//
home

Latest Post

(Not so) Mini post: Do you exercise to get positive outcomes or avoid negative ones?

Posted by ⋅

Admittedly, this topic is big, multifaceted, and developing, so today’s post isn’t going to look at the entire field. I’m focusing on one paper by Hannan, Moffitt, Neumann, and Kemps (2018). I was inspired to investigate this because I kept coming up with reasons that I didn’t need to go do the run I planned … Continue reading →

Leave a comment Sport, Psychology

Instagram

Are you motivated to workout because of positive things like completing a run or having fun or feeling good? Or by negative things like avoiding weight gain or dealing with high blood pressure? When you look around do you notice cues to be active or ones to sit down and relax? These two things may be interacting on an unconscious level more than we thought to trigger people to exercise or not. Hannan et al (2018) found that people who exercise more may be unconsciously motivated to do so, which may have implications for how we encourage others to be active as well.
This week's #throwbackthursday looked at a pretty small study with lots of room for improvement, comparing caffeine and stair walking on alertness. As a non-caffeine user but frequent stair climber, I wanted this to give a clear cut result (in favour of stairs of course) but it just didn't. What I will say though is we do need more of these non result studies to be published. Science grows, not just from sharing positive findings but sharing negative and no results as well. You can read about the complete study from the main page of my blog.
Forgot to post this earlier. The low lying clouds in the river valley were spectacular yesterday morning. On a different note, this is what we often don't realize in science communication: the simplest words may still be jargon, as in the difference here between clouds and fog. Meaningful to someone but many are left without a clear understanding.
In a small study, a group of researchers found that sub-elite triathlon training is correlated with improved DNA health. Read more on my blog.
Valentine's Day is about passion right? So what happens when we share our passions in a citizen science project? We find out the migratory and seasonal abundance of more that 600 bird species. At least that's one of the outcomes of eBird, a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Read more from the main page of my blog. Map: Image provided by eBird (www.ebird.org) and created 2020 Photo: Tai Munro
To celebrate the International Day for women and girls in science I chose a random female researcher from the department I did my undergrad in (biology at the University of Alberta), chose a paper that sounded intriguing and worked to break it down. So I give you Rebecca Case's work on sunscreen in cyanobacteria. I hope I did her work justice, it was fascinating to read and I learned a lot. Check out the post by following the link in my profile to the most recent post. 📷: Aleksey Nagovitsyn (User:Alnagov) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16233083

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 280 other followers

Follow me on Twitter

Archives