News Articles

If you are concerned your child spends too much time playing video games, you're not alone.  And you may be right in your worry.   A new study says video game "addiction" is a global problem and that greater amounts of gaming, lower social competence and greater impulsivity were risk factors for becoming pathological gamers.A two-year longitudinal study of 3,034 third through eighth grade students in Singapore found approximately 9% of gamers to be pathological players according to standards similar to those established by the American Psychiatric Association for diagnosing gambling addiction. Serious problems like depression, anxiety, social phobias and lower school performance seemed to be outcomes of their pathological play.

America has been a global powerhouse more due to individual and small group initiative than the large, government projects currently popular.     But the U.S. seems to have a widening 'inventor' gap - people who regard themselves as creative and interested in science math and desiring to help society.   While the U.S. relies on big funding, Indians make $4 microscopes so everyone can have fun with science and generate interest.The 2011 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index announced today indicates  there is a generational basis for the looming shortfall.    Americans aged 16–25 possess creativity, interest in science and math and preference for working in groups or with mentors yet do not regard themselves as inventive. 

At isn't just people that have gotten fatter as society has converged on the Utopian ideal of enough food for everyone at low cost.   Over 20 percent of horses are overweight or obese too.   A pilot study carried out by The University of Nottingham's School of Veterinary Medicine and Science and published in Veterinary Record showed that rates of obesity among horses are likely to be just as high as they are among people, a condition that can lead to laminitis and equine metabolic syndrome.Yes, horses can have metabolic syndrome also.

In every study done over the last 70 years, since weight loss research began, the one solution guaranteed to work was ingesting fewer calories than you burn.   Nevertheless, any number of gimmicks have come into fashion.One claim is that eating a big breakfast will lead to weight loss.   It can be confusing for laypeople because almost anything can begin with 'clinical tests show' and sound authoritative.

A U.K. study showed that wetter, cooler summers have a detrimental effect on the milk we drink.Newcastle researchers found that milk collected during a cooler summer and the following winter had significantly higher saturated fat content and far less beneficial fatty acids than in a warmer year.

Why are we forked creatures instead of tumbling beach balls of undifferentiated cells?An embryo begins by dividing into identical cells, but within hours these cells begin to make genetic decisions, turning off some genes and turning on others. So the ball of cells acquires a front end and a back end, a top and a bottom, nerve cells and muscles cells, all still carrying the same DNA, but DNA now packaged in such a way that some genes are shrink wrapped and silent but others are spread-eagled for easy access and active.

Want to know if you can be the king of Donkey Kong?    A group of researchers say they can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how well you will do on a complex task like a strategic video game - by analyzing activity in a specific region of your brain.Instead of measuring how brain activity differs before and after subjects learn a complex task, the researchers analyzed background activity in the basal ganglia, a group of brain structures known to be important for procedural learning, coordinated movement and feelings of reward.

Forget spray-on tans, new research in Evolution and Human Behaviour says eating carrots and tomatoes gives you a more healthy tan than even the sun.Dr Ian Stephen, from the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus, led the research and said, "Most people think the best way to improve skin colour is to get a suntan, but our research shows that eating lots of fruit and vegetables is actually more effective."

Stereotypes exist for a reason.  They give us a comfortable idea of what we are dealing with, based on experience or at least perception.   Gender stereotypes suggest that men are usually tough and women are usually tender but it turns out stereotypes may be more than experience to our brains.In a new Psychological Science study,  when subjects looked at a gender-neutral face, they were more likely to judge it as male if they were touching something hard and female if they were touching something soft.

The American Diabetes Association estimates that nearly 24 million children and adults in the U.S. have diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of the disease and accounts for about 90 to 95 percent of these cases.Some studies have shown that coffee may be protective against type 2 diabetes.  No one has determined why but researchers at UCLA have discovered a possible molecular mechanism behind coffee's protective effect.  The protein sex hormone–binding globulin (SHBG) regulates the biological activity of the body's sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen, which have long been thought to play a role in the development of type 2 diabetes. And coffee consumption, a new study in Diabetes says, increases plasma levels of SHBG. 

Observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea have found 16 close-knit pairs of supermassive black holes in merging galaxies.These black-hole pairs, also called binaries, are about a hundred to a thousand times closer together than most that have been observed before, providing astronomers a glimpse into how these behemoths and their host galaxies merge—a crucial part of understanding the evolution of the universe. Although few similarly close pairs have been seen previously, this is the largest population of such objects observed as the result of a systematic search.

A new paper says that as many as 20 percent of the most distant galaxies currently detected appear brighter than they actually are, because of an effect called "strong gravitational lensing."How strong gravitational lensing works; from our view on Earth, if a faraway galaxy and a nearby galaxy line up on the sky, the gravity of the nearby galaxy bends the light from the faraway galaxy, as if the nearer galaxy were a magnifying glass, or lens.  Einstein predicted decades ago that gravity could bend light, and astronomers have since proven him right. In fact, modern astronomers exploit the effect to find distant objects that would otherwise be invisible, such as planets orbiting other stars.