Brides and the bereaved beware: You, like many shoppers, may have a tendency to reject thriftiness when your purchase is a matter of the heart, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

People are reluctant to seek cost-saving options when buying what they consider sacred -- such as engagement rings, cremation urns, or even desserts for a birthday party -- for or to commemorate loved ones. The paper, published in the most recent volume of Judgment and Decision Making, is the first to examine the implications of this phenomenon.

Smokers who try to cut down the amount they smoke before stopping are less likely to quit than those who choose to quit all in one go, Oxford University researchers have found. Their study is published in journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Most experts say that people should give up in one go, but most people who smoke seem to try to stop by gradually reducing the amount they smoke before stopping. This research helps to answer the questions 'Which approach is better?', and 'Are both as likely to help people quit in the short and long term?'.

PASADENA, Calif., March 14, 2016 -- Surgical patients who received the flu vaccine during their hospital stay did not have an increased risk of emergency department visits or subsequent hospitalizations in the week following discharge, compared with surgical patients who did not receive the vaccine. The new study from Kaiser Permanente, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, also found that compared with unvaccinated surgical patients, vaccinated surgical patients did not have an increased risk of fever nor did they have an increased number of laboratory tests checking for infection.

Plant cell walls are comprised of many complex polymers that require multiple different enzymes to fully break down, such as cellulase to digest cellulose and xylanase to digest xylan. For decades scientists thought only microbes could produce cellulase, until cellulase genes were found in wood-feeding insects. Now, new research from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, overturns another old theory. The scientists discovered that stick insects (Phasmatodea) produce cellulases that can handle several types of cell wall polymers equally (Insect Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, February 2016).

A recent observational campaign involving more than two dozen optical telescopes and NASA's space based SWIFT X-ray telescope allowed a team of astronomers to measure very accurately the rotational rate of one of the most massive black holes in the universe. The rotational rate of this massive black hole is one third of the maximum spin rate allowed in General Relativity. This 18 billion solar mass heavy black hole powers a quasar called OJ287 which lies about 3.5 billion light years away from Earth. Quasi-stellar radio sources or `quasars' for short, are the very bright centers of distant galaxies which emit huge amounts of electro-magnetic radiation due to the infall of matter into their massive black holes.

The dilemma of our immune system is comparable to the story of Icarus and Daedalus from Greek mythology. To escape their captivity, Daedalus built wings from feathers and wax for himself and his son. Daedalus warned his son that he must neither fly too high but also not too low, otherwise the sun's heat or the humidity of the sea would destroy his wings and he would crash. After they had successfully escaped, Icarus became boisterous and flew higher and higher until the sun began to melt the wax of his wings and he fell into the sea. Similarly, an over- or under-reaction of our immune system can be life-threatening.