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.
(NEW YORK, NY)--Low levels of serotonin in the brain are known to play a role in depression and anxiety, and it is customary to treat these disorders with medications that increase the amount of this neurotransmitter. However, a new study carried out by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) suggests that this approach may be too simple. It appears that neighboring serotonin-producing brainstem regions exert different and sometimes opposing effects on behavior.
The findings, published today in the online edition of Cell Reports, provide new insights into the development of mood disorders and may aid in designing improved therapies.
The United States Food and Drug Administration has approved the AquAdvantage salmon, a genetically modified Atlantic salmon that expresses a gene from a Chinook salmon to grow faster, after reviewing it since 1996.
Recently, the American actress Jennifer Lawrence said she could never be a Republican even though she was 'raised' Republican. To the American public, that was no surprise, it is quite common for kids to rebel in lots of ways, including in politics, and Republicans in the Hollywood community, where fantasy is the core business, are rare.
A simple test using a raisin can predict how well a toddler will perform academically at age eight, according to a new paper. Using just the piece of dried fruit and a plastic cup they have devised a test based on how long a 20-month old child can wait to pick up a raisin in front of them.
ANN ARBOR--Coffee rust has ravaged Latin American plantations for several years, leading to reductions in annual coffee production of up to 30 percent in some countries and threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers in the region.
A new study by University of Michigan researchers suggests that the coffee plants themselves may hold biological weapons that could someday be harnessed in the fight against the coffee rust fungal pathogen.
Those potential weapons are themselves fungi, a surprisingly diverse community of more than 300 species of them--including 15 likely fungal parasites--living on coffee leaves, within or alongside the yellow blotches that mark coffee rust lesions.
The notion that older people are happier than younger people is being challenged following a recent study led by a University of Bradford lecturer.
In fact it suggests that people get more depressed from age 65 onwards.
The study, led by psychology lecturer Dr Helena Chui and recently published in the international journal Psychology and Aging, builds on a 15-year project observing over 2,000 older Australians living in the Adelaide area.
Previous studies have shown an increase in depressive symptoms with age but only until the age of 85. This is the first study to examine the issue beyond that age.
The Internet of Things, IoT, the cloud, big data...buzzwords for the modern age. But, asks Won Kim, Jaehyuk Choi and colleagues in the Department of Software at Gachon University, in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea: Is the IoT actually anything new and how does it work? Writing in the International Journal of Web and Grid Services, the team offer some answers and a high-level view of the IoT from the perspective of its architecture.
Most animals reproduce by laying eggs. As the embryo develops, its feeds on the egg yolk. No egg yolk, no offspring, then? Not always. Biologists from KU Leuven, Belgium, have discovered an exception to the rule: the eggs of nematodes (roundworms) can also hatch without egg yolk. The findings were published in Scientific Reports.
Wild birds will sacrifice access to food in order to stay close to their partner over the winter, according to a study by Oxford University researchers.
Scientists from the Department of Zoology found that mated pairs of great tits chose to prioritise their relationships over sustenance in a novel experiment that prevented couples from foraging in the same location.
This also meant birds ended up spending a significant amount of time with their partners' flock-mates.
And, over time, the pairs may even have learned to cooperate to allow each other to scrounge from off-limits feeding stations.
A garnet crystal only one micrometre in diameter was instrumental in a University of Alberta team of physicists creating a route to "lab-on-a-chip" technology for magnetic resonance, a tool to simplify advanced magnetic analysis for device development and interdisciplinary science.
"To most, a gem so tiny would be worthless, but to us, it's priceless," says Mark Freeman, University of Alberta physics professor and Canada Research Chair in condensed matter physics. "It was the perfect testbed for this new method."
A team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and its collaborators has sequenced the genomes of two species of small water creatures called acorn worms and showed that we share more genes with them than we do with many other animals, establishing them as our distant cousins.
A new study by scientists in the UK and France has found that Antarctic ice sheet collapse will have serious consequences for sea level rise over the next two hundred years, though not as much as some have suggested.
