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Exploring why mindfulness meditation has positive mental health outcomes
Feb 21, 2020 07:01Researchers suggest that consistently practicing mindfulness meditation encourages self-compassion, helping people to find greater meaning in their life, but also reducing the tendency to avoid or escape from unpleasant thoughts or emotions that cause pain, suffering or discomfort. Combined, these three factors could lead to improvements in wellbeing and mental health.
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Struggling to quit sugar? You might not be sleeping enough
Feb 19, 2020 07:38Levels of insomnia can influence the hippocampus, the region of your brain that regulates food intake. If intake of sugary and fatty foods leads to abnormal activity of the hippocampus, it might be harder to avoid cravings for unhealthy foods. The researchers said another potential explanation for the connection between poor sleep and poor dietary habits, is that consuming too much food can cause gastrointestinal discomfort, which can make it harder to fall or remain asleep.
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Predicting autism risk may begin with a drop of blood
Feb 16, 2020 08:53Principal Investigator Robert Naviaux, professor of medicine and pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine said “We know from the history of certain genetic diseases, such as PKU, that if children can be identified before the first symptoms have appeared, then the disease can be prevented, even though the children have the DNA mutations,” adding, “I believe that over half of autism cases may be preventable if only we had a way to identify the children at risk before the first symptoms appear.
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Something special about bat immunity makes them ideal viral incubators
Feb 16, 2020 08:24Researchers say that rapidly replicating viruses that have evolved within bats will probably cause enhanced virulence if they jump to subsequent hosts, including humans, with immune systems that diverge from those unique to bats.
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Could ‘young’ blood stop us getting old?
Feb 06, 2020 09:55A clutch of scientific startups are trying to discover the secrets of parabiosis and use them to tackle age-related disease. By identifying factors in plasma that change with age, they aim to create therapies that either supplement what’s beneficial in young blood or to inhibit what’s detrimental in old. One is even beginning to report early clinical trial results.
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How smart were our ancestors? Answer isn’t in brain size, but blood flow
Feb 05, 2020 11:03Researchers have often assumed increases in intelligence in human ancestors (hominins) occurred as brains grew larger. This is not an unreasonable assumption; for living primates, the number of nerve cells in the brain is almost proportional to the brain’s volume. Other studies of mammals in general indicate the brain’s metabolic rate — how much energy it needs to run — is nearly proportional to its size.
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Personalized diets may be the future of nutrition, but the science isn’t all there yet
Feb 03, 2020 13:13Nutrition recommendations have focused on properties of food, debating whether focusing on calorie counts, carbohydrates, fats or proteins might be more important. But more studies are showing that people’s bodies can react very differently to the same foods, and standardized nutrition advice doesn’t fit everybody.
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Scientists say we need these six things to meet climate goals
Feb 02, 2020 07:46In a multi-faceted study that drew upon workshopping, surveying, and an assessment of scientific and academic literature, the researchers examined the elements most likely to help society limit global warming by transitioning to a carbon-neutral state by 2050.
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Automation isn’t wiping out jobs. It’s that our engine of growth is winding down
Jan 29, 2020 06:53In the context of economic stagnation, even small increases in productivity are enough to destroy more manufacturing jobs than are created. The best explanation for this worsening economic stagnation is that, since the 1970s, more and more countries adopted export-led growth strategies, built up manufacturing sectors and began to compete in global markets. In this context, countries with high levels of robotization are not necessarily the ones that have lost the most industrial jobs.
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Lyme disease patients fight for their lives while academics fight each other
Jan 29, 2020 06:51A study from Johns Hopkins demonstrated that 23 percent of Lyme rashes are not properly diagnosed. The blood tests used to diagnose Lyme are four decades old and unacceptably inaccurate: A review of eight studies that evaluated the effectiveness of these tests revealed that they miss more cases than they diagnose. The result is that many people go undiagnosed and misdiagnosed, leading to a life that can be devastatingly altered or worse.