Following a recession, the aggregate labor market is slack–employment remains below normal and recruiting efforts of employers, as measured by help-wanted advertising and vacancies, are low. A model of matching friction explains the qualitative responses of the labor market to adverse shocks, but requires implausibly large shocks to account for the magnitude of observed fluctuations. The incorp...

Blundering into a sticky spider’s web is unpleasant enough, evenwhenyouare large and can tear free. But for smaller creatures, impacting a web is a death sentence. Brent Opell and colleagues from Virginia Tech, USA, explain that the stickiness of a web depends on the stretchiness of the adhesive globules that are dotted along the spiral thread. ‘When an insect flies into an orb web, its legs, w...

The viscous capture threads produced by over 4000 species of orb-weaving spiders are formed of regularly spaced aqueous droplets supported by a pair of axial fibers. These threads register increased stickiness when spans of increasing lengths contact a surface, indicating that adhesion is recruited from multiple droplets. This study examined threads produced by five species to test the hypothes...

Sensory evaluation techniques and instrumental analyses were used to investigate the changes in crumb appearance, texture properties and taste profile of bread containing tea antioxidants. Bread incorporating green tea extract (GTE) at the levels of 1.5 and 5.0 g/kg flour was analyzed concurrently with the control in a random order by panelists. Sensory analysis was carried out through a descri...

Conditions were found in which Chlamydomonas reinhardi exhibits a circadian alteration of its cell surface, measured as ability to stick to glass. Under these same conditions the cells also show circadian rhythms of cell division and release of daughter cells. The three rhythmic phenomena were shown to have typical properties of rhythms controlled by the biological clock. The rhythm of stickine...

When opinions, behaviors or ideas diffuse within a population, some are invariably stickier than others. The stickier the opinion, behavior or idea, the greater is an individual’s inertia to replace it with an alternative. Here we study the effect of stickiness of opinions in a two-opinion model, where individuals change their opinion only after a certain number of consecutive encounters with t...

A large body of experimental evidence suggests that people are loss averse. Inspired by this evidence, we develop a model in which a monopolist sells to loss averse, yet rational, consumers. We first introduce (portable) techniques for analyzing the demand of such consumers, and then investigate the monopolist's pricing strategy. In contrast to the standard monopoly model, we find that in relat...