Americans waste more than a billion gallons of gas every year because of obesity

overweight-man-driving-car

For every additional pound of passenger weight, the United States uses up another 39 million gallons of fuel each year.

Obesity raises health costs as we all know with more frequent visits to the hospital, more prescription drugs, and a greater risk for developing diseases like diabetes.  What is less known are the economic costs of obesity.  What are increased costs obesity puts on the public infrastructure, the GDP or on the federal deficit?

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How much revenue does it take to be a $1B public company?

one-Billion

One billion dollars neatly stacked.

With all the chatter about Billion dollar valuations — like Instagram, Evernote, Splunk —  combined with recent S1 filings and IPOs, the topic of tech company valuation is coming to the forefront of people’s minds. Specifically related to the software industry, the growing number of SaaS IPO candidates of late is signaling an important shift in the way that enterprise software is built and sold. It also indicates that the subscription business model is here to stay. What does this shift towards a subscription economy means for startups, investors and the IPO landscape?

First of all – get Instagram out of your mind. The price it sold for is not relevant to us mere mortals who are building B2B software businesses. For all good, non-bubble reasons, SaaS companies need tens of millions in revenue, high growth, and solid business fundamentals. What you may notice though, is that revenue may be lower than what we’ve become accustomed to during the last few years of IPO drought…

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Everything you need to know about the Higgs Boson in under eight minutes

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/41038445[/vimeo]

The Higgs Boson is kind of a big deal. If it does exist, it could provide a key to unifying the standard and quantum models of physics. But what is a Higgs Boson, what does it do, and how does it work? With the help of this animated short, UCI physics professor Daniel Whiteson breaks down the basics of this mysterious particle (or is it a field?) in a way even your parents can understand.

[Vimeo via Open Culture]

Thinking in a different language affects how you make decisions

languages 234576

The languages you know affect how you think.

Back in 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the economics Nobel Prize for showing that human beings don’t have a really good intuitive grasp of risk. Basically, the decisions we make when faced with a risky proposition depend more on how the question is framed than on what the actual outcome might be.

The classic example is to tell a subject that there’s going to be a disaster. Out of 600 people, she has a chance of saving 200 if she takes x risk. If she doesn’t take the risk, everybody dies. Most people will take the risk in that scenario, but if you present the same situation and frame it differently—”If you take this risk, 400 people will die”—the decisions suddenly flip in the other direction. Nothing has changed about the outcome. But everything has changed in terms of how people feel about the decision they have to make. This is the kind of thing that matters a lot to economics because it helps to explain why economic behavior in the real world isn’t always as rational and self-interested as it is in theory…

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Daylight could reduce risk of having a heart attack

heart attack

Daylight exposure inside hospital could also reduce the damage caused by a heart attack.

Treating a heart attack victim could be as simple as exposing them to light.  Doctors say strong light or even just daylight could cut the risk of having a heart attack or suffering permanent damage after having one.

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30% of U.S. workers are affected by insufficient sleep

sleepy worker

Insufficient sleep can have serious and sometimes fatal consequences for tired workers and the people around them.

Thirty percent of the nation’s workers are sleeping under 6 hours a day, which is less than the 7 to 9 hours that the National Sleep Foundation recommends for healthy adults, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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Repairing heart attack damage without using stem cells

xray

Researchers used molecules called microRNAs to convert scar tissue (called fibroblasts) into heart muscle cells.

When someone suffers a heart attack, scar tissue forms over the damaged areas of the heart, reducing the organ’s function.   In a new study, scientists successfully turned this scar tissue into working heart muscle without the use of stem cells.

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