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(09/24/14 11:54pm)
The creation and expansion of the periodic table is a conundrum that has puzzled scientists for generations, but it is one that a group of astrophysicists at ASU are going to try to solve with the help of a $1 million, five-year research grant from the National Science Foundation.
(09/24/14 11:03pm)
Tempe Police reported the following incidents Tuesday:
A 54-year-old Phoenix man was arrested Sept. 18 on the 5400 block of South Kyrene Road on suspicion of dangerous drug possession and possession of drug paraphernalia, according to a police report.
The man was spotted by a police officer while he was riding his bicycle into the parking lot of a closed auto shop, police reported.
Officers said the man immediately turned his bicycle around and began riding away upon seeing their marked patrol car, and they approached him, because he was riding his bicycle in the wrong direction along the sidewalk.
When the officers initially tried to contact the man, he tried to escape them by riding around them on his bicycle, but he was eventually removed from the bike and handcuffed by officers, according to the report.
Before the man was contacted by officers, he threw a dark object over a road-side fence that was later identified as a bag filled with methamphetamine and drug-related paraphernalia, according to the police report.A 26-year-old Tempe man was arrested Sept. 17 on the 3200 block of South Rural Road on suspicion of forgery, narcotic drug possession, illegally obtaining narcotic drugs and being a fugitive from justice, according to a police report.The man was arrested at a Fry’s grocery store for allegedly attempting to forge a prescription document, police reported.The man presented a prescription for the drug Percocet at the store, which was found to be forged after a store employee called the doctor named on the prescription, police reported.The employee said he suspected the false prescription because of the the handwriting used to write it, according to the report.The man told officers that he thought the false prescription was real, according to the report.
After his arrest, it was discovered that the man had an outstanding Mesa warrant for failing to appear in court, police reported.
He was transported to the Tempe City Jail and held to see a judge, according to the report.Reports compiled by Megann PhillipsReach the reporter at megann.phillips@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @megannphillips
(09/24/14 1:24am)
Tempe Police reported the following incidents Tuesday:A 31-year-old Tempe man was arrested Sept. 17 on the 1800 block of North Scottsdale Road on suspicion of criminal trespassing, criminal damage, shoplifting, robbery and interference with an emergency telephone call, according to a police report.
The man and another unidentified man took more than $60 of raw meat from a Food City grocery store, police reported.
They then stole the assistant store manager’s iPhone after he confronted them and attempted to call the police, according to the report.
The man allegedly grabbed the cell phone forcefully from the manager’s ear after asking him, “What are you going to do?”, police reported.
The men then fled the store heading southbound along Scottsdale Road, according to the report.
Police reported that officers found the man roughly three hours after he fled the grocery store. Officers were able to find the man by tracking the manager's phone with an app he had installed, according to the report.
Officers found the man in an alley near a vacant lot, attempting to flee on a bicycle, according to the police report.
The man was transported and booked into Tempe City Jail, police reported. A 58-year-old Phoenix man was arrested Sept. 20 on the 500 block of South Mill Avenue on suspicion of criminal littering, disorderly conduct, obstruction of a public thoroughfare, reporting false information to a police officer and failing to carry sex-offender identification, according to a police report.
People saw the man crossing the street illegally when he caused a “small passenger vehicle” to stop in the roadway, police reported.
The man then threw a newspaper he had been holding at the window of the vehicle, and the wind caused the newspaper’s pages to separate and cover the stretch of Mill Avenue between Fifth and Sixth Street, according to the report.
After officers contacted the man, he give them a false name and date of birth, police reported.
According to the report, it took multiple attempts to obtain the suspect’s information before he admitted his real name and date of birth, which revealed him to be a registered sex offender.
The suspect allegedly said he "did not want to go to jail” and he had “lost” the state-issued sex offender ID he was required to carry at all times, police reported.
The man told officers he became a registered sex offender after he was seen defecating in public, according to the report.
The man was transported to Tempe City Jail, where he was booked and released pending charges, police reported.
Reports compiled by Megann Phillips
Reach the reporter at megann.phillips@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @megannphillips
(09/21/14 10:37pm)
A group of researchers at ASU’s School of Nutrition and Health Promotion has come to the conclusion that popular smartphone health-tracking apps like Lose It! may not be quite as helpful as they initially seem.
The researchers, including ASU School of Nutrition and Health Promotion faculty and students, discovered that among the dieters they observed throughout their study, those who used a paper and pencil to catalog their dietary habits lost just as much weight as those who used the smartphone app Lose It! or their smartphone’s digital notepad.
Carol Johnston, a professor at the ASU School of Nutrition and Health Promotion who co-authored the research, said she found it odd that her efforts to investigate the true effectiveness of smartphone health-tracking technology were the first of their kind.
“I was surprised five years ago when we started this trial, and am still perplexed, that there are no other trials in the research literature examining the efficacy of smart phone apps for diet and weight management,” Johnston said. “There are hundreds of apps but no research demonstrating their worth.”
The use of smartphone apps that assist in personal diet- and fitness-tracking has increased since the advent of the smartphone, but interest in this technology has seen particularly rapid growth in recent years with the rollout of products like the Nike+ Fuelband and related apps, and more recently, Apple’s iOS 8.
With Apple’s September 9 announcement of its new fitness-tracking feature, available on the recently released iPhone 6 and downloadable to previous iPhone models through iOS 8, interest in health-tracking technology is greater than ever.
“People love to play games on their phones,” Johnston said. “It seems such a logical transition to use phone 'games' to help individuals develop more healthful diet plans and become healthier individuals.”
The app does have certain advantages over pen-and-paper methods of diet tracking, Johnston said.
Social work sophomore J.J. Williamson, who was not involved in the new research, said the Lose It! app is fun and easy to use, and he found its features comprehensive.
“The Lose It! app is so visually inviting and user-friendly,” Williamson said. “It has everything I need to meet my goals.”
But while its user-friendly features did stimulate subjects of the study to record their eating habits more consistently than did their digital notepads or pencil-and-paper logbooks, it did not motivate them to actually improve their eating habits.
Nutrition professor Christopher Wharton said the dietary quality of app-users showed a “downward curve” throughout the study.
“A lot of these apps tend to have calorie information, because that’s what people look for first and foremost and understand the best, but when they have other types of feedback, it’s often in terms of the ‘numbers of nutrition,’ like milligrams of sodium or grams of fat and protein, and that’s not actually very useful for a lot of people,” he said.
Wharton attributed the “downward curve” in dietary quality to the fact that subjects who used a pen and paper to track their eating habits were given in-person dietary counseling, which probably put the nutritional value of their food in more understandable terms.
“Not very many people are expert enough at nutrition to be able to interpret a compilation of numbers to understand how much quality they have in their diet,” Wharton said.
He said he thought it would be much more useful to have a “food-based feedback system” through which servings of fruits, vegetables and grains could be tracked in addition to caloric intake.
Johnston said she agreed and that she planned to investigate this idea in the future.
Johnston also had some advice to give those trying to lose weight that didn’t have anything to do with whether or not to use a health-tracking app.
“Eat out less and take the time to prepare most of the food you eat from fresh sources,” she said.Johnston also had other suggestions to maintain a healthy diet.
“Eat smaller portions, eat slower, focus on conversation with others at meals,” she said. “Do not drink calories — reduce or eliminate sugar-sweetened beverages (from your diet).”
Contact the reporter at megann.phillips@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @megannphillips
(09/17/14 11:50pm)
ASU engineering graduate student Jason Kerestes has developed a one-of-a-kind jetpack that enables users to run a four-minute mile, and the invention could have a bight future in extreme sports as well as potential military applications.
(09/14/14 10:34pm)
A group of researchers lead by ASU Professor of Environmental Economics Charles Perrings received a grant of $1.6 million from the National Science Foundation this month in order to advance investigation of transnational trade patterns and their effect on the spread of infectious diseases.
(09/07/14 9:15pm)
An increase of physical activity in the workplace could have very positive consequences for the health of office workers, according to research preformed by ASU doctoral student Zachary Zeigler.
Zeigler, who began studying the topic of workplace exercise as part of his master’s thesis, said his findings proved that simply walking at one mile per hour behind a desk while working, instead of sitting behind a desk, could significantly lower blood pressure.
“If our population changed to make our jobs more active, if we saw that kind of reduction on a population basis, we could reduce rates for stroke and cardiovascular events by 10 to 12 percent,” he said. “On a population basis, that would be pretty successful.”
Although his research focused solely on the short-term benefits of such a change, he said the potential long-term benefits of more active offices could be revolutionary in a country where obesity and related health problems are often described as an epidemic.
TrekDesks, the machines that Zeigler has been using for his research, are an innovative combination between a treadmill and a traditional desk on which users can work and walk.
After eight TrekDesks were donated to ASU, Zeigler began using them to measure the effects of mild exercise on blood pressure throughout the course of a normal workday, which he simulated in his lab.
ASU exercise and wellness professor Pamela Swan, who was Zeigler’s master’s thesis advisor and is currently his doctoral advisor, has kept a close eye on this research since it began.
Swan said it’s rare for a master’s thesis to be published in an academic journal, but Zeigler’s research was revelatory and thorough enough to earn the respect of the scientific community.
Already available online, it will be published on paper in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health in June 2015.
His research won the Gail Butterfield Award from the Southwest American College of Sports Medicine in 2012.
“His research is exceptional, because it shows for the first time that this very easy kind of exercise, which is hardly exercise at all, because it’s just typing standing up and walking very slowly, can actually make a big difference in somebody’s health,” Swan said.
TrekDesk founder and CEO Steve Bordley, who lives in Scottsdale, donated TrekDesks to ASU and a number of other universities around the country in order to obtain good evidence of his product’s health benefits.
He said this desire for good evidence stemmed from his product’s initial rejection by companies he thought would be eager to employ it as preventative medicine.Bordley said one thing that frustrated him when he got started was the false impression that chief medical officers of companies would want to get their employees "up and moving" in order to decrease preventable diseases. “What I found was that they didn’t care, and when I did get a hold of them, all they said was, ‘Give me hierarchical evidence specific to the TrekDesk,’” he said.
Bordley now has solid, product-specific evidence of the TrekDesk’s health benefits, thanks to Zeigler and other student researchers, but he said he still doubts it will make a significant difference in the eyes of the aforementioned chief medical officers.
He does plan to use the new data to promote the TrekDesk, however, as it will surely raise public interest in his product.
“What I’m really pleased about is that all of this research is done at the highest professional standard, and every one of (the researchers) is going down a different road with it, but it’s all ending up in the same place,” he said.
Reach the reporter at megann.phillips@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @megannphillips
(09/04/14 12:00am)
Several ASU researchers challenged popular belief last month by asserting that seals and sea lions, not Christopher Columbus, were guilty of bringing tuberculosis to the Americas.
(09/03/14 12:30am)
A group of ASU researchers made a great stride in the realm of biology last month by mapping the genome of the green anole, a small lizard found in the southeastern U.S., and identifying 326 genes that enable it to lose and then regenerate its tail.
(08/28/14 1:06am)
Researchers at ASU are challenging common assumptions about autism by looking at gastrointestinal bacteria as a possible cause for behavioral abnormalities.
(08/24/14 10:36pm)
ASU alumna Natalie Hinkel has broken new ground in the world of astronomy this month by publishing a catalog of elemental abundances in more than 3,000 stars within 500 light years of our own sun, and it may lead to interesting discoveries about the birth and life of our galaxy.
(08/22/14 1:44am)
The Tempe Police Department launched its Safe and Sober Campaign for the second year on Thursday in an effort to minimize drug use, drunk driving and underage drinking in and around Tempe.
(04/16/14 10:30pm)
A current Sparky mascot waits for the start of the Sparky tryouts in Wells Fargo Arena on April 9. (Photo by Diana Lustig)
(04/13/14 8:40pm)
Tempe police reported the following incidents on Friday:
(04/09/14 9:30pm)
By participating in a newly rebooted student club called GlobalResolve, a handful of students on ASU’s Polytechnic campus hope to use the skills they’ve learned in school to aid underprivileged communities around the world.
(03/26/14 12:21am)
Seven years after its conception, an ASU organization continues to challenge the concept of gender norms and is leading the crusade for gender and socio-economic diversity in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
(03/19/14 9:30pm)
Sun Devils were buzzing after ASU President Michael Crow released a proposal on Friday that increased the cost of University tuition by 3 percent for out-of-state and graduate students for the 2014-15 academic year.
(02/25/14 11:46pm)
ASU has long been recognized as one of the nation’s most veteran-friendly schools, but the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College has recently taken steps to set itself apart from the greater university in terms of high standards for post-military education.
(02/15/14 5:15pm)
Hugs were given in abundance at ASU on Valentine’s Day, thanks to a multimedia CEO on a mission to spread kindness across America.
(02/13/14 11:47pm)
"Who we are and where we come from?" are the types of questions the Origins Project seeks to answer. Origin's director, Lawrence Krauss, explains the multifaceted aspect of the project that aims to improve education, research and bring some of the world's greatest minds together. (Photo by Mario Mendez)