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You can’t believe everything people say, but you sometimes can’t even believe what you hear, especially if you’ve had 3 or more cups of coffee. Australian researchers from La Trobe University have just published a study suggesting that people on a major coffee buzz are prone to hear and seethings that aren’t there. The thins […]
A much anticipated and highly expected drug could come from Pfizer Inc, the biggest drug company in the world; the drug appears to double survival over standard approved drugs, but only against lung tumours with a certain mutation. The drug, called crizotinib, would be the first targeted treatment for the roughly 50,000 people who get […]
You know the food pyramid, right ? It shows you just approximately how much of each food element you should eat in order to be healthy and make the most out of your life. Well, the Food and Drug Association (FDA) decided that it’s no longer hip enough, and decided to give it a new […]
What can possibly link together speed, strength, and the colour red ? Nope, it’s not a brand new Ferrari – it’s your muscles ! A new groundbreaking study published in the journal Emotion shows that if you see red, your reactions become faster, more powerful, and you won’t even realize it. Science and sports Of […]
Remember the days when cigarettes didn’t have to feature labels of all the bad things that can happen if you smoke ? Well, I don’t; but then again, maybe in a few decades people won’t remember the days when cigarettes used to have such ‘light warnings’. Practically, in just a generation or so, things have […]
After she suffered a stroke, a 36-year-old professor started to feel sounds. In the beginning she didn’t know what was happening when a radio announcer’s voice made her tingle, or when during a flight she became physically uncomfortable. Neuroscientist at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of […]
Our perception of size and distances is basically a product of how the brain interprets different visual signals, like for example the size of an object on the retina or its movement across the visual field. Now, if you were shrinking to the size of a doll in your sleep, when you woke up, the […]
Pictured above is a cardinal, and if you don’t see anything special about it yet, you should check out its plumage. Alright, maybe not all of us are ornithologists, so I’ll just set the facts straight. If you look closely, you’ll see that the bird has bright red plumage of a male on its left […]
Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have found that more and more young adults are suffering from a condition that has traditionally been the problem of older adults – high blood pressure. The researchers believe that general problems, such as an unbalanced diet, coffee, and obesity are the main causes for this surge […]
Ironically, while most tidy people in the world are busy dusting off furniture, electronics, ceilings, cats, whatnot, researchers have shown in a recent study that the same dust is actually very good for the air, reducing ozone levels by 2 to 15 percent. All because of dead human skin. Ozone is crucial for preventing potentially […]
Of course, it is always better to prevent than to treat, but if prevention is no longer an option, than it is much better to start drug therapy as soon as possible after being detected HIV positive; this could help both the patient and it is also far less likely to pass on the virus […]
A healthy life style, plenty of exercise and good genes might be your best bet, if you’re looking for a long life, but an eight decade study in the making found one common denominator – the answer to longevity is consciousness. In 1921, in a quest to understand what really sets apart people who happen […]
HIV research has been in a state of disarray, especially since the economic crisis, which put a lot of research on hold, as well as slowed down the prevention rate. However, there have been several reports of breakthroughs in this field, especially regarding a vaccine for HIV, and Bill Gates has agreed to sponsor the […]
Lately, I’m feeling quite skeptical about the studies I read regarding coffee consumption, especially since it’s known that sometimes a major industry (like oil, or tobacco, or coffee) tends to… influence certain researchers to publish favorable results. I just recently wrote about how 9 out of the top 10 climate change deniers are influenced by […]
Autism is still yet poorly understood, and researchers are just starting to figure out the mechanisms behind this strange condition which seems to affect more and more children (and not only) with each passing year. A 6 year autism study The ambitious six year effort attempted to gauge the rate of autism in a South […]
Researchers from the University of Texas and Yale infected a computer with schizophrenia in order to find out more about how the human brain behaves and understands things. Human behaviour from a computer Computers can show some signs of virtual schizophrenia too, if they can’t ‘forget’ fast enough. So researchers used a virtual computer model, […]
Viagra isn’t just for grown ups, not anymore. As a matter of fact, few people know that at first, viagra was used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), and treating erectile dysfunction was just a bonus; of course, the huge advantages that the ‘bonus’ provided made it into the most effective and sold medicine out […]
Due to the rising of the phenomena, there has been a surge in the studies concerning obesity; there are, of course, a significant number of factors which affect it, and the number continues to grow each month. This time, it’s bottle feeding. Obesity in babies Researchers from the Center for Obesity Research and Education at […]
In the long and tenuous fight agains HIV and AIDS, researchers seem to have made a small, but extremely important step towards finally beating the virus. HIV vs antibodies Researchers at the University of Melbourne have reported identifying the antibodies which fight HIV in a breakthrough that gets us likely closer than ever to develop […]
In what can be considered somewhat paradoxal, according to a recent study from the University College London, scientists have found larger than average volumes of grey matter in certain brain regions of people easily distracted. Meaning, people who are easily distracted may have “too much brain”. This conclusion came after scientists compared the brain activity […]
According to a recently published study reported by Swedish scientists, people who are obese and middle aged are up to four times more likely do develop dementia than people of normal weight. Published in the journal Neurology, the research was conducted 8,534 Swedish twins over the age of 65, of which data showed that 350 […]
The Ebola virus has been the subject of numerous panic inducing books and movies, portraying it as a devastating killer, and in all seriousness its quite deadly. Research on the virus and its numerous variation has made across the past decades, but so far little to no advances in prevention have been made and currently […]
In what can be considered a breakthrough in the battle against worldwide depression, scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry have found a link between a particular gene and depression which might provide solid treatment in the future. The discovery was made after reserachers analyzed the results of a study conducted upon 15,000 people […]
More than one quarter of children aged 16 and below living in the UK can expect to live to be 100, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics; they also concluded that 11 million people who are alive today will reach that mark, which is quite surprising if you ask me, especially […]
In a breakthrough discovery that could revolutionize transplants, British researchers have managed to create human kidneys from stem cells, which could lead to transplant patients growing their own organs; the artificial organs were created using human amniotic fluid and animal foetal cells. The kidneys are now about half of centimeter long, which is about what […]
Researchers have managed to restore light perception to mice through gene therapy, by inserting algae genes into the retina. The treatment has succeeded in restoring the ability to sense light and dark to blind mice, and clinical trials in humans could begin in as little as two years. “The idea is to develop a treatment […]
The average brain can only hold about five to seven pieces of information at a time within 30 seconds – this is called working memory. What people usually do to get pass the 30 seconds interval is they re-expose themselves to the information, for instance if you want to remember a 7 digit phone number […]
Almost all Nobel prize laureates are active in an artistic field as well as in science. They are 25 times more likely (that’s 2500%) than an average adult to sing, dance or act, and 17 times more likely to be an artist. This proves wrong the general belief that there aren’t any useful connections between […]
In the theoretical and absurd case of a pigeon going on a police identification line, do you think it would use the same processes you’d use ? If your answer is “yes”, you may seem a bit strange… but you’re right. A study published by researchers from the University of Iowa found that pigeons recognize […]
It’s somewhat evidently observable that the elderly have more trouble focusing or multitasking than young people, but a recent study in which scientists used brain scans shows an unexpected explanation to the generation deficit. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco led by neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, recruited 20 relatively young adults, average age 25, […]
The death of medical marijuana is drawing closer and closer, as researchers find out that the cannabinoid THC, the primary active ingredient, is only responsible for the ‘high’, not for the pain relief. The study indicates that at least some of the painkilling effects are mediated via a receptor that wasn’t previously known to interact […]
The brains of adults can grow significantly in a staggeringly short amount of time if you just start learning like children do, according to research that had the purpose of treating braind disorders; they seem to have stumbled into something different, but extremely interesting. The researchers unexpectedly discovered that adult brains can grow in only […]
I always find myself amused whenever I hear the term “food addiction” get mentioned, simply because, hey, who isn’t addicted to food? Besides me being a smart ass and humans having to eat to live (even zombies have to eat some brain – it’s still food right?), seriously there are a lot of people out […]
I had no idea IBM was doing this kind of thing too, but I recently found out that they developed a technology that could revolutionize the treatment of drug resistant bacteria. A whole team of engineers and researchers headed by Dr. James Hedrick at IBM Inc. has worked on this technology, which relies on a […]
Aphrodisiacs have been used to improvement sexual performance and desire for thousands of years now, but which of them are really effective or simple old waives’ tales? Researchers from University of Guelph claim they’ve conducted the most elaborate study to date as far as aphrodisiacs are concerned. “Aphrodisiacs have been used for thousands of years […]
Five years ago, an outbreak of a mysterious and deadly disease in central China first started alarming local authorities when an alarmingly high mortality rate was linked to it. At first, the outbreak was considered to be bacterial, namely human granulocytic anaplasmosis (HGA), carried by infected ticks that passed the deadly disease on to farmers […]
For the first time in modern history, researchers have managed to reconstruct a three dimensional circuit of connected cells in the brain, thus offering insight in how it works; the model, which was built using microscopes and a supercomputer offers a novel insight and an unprecedented opportunity to discover how the complex mechanism of the […]
While gene-therapy is still regarded as a very innovative practice, it seems like the procedure might take traction as of today when remarkable results were concluded after the first successful double-blind gene therapy for Parkinson disease. In the case of this dreadful disease, medical researchers injected patients with a a gene that codes for glutamic […]
It never ceases to amaze me how this kind of idiotic, or perhaps even intentionally wrong studies are published and accepted by the world. What am I talking about ? Well, you know those pamphlets and promotional stuff that show your brain with holes in it when you take ecstasy, or that you will get […]
While a dog’s psychological value to its owner is very much attested, helping cure loneliness and such, a recent study published in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health, finds that people who own and walk a dog are 34 percent more likely to meet federal benchmarks for physical activity. “Walking is the most accessible […]
The recent tsunami wave that hit the Japanese coast this Friday simply devastated the countries costal areas. Besides the actual casualties (now reported to around 1,700), there are a few thousand people still isolated (footage of Japanese citizens stranded on rooftops have been circulating everywhere recently) and thousands more left homeless. The Japanese Government and […]
To be touched by a careful nurse, and to feel taken care of is very important, and often neglected; having that sense of comfort and tranquility might just be what gives that extra boost to the patient. Touching patients can lead to a numerous of responses, from calmness to discomfort, from intimacy to even aggression. […]
It’s ignorance like this that never sees to baffle me. Steve Pop is an overnight notorious psychotherapist who, like most of today’s center stage and tomorrow’s props, became famous after stating live on BBC Radio that “spending two hours on a game station is equivalent to taking a line of cocaine in the high it produces […]
Pancreatic cancer, also known as pancreatic carcinoma, is an aggressive type of cancer that invades the pancreas, an important organ near the stomach and the liver. While some pancreatic cancers can be caught and treated early, the prognosis for this disease is usually not good; the National Institutes of Health report that about 80% of […]
Ironically, the Medical and Pharmaceutical industry isn’tclean at all; the huge sums of money involved, and the interests that revolve around them often lead to unpleasant and unwanted consequences, such as inaccurate studies or overpriced meds. Also, despite the numerous efforts to make medical journals disclose funding sources for what they publish, the results have […]
Pictured on the left is Eden Sawczenko, an autistic four year girl from Stevenage, that has had a lot of problems bonding with other children, not being able to understand emotions and actually frawining upon them. Her best friend in the world is Kaspar, a very friendly human-like, child-sized robot built by scientists from University […]
A new study conducted by the German Medical Association reported that about half of the doctors in Germany have prescribed placebo at some point, and no less than 88% of GPs in Bavaria have sent patients home with placebo treatments. Placebo’s are still a matter of debate throughout the medicine world and not only, and […]
Neuroscientists are always looking for new and interesting ways to manipulate individual neurons and neural networks-- shooting magnetic waves at our brains may be the best route yet.
The fight against Alzheimer’s is a harsh and rugged one, and despite numerous advancements, there still isn’t a definitive cure for the disease around – or a fail proof way to detect it in the early stages.. Still, if you can’t defeat it, it’s still better to slow it down a little, and that’s exactly […]
Artists suffer for their art – it’s a well known fact. But for an artist at the New York University, things escalated to a whole new level: the camera he installed himself in his head was rejected by his body, causing some serious health issues. Let’s rewind a little; back in November, Wafaa Bilal, an […]
