News Articles

While most researchers and policy makers are looking to new technologies to slow the pace of climate change, scientists from Cornell University and the University of New South Wales are reporting that "biochar" — a material that the Amazonian Indians used to enhance soil fertility centuries ago — has potential in the modern world to help slow global climate change. Mass production of biochar could capture and sock away carbon that otherwise would wind up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. .

The more hands of online poker a player wins, the more money that person is likely to lose, concludes a study conducted by a Cornell sociology doctoral student. The likely reason being that multiple wins are common for small stakes poker, and the more someone plays, the more likely he or she will eventually be walloped by occasional – but significant – losses.

Drinking green tea could modulate the effects of smoking on lung cancer, suggests a hospital-based, randomized study presented at the AACR-IASLC Joint Conference on Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer. Researchers enrolled 170 patients with lung cancer and 340 healthy patients as controls.  The team administered questionnaires to obtain demographic characteristics, cigarette smoking habits, green tea consumption, dietary intake of fruits and vegetables, cooking practices and family history of lung cancer. They also performed genotyping on insulin-like growth factors as polymorphisms on the following insulin-like growth factors: IGF1, IGF2 and IGFBP3, which have all been reported to be associated with cancer risk.

Blocking the function of an enzyme called cPLA2 with a specific kind of vitamin E can prevent nerve cells from dying after a stroke, new research published in the Journal of Neurochemistry suggests. Using mouse brain cells, scientists found that the tocotrienol (TCT) form of vitamin E stopped the enzyme from releasing fatty acids that eventually kill neurons.Vitamin E occurs naturally in eight different forms. The best-known form of vitamin E belongs to a variety called tocopherols. The form of vitamin E in this study, tocotrienol or TCT, is not abundant in the American diet but is available as a nutritional supplement. It is a common component of a typical Southeast Asian diet.

No matter what you do for a living, you're likely to consistently feel better mentally and physically on the weekend, according to a study of daily mood variation in employed adults. Dubbed the 'weekend effect', this tendency to feel  better on your days off is largely associated with the freedom to choose how you spend your time, the study's authors suggest. 

While exerting willpower is an important part of losing weight, new evidence suggests that their may be more to successful dieting than simply trying to eat less. Cognitive scientists from Indiana University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin have found that the perceived complexity of diets themselves can also have a big influence on the pounds shed. Their research was published in the journal Appetite. 

Policy makers and lobbyists who want to enact a carbon tax would do well to choose their words carefully, say Columbia University Psychologists. In a new study in Psychological Science, the research team suggests that since voters typically don't like higher taxes, policy proposals aimed at reducing CO2 emissions should be referred to as 'carbon offsets' in order to generate the most public support. The semantic trick even works on those who are most resistant to a political response to climate change--Republicans. 

 Giving up caffeine does not relieve tinnitus and acute caffeine withdrawal may actually add to the problem, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Audiology. 

Parents are acutely aware of the influence that friends exert over their children's behavior -- how they dress, how they wear their hair, whether they drink or smoke. And now a new laboratory-based study has shown that friends may also influence how much adolescents eat. The study appears online in the current issue of Annals of Behavioral Medicine and involved 54 overweight and non-overweight youth -- 24 boys and 30 girls -- between the ages of 9 and 11.  Each was assigned randomly to bring a friend or to be paired with an unfamiliar peer. Studyparticipants worked on a computer game to earn points exchangeable for food or time to spend with their friend or with an unfamiliar peer.

Scientists have long puzzled over how iguanas, a group of lizards mostly found in the Americas, came to inhabit the isolated Pacific islands of Fiji and Tonga. For years, the leading explanation has been that progenitors of the island species must have rafted there, riding across the Pacific on a mat of vegetation or floating debris. But new research in the January issue of The American Naturalist suggests that iguanas may have simply walked to Fiji and Tonga when the islands were still a part of an ancient southern supercontinent.

Education plays a key role in lifelong memory performance and risk for dementia, and it's well documented that those with a college degree possess a cognitive advantage over their less educated counterparts in middle and old age. But if you didn't attend college there's still a way to retain your memory, and it'll probably cost you a lot less than a degree.  A large national study published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry shows that people with less schooling can significantly compensate for poorer education by frequently engaging in mental exercises such as word games, puzzles, reading, and lectures.

Spending too many hours on the couch watching TV could cut your life short, according to a new study in Circulation. Australian researchers tracked the lifestyle habits of 8,800 adults and found that for every hour of television watched per day, the risk of dying earlier from cardiovascular disease increased by 18 percent. The team also found that each hour spent in front of the television daily was associated with an 11 percent increased risk of death from all causes and a 9 percent increased risk of cancer death.