|  Daydreaming Your Stress Away Will Probably Backfire  | "What you do on Monday really makes a difference for how you feel on Tuesday," study author Shevaun Neupert, an associate professor of psychology at North Carolina State University, said in a statement. Meanwhile, "problem analysis" and "plan rehearsal" didn't seem to affect wellbeing the following day.
| Read More » Utah Suicides Linked to Air Pollution Altogether, the findings suggest that suicide "is a preventable outcome, and air pollution could be a modifiable risk factor," said Amanda Bakian, an epidemiologist at the University of Utah and the leader of the new study. Unsurprisingly, mental illness plays a huge role — at least 90 percent of people who die by suicide have a diagnosable mental disorder, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Read More » Whole Diet Approach to Child Nutrition Urged by Pediatricians New guidelines released today by a leading U.S. pediatrician's group urge a more practical, commonsense approach toward nutrition to help improve children's diets and health, both in school and at home. In the paper, the doctors focus on promoting a healthy overall diet, and using only a little bit of sugar, fat and salt to make healthy foods more appealing to kids. "Parents should look for every opportunity to make small, simple improvements in the nutritional value of the foods and drinks they provide children, in school and out," said Dr. Robert Murray, one of the statement's lead authors and a professor of nutrition at The Ohio State University. 1.Choose a mix of foods from the five food groups: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lower-fat dairy products and quality proteins, such as lean meats, fish, eggs, beans, nuts and seeds. Read More » Children Have Fewer Allergies When Families Do Dishes by Hand Doing dishes the old-fashioned way — by hand — might help curb a modern-day problem: rising rates of childhood allergies, a new study suggests. Researchers in Sweden found that children living in families that hand-washed their dishes were about 40 percent less likely to develop allergies compared with kids in homes that used a dishwasher, said study researcher Dr. Bill Hesselmar, an allergist at the University of Gothenburg Department of Pediatrics. The researchers said they suspect that hand-washing dishes doesn't get them as clean as the dishwasher does, which is actually a good thing because it can help protect against allergies by exposing family members to more bacteria. Under an idea known as the "hygiene hypothesis," some health researchers think that increased exposure to microbes during early life may stimulate children's immune systems, and that this stimulation may help reduce the risk that a child will develop allergies, the researchers wrote in their study, published online today (Feb. 23) in the journal Pediatrics. Read More » Cities Birth More Thunderstorms Than Rural Areas  | Atlanta may not be for you, as scientists recently found such hot-and-humid metros in the Southeast can birth more summer thunderstorms than rural areas. There were nearly 26,000 thunderstorms detected between 1997 and 2013. The was a 5 percent greater chance that thunderstorms would pop up over Atlanta compared with the city's surrounding rural areas, the researchers found.
| Read More » 5 Things a Man's Finger Length Says About Him Is your index finger shorter than your ring finger? Men with short index fingers and long ring fingers tend to be nicer toward women, according to a new study, to be published in the March issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences. Men with small digit-ratios (shorter index fingers relative to ring fingers) engaged in roughly a third more agreeable behaviors toward women, and a third fewer quarrelsome ones, than men with large digit-ratios, the reports showed. Previous research has found that this "2D:4D" ratio — the ratio of the length of the second digit (the index finger) to that of the fourth digit (the ring finger) — reveals the amount of male hormones, mainly testosterone, a person is exposed to in the womb. Read More » Penguins Are Well Dressed, But Have Poor Taste  | Despite their tuxedo style, when it comes to enjoying food, penguins have poor taste, a new study finds. These flightless birds can't taste the savoriness of fish or the sweetness of fruit, because over the course of evolution, they have lost the ability to taste all but salty and sour flavors. Many birds, such as chickens and finches, lack the receptors for sweet taste, but they can still taste bitter and umami. "Penguinseat fish, so you would guess that they need the umami receptor genes, but for some reason they don't have them," Jianzhi "George" Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan and co-author of the study published yesterday (Feb. 16) in the journal Current Biology, said in a statement.
| Read More » Mexican Wolf Population Now Tops 100 in US  | Once driven to the brink extinction in the United States, the population of Mexican wolves has doubled in the past five years. There were at least 109 wild Mexican wolves, or lobos, in the Southwest in 2014, up from 83 in 2013, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced Friday (Feb. 13). In 2010, there were just 50 Mexican wolves in the wild. The 2014 total also included 38 wild-born pups that survived through the end of the year, FWS officials said in a statement.
| Read More » New Sea Dragon Species Flaunts Ruby-Red Skin  | For the first time in 150 years, researchers have found a new species of sea dragon, a marine creature with "unusual red coloration," according to a new study. Scientists discovered the new species, Phyllopteryx dewysea, while they were studying ways to protect the two known species of sea dragons — the orange-tinted leafy sea dragon and the yellow-and-purple common sea dragon — both of which are native to Australian waters. During their work at the Western Australian Museum, they came across a pregnant male sea dragon, carrying dozens of babies, with ruby-red coloring. The sea dragon had been caught in 2007, off the remote Recherche Archipelago near Australia's southern coast.
| Read More » New Residents: Dolphins Swam into Mediterranean 18,000 Years Ago  | Bottlenose dolphins moved into the Mediterranean, once too salty to harbor much marine life, at the end of the last ice age about 18,000 years ago, a new study finds. "It is quite likely that the bottlenose dolphin hasn't actually been in the Mediterranean for long, in terms of the evolutionary time frame," said Andre Moura, one of the study's researchers and a lecturer of life science at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom. During the last ice age, the Mediterranean was saltier and shallower than it is today, making it a difficult place for marine creatures to live, the researchers said. When fish and other sea creatures moved in, hungry bottlenose dolphins quickly followed, Moura said.
| Read More » Line of Cocoa: Is Chocolate Snorting Safe?  | In a bizarre new trend in certain circles, people are snorting chocolate powder through their noses with the aid of a machine. The man behind the "chocolate shooter" is Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone. "You load it like a gun, putting very little chocolate mix on the machine … Then, you push, and pfffff! The chocolate blows in your nose," Persoone told Live Science.
| Read More » World View Makes Record-Setting Parafoil Flight from Near Edge of Space  | A private company that aims to send tourists to the edge of space in a balloon broke a record Friday, flying a parafoil higher than anyone has before. The Arizona-based company World View sent the parafoil 102,200 feet (31,151 meters) into the air during a test flight Friday (Feb. 20), according to representatives with the organization.
| Read More » Stephen Hawking Praises 'Theory of Everything' Oscar Winner  | Famed British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking took to Facebook last night to congratulate actor Eddie Redmayne for winning the best actor Oscar at the 2015 Academy Awards for "The Theory of Everything," a biopic about Hawking's life and his debilitating illness. Hawking had previously congratulated Redmayne on winning a Golden Globe award for the role.
| Read More » Predawn Military Rocket Launches Visible from US East Coast Tuesday  | As part of an undisclosed project by the Department of Defense (DoD), three Terrier-Oriole suborbital rockets are scheduled to launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, between 12:30 a.m. EST (0530 GMT) and 4:30 a.m. EST (0930 GMT) on Tuesday (Feb. 24). According to a news release from NASA, the rockets will reach altitudes that should make them visible from southern New Jersey down to the north-east corner of North Carolina. All three rockets are scheduled to launch within a one minute window on Tuesday morning. The DoD will not broadcast the launches or provide specific launch times, according to NASA.
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