One of astronomy's big questions is why galaxies forming as recently as 1 billion years after the Big Bang contain so much dust. The leading hypothesis is that supernovae, stars that explode at the end of their lives, contain large amounts of metal-enriched material that, in turn, harbors key ingredients of dust, like silicon, iron and carbon.
Consumers often make decisions by predicting how they'll feel after an event or purchase. But different approaches to predicting lead to different conclusions, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Authors Jane E. J. Ebert (University of Minnesota), Daniel T. Gilbert (Harvard University), and Timothy D. Wilson (University of Virginia) examined the difference between two common ways of predicting emotions: forecasting and "backcasting."
Washington, DC – Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) have been able to speed recovery and substantially reduce damage resulting from spinal cord injury in preclinical studies.
Their research, published online in Annals of Neurology and led by Kimberly Byrnes, PhD, shows that inflammation following injury causes the neurotoxicity that leads to lasting nerve cell damage, and that an experimental agent is able to block this inflammatory reaction.
To avoid unwanted or unnecessary purchases, keep your hands off the goods. That's the conclusion of a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Authors Joann Peck (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Suzanne B. Shu (UCLA) cite a 2003 warning from the Illinois state attorney general's office that warned holiday shoppers to be cautious of retailers who encourage them to hold objects and imagine the objects as their own when shopping. The authors wondered whether the warning was valid and, more generally, if touch influences the feeling of ownership and valuation of an object.
Although perhaps the greatest public health achievement of the 20th century was the disinfection of water, a recent study now shows that the chemicals used to purify the water we drink and use in swimming pools react with organic material in the water yielding toxic consequences.
Consumers are constantly bombarded with subtle and even subconscious cues from their environment. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines whether these cues activate goals that affect behavior in the long term or momentary desires that fade away.
Authors Aner Sela and Baba Shiv (both Stanford Graduate School of Business) investigated the difference between goals that influence behavior and semantic activation, which has no lingering effect on behavior.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Stopping to smell the coffee – and enjoy a cup of it – before your morning workout might do more than just get your juices flowing. It might keep you going for reasons you haven't even considered.
As a former competitive cyclist, University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Robert Motl routinely met his teammates at a coffee shop to fuel up on caffeine prior to hitting the pavement on long-distance training rides.
"The notion was that caffeine was helping us train harder … to push ourselves a little harder," he said.
Cells isolated from the eye that many scientists believed were retinal stem cells are, in fact, normal adult cells, investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have found. If retinal stem cells could be obtained, they might provide the basis for treatments to restore sight to millions of people with blindness caused by retinal degeneration. Stem cells are immature cells capable of producing large numbers of adult cells, such as retinal cells. Researchers believe that stem cells offer the promise of regenerating tissue in organs such as the eye, brain and heart, damaged by trauma or disease.
The beneficial effects of anti-angiogenesis drugs in the treatment of the deadly brain tumors called glioblastomas appear to result primarily from reduction of edema – the swelling of brain tissue – and not from any direct anti-tumor effect, according to a study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers. Their report, to be published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology and receiving early online release, describes how treatment with the experimental drug cediranib reduced edema and improved survival in three mouse models of glioblastoma.
DURHAM, N.C. – Mice born without a certain enzyme can resist the normal effects of a heart attack and retain nearly normal function in the heart's ventricles and still-oxygenated heart tissue, according to a study by researchers at Duke University Medical Center.
The findings raise the possibility of a therapy that could stimulate the growth of blood vessels and limit damage from a heart attack as well as prevent an attack from occurring at all, the scientists said.
Normal mice that went through the same experiment had full heart attacks, suffering damage to their heart pumps and a lack of oxygen in their heart tissues, which are typical effects of a heart attack.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Studies done with laboratory rats suggest that supplementation of their diet with lipoic acid had a significant effect in lowering triglycerides, which along with cholesterol levels and blood pressure are one of the key risk factors in cardiovascular disease.
In the lab animals, supplements of lipoic acid lowered triglyceride levels up to 60 percent. If the effect were the same in humans – which is not yet clear – that would be a greater impact than found with other dietary supplements, and similar to the effects of some prescription drugs.
Two-year-olds with autism lack an important building block of social interaction that prompts newborn babies to pay attention to other people. Instead, these children pay attention to physical relationships between movement and sound and miss critical social information. Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine report their results in the March 29 online issue of Nature.
February's brutal chimpanzee attack, during which a pet chimp inflicted devastating injuries on a Connecticut woman, was a stark reminder that chimps are much stronger than humans—as much as four-times stronger, some researchers believe. But what is it that makes our closest primate cousins so much stronger than we are? One possible explanation is that great apes simply have more powerful muscles. Indeed, biologists have uncovered differences in muscle architecture between chimpanzees and humans. But evolutionary biologist Alan Walker, a professor at Penn State University, thinks muscles may only be part of the story.
