Studies throughout the decades have shown that regular diet and exercise is the number-one way to get healthy. Wolfram|Alpha can offer you a variety of different ways to start, track, and maintain your new healthy lifestyle.

Query how to lose weight, and Wolfram|Alpha will bring up a formula where you can enter all the information needed, including your intended physical activity level, to figure out how many calories you should be eating every day in order to reach your target body weight:

Once you’ve filled out all your information, you’ll be able to see all sorts of different data. You’ll come across a “weight loss regimen duration pod”, which will show you how long it should take you to meet your goal if you stick to the plan. A little further down the page is information on what your caloric intake should be in order to maintain your weight once you’ve reached your goal. Wolfram|Alpha also shows you what your ideal body weight should be based on the information you entered into the formula.

Now, everyone is different, and the ideal body weight for all people of the same age, same gender, and same height is definitely not the same across the board, so don’t worry if your personal target differs from the “ideal body weight.” You know your body and goals best!

Other pods on the page will show you comparison charts; if you want to lose your weight in four months or in half a year, Wolfram|Alpha shows you the different caloric intakes necessary for each frame of time. If you aren’t able to be moderately active or if you plan on being extremely active, we’ll show you how your daily required caloric intake will change. Play around with the formula, figure out what regimen works best for you, and start your new healthy lifestyle right away!

Now that you’ve got your caloric intake numbers set, you can use Wolfram|Alpha to figure out how many calories are in the food that you’re eating! You can either query a food directly or you can use one of the many widgets that other Wolfram|Alpha users have created for a quick answer. With all the options we’ve got, you’ll be able to find accurate calorie counts for all the foods you’re eating every day—even the ones you’d pick up at some fast food restaurants:

The next step is to get a better idea of how many calories you’re burning when you exercise. Typically, you need to burn 500 more calories than you eat every day in order to lose one pound per week. This handy widget will help you to accurately figure out not only your caloric burn, but also what other activities are equivalent to the specific activity you’ve just queried. Awesome, right?

As we stated before, possible results will vary from person to person. Make sure to consult a medical professional before starting any new weight-loss regimen.

It can be really hard to make the necessary changes required for losing weight and getting healthy. We all know it. But we at Wolfram|Alpha also know how integral the right tools can be in securing a victory and long-term success. So get yourself a food journal (or make yourself a spreadsheet using Mathematica) and start tracking your caloric intake and caloric burn with our data and widgets. Let Wolfram|Alpha help you to reach your goal this year of becoming a healthier person!

First, the stats. The Giants won their regular season clash with the Patriots this year, and with the new game-level history plots we just added to team and player results, you can clearly see that the Giants’ defense put the pressure on Tom Brady that week, holding his passer rating to its lowest point of the season:

Neither the Pats nor the Giants have ever won a game at Lucas Oil Stadium, but the Patriots have the better record on turf this year—and they haven’t lost a game since that week 9 clash with the Giants. But will Rob Gronkowski’s ankle injury cancel out that momentum? He had the most receiving yards of any tight end in 2011 and was a huge part of the Patriots’ offense. How big? Ask Wolfram|Alpha to divide Gronkowski’s receiving targets by overall Patriots passing attempts, and you can see that his team threw to him about 20% of the time. That’s a big burden to spread across the team’s other leading receivers.

Much of this year’s pre-game noise is about how the Brady-Manning Super Bowl rematch will play out. But they’re not the only returning players from 2007. In the last Giants-Pats Super Bowl, Giants running backs Ahmad Bradshaw (in his rookie year) and Brandon Jacobs were the leading rushers. Jacobs got the bulk of the carries in the regular season that year, but Wolfram|Alpha’s season total plot shows how Bradshaw has come into his own since then, despite being out for a few games in mid-season 2011.

Also returning will be 330-pound Giants offensive tackle Kareem McKenzie, for whom Wolfram|Alpha can compute some brand-new statistics—like that fact that the number of calories he’d burn playing 2 hours of football (2,830) is roughly equivalent to 7 bowls of chili con carne. (Note: unless you’re Kareem McKenzie, don’t try this at your Super Bowl party.)

Although they’ll probably have the roof up, it’s still good to know that fans in the area should be in for pretty good weather at Lucas Oil Stadium at 6:30pm this Sunday. And if you happen to be lucky enough to have a Super Bowl ticket and the Wolfram|Alpha app on your mobile device, don’t forget that you can use us to identify flights over Lucas Oil Stadium, if the tailgating isn’t exciting enough for you.

There’s a lot more to compute about this Sunday’s competitors, but we’ll leave the rest to you. And even though the season’s almost over, we’ll continue to expand and improve our NFL coverage. We’ll have more detailed player and team analysis, support for fantasy football, and much more by the time the 2012 season rolls around—and we encourage you to send us comments, suggestions, and just plain cool queries that you discover with Wolfram|Alpha.

Most of our users are aware that we release a new version of Wolfram|Alpha every week. Each version includes countless changes—including regular data updates to hundreds of sources, improvements to our natural-language parser and other core frameworks, and completely new areas of coverage.

This blog usually focuses on new datasets and functionality, and if you’ve been reading it recently, you know we’ve made some huge additions in just the last couple of months. We’ve introduced our own unique spin on NFL statistics. We’ve added the ability to visualize, compare, and purchase consumer products. And we’ve extended popular mathematics functionality like “Show steps” to more and more domains, most recently differential equations, as we highlighted earlier this week.

But the biggest change to Wolfram|Alpha since its launch nearly three years ago will be our next release, and we wanted you to be aware that it’s coming. We’re not going to let you know the details just yet, but what you’re going to find is a dramatic enhancement of functionality. You’ll be able to personalize your interaction with Wolfram|Alpha in ways that only our combination of algorithms, presentation tools, and data representation could make possible.

You’ll still be able to use Wolfram|Alpha as you have in the past if you choose, but we think what we’ve put together represents the next big step in the evolution of computational knowledge, and one that will make Wolfram|Alpha an indispensable part of your online life.

Stay tuned! The announcement of this important release will be made on this blog.

To celebrate our first birthday, we thought we would share some of our favorite and most popular Wolfram Fun Facts from the past year:

round(log_12(vitaminC in a cubic light year of coffee/kg)))= meaning of lifehttp://bit.ly/hl98zt #FunFact— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts)March 16, 2011

#FunFact The density of Saturn is less than the density of water. http://bit.ly/fpPOAX#science— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) March 30, 2011

#FunFact Which country in the European Union eats the most bananas per capita? http://wolfr.am/o8PvYG— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) August 11, 2011

#FunFact: There are almost 8 times more sheep than people in New Zealand wolfr.am/p902sL— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) August 24, 2011

#FunFact If Warren Buffett divided his wealth evenly among all living people, how big would your check be? wolfr.am/r2wRKd— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) September 28, 2011

#FunFact 10! seconds is exactly 6 weeks. wolfr.am/tZ2B1y— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) November 21, 2011

#FunFact 1 donkey power is equivalent to 0.3353 horsepower.wolfr.am/vUnLtx— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) December 2, 2011

#FunFact A nanocentury is about Pi seconds long. wolfr.am/AckgUT#math— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) January 17, 2012

If every kid in the US left out 2 cookies and a glass of milk for #Santa, how many calories would he eat? wolfr.am/v06Gjf— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) December 21, 2011

And some of the best user-submitted Fun Facts:

RT @Chris_Akiki: #FunFact: The energy of 6.8 trillion Big Macs would power the United States for a year. shar.es/32qBF— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) February 7, 2011

RT @rigginsconst: It would require 8.4×10^11 gallons of paint to cover the surface of the moon via @WolframFunFacts [That's a lot of paint!]— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) February 2, 2011

Now that’s a #FunFact! RT @tsilb: About 107 billion people have lived. Ever. http://bit.ly/jd9d25 cc @WolframFunFacts— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts) May 10, 2011

@WolframFunFactsWhy I like WolframAlpha: wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28ep…— briggsian logarithms (@deka_log) November 22, 2011

Don’t worry about not getting us a birthday present. If you really want to get us something, tweet some fun facts that you find in Wolfram|Alpha to @WolframFunFacts. Thanks for all the support, and here’s to another great year of Wolfram Fun Facts!

From basic separable equations to solving with Laplace transforms, Wolfram|Alpha is a great way to guide yourself through a tough differential equation problem. Let’s take a look at some examples.

Wolfram|Alpha can show the steps to solve simple differential equations as well as slightly more complicated ones like this one:

Wolfram|Alpha can help out in many different cases when it comes to differential equations. Get step-by-step directions on solving exact equations or get help on solving higher-order equations. Even differential equations that are solved with initial conditions are easy to compute.

What about equations that can be solved by Laplace transforms? Not a problem for Wolfram|Alpha:

This step-by-step program has the ability to solve many types of first-order equations such as separable, linear, Bernoulli, exact, and homogeneous. In addition, it solves higher-order equations with methods like undetermined coefficients, variation of parameters, the method of Laplace transforms, and many more. So the next time you find yourself stuck solving a differential equation or wanting to check your work, consult Wolfram|Alpha!