Habits

Jeff Fischer doesn't have a vineyard or a winery. He has no formal training and zero employees. Yet in a short time he's managed to land his small-batch Habit wines in nearly 50 of L.A.'s top restaurants, including the Chateau Marmont, Spago, AOC, Ink, the Hungry Cat, Providence, Hatfield's and Bäco Mercat. "He's on the fast track, and it's kind of crazy," says Caroline Styne of AOC and Tavern, who was the first sommelier to champion Fischer's wines, even writing about them on her popular wine blog, Styne on Wine.

In an age when the text and the tweet can destroy a movie an hour after it opens, Hollywood market research firms are scrambling to rethink the way they help movie studios promote their films. That has created new challenges for companies such as Capstone Global Marketing and Research Inc. in Sherman Oaks, which must adapt their testing methods to the changing habits of the tech-savvy moviegoer. "None of us knows the answers," said veteran marketing strategist and researcher Catherine Paura, Capstone's co-founder.

California gasoline prices may have already peaked for the first half of the year and should head lower soon, analysts said. Meanwhile, nationwide gasoline price averages over the first two months of the year rose at such a blistering rate that Americans were on pace to pay half a trillion dollars on gasoline in 2013 for the first time ever, analysts said. The high prices were causing big changes in the driving habits of American motorists, with gasoline consumption dropping sharply.

The Los Angeles Fire Department wants the City Council to give it an additional $50 million next fiscal year while the city faces a $200-million deficit. To deserve that, the department should show it's willing to shed some of its old habits and embrace new ideas that might make it more efficient. It could start with its dispatch center. Los Angeles County has shown that non-sworn dispatchers can be effective and going to shorter work shifts could save millions. The city, however, continues to deploy sworn personnel - who often earn up to $30,000 more in base salary - for those jobs, and assigns them to 12-hour shifts.

It's never too late to quit smoking, and researchers have new data to prove it. Even at the age of 64, kicking the habit can add four years to a person's life, while quitting by age 34 can increase life expectancy by a decade, according to a study published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine. After analyzing health data from more than 200,000 Americans, researchers calculated that current smokers were three times more likely to die during the course of the study compared with people who had never smoked.

Star Wars' forest moon of Endor might be fiction, but astronomers say they're hot on the trail of real-life alien moons -- which could also potentially be viable candidates for habitable worlds, researchers say.  Astronomers have found roughly 850 known alien worlds. And as announced at this week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, the Kepler spacecraft has picked up 2,740 candidate planets since its 2009 launch. Scientists are looking for the slice of this population that lies in what's known as the habitable zone, a region just close enough to the home star for liquid water to potentially exist.

There could be a lot of Earth-like planets out there, new analysis of data from NASA's Kepler telescope suggests. Speaking in Long Beach on Monday, at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, NASA researchers working with the mission reported that they had discovered 461 new planet candidates -- four of which are less than two times the size of Earth and are located in their stars' so-called habitable zones, where liquid water might...

The sun has risen on a new year, a time for (once the hangover has subsided) fulfilling all the resolutions we made last night. Getting more exercise. Writing thank-you notes. Flossing. Or maybe not. Jeremy Dean, founder of Psyblog and author of “ Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick ” knows that New Year's resolutions rarely last. He explains how we might have a chance of sticking to our New Year's resolutions -- and why bad habits are so darn hard to break.

A team of astronomers has made two discoveries: a super-Earth sitting a mere 42 light years away at just the right temperature for liquid water -- and a creative new way to look for such exoplanets. The super-Earth, HD 40307-g, is one of three discovered around HD 40307, bringing the grand total of planets around the dwarf star up to six. It lies in what's known as the habitable zone, where liquid water -- a required ingredient for life -- could exist. At seven Earth masses, it's likely hefty enough to have an atmosphere, said study co-author Hugh Jones, a University of Hertfordshire astronomer.

Re "Romney spends big with aides' firms," Oct. 27 A lot of money is wasted in political campaigns on useless advertisements. You know, the totally annoying stuff. It's too bad that money doesn't go toward something useful, such as reducing the deficit, funding schools or fixing potholes. You know, stuff that can actually help ordinary citizens. But our political system runs on money these days. No wonder politicians spend like drunken sailors; they're used to wasting money before they get into office.