A new study suggests that how much you eat at movie night may be related to what you're watching.
The study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Internal Medicine, looked at the effect of various movie genres on the eating habits of undergraduate students. Ninety-four students were divided into three groups, each of which was shown 20 minutes of a movie or TV show. Those watching an action film consumed almost twice as much as those watching a talk show.
All three of the groups were offered M&Ms, cookies, carrots, and grapes while watching the TV. One group was shown the thriller The Island, one group was shown The Island on mute, and one group was shown a clip from Charlie Rose. The results were staggering: The students watching The Island consumed a total of 206.5 grams of food, while those watching Charlie Rose consumed a total of just 104.3 grams of food. Those watching the muted version of The Island still consumed more than the Charlie Rose viewers, with a total of 142.1 grams of food.
Of course, this study had a small sample size, and more research is needed to draw broad conclusions. But Aner Tal, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell's Food and Brand Lab and author of the study, said that the fast-paced nature of action films could distract viewers from realizing how much they're eating. "They can make you eat more because you're paying less attention to how much you are putting in your mouth," Tal said in a statement. Meghan DeMaria
A gunman killed three people and injured three others in a shooting at a bowling alley in Rockford, Illinois, on Saturday night. Police believe the shooting was a random attack, and a 37-year-old male suspect was reportedly in custody.
"When officers arrived on the scene, the shooter was still in the building," Rockford Police Chief Daniel O'Shea said at a news briefing Saturday night. "No officers fired their weapons that we know of at this point, but the individual that we believe is responsible, and the only individual we believe at this point to be involved, we may have in custody."
Details about the victims were mostly kept under wraps — it's not clear whether they were employees or patrons of Don Carter Lanes. Two of the victims were teenagers, but it is not known if they survived. The three wounded victims were taken to a local hospital for treatment. Read more at The Associated Press and CNN. Tim O'Donnell
China is on course to overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy by 2028, the Center for Economics and Business Research predicted in a report released Saturday. The two countries have long been expected to swap places, but CEBR anticipates the pace has accelerated thanks to China recovering more quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic.
A year ago, the CEBR pegged 2033 as the transition year, but China's economy is expected to grow by 2 percent in 2020, the lone major global economy to expand, while the U.S. economy is expected to contract by 5 percent. The report also anticipates China will become a "high-income economy" by 2023, though living standards are expected to remain much lower than in the U.S.
China is not an outlier in its region when it comes to future economic growth. "Other Asian economies are also shooting up the table," said Douglas McWilliams, the CEBR's deputy chair. "One lesson for western policymakers, who have performed relatively badly during the pandemic, is that they need to pay much more attention to what is happening in Asia rather than simply looking at each other." Read more at The Guardian and Bloomberg. Tim O'Donnell
Scientists are homing in on the potential cause of allergic reactions to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded six severe allergic reactions (all of which were treated successfully) out of the 272,001 doses administered through Dec. 19, and the compound polyethylene glycol, known as PEG, has become a leading suspect in the cases, The Wall Street Journal reports. While still speculative at this point — allergies to PEG are rare and the reactions may have been to something else, per the Journal — PEG is found in other drugs, cosmetics, and food and is known to trigger anaphylaxis on rare occasions, though not all forms of the compound are "equal" in terms of allergic potential.
Part of the challenge of pinpointing PEG as the likely catalyst for the reactions is that the compound in the vaccines "is different than what has been previously associated with allergic reactions," James Baker, an immunologist who heads the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and the Biological Sciences at the University of Michigan, told the Journal.
PEG is also found in the Moderna vaccine. A health care worker became the first known person to experience an allergic reaction to that shot on Thursday. Dr. Hossein Sadrzadeh, who said he has a history of allergies, reported tingling sensations, an elevated heart rate, and low blood pressure shortly after his inoculation. The symptoms were akin to a reaction he had previously had to shellfish, he said. He was discharged a few hours later.
The incidents, while concerning, are rare — more than 1 million Americans have been vaccinated — and scientists and public health officials maintain the vaccines are safe, effective, and crucial to ending the pandemic. Read more at The Wall Street Journal and CNN. Tim O'Donnell
The United Kingdom and the European Commission published the full text of their trade agreement Saturday morning after the sides came to terms ahead of the Dec. 31 Brexit deadline earlier this week. The deal includes a 1,246-page trade document, as well as accords on nuclear energy, classified information exchanges, and several joint declarations.
Writing in The Times on Saturday, Michael Gove, a senior British minister and a prominent voice in the U.K.'s "leave" campaign in the lead up to the 2016 referendum, said he hopes the pact will mean leaving behind some of the divisions between London and Brussels, and within the U.K. itself, that cropped up over the last several years. "Friendships have been strained, families were divided, and our politics has been rancorous and, at times, ugly," he wrote. "Through the past four years, as a politician at the center of this debate, I've made more than my fair share of mistakes or misjudgments, seen old friendships crumble, and those closest to me have to endure pressures they never anticipated."
But with a deal in tow, he wrote, "we can develop a new pattern of friendly cooperation with the EU, a special relationship if you will, between sovereign equals." Read more at BBC and Reuters. Tim O'Donnell