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.
Like with emissions control and human rights, the Chinese government will publicly say one thing and then do another. Reducing cigarette smoking is in that same camp.
China is the world's largest producer and consumer of cigarettes, with more than 300 million smokers. The annual cigarette related death toll of 1.4 million (which includes approximately 100,000 deaths blamed on second-hand smoke) is expected to triple by 2050.
A National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded study by public health experts from the University of Liverpool has found that the programme of reassessing people on disability benefits may have had an adverse effect on the mental health of claimants.
In England between 2010 and 2013, just over one million recipients of the main out-of-work disability benefit had their eligibility reassessed using a new functional checklist--the Work Capability Assessment.
Doctors and disability rights organisations have raised concerns that this has had an adverse effect on the mental health of claimants, but there have been no population level studies exploring the health effects of this.
Reported mental health problems
People diagnosed with schizophrenia who are prone to hallucinations are likely to have structural differences in a key region of the brain compared to both healthy individuals and people diagnosed with schizophrenia who do not hallucinate, according to research published today.
The study, led by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with Durham University, Macquarie University, and Trinity College Dublin, found that reductions in the length of the paracingulate sulcus (PCS), a fold towards the front of the brain, were associated with increased risk of hallucinations in people diagnosed with schizophrenia.
A team led at Newcastle University, UK, has shed light on the evolutionary roots of language in the brain.
Publishing in Nature Communications, the team led by Dr Ben Wilson and Professor Chris Petkov explain how using an imaging technique to explore the brain activity in humans and monkeys has identified the evolutionary origins of cognitive functions in the brain that underpin language and allow us to evaluate orderliness in sequences of sounds.
This new knowledge will help our understanding of how we learn - and lose - language such as in aphasia after a stroke or in dementia.
Cetuximab, marketed as Erbitux, is one of the key therapies for metastatic colorectal cancer, yet the cancer still returns in some patients, shortening overall survival. A new study may help explain why. Key proteins, known as epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFR), are regulated, leading to resistance.
"Our study investigated the role of extracellular methylation in EGFR signaling, and unexpectedly discovered new information about how EGFR renders cancer cells resistant to cetuximab antibody therapy," said Mien Chie Hung, Ph.D., chair of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
People who drink three to five cups of coffee per day are less likely to die prematurely from some illnesses than those who don't drink or drink less coffee, according to a new study. Drinkers of both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee saw benefits, including a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases, type 2 diabetes, and suicide.
Scientists have shown how a parasitic worm infection common in the developing world increases susceptibility to tuberculosis. The study demonstrated that treating the parasite reduces lung damage seen in mice that also are infected with tuberculosis, thereby eliminating the vulnerability to tuberculosis (TB) that the parasite is known to cause.
The study raises the possibility of using inexpensive and widely available anti-parasitic drugs as a preventive measure in places where the parasite and TB are common -- stopping infection with the parasite and reducing susceptibility to TB and the risk of a latent TB infection progressing to disease.
Scholars have additional evidence that among U.S. adults some recent cigarette quitters may have done so with the assistance of electronic cigarettes.
The research informs the ongoing debate as to whether e-cigarettes are effective aids for smoking cessation or instead promote uptake by non-tobacco users.
Noisy gymnasiums, restaurants where conversations are nearly impossible, and concert halls less than perfect for the music are all engineering problems.
What does that have to do with emotions? Perhaps a lot. Penn State acoustical engineers are using functional MRI, measuring brain activity by sensing changes in blood flow in the brain, to better understand room acoustics and the emotions they can cause.
Ancient climates on Earth may have been more sensitive to carbon dioxide than was previously thought, according to an analysis of nahcolite crystals found in Colorado's Green River Formation, formed 50 million years old during a hothouse climate.
Scientists found that CO2 levels during this time may have been as low as 680 parts per million (ppm), nearly half the 1,125 ppm predicted by previous experiments. The new data suggests that past predictions significantly underestimate the impact of greenhouse warming and that Earth's climate may be more sensitive to increased carbon dioxide than was once thought
Scientists have found that people infected by the dengue virus but showing no clinical symptoms can actually infect mosquitoes that bite them. It appears that these asymptomatic people - who, together with mildly symptomatic patients, represent three-quarters of all dengue infections - could be involved in the transmission chain of the virus.
The ice-covered Arctic Ocean is a more important factor concerning the concentration of the greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere than previously assumed. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) report on the newly discovered interactions between the atmosphere, sea ice and the ocean in a recent online study in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports.
