Practicing a little Zen before class can lead to better grades, according to a new experimental study by George Mason University professor Robert Youmans and University of Illinois doctoral student Jared Ramsburg. The pair of researchers conducted three classroom experiments at a California university to see if meditation might help students focus better and retain information. A random selection of students followed basic meditation instructions before a lecture, and the students who meditated before the lecture scored better on a quiz that followed than students who ...

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—April 9, 2013—A new national public opinion poll commissioned by Research!America shows only 18% of respondents believe chronic pain is a major health problem, even though a majority of Americans (63%) say they know someone who experienced pain so severe that they sought prescription medicines to treat it. Chronic pain conditions affect about 100 million U.S. adults at a cost of approximately $600 billion annually in direct medical treatment costs and lost productivity. Most Americans are concerned about the misuse of pain medication to treat chronic ...

Consumers from less individualistic cultures are more likely to judge the quality of a product by its price, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Culture influences the tendency to use the price of a product to judge its quality. Although price-quality judgments are made by consumers across cultures, less individualistic consumers (Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Chinese) rely more on price to judge quality than do individualists (Americans, British, French, Canadians, Australians)," write authors Ashok K. Lalwani (Indiana University) and Sharon ...

April 9, 2013 ANN ARBOR, Mich. — One-quarter of women who should take hormone-blocking therapies as part of their breast cancer treatment either do not start or do not complete the five-year course, according to a new study led by University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers. Five years of daily tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors -- two types of endocrine therapy that are taken as a pill -- is recommended for many women whose breast cancer expresses the hormones estrogen or progesterone. The drugs have been shown to reduce cancer recurrence and increase ...

This press release is available in German. In the search for new antibiotics, researchers are taking an unusual approach: They are developing peptides, short chains of protein building blocks that effectively inhibit a key enzyme of bacterial metabolism. Now, scientists at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) in Saarbrücken, a branch of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI), have published their findings and the implications for potential medical application in the scientific journal ACS Chemical Biology. The road from gene ...

In a competitive context, consumers are willing to pay significantly more to win when other bidders are unknown, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "The tendency to assume that other consumers are similar to us is reversed when we're in a competitive, as opposed to cooperative, situation. This alters our aggressiveness toward others and the prices we are willing to bid in auctions," write authors David A. Norton (University of Connecticut), Cait Lamberton (University of Pittsburgh), and Rebecca Walker Naylor (Ohio State University). Consumers ...

Certain physical acts of completion provide consumers with a sense of closure that makes them happier with their purchases, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Choice closure, the psychological process through which consumers perceive a decision as complete and stop reassessing their choice, can increase satisfaction with decisions involving many alternatives. Subtle physical acts that symbolize closure can trigger choice closure and increase satisfaction," write authors Yangjie Gu, Simona Botti, and David Faro (all London Business School). After ...

Financial pressure and workplace stress lead some American men to take on home improvement projects, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Depending on their social class, men tend to use DIY home improvement to envision themselves as either suburban craftsmen or family handymen," write authors Risto Moisio (California State University, Long Beach), Eric J. Arnould (University of Bath), and James Gentry (University of Nebraska, Lincoln). Consumer research has tended to focus on demonstrating how masculine identity is constructed away from home ...

Setting a mouse free to roam might alarm most people, but not so for nuclear imaging researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Maryland who have developed a new imaging system for mouse brain studies. Scientists use dynamic imaging of mice to follow changes in brain chemistry caused by the progression of disease or the application of a drug as an effective research tool for developing better ways to diagnose disease and formulate better ...

As demand for computing and communication capacity surges, the global communication infrastructure struggles to keep pace, since the light signals transmitted through fiber-optic lines must still be processed electronically, creating a bottleneck in telecommunications networks. While the idea of developing an optical transistor to get around this problem is alluring to scientists and engineers, it has also remained an elusive vision, despite years of experiments with various approaches. Now, McGill University researchers have taken a significant, early step toward this ...

The intrauterine environment plays an important role in the health of the offspring. Now, experts from the University of Navarra affirm that the mother's stress, due to socio-economic or psycho-social causes, is associated with the development of pathologies related with obesity. "The growing prevalence of obesity cannot be solely attributed to genetic factors or poor nutrition, but also to lifestyle and adverse environmental factors," as explained to SINC by Javier Campión, lead researcher of this new study. "The said environmental factors could have a bearing on epigenetic ...

Sellers mostly focus on the desirability of a product when setting prices. Buyers, however, focus evenly on the product itself and what's entailed in using it, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Sellers tend to focus on aspects of a product that are related to its desirability. Buyers, in contrast, focus both on its desirability and the feasibility of using and consuming the product. This difference in focus leads buyers and sellers to set different prices for the same product," write authors Caglar Irmak (University of South Carolina), Cheryl ...

These results incentivise the development of targeted therapies enabling improved neurone production to alleviate cognitive decline in the elderly and reduce the cerebral lesions caused by radiotherapy. The research is published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. New neurones are formed regularly in the adult brain in order to guarantee that all our cognitive capacities are maintained. This neurogenesis may be adversely affected in various situations and especially: in the course of ageing, after radiotherapy treatment of a brain tumour. (The irradiation ...

For territorial animals, such as beavers, "owning" a territory ensures access to food, mates and nest sites. Defending that territory can involve fights which cause injury or death. How does an animal decide whether to take on an opponent or not? A new study by Helga Tinnesand and her colleagues from the Telemark University College in Norway has found that the anal gland secretions of beavers contain information about age and social status which helps other beavers gauge their level of response to the perceived threat. The study is published online today in Springer's journal ...

COLUMBUS, OHIO -- Beyond good test scores and high school grades, a new study finds one key factor that helps predict if a young black man will succeed at a predominantly white university. That factor is "grit" – a dedication to pursuing and achieving a goal, whatever the obstacles and failures along the way. Grit is so important that it was found to affect college grades for black men almost as much as high school GPA and ACT scores, said Terrell Strayhorn, author of the study and associate professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University. "For many ...

New Rochelle, NY, April 9, 2013–The decision to perform an invasive procedure to open clogged arteries in the heart instead of first trying medication and lifestyle changes may not reduce a patient's risk of death or of a major cardiac event. Unnecessary procedures to treat chronic, stable heart disease contribute to rising health care costs. A targeted approach to avoiding this kind of overutilization by instead relying on evidence-based decision-making is presented in Population Health Management, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article ...

Researchers from the Bonn University Hospital implanted pacemaker electrodes into the medial forebrain bundle in the brains of patients suffering from major depression with amazing results: In six out of seven patients, symptoms improved both considerably and rapidly. The method of Deep Brain Stimulation had already been tested on various structures within the brain, but with clearly lesser effect. The results of this new study have now been published in the renowned international journal "Biological Psychiatry." After months of deep sadness, a first smile appears on ...

Rising temperatures will lead to a massive "greening" of the Arctic by mid-century, as a result of marked increases in plant cover, according to research supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of its International Polar Year (IPY) portfolio. The greening not only will have effects on plant life, the researchers noted, but also on the wildlife that depends on vegetation for cover. The greening could also have a multiplier effect on warming, as dark vegetation absorbs more solar radiation than ice, which reflects sunlight. In a paper published March ...

High blood pressure and obesity are no longer confined to wealthy countries, a new study has found. These health risks have traditionally been associated with affluence, and in 1980, they were more prevalent in countries with a higher income. The new research, published in Circulation, shows that the average body mass index of the population is now just as high or higher in middle-income countries. For blood pressure, the situation has reversed among women, with a tendency for blood pressure to be higher in poorer countries. Researchers at Imperial College London, ...

We all desire self-control — the resolve to skip happy hour and go to the gym instead, to finish a report before checking Facebook, to say no to the last piece of chocolate cake. Though many struggle to resist those temptations, new research suggests that people with low self-control prefer and depend on people with high self-control, possibly as a way to make up for the skills they themselves lack. This research, conducted by psychological scientists Catherine Shea, Gráinne Fitzsimons, and Erin Davisson of Duke University, is published in Psychological Science, a journal ...

Wetlands serve as the Earth's kidneys. They filter and clean people's water supplies while serving as important habitat for many species, including iconic species like cattails, cranes and alligators. Conventional ecosystem health assessments have focused on populations of these larger species. However, the tiny, unseen creatures in the wetlands provided crucial indicators of the ecosystems' health in a study by University of Missouri Associate Professor of Engineering Zhiqiang Hu and his team. Using analysis of the microbiological health of wetlands is cheaper and faster ...

Amsterdam, NL, April 9, 2013 – Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is being increasingly explored as a therapeutic tool for movement disorders associated with deficient inhibition throughout the central nervous system. This includes treatment of focal hand dystonia (FHD), characterized by involuntary movement of the fingers either curling into the palm or extending outward. A new study published in Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience reports short-term changes in behavioral, physiologic, and clinical measures that support further research into the therapeutic ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – GSA Bulletin articles posted online ahead of print over the last month study (1) a Carboniferous collision in central Asia; (2) crystal xenoliths in the Bolivian Altiplano; (3) The Tsakhir Event; (4) Onverwacht Group and Fig Tree Group contact, Barberton greenstone belt, South Africa; (5) iron oxide deposits in the Paraíba Basin, NE Brazil; (6) the southern Alaska syntaxis; (7) paleotopography of the South Norwegian margin; and (8) the Cheyenne belt suture zone, USA. GSA BULLETIN articles published ahead of print are online at http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/early/recent; ...

WASHINGTON, DC (April 8, 2013)—Once considered part of the "junk" of our genome, much of the DNA between protein-coding genes is now known to be transcribed. New findings by scientists at Fox Chase Cancer Center have identified several dozen transcripts known as lincRNAs, or long intergenic non-coding RNAs, that are dysregulated in breast cancer. The results, to be presented at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 on Monday, April 8, offer both a new research path for better understanding of how breast cancer works and a new method for identifying lincRNAs that may contribute to ...

Minocycline, an older, broad-spectrum antibiotic in the tetracycline family, provides meaningful improvements as a therapeutic for children with fragile X syndrome, a study by researchers at the UC Davis MIND Institute has found. The finding is important, the researchers said, because minocycline is a targeted treatment for the condition that is readily available by prescription. After three months of treatment with minocycline, children with fragile X syndrome had greater improvements in general behavior, anxiety and mood-related behaviors when compared with children ...