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.
COLUMBIA, Mo. - In 2014, 75.4 million Baby Boomers lived in the United States, according to Pew Research. As this generation continues to age, dialogue will increase on how to manage concerns associated with aging, such as the decline in cognitive ability and retirement decisions. Now, a researcher at the University of Missouri has found that older individuals with lower cognitive abilities are susceptible to behavioral biases, such as being adverse to upfront costs. Michael Guillemette, an assistant professor of personal financial planning in the University of Missouri's College of Human Environmental Sciences, says that risk aversion, along with lower cognitive ability among older Americans, might explain the lack of demand for certain retirement savings products.
There are claims by some that many diseases we now get more frequently are "lifestyle" diseases, caused by decadent Western problems like plentiful food and too much science. Instead, it has also been posited, we simply are not killed by lots of other things young (organic food, lack of medicine. unheated homes) and that makes diseases of age look like diseases of lifestyle.
A new study adds to that, using using modern imaging techniques on hearts more than 400 years old found at an archaeological site. Archaeologists with the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research excavating the basement of the Convent of the Jacobins in Rennes, France, unearthed several grave sites dating back to the late 16th or early 17th century.
Dietary restriction enhances the expression of the circadian clock genes in peripheral tissue, according to research in Cell Metabolism which found that dietary restriction, induced by reducing protein in the diet, increased the amplitude of circadian clocks and enhanced the cycles of fat breakdown and fat synthesis.
This improvement in fat metabolism may be a key mechanism in explaining why dietary restriction extends lifespan in several species, including the flies in this study.
Army ants build living bridges by linking their bodies to span gaps and create shortcuts across rainforests in Central and South America. An international team of researchers has now discovered these bridges can move from their original building point to span large gaps and change position as required.
The bridges stop moving when they become so long that the increasing costs incurred by locking workers into the structure outweigh the benefit that the colony gains from further shortening their trail. Bridges dismantle when the ants in the structure sense the traffic walking over them slows down below a critical threshold.
A new analysis led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that while most U.S. health insurance plans deny benefits to transgender men and women for medical care necessary to transition to the opposite sex, paying for sex reassignment surgery and hormones is actually cost-effective.
How does the price impact your evaluation of a restaurant meal?
Psychologists have long believed that we judge experiences based on their most intense moment (the peak) and the last part of the experience (end). But that can change dramatically depending on how much customers are paying for the experience., according to a new paper which investigated how the price of pizza changed the relationship between a consumer's overall evaluation of the meal and the evaluation of each individual slice of pizza.
An international team of astrophysicists led by a Johns Hopkins University scientist has for the first time witnessed a star being swallowed by a black hole and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.
The finding reported Thursday in the journal Science tracks the star -- about the size of our sun -- as it shifts from its customary path, slips into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole and is sucked in, said Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins.
"These events are extremely rare," van Velzen said. "It's the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months."
Scientists have developed a new method to model heat wave magnitude that takes both the duration and the intensity of the heat wave into account.
The new metric--the Heat Wave Magnitude Index daily (HWMId)--indicates that a little-studied heat wave in Finland in 1972 had the same extent and magnitude of the 2003 European heat wave that is considered the second strongest heat wave since 1950.
The findings are published today, 27th November 2015, in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
New research finds that progesterone supplements in the first trimester of pregnancy do not improve outcomes in women with a history of unexplained recurrent miscarriages.
The study of 826 women with previously unexplained recurrent miscarriage showed that those who received progesterone treatment in early pregnancy were no less likely to miscarry than those who received a placebo. This was true whatever their age, ethnicity, medical history and pregnancy history.
Smoking high potency 'skunk-like' cannabis can damage a crucial part of the brain responsible for communication between the two brain hemispheres, according to a new study.
Researchers have known for some time that long-term cannabis use increases the risk of psychosis and recent evidence suggests that alterations in brain function and structure may be responsible for this greater vulnerability.
Two new studies report dramatic changes in phytoplankton abundance and nature, changes that have important implications for storing excess carbon. Collectively, these studies suggest that certain types of carbon-intensive algae are flourishing and will play increasingly prominent roles as carbon pumps, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Using the isotopic signature of phytoplankton amino acids embedded in skeletons of deep water soft corals, Kelton McMahon and colleagues determined how plankton dominance changed in the North Pacific over the past millennium. Their analysis reveals that there was a transition from dominance by non-nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria to that by eukaryotic microalgae.
Cognitive behavioural therapy could help many people with a dental phobia overcome their fear of visiting the dentist and enable them to receive dental treatment without the need to be sedated, according to a new study by King's College London.
Anxiety about visiting the dentist is common and becomes a phobia when it has a marked impact on someone's well-being; people with dental phobias typically avoid going to the dentist and end up experiencing more dental pain, poorer oral health and a detrimental effect on their quality of life. Estimates from the most recent Adult Dental Health Survey in the UK suggest around one in ten people suffers from dental phobia.
