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.
Taste buds vary widely in humans, which is one reason why some kids prefer sweet or salty treats and others do not, but it may also be the reason that some kids need more sugar to get that same sweet taste.
Conventional measures of age usually define people as 'old' at one chronological age, often 65. In many countries around the world, age 65 is used as a cutoff for everything from pension age to health care systems, as the basis of a demographic measure known as the 'old-age dependency ratio,' which defines everyone over 65 as depending on the population between ages 20 and 65.
In new study in the journal Population and Development Review, IIASA researchers Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov provide new measures to replace the old-age dependency ratio.
A leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer is famously resistant to treatment. There are many reasons for this, but one has to do with a group of persisting cancer cells in the colon that cause relapses. Conventional therapies against them are mostly ineffective. EPFL scientists have now identified a biological mechanism that can be exploited to counteract colon cancer relapses. The approach activates a protein that is lost in the persisting cancer cells. The researchers were able to reactivate it using vitamin A, thus eliminating the cancer cells and preventing metastasis. The study is published in Cancer Cell, and introduces a new way to treat colon cancer.
When you think of it, all of the natural gas harvested by hydraulic fracturing is natural but groups that once embraced it as clean energy have now turned on it and have sought to use its biological origins against it, with manufactured videos of flaming tap water and such that have nothing to do with fracking.
Scientists revealed mayor players in the severe muscle damage caused by sepsis, or septicemia, which explains why many patients suffer debilitating muscle impairment long-term after recovery. They propose a therapeutic approach based on mesenchymal stem cell transplantation, which has produced encouraging results and has proved successful in restoring muscle capacity in animals.
Galaxy clusters are massive congregations of galaxies that host huge reservoirs of hot gas -- the temperatures are so high that X-rays are produced. These structures are useful to astronomers because their construction is believed to be influenced by the Universe's notoriously strange components -- dark matter and dark energy. By studying their properties at different stages in the history of the Universe, galaxy clusters can shed light on the Universe's poorly understood dark side.
The amygdala, a small structure at the front end of the brain's temporal lobe, has long been associated with negative behaviors generally, and specifically with fear. But new research shows this collection of nuclei can also influence positive social functions like kindness and what might be called charitable giving in humans.
Though politicians in Paris cheering a climate accord that 150 out of the 200 countries present have no intention of honoring is getting all of the attention, a more pressing concern is being ignored: a Zombie apocalypse.
Tara Smith, Associate Professor at Kent State University in Ohio says in the Christmas issue of The BMJ(1) that emerging zombie infections have been identified around the globe and, though sporadic, are becoming a source of greater concern to the medical and public health community.
The cycling World champion is significantly less successful during the year when he wears the rainbow jersey than in the previous year, and many have said this is due to a curse.
Thomas Perneger at Geneva University Hospital, Switzerland, put his intellectual petal to the metal to find out if this curse is real and details his work in the Christmas issue of The BMJ.(1)
The "rainbow" jersey is worn by the current cycling World champion (it is white, with bands of blue, red, black, yellow and green across the chest) and many cyclists believe that the World champion will be afflicted with all manner of misery while wearing the jersey- injury, disease, family tragedy, doping investigations, even death - but especially a lack of wins.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (DEC. 15, 2015). Researchers have found little or no 'July effect' in the field of neurosurgery.
The 'July effect' is the theory that more medical and surgical errors, and, consequently, greater levels of morbidity and mortality occur during July, the month during which fourth year medical students become interns and residents advance to higher levels of training where they face greater challenges and more responsibility.
When we speak, we "leak" information about our social identity through the nuanced language that we use to describe others, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This research shows that people can infer a speaker's social identity (e.g., political party affiliation) from how the speaker uses abstract or concrete terms to describe someone else's behavior.
EUGENE, Ore. -- Dec. 14, 2015 -- Evolution is usually thought of as occurring over long time periods, but it also can happen quickly. Consider a tiny fish whose transformation after the 1964 Alaskan earthquake was uncovered by University of Oregon scientists and their University of Alaska collaborators.
The fish, seawater-native threespine stickleback, in just decades experienced changes in both their genes and visible external traits such as eyes, shape, color, bone size and body armor when they adapted to survive in fresh water. The earthquake -- 9.2 on the Richter scale and second highest ever recorded -- caused geological uplift that captured marine fish in newly formed freshwater ponds on islands in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska south of Anchorage.
