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.
Low-income housing residents who live in "green" buildings that are built with eco-friendly materials and energy-efficient features appear to have fewer "sick building" symptoms (SBS) than residents of traditionally constructed low-income housing, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Asthma outcomes--hospitalizations, attacks, and missed school days due to asthma--were also significantly lower for children living in the green buildings.
A new paper in the Journal of Environmental Analytical Chemistry states next generation 'heated' tobacco devices - confusing to the public because heating nicotine vapor is the mechanism behind e-cigarette devices - produce side-stream emissions similar to secondhand cigarette smoke.
Horses need help when it comes to insect pests like flies but many horse owners are in the dark about how best to effectively manage it.
A new overview of equine fly management in the latest issue of the Journal of Integrated Pest Management, an open-access journal that is written for farmers, ranchers, and extension professionals.
One fly-management method that is gaining ground is the use of wasps that are parasitoids of fly pupae. The female wasp inserts an eggs into the fly puparium, and when the egg hatches, the wasp larva eats the fly pupa.
The authors conducted research on two wasp species that are sold commercially to see what type of manure they preferred.
Social networking makes it easy to monitor the status and activities of a former romantic partner, an often unhealthy use of social media known as interpersonal electronic surveillance (IES) by about five scholars on the planet who hope the term will catch on.
In the real world it is probably called cyber-stalking when it is not just stalking. There are warning signs it will occur but people often assume the best and ignore those. But after the fact, psychological and relationship factors and how individuals cope with the termination of a romantic relationship can help predict their use of online surveillance, according to a study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
Cigarette smoking is bad because it's nicotine that is addictive but it is the hundreds of carcinogens in smoke that kills people. They are a deadly combination. For that reason, advocates often promote harm reduction techniques while smoking cessation happens - gums, patches and e-cigarettes all replacement the nicotine with the cigarette smoke.
What is happening in the brain? It's a lot like codeine.
According to new research in rat models, nicotine use over time increases the speed that codeine is converted into morphine within the brain, by increasing the amount of a specific enzyme. It appears smokers' brains are being primed for a bigger buzz from this common pain killer - which could put them at a higher risk for addiction, and possibly even overdose.
They stayed up late into the evening, averaged less than 6.5 hours of sleep a night and rarely napped.
College students during final exams? Working moms? No, says a UCLA-led team of researchers who studied sleeping patterns among traditional peoples whose lifestyles closely resemble those of our evolutionary ancestors. Instead it was pre-industrial humans, according to a team that studied the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia and the Tsimane of Bolivia challenges conventional wisdom about their sleeping habits. The findings, published today in Current Biology, suggest that the industrialized world's sleep habits do not differ much from those that humans evolved to have.
Stanford engineers have created a plastic "skin" that can detect how hard it is being pressed and generate an electric signal to deliver this sensory input directly to a living brain cell.
Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, has spent a decade trying to develop a material that mimics skin's ability to flex and heal, while also serving as the sensor net that sends touch, temperature and pain signals to the brain. Ultimately she wants to create a flexible electronic fabric embedded with sensors that could cover a prosthetic limb and replicate some of skin's sensory functions.
When flowering plants are surrounded by a large number of insects, usually both sides profit from the encounter. Feasting on the plant juice and pollen, the insects pollinate the flowers and thus secure the survival of the plants. However, sometimes the insects - in this case a certain species of leafhoppers - can bring disaster to the plants, which they are not able to overcome.
Climate variability is one of the major forces in the rise and fall of agrarian states in Mexico and Peru, according to a team of researchers looking at both climate and archaeological records.
"We are arguing that the climate information in both areas is good enough to establish that climate is playing some role in the rise and fall of these city states," said Douglas Kennett, professor of environmental archaeology. "Now we need to further refine the archaeological data."
REM sleep, the phase of night-time mammalian sleep physiology where dreams occur, has long fascinated scientists, clinicians, philosophers, and artists alike, but the identity of the neurons that control REM sleep, and its function in sleep have been controversial due to a lack of precise genetic methods to study the sleeping brain.
A demonstration of a recent brain technology provides the first answers to both questions, identifying a neural circuit in the brain that regulates REM sleep, and showing that REM sleep controls the physiology of the other major sleep phase, called non-REM (NREM) sleep.
Within modern cosmology, the Big Bang marks the beginning of the universe and the creation of matter, space and time about 13.8 billion years ago. Since then, the visible structures of the cosmos have developed: billions of galaxies which bind gas, dust, stars and planets with gravity and host supermassive black holes in their centres. But how could these visible structures have formed from the universe's initial conditions?
To answer this question, theoretical astrophysicists carry out cosmological simulations. They transform their knowledge about the physical processes forming our universe into mathematical models and simulate the evolution of our universe on high-performance computers over billions of years.
WASHINGTON, DC - Researchers at a Dallas children's hospital aim to show that nonpowder firearms such as airsoft, BB, and paintball guns should not be viewed as toys, but rather powerful weapons causing increasingly severe and sometimes life-threatening injuries in pediatric patients.
