Intermittent fasting, and fasting in general, has been a popular fad health gimmick, but the science isn't on its side. Instead, proponents believe mice are little people so if mice weaned on starvation diets lived longer, people would also.
Do you want a better sex life and a better relationship to go with it? Sociologists say surveys show that if men take up more of the child-care duties, splitting them equally with their female partners, heterosexual couples have more satisfaction with their relationships and their sex lives, according to new research by Georgia State University sociologists.
Daniel L. Carlson, along with graduate students Sarah Hanson and Andrea Fitzroy, all of Georgia State University, used data from more than 900 heterosexual couples' responses in the 2006 Marital Relationship Study (MARS).
They found that when women were responsible for most or all of the child care, both parties reported both the lowest quality relationships and sex lives.
Does watching the news make you lose faith in a higher purpose? Does taking out an army of terrorists alone without so much as a scratch make you feel like you must have a divine gift? An analysis of cellphone data shows that spiritual awareness does vary based on activity, rather than being constant, according to sociologists at the American Sociological Association meeting who say that people had the highest levels of spiritual awareness in the morning and while engaged in activities such as praying, worship, and meditation. Spiritual awareness also was high when people listened to music, read, or exercised. It was low while people were doing work-related activities or playing video games.
Regular consumption of caffeinated coffee may help prevent the return of colon cancer after treatment and improve the chances of a cure, according to a new study.
The patients, all of them treated with surgery and chemotherapy for stage III colon cancer, had the greatest benefit from consuming four or more cups of coffee a day (about 460 milligrams of caffeine), according to the study. These patients were 42 percent less likely to have their cancer return than non-coffee drinkers, and were 33 percent less likely to die from cancer or any other cause.
As more money has been spent on biomedical research in the United States over the past 50 years, there has been diminished return on investment in terms of life expectancy gains and new drug approvals, two Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers say.
In a report published Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that while the number of scientists has increased more than nine-fold since 1965 and the National Institutes of Health's budget has increased four-fold, the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration has only increased a little more than two-fold. Meanwhile, life expectancy gains have remained constant at roughly two months per year.
Scientists working have developed a brain-computer control interface for a lower limb exoskeleton by decoding specific signals from within the user's brain using an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap.
The system allows users to move forwards, turn left and right, sit and stand simply by staring at one of five flickering light emitting diodes (LEDs), according to the paper in the Journal of Neural Engineering.
Each of the five LEDs flickers at a different frequency, and when the user focusses their attention on a specific LED this frequency is reflected within the EEG readout. This signal is identified and used to control the exoskeleton.
Same-sex couples encounter more obstacles to fertility treatment than traditional couples, said Ann V. Bell, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, who noted that the U.S. medical system is standardized to work with heterosexual couples.
When government scientists determined that there would be negligible environmental impact due to the Keystone XL pipeline, another 400 miles of new, safer pipeline in an area where 20,000 miles of older pipeline already existed were not going to ruin the ecology, President Barack Obama ordered them to study it again.
If an unidentified flying object suddenly appeared in the sky, it's likely your heart would beat faster.
Now, researchers have found that the same is true for bears.
The UFOs in this case are actually unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which have become increasingly valuable to wildlife researchers, allowing them to observe animals, including endangered species, in their natural settings from long distances and over difficult terrain. It had appeared as though the animals were taking these encounters in stride. For instance, American black bears rarely seem to startle or run away when a UAV comes near. But the new study reveals that despite the bears' calm demeanor when in the presence of UAVs, their heart rates soar, a sign of acute stress.
The introduction of a new prescription smoking-cessation aid, varenicline, in 2006 has had no significant impact on the rate at which Americans age 18 and older successfully quit smoking, according to a new study in Tobacco Control which suggests that the primary effect of varenicline (marketed as Chantix) has only been to displace the use of older tobacco addiction therapies, such as nicotine patches and the antidepressant, bupropion (Zyban).
Much of the European continent has been affected by a severe drought so far this summer, one of the worst since the drought and heat wave of summer of 2003, according to the latest report by the European Drought Observatory (EDO). The drought, which particularly affects France, Benelux, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, northern Italy and northern Spain, is caused by a combination of prolonged rain shortages and exceptionally high temperatures. The current seasonal weather forecast envisages more abundant rains for the Mediterranean region in September, but no effective improvement is yet foreseen for parts of western, central and eastern Europe.
Though it is the common metric, hospice use is not really an indicator of quality of end-of-life care. Instead, when researchers in the U.S. studied variations in patterns of hospice use between states, they found troubling trends. Shi-Yi Wang, MD, PhD, Yale University School of Public Health and coauthors discuss the variations in the timing and duration of hospice enrollment and their implications in an article published in Journal of Palliative Medicine (doi:full/10.1089/jpm.2014.0425). They performed a retrospective analysis of Medicare patients who used hospice services during the last 6 months of their lives.
You are gazing over the clear stream, thinking of fishing the crystal waters in the Rockies. The next morning, you are stunned to see an orange-yellow sludge covering the stream as far as you can see. Is this the Colorado Gold King Mine spill into Cement Creek of August 5, 2015?
No, this describes the Clear Creek, CO spill of April, 2009 from a private mine or it could be the 1975 or 1978 Cement Creek spills from abandoned mines.
