More Than Money: Experienced Positive Affect Reduces Risk-Taking Behavior on a Real-World Gambling Task.

Previous research indicates that when people participate in multi-trial games of chance, the results of previous trials impact subsequent wager size. For example, the "house money" and "break even" effects suggest that an individual's risk-taking propensity increases when financially winning losing during a gambling session. Additionally, the "mood maintenance hypothesis" and affect regulation hypothesis suggest that people in positive and negative affective states are less and more likely to gamble than when in neutral affective states, respectively.

A fallacious "Gambler's Fallacy"? Commentary on Xu and Harvey (2014).

In their recent article in Cognition, Xu and Harvey (2014) suggested that people who placed wagers on an online gambling site demonstrated very different wagering preferences depending on whether they were on winning or losing streaks. Specifically, they reported that people on winning streaks were more likely to win their subsequent wagers because they chose increasingly "safer," higher-probability bets as the win streak continued. People on losing streaks were more likely to lose their subsequent wagers because they chose "riskier," lower-probability wagers as the losing streak progressed.

Alternative hosts for functional (meta)genome analysis.

Microorganisms are ubiquitous on earth, often forming complex microbial communities in numerous different habitats. Most of these organisms cannot be readily cultivated in the laboratory using standard media and growth conditions. However, it is possible to gain access to the vast genetic, enzymatic, and metabolic diversity present in these microbial communities using cultivation-independent approaches such as sequence- or function-based metagenomics.

Functional screening of metagenome and genome libraries for detection of novel flavonoid-modifying enzymes.

The functional detection of novel enzymes other than hydrolases from metagenomes is limited since only a very few reliable screening procedures are available that allow the rapid screening of large clone libraries. For the discovery of flavonoid-modifying enzymes in genome and metagenome clone libraries, we have developed a new screening system based on high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC). This metagenome extract thin-layer chromatography analysis (META) allows the rapid detection of glycosyltransferase (GT) and also other flavonoid-modifying activities.