Habits

Leslie Moonves has had the same morning routine for decades. "The first thing I do after getting out of the shower is pick up Daily Variety and have a cup of coffee," the CBS Corp. chief executive said. "It's a 30-year habit. " That habit is ending for Moonves and lots of other Hollywood power players, movie and television stars, producers and publicists and thousands of wannabes: Daily Variety is ceasing as a print publication after almost 80 years. Tuesday's edition is its last.

OK, you've had nearly a third of the year. Lost that weight? Smoking a thing of the past? Nicer to your husband? If you are like many people, such resolutions have disappeared as completely as the bubbles in your Champagne toast. But you can start again. We all have habits that we could stand to break. But desire isn't everything, and it can be difficult to know where to start and frustrating to carry on through setbacks, temptation and outright failure. Still, in order to live healthful and productive lives, many of us need to make changes.

Maybe you chew your fingernails when you're nervous. Or scarf down chocolate when you're sad. Or take home a stray kitty whenever you see one, until the SPCA has to come rescue them all and have you arrested for being a hoarder. Chances are, you have a few habits you wish you didn't have, and quite possibly you've tried (and tried and tried) to break them. Scientists are learning why you may have failed (and failed and failed).

NASA scientists announced Thursday that the Kepler mission had confirmed finding three planets , slightly larger than our own Earth, orbiting in their stars' so-called habitable zones -- that "Goldilocks" region where temperatures are not too hot and not too cold. Researchers don't know for sure, but the planets' sizes and proximity to their stars mean that they could be rocky and could have liquid water, two attributes thought necessary for a planet to harbor life. What is certain, the scientists said during a press conference Thursday, is that the discoveries mark yet another step forward in the space agency's quest to find an Earth-sized planet in a star's habitable zone.

I feel vindicated! Regarding "Children Learn to Say, 'Buy, Buy,' " (Aug. 9), I have been saying this for years. I have two sons of my own, and I teach third grade in a Los Angeles Unified School District school. For years most people have thought I was overreacting to this issue. Have you checked out the Center for Media Literacy, located in L.A., and the organization TV-Free America, based in Washington, D.C.? Both are worthy and interesting groups. I hope that with the recent attention this issue has been receiving, more people, especially parents and teachers, will realize just how important it is and begin to change their current viewing habits.

What does it really take to change a habit? It may have less to do with willpower and more to do with consistency and a person's environment, researchers have found. A 2009 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology had 96 people adopt a new healthful habit over 12 weeks - things like running for 15 minutes at the same time each day or eating a piece of fruit with lunch. The average number of days it took for participants to pick up the habit was 66, but the range was huge, from 18 to 254 days.

If you frequently bite your nails, twist a lock of hair or chew on pencils, don't worry. You're not alone. A lot of kids have these kinds of nervous habits as a way to deal with stress in their lives. "It's tough to be a kid nowadays," says Barbara Korsch, a professor at USC and a pediatrician at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Kids can get stressed out by their own lives, she says, as well as by troubling events on the news. Often, you're unaware of your habit until a parent reminds you.

Stephen R. Covey, a former Brigham Young University business professor who blended personal self-help and management theory in a massive bestseller, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," died Monday at a hospital in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He was 79. The cause was complications from injuries sustained in a bicycle accident, said Debra Lund, a spokeswoman for the Utah-based FranklinCovey leadership training and consulting company he co-founded. In April, Covey lost control of his bike while riding down a hill in Provo, Utah.

It's not always easy getting children to read, especially during the long summer months. Experts say that sometimes the best thing a parent can do is nothing--but make sure books are easily available. Let children get tired of the same old television reruns, of doing nothing with the same old friends. Let them be bored, and they could become avid readers, according to librarians, principals, teachers, children and those who study literacy.

Dr. Stephen Brunton is used to having his instructions followed--by his patients and also by the family medicine residents he oversees at Long Beach Memorial Hospital. So when Brunton prescribed a month of clean living to nine first-year residents, he was understandably taken aback by the results: All but one cheated. Like sinners at a confessional, the doctors admitted to bingeing on soft drinks, scarfing desserts and furtively playing computer games that they had promised to give up.

Los Angeles County prosecutors have closed an investigation into the spending habits of West Hollywood Councilman John Duran, whose charges on a city-issued credit card were the focus of a nearly two-year probe. Deputy Dist. Atty. Max Huntsman said criminal charges will not be filed against Duran, who charged dozens of meals to his city expense account, spending more than $7,000 at local restaurants over three years. There was "no evidence available to contradict the claim of city officials that they were conducting public business during these meals," Huntsman wrote in a letter Thursday to a person who filed a complaint against members of the City Council.

It's "proxy season" again for most public companies - called that because most shareholders submit their votes via proxy rather than attend the companies' annual meetings in person. This year's season represents a critical juncture in public company corporate governance because of the 2012 season, which earned the moniker "Shareholder Spring" in some circles. The reference was to the dramatic "Arab Spring" across the Middle East, which was marked by wide-scale protests seeking reform within autocratic governments.

Among the household items put to unintended use in the new film "Evil Dead," a playfully reverent if not-overly-so remake of Sam Raimi's 1981 cult favorite horror movie, are a nail gun, an electric knife, a jerry-rigged defibrillator, and, in an obvious nod to the original, a chain saw. The feature debut of Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez, discovered via a short on YouTube, "Evil Dead" has a gleeful exuberance of its own analogous to the mad invention...

The Senate's habit of filibustering judicial nominees must end. Both Republicans and Democrats are to blame. Nearly two and a half years after she was first nominated, a candidate for a seat on a federal appeals court in Washington has been denied an up-or-down confirmation vote by Senate Republicans who persist in obstructing President Obama's judicial appointments. But the blame must be shared by the Senate's Democratic leadership, which can't bring itself to repudiate the undemocratic institution of the filibuster.

Leslie Moonves has had the same morning routine for decades. "The first thing I do after getting out of the shower is pick up Daily Variety and have a cup of coffee," the CBS Corp. chief executive said. "It's a 30-year habit. " That habit is ending for Moonves and lots of other Hollywood power players, movie and television stars, producers and publicists and thousands of wannabes: Daily Variety is ceasing as a print publication after almost 80 years. Tuesday's edition is its last.

Even the Clippers knew they needed a signature win. They were presented with another opportunity to beat a top-tier team on Wednesday night, but they failed to do so in falling to the Memphis Grizzlies, 96-85, at Staples Center. Memphis (44-19) joins Miami, San Antonio and Oklahoma City as top teams the Clippers have not been able to beat lately. The Clippers have defeated the Grizzlies twice this season, the Heat once and the Spurs twice, but all those victories came earlier in the season.

Breathe in. Breathe out. It seems so simple. And yet, when the intake is particularly deep and the outgo unusually sharp, the resulting sigh can reveal far more than words convey. During last week's televised presidential debate, candidate Al Gore's sighs, loud and noticeably theatrical, set off a round of speculation. Vicki Marsh Kabat, a mother of three from Waco, Texas, thinks Gore was just frustrated and letting off steam the way she and her family often do.

Heart attacks might not be such a big wake-up call for some. Sure, many people turn their lives around, but consider this study that tracked fast-food habits among patients who had been hospitalized with heart attacks. Six months after having an attack, researchers say some cut back on their frequent fast-food habit -- but more than half didn't. The study published in February in the American Journal of Cardiology identified 884 heart attack patients who said they frequently -- every week or more -- ate fast food.

Hydrogen. Carbon. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Sulfur. Phosphorus. These elements account for more than 96% of the stuff life on Earth is made from - and all six have been found in a rock sample on Mars. NASA scientists said Tuesday that the Curiosity rover discovered these basic building blocks of life in the very first rock it has drilled from beneath the Martian surface - along with signs that the Red Planet was once capable of hosting primitive microbes. "It definitely has all the indications of being a habitable environment at one point in time," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said at a news conference in Washington.

Measurement firm Nielsen has begun tracking the viewing habits of some 5 million American households that receive entertainment on Internet-connected devices and television sets. It's a group Nielsen dubs the "Zero TV" households, though that fails to precisely describe this group of viewers who are mainly younger than age 35 and childless. The vast majority -- some 75% -- own at least one television, but these sets are connected to the Internet, not to a cable or satellite service.  These nontraditional TV viewers surveyed as part of the latest Cross-Platform Report from Nielsen cited cost and lack of interest as the main reasons for not subscribing to a traditional pay TV service.