Exercise Incentivized
The rewards of exercise have gone beyond biceps and into the workplace—even your bank account

As if you didn’t already have enough incentive to exercise (see studies that show that exercise boosts brain power among the elderly, improves memory and learning in children, reduces anxiety and saves the chronically ill money on medication), now there’s even more reason not to squander your gym membership. The Gym-Pact iPhone app pays users every time they work out (footing the bill: [...]

The following post was originally published on Mommylens.com.
We just returned from our fourth trip to Disney with the boys and one of my funniest memories was of watching a woman beg an ice cream stand server at Epcot to please plug in her dying phone so that the rest of her family could find her.
This time round mobile technology played a big part of our trip, partly because the boys are older and more tech savvy and partly because we [...]

The White Stuff
A spoonful of sugar might be making all of your health problems worse

If 2011 was

The following was originally published on the Huffington Post.
Can what you believe affect your health? There are cases where it clearly does. On the unhealthy side, there are people who believe “It won’t happen to me,” and carry on engaging in risky sex. On the healthy side, there are people whose religious beliefs forbid smoking. These are extremes with an obvious link between belief and health, but what about the millions of other beliefs that we all have? There are [...]

The following was originally published on MediaPost.
It’s taken a while for the Internet to shift from being the text-only medium of its early days to the image-dominated medium it’s increasingly becoming.
In fact, it’s barely a decade since Internet users could post on photo-sharing sites such as SmugMug (founded 2002) and Flickr (founded 2004). There are now more than six billion photos on Flickr, although Facebook dwarfs that number with six billion photo uploads per month and a total of 90 [...]

Smile Files
Last year it was sleep; now happiness is the new sex

It’s intangible and difficult to quantify, but happiness nonetheless has become a burgeoning field of scientific study. The thing about happiness, like sex, is that everyone wants it, especially after the Great Recession emptied our pockets and sent us pursuing pleasures that money can’t buy. This dogged pursuit of happiness has become a movement. See the widely viewed documentary Happy, hyped with the introduction of World Happy Day, [...]

Hopelessly Devoted to Food?
New insight into weight loss indicates it’s more complicated than we thought, but not impossible

Obesity rates the world over have doubled in the past 30 years, and along with so many expanding waistlines we’ve seen weight-loss methods fluctuate in popularity (most recently, studies show that starving yourself every other day and switching to diet drinks leads to fewer pounds). Diet books, pills and plans have come and gone, but the “eat less, exercise more” adage has [...]

Kid Stuff
Conflicting research and cultural divides over parenting make us understand why it’s universally understood to be the hardest job in the world

In case you needed more parenting-related pressure laid on your shoulders, a recent study reveals that a child’s hippocampus—the region of the brain that helps manage stress and strengthen memory and learning—can be up to 10 percent larger if his mother is patient and encouraging. The modern understanding of child development is in stark contrast to [...]

The Human Race
From transportation to healthcare to pet-sitting, robots are busy these days

If the robotic car Google is testing can ever navigate all its roadblocks, you may one day be able to commute to work while catching some extra shut eye. Among the burning questions: How would insurance concerns be addressed, and how would a police officer issue a traffic ticket to a robotic car? BMW, too, has designed a robotic car that uses cameras, sensors and a computer [...]

The following post was originally published on Mommylens.com.
Words with Friends, the highly addictive iPhone app, has gotten more than its fair share of press. There was Alec Baldwin getting kicked off an American Airlines flight for refusing to power down in the middle of his game. And there was the Wall Street Journal article that portrayed the bonding that comes with playing Words with Friends as one of the off-the-field activities that helps the Super Bowl–winning Giants play so well [...]