News Articles

A new paper says that people who are aware of their own thoughts and emotions - mindful  - show less neural response to positive feedback than their less mindful peers. 
That means they are typically less impulsive.
Trait mindfulness is characterized by an ability to recognize and accept one's thoughts and emotions without judgment. Mindful individuals are much better at letting their feelings and thoughts go rather than getting carried away.

The world's best supercomputers are staggeringly inefficient and energy-intensive machines and the human brain is staggering in its own right; putting a brain's information into CDs would require a skyscraper full of them and, unlike MP3s, there is no way to just create a compression algorithm.
The 86 billion neurons in our brains are connected by synapses that not only complete myriad logic circuits, they also they continuously adapt to stimuli, strengthening some connections while weakening others. We call that process learning and its rapid, highly efficient computational processes can't be matched.

Cognitive fatigue - fatigue resulting from mental work rather than from physical labor - occurs in patients suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) also. 
A recent study investigated the neural correlates of cognitive fatigue in
multiple sclerosis
utilizing three neuroimaging approaches: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allows researchers to look at where in the brain activation is associated with a task or an experience; diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which allows researchers to look at the health of the brain's white matter; and voxel-based morphometry (VBM), which allows researchers to investigate structural changes in the brain.

Despite mainstream media coverage of the 'controversy' over genetically modified foods, Americans still don't see the controversy.The survey found that more than half (53 percent) say they know very little or nothing at all about genetically modified foods, and 25 percent say they have never heard of them. Without being prompted by survey takers, only 7 percent raised GM food labeling on their own as a concern.

NASA is going to measure changes in the height of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding Arctic sea ice produced by a single season of summer melt, which will give researchers a more comprehensive view of seasonal changes and provide context for measurements that will be gathered during NASA's ICESat-2 mission, which is scheduled for launch in 2016. 

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) say the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program is inconsistent when it comes to animal testing.

In recent years, approximately 4.4 million women in the U.S. have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and women of childbearing age having the highest number of diagnoses. 
A new study has found that physiological changes during pregnancy reduce the effects of lamotrigine, a drug commonly prescribed for people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, making women more vulnerable to recurring episodes. The new findings will help psychiatrists and physicians prevent bipolar manic and depressive symptoms during pregnancy, which are risky for the health of the mother and her unborn child.

Despite what you may have read in the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets jumping on the 'sugar is bad' fad, sugar intake is off the hook in one area; nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. High-calorie diets promote the progression of this serious form of liver disease, but that isn't a sugar issue, it is a behavioral one.

Women consistently score lower than men on common assessments of conceptual understanding of physics but there is no clear reason why.
Controlling for student background and test-taking strategies provides little help and therefore claims that the causes of this gender gap have been determined (gender bias, stereotype threat) lack substance.

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) was launched in early September and arrived in orbit around the Moon in October. Its mission is to probe the Moon’s environment but it’s also carrying an interesting piece of technology - a new laser terminal. ESA’s Optical Ground Station in Spain’s Canary Islands was upgraded with an advanced laser terminal that can communicate with LADEE and they report that they have received signals from LADEE 400,000 KM away - at a rate many times faster than possible with traditional radio waves - which means 3 stations on Earth are using next-generation space communications.

The Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas, is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy., hurtling toward its doom at more than 540,000 miles per hour.
But that means the impact will happen in approximately 30 million years. Yet when it does, it will set off a spectacular burst of star formation.
All is not lost, though. It would first have to navigate through the halo of hot ionized gas surrounding the Milky Way, and to do that it has a secret weapon: A magnetic field deep in the cloud's interior which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk. 

Astronomers have calculated the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova occurring in our home galaxy will be visible from Earth and found the chances to be nearly 100% - and it will be visible from telescopes in the form of infrared radiation.