Providing employees with a bonus to spend on charities or co-workers may increase job satisfaction and team sales, according to results published September 18 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Lalin Anik from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and colleagues from other institutions.Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-shifting-employee-bonuses-satisfaction-productivity.html#jCp

http://phys.org/news/2013-09-shifting-employee-bonuses-satisfaction-productivity.html

Two experiments primed college students with either sleep-related or neutral words and then assessed sleep during a 25 minute nap period. Both experiments showed that participants primed with sleep-related words reported having slept longer than did those primed with neutral words. Furthermore, both experiments showed that sleep-primed participants exhibited lower heart rate. Experiment 2 also revealed that the effect of the priming manipulation was especially strong among participants who had trouble sleeping. This suggests that priming might be a cost-effective treatment for inducing sleep among people with sleep problems.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jasp.12123/abstract

You do the priming by writing words like relax, comfy, warm, etc where you can read them from bed

Ever send a bottle of wine back at a restaurant? If you weren’t just being a pretentious snob, then it was probably because the wine seemed “corked”—had a musty odor and didn’t taste quite right. Most likely, the wine was contaminated with a molecule called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), the main cause of cork taint. But a new study by Japanese researchers concludes that you do not smell TCA directly; rather, TCA blocks up your sense of smell and distorts your ability to detect odors. The findings could help the food and beverage industry improve its products and lead to less embarrassment for both you and your waiter.

http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2013/09/corked-wine-plugs-your-nose

This study goes in depth about why people are quitting social networking sites and finds some interesting conclusions

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2012.0323

According to Gina Kolata in the New York Times, The Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, has supported 175 randomized controlled studies, like the studies used in medicine, to find out what works and doesn’t work, which are reported in the What Works Clearinghouse. Surprisingly, the choice of instructional materials — textbooks, curriculum guides, homework, quizzes — can affect achievement as much as teachers; poor materials have as much effect as a bad teacher, and good materials can offset a bad teacher’s deficiencies. One popular math textbook was superior to 3 competitors. A popular computer-assisted math program had no benefit. Most educators, including principals and superintendents, don’t know the data exists. 42% of school districts had never heard of the clearinghouse. Up to 90% of programs that seemed promising in small studies had no effect or made achievement scores worse. For example a program to increase 7th-grade math teachers’ understanding of math increased their understanding but had no effect on student achievement. Upward Bound had no effect.

http://m.slashdot.org/story/191103