Think of your next exercise workout as a "fun run" or as a well-deserved break, and you'll eat less afterward. Think of it as exercise or as a workout and you'll later eat more dessert and snacks to reward yourself. These new findings from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab study involved two studies where adults were led on a 2 km walk around a small lake and were either told it was going to be an exercise walk or a scenic walk. In the first study, 56 adults completed their walk and were then given lunch. Those who believed they had been on an exercise walk served and ...

SALT LAKE CITY, July 9, 2014 – Collectors found the first two specimens of the prickly plant in 1974 and 1990 in west Texas. Then, for two decades, the 14-inch-tall plant was identified wrongly as one species, then another and then a third. Now – after a long search turned up a "pathetic, wilted" third specimen – a University of Utah botanist and her colleagues identified the spiny plant as a new, possibly endangered species and named it "from the heart" in Latin because it was found in Valentine, Texas, population 134 in 2010. Most new plant species are found in the ...

Hospitals across the country vary substantially in their use of minimally invasive surgery, even when evidence shows that for most patients, minimally invasive surgery is superior to open surgery, a new study shows. The finding represents a major disparity in the surgical care delivered at various hospitals, the study's authors say, and identifies an area of medicine ripe for improvement. "Some surgeons specialize in complex open operations, and we should endorse that expertise," says Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School ...

Astronomers have studied the carbon monoxide in a galaxy over 12 billion light years from Earth and discovered that it's running out of gas, quite literally, and headed for a 'red and dead' future. The galaxy, known as ALESS65, was observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in 2011 and is one of less than 20 known distant galaxies to contain carbon monoxide. Dr Minh Huynh from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) led the team on their search for galactic carbon monoxide in work published ...

Hand hygiene rates were found to be three times higher when auditors were visible to healthcare workers than when there were no auditors present, according to a study in a major Canadian acute care hospital. The study, titled, "Quantification of the Hawthorne effect in hand hygiene compliance monitoring using an electronic monitoring system: a retrospective cohort study," published today on-line in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal, by first author Dr. Jocelyn Srigley, who did the study as part of her Master's thesis while a Clinical Fellow in Infection Prevention and ...

SAN DIEGO – July 8, 2014 In a study published yesterday in the scientific journal Nature Immunology, a group at the La Jolla Institute (LJI) led by Pandurangan Vijayanand, Ph.D. identify new genes that likely contribute to asthma, a disease that currently affects over 200 million people world wide. An organism's genetic material, also known as its genome, can be divided into small sections or 'neighborhoods.' Scientists can determine which genetic neighborhoods in a cell are active, or primed for gene production, by looking for a marker on the genome called an enhancer. ...

VIDEO: NASA Goddard astrophysicists Ted Gull and Tom Madura discuss Eta Carinae and their new model of the Homunculus Nebula, a shell of gas and dust ejected during the star's mid-19th... Click here for more information. In the middle of the 19th century, the massive binary system Eta Carinae underwent an eruption that ejected at least 10 times the sun's mass and made it the second-brightest star in the sky. Now, a team of astronomers has used extensive new observations to create ...

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 12:20 p.m. EDT on July 8, 2014, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's ...

VIDEO: The animation begins with global infrared data showing the progression of the storm as it forms into a hurricane. Then GPM flies overhead measuring rain rates on the ground. GPM's... Click here for more information. The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory flew over Hurricane Arthur five times between July 1 and July 5, 2014. Arthur is the first tropical cyclone of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan ...

Tropical Storm Fausto was literally born yesterday and strengthened to a tropical storm quickly. Satellite imagery from NOAA's GOES-West satellite shows a rounded Fausto being "chased" by a developing area of low pressure to the east of the storm. NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite GOES-West captured a combination visible and infrared image of the Eastern Pacific on July 8 at 1500 UTC (10 a.m. EDT). In the image, Tropical Storm Fausto appeared as a rounded area of clouds, compared to the amorphous developing low pressure area behind it. At 6:30 ...

Adults with extreme obesity have increased risks of dying at a young age from cancer and many other causes including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and kidney and liver diseases, according to results of an analysis of data pooled from 20 large studies of people from three countries. The study, led by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, found that people with class III (or extreme) obesity had a dramatic reduction in life expectancy compared with people of normal weight. The findings appeared July 8, 2014, in ...

VIDEO: Researchers at Brown University have developed a wireless virtual reality system to better understand how pedestrians interact with one another and generate patterns of crowd movement. Click here for more information. PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —The cognitive scientists in the Virtual Environment Navigation lab at Brown University are not only advancing a frontier of behavioral research but also of technology. Led by Professor William Warren, the group developed ...

California's landmark cap-and-trade system for regulating greenhouse gases could be vulnerable to price spikes and market manipulation, according to a new study released by scholars affiliated with the Energy Institute at Haas. But the state's air-quality regulators can prevent that outcome with three straightforward reforms, the study says. Specifically, the California Air Resources Board should consider (1) strengthening the new market's price collar—the so-called allowance price containment reserve—(2) allowing permits to be converted from one compliance period to ...

TEMPE, Ariz. - Planet Mercury's unusual metal-rich composition has been a longstanding puzzle in planetary science. According to a study published online in Nature Geoscience July 6, Mercury and other unusually metal-rich objects in the solar system may be relics left behind by collisions in the early solar system that built the other planets. The origin of planet Mercury has been a difficult question in planetary science because its composition is very different from that of the other terrestrial planets and the moon. This small, innermost planet has more than twice ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (http://www.ucr.edu) — Researchers at the University of California, Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering have created a lithium ion battery that outperforms the current industry standard by three times. The key material: sand. Yes, sand. "This is the holy grail – a low cost, non-toxic, environmentally friendly way to produce high performance lithium ion battery anodes," said Zachary Favors, a graduate student working with Cengiz and Mihri Ozkan, both engineering professors at UC Riverside. The idea came to Favors six months ago. He was relaxing ...

University of Iowa researchers have discovered a biomarker that could give expecting mothers and their doctors the first simple blood test to reliably predict that a pregnant woman may develop preeclampsia, at least as early as 6 weeks into the pregnancy. Preeclampsia is a cardiovascular disorder generally occurring late in pregnancy and often resulting in an early delivery, creating immediate and potentially lifelong risks to both mother and baby. It causes high blood pressure and protein in the urine, and is typically diagnosed in the late second or third trimester ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A perspective article published last month by University of California, Riverside chemists in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters was selected as an Editors Choice—an honor only a handful of research papers receive. The perspective reviews the chemists' work on "singlet fission," a process in which a single photon generates a pair of excited states. This 1->2 conversion process, as it is known, has the potential to boost solar cell efficiency by as much as 30 percent. Applications of the research include more energy-efficient lighting and photodetectors ...

VIDEO: NASA's TRMM Satellite Sees Heavy Rainfall in Typhoon Neoguri On July 7 at 2:41 a.m. EDT the TRMM satellite had a near perfect view as it passed above the center... Click here for more information. NASA's Aqua, TRMM and CloudSat dissected powerful Typhoon Neoguri as it moved through the Northwestern Pacific Ocean and affected southern Japan. The three satellites gathered data on rainfall, cloud heights, cloud extent, cloud temperatures, the size of the eye, and what was ...

Princeton, N.J. – A new NPR/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) poll released today that examines the role of stress in Americans' lives finds that about half of the public (49%) reported that they had a major stressful event or experience in the past year. Nearly half (43%) reported that the most stressful experiences related to health. More than half of those who experienced a great deal of stress in the past month say too many overall responsibilities and financial problems were contributors (54% and 53% respectively). More than a ...

Invading glioblastoma cells may hijack cerebral blood vessels during early stages of disease progression and damage the brain's protective barrier, a study in mice indicates. This finding could ultimately lead to new ways to bring about the death of the tumor, as therapies may be able to reach these deadly cells at an earlier time point than was previously thought possible. This research, published in Nature Communications, was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health. Glioblastoma, ...

Researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences dug into the last 70 years of peer-reviewed publications about protozoan parasites that infest bivalve mollusks and found that when an organism can be cultured in the laboratory, more papers and greater understanding result. Senior Research Scientists, José Fernández Robledo and Nicholas Record co-authored an analysis of peer-reviewed publications since 1950 and reported their findings in the June 23 edition of PLOS ONE, an open access journal covering broad aspects of basic and applied biology. Fernández-Robledo ...

Processes that shaped the ridges and troughs on the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Ganymede are likely similar to tectonic processes seen on Earth, according to a team of researchers led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). To arrive at this conclusion, the team subjected physical models made of clay to stretching forces that simulate tectonic action. The results were published in Geophysical Research Letters. Physical analog models simulate geologic structures in laboratory settings so that the developmental sequence of various phenomena can be studied as they occur. ...

New Rochelle, NY, July 8, 2014—For African American women in their 50's and 60's, self-managing their HIV as they age is proving to be less of a challenge than dealing with age-related diseases such as diabetes or hypertension and socioeconomic and emotional aspects of aging, as described in a study published in AIDS Patient Care and STDs, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the AIDS Patient Care and STDs website at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/apc.2014.0024 until August 8, 2014. In the article ...

Smartphone apps can track where we eat our meals, when we commute to and from work and how many minutes we exercise each day. Ten thousand steps today? Check. More people are opting to use their phones as "life-logging" devices, but is the data they collect actually useful? Massive amounts of information showing your life patterns over a week, month or year are going untapped because these applications don't have a way to interpret the data over the long term. University of Washington researchers have developed visual tools to help self-trackers understand their daily ...

Light from tiny galaxies more than 13 billion years ago played a larger role than previously thought in creating the conditions in the universe as we know it today, according to a new study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. Ultraviolet (UV) light from stars in these faint dwarf galaxies helped strip interstellar hydrogen of electrons in a process called reionization, researchers said in a paper published this week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical ...