From recycling to reusing hotel towels, consumers who participate in a company's "green" program are more satisfied with its service, finds a new study co-led by a Michigan State University researcher.

Doing good makes customers feel good, and that "warm glow" shapes opinion, said Tomas Hult, Byington Endowed Chair and professor of marketing in the Eli Broad College of Business. But it gets more complicated when companies throw incentives into the mix.

PHILADELPHIA -- In the era of precision medicine, targeting the mutations driving cancer growth, rather than the tumor site itself, continues to be a successful approach for some patients. In the latest example, researchers from Penn Medicine and other institutions found that treating metastatic thyroid cancer patients harboring a BRAF mutation with the targeted therapy vemurafenib -- originally approved for melanoma patients with the mutation -- showed promising anti-tumor activity in a third of patients. The results were published in this week's Lancet Oncology.

(Toronto - July 21, 2016) Since the discovery of their true nature 140 years ago, lichens have been the poster children for symbiosis. In the textbook definition of a lichen, the filaments of a single fungus provide protection for photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria, which in turn provide food for the fungus.

But 140 years after the term "symbiosis" was coined to describe lichen, it turns out there's a third party involved in the relationship - a yeast that may help provide the structure found in large "leafy" and "branching" lichens.

As explained in the previous installment of this series, these questions are a warm-up for my younger colleagues, who will in two months have to pass a tough exam to become INFN researchers.
By the way, when I wrote the first question yesterday I thought I would not need to explain it in detail, but it just occurred to me that a disclaimer would be useful. Here it is:

The combination of two plant compounds that have medicinal properties - curcumin and silymarin - holds promise in treating colon cancer, according findings in the Journal of Cancer.

Curcumin is the active ingredient in the spice turmeric, which is present in spicy curry dishes, and silymarin is a component of milk thistle, which has been used to treat liver disease.

This is another of my articles to help the many people who come to my science blog saying how scared they are of a planet, which they think is hidden behind the sun and is about to fly past or hit Earth in the near future. What I'm going to describe here is beginner level astronomy, but of course many never study astronomy. Most know that the Earth orbits the sun, nowadays, but few stop to think through what this means for the night sky and where planets can appear in it.

So let's draw out some of those implications, and then, if you are one of those who worry about this, I hope you'll see for yourself why astronomers say the idea is just plain nutty. Maybe after reading this, you will be kicking yourself that you got so scared of such a nutty idea. I hope so, anyway.

Today I wish to start a series of posts that are supposed to help my younger colleagues who will, in two months from now, compete for a position as INFN research scientists. 
The INFN has opened 73 new positions and the selection includes two written exams besides an evaluation of titles and an oral colloquium. The rules also say that the candidates will have to pass the written exams with a score of at least 140/200 on each, in order to access the oral colloquium. Of course, no information is given on how the tests will be graded, so 140 over 200 does not really mean much at this point.

Think tanks are designed to help policy makers shape decisions by giving them evidence-based information in an apolitical format.

Who doesn't claim to be doing that? Though Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund were both inspired by rabid eugenics proponents who simply reframed their beliefs about the poor being vermin into the "population control" rhetoric after World War II, they still claim they are more consumer advocacy oriented than corporations that actually help people. And government-controlled panels like the International Agency for Research on Cancer agree, an expert on a pesticide who works for the private sector can't be on their pesticide working group but an anti-pesticide consultant for EDF can be.

WASHINGTON -- Is empathy the result of gut intuition or careful reasoning? Research published by the American Psychological Association suggests that, contrary to popular belief, the latter may be more the case.

"Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others - that is, to be empathically accurate. Some are better at this than others, a difference that may be explained in part by mode of thought," said Jennifer Lerner, PhD, of Harvard University, a co-author of the study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Until now, however, little was known about which mode of thought, intuitive versus systematic, offers better accuracy in perceiving another's feelings."

The death of King Albert I of Belgium in 1934 -- officially a climbing accident -- still fuels speculation. Forensic geneticist Maarten Larmuseau and his colleagues at KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium), have now compared DNA from blood found on the scene in 1934 to that of two distant relatives. Their analysis confirms that the blood really is that of Albert I. This conclusion is at odds with several conspiracy theories about the king's death.