, when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead, Marie reached Category 4 hurricane status and maintained strength on August 25. Marie continues to cause dangerous surf along the west coast of Mexico. The MODIS instrument (or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) aboard NASA's Aqua satellite took a visible picture of Hurricane Marie as it reached Category 4 hurricane status off the west coast of Mexico ...

Hurricane Marie is a powerhouse in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and because it is close to Tropical Storm Karina, Karina is being weakened by wind shear from the larger, more powerful storm. NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured the tiny storm near Hurricane Marie today. On August 23, Karina had strengthened into a hurricane and by the next day wind shear had weakened the storm back into a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds near 70 mph (110 kph). Satellite data on August 24 gave Karina the classic appearance of a sheared tropical cyclone, showing the strongest storms ...

The third tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season formed near the southeastern Bahamas on Sunday, August 24. NASA's Aqua satellite and NOAA's GOES-East satellites provided imagery of the storm's birth and movement. System 96L lingered in the eastern Caribbean over the last couple of days and on Saturday, August 23, became a tropical depression. That depression strengthened into a tropical storm during the morning of August 24. A GOES-East satellite image was taken at 9:30 a.m. EDT on August 24 showed Cristobal as a rounded area of clouds north of Hispaniola (Haiti ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 25, 2014— Nearly 1 in 6 adults worldwide may suffer from chronic constipation and, over time, the disorder can cause serious complications. Auriculotherapy, a form of acupuncture that involves stimulating targeted points on the outer ear, may help in managing constipation. Evidence from numerous clinical studies published between 2007-2013 that evaluated the effectiveness of auriculotherapy in treating patients with constipation is presented and discussed in a Review article in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed ...

For "credence services" such as auto-repair, healthcare, and legal services, the benefit to the customers for the service is difficult to assess before and even after the service. A new study in a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) finds that in a credence services market, when more service providers care about the customer's well-being, society as whole may actually be worse off. The study titled, "Signaling through Pricing by Service Providers with Social Preferences," is by Baojun Jiang (Washington University in ...

To get the most enjoyment out of our dollar, science tells us to focus our discretionary spending on trips over TVs, on concerts over clothing, since experiences tend to bring more enduring pleasure than do material goods. New research shows that the enjoyment we derive from experiential purchases may begin before we even buy. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This research offers important information for individual consumers those who are trying to "decide on the right mix of material and experiential ...

Rice University researchers have created a CMOS-compatible, biomimetic color photodetector that directly responds to red, green and blue light in much the same way the human eye does. The new device was created by researchers at Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) and is described online in a new study in the journal Advanced Materials. It uses an aluminum grating that can be added to silicon photodetectors with the silicon microchip industry's mainstay technology, "complementary metal-oxide semiconductor," or CMOS. Conventional photodetectors convert light into ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 25, 2014—In a closed-loop control approach to managing type 1 diabetes, glucose sensors placed under the skin continuously monitor blood sugar levels, triggering the release of insulin from an implantable insulin pump as needed. The aim of this closed-loop insulin delivery system is improved control of blood glucose levels throughout the day and night. But a new study in adults and adolescents found that mean blood glucose levels remained at safe levels 53-82% of the time, according to the results published in Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics ...

HOUSTON – (Aug. 25, 2014) – With approximately 50 million scientific papers available in public databases– and a new one publishing nearly every 30 seconds – scientists cannot know about every relevant study when they are deciding where to take their research next. A new tool in development by computational biologists at Baylor College of Medicine and analytics experts at IBM research and tested as a "proof-of-principle" may one day help researchers mine all public medical literature and formulate hypotheses that promise the greatest reward when pursuing new scientific ...

Alexandria, Va. — The rapid proliferation of 3-D printing technology in the early 2000s sent ripples of excitement through the tech world and beyond, but the high price of printers put them out of reach for most academic researchers and hobbyists. Now, more affordable printers have broken this barrier, and geoscientists have started testing the waters. From the delicate geometry of a crystal lattice to the sweeping strata of an anticline, geology is an inherently 3-D discipline. Three-dimensional printing offers the chance to make those structures replicable, communicable ...

The blood-brain barrier prevents xenobiotics from entering the central nervous system. Growing evidence indicates that neurotoxins, such as tributyltin, manganese and nanoparticles, may disrupt the function of the blood-brain and blood-cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) barriers. Previous studies show that chronic acrylamide exposure leads to central and peripheral neuropathy. However, very few studies have focused on the effects of acrylamide exposure on these barriers. Prof. Yanshu Zhang and co-workers from Hebei United University in China found that acrylamide exposure damages ...

There are many biological tools that help animals ensure reproductive success. A new study in The Journal of Cell Biology provides further detail into how one such mechanism enables male fruit flies to improve their odds by stopping females from mating with other flies. In addition to sperm, semen carries products that foster sperm survival, promote egg fertilization, and serve other functions that optimize a male's chances of passing along his genes. In male fruit flies, for example, reproductive accessory glands (thought to be equivalent to the prostate gland in humans) ...

Researchers at the Gladstone Institutes and University of California, San Francisco have shown that a loss of cells in the retina is one of the earliest signs of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in people with a genetic risk for the disorder—even before any changes appear in their behavior. Published today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the researchers, led by Gladstone investigator Li Gan, PhD and UCSF associate professor of neurology Ari Green, MD, studied a group of individuals who had a certain genetic mutation that is known to result in FTD. They discovered ...

It is a fact that smoking is harmful and associated with deadly diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. Researchers also know that smokers die earlier than non-smokers. But a study that sheds light on the direct causal relationship between smoking and mortality by investigating genes has never been published before: – We have studied 55,568 individuals, including 32,823 smokers who we followed for ten years. 3,430 died during this period. The epidemiological studies were supported by genetic analyses, and the conclusion is clear. Smoking is associated with ...

In a recent report in Aging Cell, a multidisciplinary team of Spanish scientists, led by Tim Cash and Manuel Serrano at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), identify rare variants in the APOB gene in several families where exceptional longevity (>100 years of age) appears to cluster. Investigators identified three Spanish families with at least two siblings of around 100 years of age and they sequenced their genes in the hope of finding rare variants that could be associated with extreme longevity. Remarkably, only one gene was found carrying rare variants ...

To get the most enjoyment out of our dollar, science tells us to focus our discretionary spending on trips over TVs, on concerts over clothing, since experiences tend to bring more enduring pleasure than do material goods. New research shows that the enjoyment we derive from experiential purchases may begin before we even buy. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This research offers important information for individual consumers those who are trying to "decide on the right mix of material and experiential ...

Engineers at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have successfully piloted the world's first ZigBee-based inter-satellite communication system. The team at the Satellite Research Centre launched the VELOX-I, which consists of a nanosatellite weighing 3.5 kg and a piggyback picosatellite weighing 1.5 kg, from the two highest points on campus. Both miniature satellites were configured with a ZigBee wireless network and equipped with small sensor nodes that perform functions such as local sensing, distributed computing and data-gathering. Designed to evaluate ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have developed a new integrated approach to pinpoint the genetic "drivers" of cancer, uncovering eight genes that could be viable for targeted breast cancer therapy. The study, published online August 24 in Nature Genetics, was authored by Michael Gatza, PhD, lead author and post-doctoral research associate; Grace Silva, graduate student; Joel Parker, PhD, director of bioinformatics, UNC Lineberger; Cheng Fan, research associate; and senior author Chuck Perou, PhD, professor of genetics and pathology. These ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — If a nursing home makes an extensive investment in "culture change" it will see improvements in quality of care, according to a new study led by Brown University gerontology researchers. Culture change is a rethinking of nursing home operations and structure to allow a more residential lifestyle for residents, more resident choice in schedules and activities, and more front-line staff input into care management. Residents, for example, may become able to decide when to go to lunch and nurse's aides may get a seat at the table in designing ...

A new summary of 12 years of research on North Carolina's pre-kindergarten program for at-risk 4-year-olds shows that "dual-language learners" make the greatest academic progress in the program. According to the report from the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG), while students in NC Pre-K advance across all spheres of learning, the program is especially beneficial for the state's dual-language learners. "On the whole, children in NC Pre-K exceed normal expectations for the rate of developmental growth, both while in the program and afterward in kindergarten," ...

During plant growth, dividing cells in meristems must coordinate transitions from division to expansion and differentiation. Three distinct developmental zones are generated: the meristem, where the cell division takes place, and elongation and differentiation zones. At the same time, plants can rapidly adjust their direction of growth to adapt to environmental conditions. In Arabidopsis roots, many aspects of zonation are controlled by the plant hormone auxin and auxin-induced PLETHORA transcription factors. Both show a graded distribution with a maximum near the root ...