Does buying a Snickers bar instead of a Milky Way improve a baseball team's chance to win?  You can't prove it doesn't - and for that reason the most superstitious baseball fans have little brand loyalty beyond their baseball team.

A paper in the Journal of Consumer Research by Gita V. Johar of Columbia Business School and Eric J. Hamerman of Tulane University shows a sports fan will easily switch to a different product if the fan believes the new brand will bring about good luck or eliminate bad luck. Routines are simultaneously that important and completely malleable, they say.

Shrinking sea ice cover in the North Atlantic - baby harp seals impacted most.

A new paper says satellite images have allowed researchers to gauge the relative roles that genetic, environmental and demographic factors such as age and gender may be playing in harp seal stranding rates along the U.S. and Canadian east coasts in recent years.  Recent warming in the North Atlantic gets the blame, according to the paper by advocacy group the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Duke University. 

Resveratrol, a natural antioxidant compound found in red grapes and other plants, has received widespread attention for being a possible anti-aging compound and is now widely available as a dietary supplement; many claims have been made about its role in explaining the cardiovascular health benefits of red wine, and other foods.

New research in The Journal of Physiology instead suggests that eating a diet rich in antioxidants may actually block or counteract many of the health benefits of exercise, including reduced blood pressure and cholesterol. This is in contrast to studies in animals where resveratrol improved the cardiovascular benefits of exercise.

Since 1935, when Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger created his famous thought experiment about a cat that was both alive and dead, physicists have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Researchers say they have made a significant step forward in this direction by creating a large system that is in two substantially different states at the same time

Understanding Schrödinger's cat

Lots of people who watch the news see when records, some that have stood for a hundred years, are broken in heat waves. But the increase in minimum daily temperatures is telling a more interesting story than maximum ones. Since 1901, nighttime heat waves, when the daily low is in the top 1 percent of the temperatures on record for at least three nights in a row, have quadrupled, according to a new paper.

Researchers found that these nighttime heat waves are becoming more frequent in western Washington and Oregon. It's a good time to stay inside and read this article because, on average, heat waves tend to strike around the last week of July.