New doctor's orders: No earbuds, no music, and no watching TV while eating.

Researchers at Brigham Young University and Colorado State University have found that the noise your food makes while you're eating can have a significant effect on how much food you eat.

The "Crunch Effect," as they call it, suggests you're likely to eat less if you're more conscious of the sound your food makes while you're eating. Therefore, watching loud TV or listening to loud music while eating can mask eating sounds that keep you in check.

Washington, D.C., March 15, 2016 - Sometimes, distance can lend a new perspective to a problem. For Japanese researchers studying protein crystal growth, that distance was 250 miles up -- the altitude at which the International Space Station (ISS) orbits the Earth. To better isolate the growth of protein crystals from the effects of gravity, the group of Katsuo Tsukamoto in Tohoku University's Department of Earth and Planetary Science in Sendai, Japan, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency grew crystals in a specially-designed chamber onboard the ISS.

There is a war on working mothers that shouldn't be waged. It is a war that seeks to make breastfeeding moms better parents, while subtly criticizing moms who use formula, which will invariably impact career and poor women most.

And there is zero evidence that "natural" is better, it is just clever marketing that caters to wealthy elites. 

Biology lessons teach us that the brain is divided into separate areas, each of which processes a specific sense. But findings to be published in eLife show we can supercharge it to be more flexible.

Scientists at the Jagiellonian University in Poland taught Braille to sighted individuals and found that learning such a complex tactile task activates the visual cortex, when you'd only expect it to activate the tactile one.

"The textbooks tell us that the visual cortex processes visual tasks while the tactile cortex, called the somatosensory cortex, processes tasks related to touch," says lead author Marcin Szwed from Jagiellonian University.

Shifting winds may explain why long-term fluctuations in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures have no apparent influence on Europe's wintertime temperatures. The findings, published in Nature Communications, could also have implications for how Europe's climate will evolve amid global warming.

The gradual accumulation of cell damage plays a very important role in the origin of ageing. There are many sources of cellular damage, however, which ones are really responsible for ageing and which ones are inconsequential for ageing is a question that still lacks an answer.

The Oxidative Hypothesis of Ageing -- also known as the Free Radicals Hypothesis -- was put forward in 1956 by Denham Harman. Since then, the large majority of attempts to prove that oxidative damage is relevant for ageing have failed, including multiple clinical trials in humans with antioxidant compounds. For this reason, although the accumulation of oxidative damage with ageing is undisputed, most scientists believe that it is a minor, almost irrelevant, cause of ageing.

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have taken some initial steps toward the creation of bioengineered human hearts using donor hearts stripped of components that would generate an immune response and cardiac muscle cells generated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which could come from a potential recipient. The investigators described their accomplishments - which include developing an automated bioreactor system capable of supporting a whole human heart during the recellularization process -- earlier this year in Circulation Research.

The introduction of screening colonoscopy in Germany is showing results: Within ten years of the start of this screening program for the early detection of colorectal cancer, the number of new cases has significantly dropped in the age groups 55 years and over. This is the conclusion drawn by Hermann Brenner, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg and co-authors in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2016; 113: 101-6).

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- When it comes to display advertising -- especially online -- simpler can be better. That's the implication of new research from the University of Maryland and Tilburg University in The Netherlands.

 
One theory of advertising holds that display ads need a degree of nuance or visual complexity in order to capture the viewer's attention. But that fails to take into account the increasingly cluttered and hectic context in which ads are viewed today, according to Michel Wedel, distinguished university professor and PepsiCo Chair in Consumer Science at UMD's Robert H. Smith School of Business.

I wrote this soon after ExoMars's successful launch to Mars, 2015. Hurray! In the program about the mission, before and during the launch, the presenters talked about the care they take to sterilize the lander of microbes to protect Mars. And indeed, kudos to all the space faring countries, and the planetary protection officers, for doing this. But in the same program they talked about ideas to send humans to Mars, talking about all its benefits. For some reason it never seems to occur to anyone to ask if humans can be sterilized in the same way as robots. There is nothing unusual about this - it's the same for programs from NASA, or programs about Mars on UK television, and anywhere.