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A study of home purchases during the real estate boom years in Chicago shows how one ethically murky – and sometimes illegal – tactic used to sell homes may have contributed to the housing crash. The tactic was inflating the selling price of a home, but offering the buyer some incentive – often cash back [...]

Regular exercise may be a useful strategy for helping prevent the development of panic and related disorders, a new study suggests. People with an intense fear of the nausea, racing heart, dizziness, stomachaches and shortness of breath that accompany panic — known as “high anxiety sensitivity” — reacted with less anxiety to a panic-inducing stressor [...]

In the quarterfinal of the 2006 Soccer World Cup, England and Portugal played for 90 tense minutes and 30 minutes extra time without a single goal being scored. This led them to a penalty shoot-out; as one by one, players went against the opposing team’s goalie. After four shots by each team, Portugal was ahead [...]

Smart phone users reading text messages and internet pages hold their devices at a closer distance than they would for printed text—which may have important implications for prescribing vision correction, reports a study in the July issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by [...]

Mothers have been telling their children to stop slouching for ages. It turns out that mom was onto something and that poor posture not only makes a bad impression, but can actually make you physically weaker. According to a study by Scott Wiltermuth, assistant professor of management organization at the USC Marshall School of Business, [...]

Heart experts at Johns Hopkins have begun testing a new device designed to replace blocked aortic valves in patients for whom traditional open-heart surgery is considered too risky, such as elderly patients and those with other serious medical conditions. The testing is part of a nationwide study to evaluate the device, which is deployed in [...]

New research suggests that people can become dependent on highly palatable foods and engage in a compulsive pattern of consumption, similar to the behaviors we observe in drug addicts and those with alcoholism. Using a questionnaire originally developed by researchers at Yale University, a group of obese men and women were assessed according to the [...]

La Trobe University research has revealed for the first time the mechanism by which current anti-malarial drugs kill the malaria parasite. It also helps us understand how these drugs are developing worrying resistance to a pathogen that kills more than 800,000 children each year. The work has just been published in one of the world’s [...]

Research to be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, indicates that caffeine added to sugar-sweetened, carbonated beverages teaches adolescents to prefer those beverages. Researchers found that the amount of caffeine added to [...]

What accounts for the sounds we like to hear? Is it something about the properties of our auditory systems or brains? Or are such tastes learned? Two-month-old human infants show a preference for consonant, or gentler harmonies over more dissonant or harsher ones. But it’s still impossible to know whether that preference is inborn, since [...]

Studies by the University of Toronto’s psychology department suggest that racism may impact some female minority groups more deeply than sexism. “We found that Asian women take racism more personally and find it more depressing than sexism,” said lead author and doctoral student Jessica Remedios. “In order to understand the consequences for people who encounter [...]

An extract of the poisonous shrub Jatropha curcas acts as a strong painkiller and may have a mode of action different from conventional analgesics, such as morphine and other pharmaceuticals. Details of tests are reported in the current issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology. Omeh Yusuf and Ezeja Maxwell of the [...]

Online consumers thought to be motivated primarily by savings are, in fact, often willing to pay a premium for purchases from online vendors with clear, protective privacy policies, according to a new study in the current issue of a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®). “The Effect of Online [...]

The author of this paper set out to determine the extent to which potential “errors” in many early epidemiologic studies led to erroneous conclusions about an inverse association between moderate drinking and coronary heart disease (CHD). His analysis is based on prospective data for more than 124,000 persons interviewed in the U.S. National Health Interview [...]

Psychologists at the University of Missouri have identified the beginning of first grade math skills that teachers and parents should target to effectively improve children’s later math learning. A long-term psychology study indicates that beginning first graders that understand numbers, the quantities those numbers represent, and low-level arithmetic will have better success in learning mathematics [...]

Although out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are typically associated with migraine, epilepsy and psychopathology, they are quite common in healthy and psychologically normal individuals as well. However, they are poorly understood. A new study, published in the July 2011 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex, has linked these experiences to neural instabilities in the brain’s temporal lobes and to [...]

Guitar virtuosos have to master all kinds of playing techniques. But how can the intricate process of playing the instrument be captured digitally? A special thin film on the tailpiece has the answer. Functioning as a sensor, it converts the tension on the string into digital control signals. Rapidly, but expressively and with amazing ease, [...]

Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered previously unknown volcanoes in the ocean waters around the remote South Sandwich Islands. Using ship-borne sea-floor mapping technology during research cruises onboard the RRS James Clark Ross, the scientists found 12 volcanoes beneath the sea surface – some up to 3km high. They found 5km diameter craters [...]

According to the researchers from the University of Bologna (Italy) who designed it, a new automatic accident detection system could reduce the number of vehicles involved in pile-ups by up to 40 percent. For now, at least, that’s what it does on paper and in computer simulations, as is described in an article published in [...]

By honing in on the mysterious potato genome and its tuber – its edible portion – researchers are unveiling the secrets of the world’s most-important nongrain food crop. Robin Buell, Michigan State University plant biologist, is part of an international research team that is mapping the genome of the potato. In the current issue of [...]