We're bombarded with information at all times, so much that if we had to try and process it all times, we'd be paralyzed. Our cerebellum does information damage control by filtering out what changes. Evolution made it possible for us to conserve energy while still processing anomalies quickly.
At this time of year it is common to see food drives for the less fortunate - and then we see reports saying that low-income people are disproportionately obese and can't control themselves and need to be taxed more heavily in order to eat less.
How can it be both? Welcome to modern American food policy.
Academics writing in Marketing Science want poor people to spend more on food and analyzed six years of sales data from over 1,700 supermarkets across the U.S. to make the case that poor people will behave as elites want if the price of food is changed.
Though we like to think we are more enlightened, advanced or progressive than in the past, it really isn't so.
We aren't all that different from 2,000 years ago - kids were kids, parents worried the new generation would doom society, and people fought over religion and politics. Or did religion bring nations together? It depends on who you ask. A new anthropology paper says that in Mexico of 700 B.C., religion drove people apart, a lot like Islam today does with everyone outside Islam.Humans haven't learned much in more than 2,000 years when it comes to religion and politics.
Using new images that show unprecedented detail, scientists have found that material rotating around a very young protostar probably has dragged in and twisted magnetic fields from the larger area surrounding the star. The discovery, made with the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, has important implications for how dusty disks -- the raw material for planet formation -- grow around young stars.
Scientists from James Cook University have discovered two critically endangered species of sea snakes they thought were extinct. They were basically hiding in plain sight on Ashmore Reef in the Timor Sea, they just hadn't been since in over 15 years.
A Western Australia Parks and Wildlife Officer, Grant Griffin, sent a photo of the snakes in for identification.
"We were blown away, these potentially extinct snakes were there in plain sight, living on one of Australia's natural icons, Ningaloo Reef," says lead author Blanche D'Anastasi from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at JCU. "What is even more exciting is that they were courting, suggesting that they are members of a breeding population."
We think of small talk as a way to pass the time or kill an awkward silence but a group of evolutionary psychologists are suggesting that these idle conversations could be a social-bonding tool passed down through evolution - well, in their press release they write "passed down from primates", which shows why you should be wary of psychologists discussing science.
It has been long-established that mental health and behavioral problems such as alcohol and drug abuse are risk factors that push teens to smoke. A new study finds that less destructive kids will opt for e-cigarettes instead of cancer-causing cigarettes.
That's a win for the future of public health, where smoking is linked to numerous maladies.
In recent years, smoking has declined in middle and high school students, but the use of electronic cigarettes in this group tripled from 2013 to 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The hope is that they are using them to wean off cigarettes and will not cause a nicotine addiction that pushes young people into smoking.
Birds use sophisticated changes to the structure of their feathers, not dyes and pigments, to create multi-colored plumage, and that is why they never go gray.
Using X-ray scattering at the ESRF facility in France to examine the blue and white feathers of the Blue Jay, researchers from the University of Sheffield found that birds demonstrate a surprising level of control and sophistication in producing colors - it is able to change the color of its feathers along the equivalent of a single human hair using a tunable nanostructure.
A team of academic cancer specialists has a way to lower drug discovery costs without politicians killing off one of the few remaining non-service industries in America: do less research.
Currently, early cancer drug studies involve extra biopsies solely for the purpose of trying to understand the pharmacodynamics -- what the drug does to the tumor -- they are often mandatory in government-sponsored phase 1 clinical trials because the belief is that computer and cellular models won't be accurate enough. This obviously increases the time and costs of development and a team says that this costly process has had no impact on subsequent drug development or how physicians use these new drugs to treat future patients.
Two newly-developed driverless cars systems can identify a user's location and orientation in places where GPS does not function, and identify the various components of a road scene in real time on a regular camera or smartphone, performing the same job as sensors costing tens of thousands of dollars.
Although the systems cannot currently control a driverless car, the ability to make a machine 'see' and accurately identify where it is and what it's looking at is a vital part of developing autonomous vehicles and robotics.
A paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology seeks to dismiss the concept of 'fat but fit' and instead suggest that the protective effects of high fitness against early death are reduced in obese people.
The detrimental effects of low aerobic fitness in older people have been well documented but few studies have investigated a direct link between aerobic fitness and health in younger populations. A study in Sweden followed 1,317,713 men for a median average of 29 years to examine the association between aerobic fitness and death later in life, as well as how obesity affected these results. The subjects' aerobic fitness was tested by asking them to cycle until they had to stop due to fatigue.
About 25 years ago, Michael Hall discovered the protein "Target of Rapamycin" (TOR) in yeast. It is one of the most studied members of the protein kinase family, an important family of regulatory proteins that control many cellular processes. Later, a TOR kinase was also found in mammalian cells, where it is known as mTOR - the mammalian Target of Rapamycin.
Follow-up times of abnormal screening exams were shorter for breast cancer than they were for colorectal and cervical cancers, according to a recent study involving more than one million individuals who underwent these screenings. Recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the study reported the percentages of individuals with abnormal screening exams receiving timely follow-up were: 93.2% to 96.7% of women across breast centers, 46.8% to 68.7% of individuals across colorectal centers, and 46.6% of women at the cervical center.
