Hubble has revealed that mysterious "blue blobs" in a structure called Arps Loop between M81 and M82 are blue clusters of stars less than 200 million years old with many stars as young as, and even younger than, 10 million years.
Finding blue blobs in space sounds like an encounter with an alien out of a science fiction movie. But the powerful NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has resolved strange objects nicknamed "blobs" and found them to be brilliant blue clusters of stars born in the swirls and eddies of a galactic pile-up 200 million years ago.
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. Astronomers at Rutgers and Penn State universities have discovered galaxies in the distant universe that are ancestors of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way.
These ancient objects, some of the first galaxies ever to form, are being observed as they looked when the universe was a mere two billion years old. Today, scientists peg the universes age at 13.7 billion years, so light from these galaxies traveled almost 12 billion years to reach Earth.
Coral reefs in the Caribbean have suffered significant changes due to the proximal effects of a growing human population, reports a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B.
Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a mouthwatering dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. For example, the researchers reveal in one experiment that the aroma of chocolate chip cookies can prompt women on a tight budget to splurge on a new item of clothing.
Characterized by a heart-tugging plot, emotional melodrama is a subtype of dramatic entertainment that fosters deep emotional reactions on the part of the consumer. Often labelled chick-flicks, tearjerkers, or human interest stories, the importance of this form of entertainment is underscored by the popularity and success of movies like Titanic and the Oprah Winfrey Show. However, despite the apparent popularity of melodramatic entertainment, scant academic attention has been paid to the genre.
People hate to wait, says common customer service insight. Marketers will hype their earnest attempts to shorten waiting times or at least promise to provide customers with information or distractions to make the waiting time more palatable. However, when it comes to waiting for stressful events, such as a doctors appointments or a job interview, these types of well-meaning wait management strategies may backfire. New research published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that the effectiveness of wait-related customer service depends upon the nature of the waited-for event.
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (Jan. 8, 2008) — Adolescent girls who frequently eat meals with their families appear less likely to use diet pills, laxatives, or other extreme measures to control their weight five years later, according to research led by Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., lead investigator of Project Eating Among Teens (Project EAT) at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
Repetition usually makes people enjoy things less. Such satiation causes our favorites to lose their sheen, makes it hard to follow a diet, and pushes us to escalate our spending on novelty. Life has even been called a hedonic treadmill where we must find better and better experiences just to stay happy. However, new research from the February issue of the Journal of Consumer Research finds that paying attention to details can help us avoid becoming bored with the same old thing.
The historical, competitive, and ideological factors that structure the practices of commercial mythmaking remain largely unexplored and undertheorized. Now, a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research investigates these interrelationships by performing a comparative analysis of two prominent New South mythmakers editors of nationally distributed magazines about the South who are seeking to ideologically reconstruct the historical legacy of antebellum, confederate, and segregationist South in ways that serve their commercial agendas.
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