Households located in poor neighborhoods pay more for the same items than people living in wealthy ones, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Author Debabrata Talukdar of Columbia University found that the critical factor in how much a household spends on groceries is whether it has access to a car.

According to the findings, those without access to cars—which are exclusively poor households, but include only 40 percent of poor households— pay higher prices for groceries than households with access to a car (whether wealthy or poor). Lacking mobility means consumers buy from the nearest neighborhood store rather than larger regional or national grocery chains, which have lower prices.

People are more than happy to fool themselves and nothing can make dieters who cheat happier than those `100 calorie' sized snacks.

As a result of that 'it is smaller so I can eat more of them' mentality, chronic dieters tend to consume more calories when foods and packages are smaller, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. The authors examined consumer behavior regarding "mini-packs," 100-calorie food packages that are marketed to help people control calorie intake.

The systematics of celestial bodies needs to be revised, say researchers at the Argelander Institute of Astronomy of the University of Bonn. Brown dwarfs, to-date merely regarded as stars which were below normal size, may well be stellar ‘miscarriages' and need to be treated as a separate class in addition to stars and planets.

Brown dwarfs (or BDs) are what scientists call objects which populate the galaxies apart from the stars. Unlike the latter, they cannot develop high-yield hydrogen fusion as in the interior of our sun due to their low mass (less than about 8% of the sun’s mass). But in addition to this brown dwarfs and stars also seem to be different in their ‘mating behavior’.

A simple and primitive animal, Trichoplax adhaerens, appears to harbor a far more complex suite of capabilities than meets the eye. The findings, reported Nature, establish a group of organisms as a branching point of animal evolution and identify sets of genes, or a "parts list," employed by organisms that have evolved along particular branches.

Trichoplax adhaerens was first detected in the 1880s clinging to the sides of an aquarium but it just recently got characterized by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI)and they found that its ancient lineage was matched by its complexity.

According to new research in the Journal of Consumer Research, simply asking people a question about whether they're willing to volunteer their time leads to increases in donations of both time and money.

The researchers conducted three separate studies, which yielded similar results. In the first study, participants completed an online survey and then read a statement about lung cancer and the American Lung Cancer Foundation's mission. Half of the participants were asked how much time they would like to donate to the foundation and half were not asked. Then all were asked how much money they would donate to the foundation. The participants who were asked to donate time eventually pledged more than those who weren't asked: $36.44 versus $24.46.

Biologists and biochemists are now able to access 3-D images of biomacromolecules underlying biological functions and disease, thanks to a collaborative website called Proteopedia which provides a new resource by linking written information and three-dimensional structural information.

Rather than relying just on text to provide the understanding of biomacromolecule structures, this wiki web resource, first described in Genome Biology, displays protein structures and other biomacromolecules in interactive format. These interactive images are surrounded by descriptive text containing hyperlinks that change the appearance (such as view, representations, colors or labels) of the adjacent 3D structure to reflect the concept explained in the text.

This makes the complex structural information readily accessible and comprehensible, even to people who are not structural biologists.