Is a new diet or exercise program working for a friend? If so, there's a good chance that you will try it, too.

A person who finds success in a wellness program is more influential in getting friends to sign up than a charismatic, but less successful pal, according to a study by University at Buffalo occupational health researcher Lora Cavuoto.

The study, "Modeling the Spread of an Obesity Intervention through a Social Network," was published in the Journal of Healthcare Engineering.

Image:Brad Perkins,CC BY-SA

Every year massive amounts of valuable resources are deemed “waste” and consigned to landfill. Take the UK – around 540 million tonnes of products and materials enter the country annually, but only 117 million tonnes are recycled.

Scientists have revealed how coral-dwelling microalgae harvest nutrients from the surrounding seawater and shuttle them out to their coral hosts, sustaining a fragile ecosystem that is under threat.

Cities may not look like they once looked, but those of ancient times and today had a lot in common when it came to intangibles.

Despite notable differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements function in much the same way as modern cities, according to new findings by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder.

City planning says that as modern cities grow in population, so do their efficiencies and productivity. A city's population outpaces its development of urban infrastructure, for example, and its production of goods and services outpaces its population. What's more, these patterns exhibit mathematical regularity and predictability, a phenomenon called "urban scaling."

If you are a scholar and get on The Dr. Oz Show, you automatically become an expert in the minds of the public that watches The Dr. Oz Show - your peers might disagree.

And when it comes to education "experts", it is hard to know if they are just reciting talking points created by education union lobbyists or even if they have a credible background in education and education policy, a new study suggests. We see experts who misrepresent American student test scores every time international standardized tests are taken, and it ends up being no surprise that the solution they advocate involves giving more money to the machine they just said was letting kids down.

Researchers have quantified how the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to a warm period 8,000-5,000 years ago, when temperatures were 2-4 degrees C warmer than present and so could inform us what might happen if the same occurred now. 

Dr. Nicolaj Krog Larsen, Aarhus University in Denmark and Professor Kurt Kjær, Natural History Museum of Denmark, ventured off to Greenland to investigate how fast the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to past warming. Over six summers, they cored lakes in the ice-free land surrounding the ice sheet. The lakes act as a valuable archive as they store glacial meltwater sediments in periods where the ice is advanced. That way it is possible to study and precisely date periods in time when the ice was smaller than present.