It’s not always best to be first, finds a new study from the Journal of Consumer Research. The researchers examined how consumers evaluate new products and found that many products may actually benefit from having competition, entering the market as followers rather than as the first of their kind.

New types of products are constantly being developed and introduced. When a brand releases a product that has never been offered by any brand before, it is the “pioneer” product, and consumers can’t evaluate it in the same way they evaluate existing products, the researchers explain. For example, Clorox was the pioneer brand for disinfectant wipes.

Other brands that then release similar products are termed “followers.” Mr.

Some elections are tougher than others. If you like John Edwards, who would you reject if he drops out, Clinton or Obama? How we decide against candidates can tell us valuable things about how people make choices.

A new study from the February issue of the Journal of Consumer Research reveals that sometimes asking people to reject an option – rather than choose an option – makes it easier for consumers to decide among options that they don’t particularly like.

“If both the alternatives are attractive, then both provide reasons to choose, and therefore are compatible with the choose task,” explain Anish Nagpal from the University of Melbourne) and Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy from the University of Houston.

2-3 percent of children are born with mental retardation. It can sometimes be attributed to external factors (such as a shortage of oxygen at birth) or to defects in the DNA but, in 80% of the cases involving DNA, scientists do not know which genes are responsible.

Researchers at VIB, the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, connected to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in collaboration with an Australian research team, have discovered that, in a portion of these patients, the mental retardation is caused by a twofold production of two proteins (HSD17B10 and HUWE1). This is the first time that scientists have found that duplication of a protein leads to mental retardation.

Researchers today closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.

The dust, chemicals, and air trapped in the two-mile-long ice core will provide critical information for scientists working to predict the extent to which human activity will alter Earth’s climate, according to the chief scientist for the project, Kendrick Taylor of the Desert Research Institute of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Working as part of the National Science Foundation’s West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core Project, a team of scientists, engineers, technicians, and students from multiple U.S.

Traditional gene therapy has focused on supplying a normal copy of a faulty gene. RNAi turns off a problematic gene. These contrasting approaches share some of the same techniques and challenges, including delivery of a therapeutic gene or siRNA into cells. RNA interference (RNAi) represents an innovative new strategy for using small RNA molecules to silence specific genes associated with disease processes.

At least six clinical trials using RNA interference (RNAi) have been approved, “with many more coming down the pipeline,” according to the Editorial by Mark A. Kay, MD, PhD, an Associate Editor of Human Gene Therapy and the Dennis Farrey Family Professor in Pediatrics and Professor of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Quick use of fingertips is common for anyone text messaging on their cell phone but researchers at the University of Southern California say that this seemingly trivial action is the result of a complex neuro-motor-mechanical process orchestrated with precision timing by the brain, nervous system and muscles of the hand.

USC Viterbi School of Engineering biomedical engineer Francisco Valero-Cuevas is working to understand the biological, neurological and mechanical features of the human hand that enable dexterous manipulation and makes it possible for a person to grasp and crack an egg, fasten a button, or fumble with a cell phone to answer a call.