Lifestyle programs focused on high-intensity interval training or the Mediterranean diet have shown results for improving the heart health of people with abdominal obesity, finds a new study.

"Each of these lifestyle interventions alone is known to have an impact, but no one has studied them together in a longer term," says Dr. Mathieu Gayda, one of the study's authors and an exercise physiologist at the Montreal Heart Institute. "Our results show that the combination of the two interventions supersized the benefits to heart health."

The heart health benefits included significant improvements in body fat mass, cholesterol and blood pressure levels, exercise capacity, muscle endurance, weight loss, waist circumference, resting heart rate and blood sugar control.

Reading this article while someone else read a piece in People means your brain has already been shaped differently than that of the other person. Each experience sends us off on divergent branches, so imaging of brain areas used for understanding language in native Japanese speakers won't reshape how we learn. but it show find that pitch-accent in words pronounced in standard Japanese activates different brain hemispheres depending on whether the listener speaks standard Japanese or one of the regional dialects.

The paper in Brain and Language examined if speakers of a non-standard dialect used the same brain areas while listening to spoken words as native speakers of the standard dialect or as someone who acquired a second language later in life.

Some of the more recent dramatic disasters in world-wide markets have occurred, not because people panicked or an election did not go someone's way, but because financial institutions have taken to hiring physicists who wrote papers on predicting chaos.

If non-linear is just linear in really small steps, then predicting and controlling nonlinearity is manageable. But those extreme chaotic events, the "dragon kings", have not obeyed numerical models yet.

An upcoming paper in Physical Review Letters seeks to tame that savage chaotic breast again, with a simple model of chaos predicting that it is possible not only to predict an extreme event, like a stock market collapse, but to intervene and prevent it from happening.

An important goal in spoken-language-systems research is speaker diarization - computationally determining how many speakers feature in a recording and which of them speaks when.

To date, the best diarization systems have used supervised machine learning; they're trained on sample recordings that a human has indexed, indicating which speaker enters when. In a new paper, MIT researchers show how they can improve speaker diarization so that it can automatically annotate audio or video recordings without supervision: No prior indexing is necessary. 

They also discuss, compact way to represent the differences between individual speakers' voices, which could be of use in other spoken-language computational tasks.

A new paper has found a significant association between low dietary fiber intake and cardiometabolic risks including metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular inflammation, and obesity.

 In the study, investigators used surveillance data from 23,168 subjects in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999-2010  to examine the role dietary fiber plays in heart health, coupled with possible sex, age, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in dietary fiber consumption. They also examined the association between dietary fiber intake and various cardiometabolic risk factors.

A dry spring has meant a rampant wildfire season already for Australia.

Hold those fires back? Arguably the largest volunteer fire department in the world.  New South Wales uses volunteer fire services, even newly-elected Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a member. 

"The tragedy is that many of them have lost their own homes while they've been out saving those of others," says Kingston University academic Dr. Neil Thomas, an expert in environmental hazards.