Soul Searching

By Tara Parker-Pope

Most people training for a race or sport focus on adding more miles, workouts or weight training to improve their fitness. But new research suggests that simply getting more sleep can improve athletic performance.

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Hello All,

Time for another GAHP adventure! We’re headed to Indonesia and Nepal this round. We leave tomorrow and return on May 12th. It should be fun. We start this trip on the heels of our success in Wyoming, hopefully it carries through.

In the meanwhile, I’m moving apartments (ugh) and the weekend after I get back I head to Seattle to teach, then back to work. It’s gonna be a busy month.

I hope you’re all well and enjoying the burgeoning of spring.

By Leon Kreitzman

Teenagers are notoriously difficult to rouse in the mornings. For the sake of parental authority it may be best that we keep this an adult secret, but . . . it may not be the youngsters’ fault.

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By Victoria Gill

An Amazonian ant has dispensed with sex and developed into an all-female species, researchers have found.

The ants reproduce via cloning - the queen ants copy themselves to produce genetically identical daughters.

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18:00 12 April 2009 by Linda Geddes

The dogma that women are born with a finite number of eggs may soon be overturned. Stem cells have been discovered in the ovaries of adult mice that seem to give rise to new eggs and healthy offspring.

If these findings are confirmed, it could revolutionise female reproduction – opening the door for women to put off child-rearing almost indefinitely, and providing a new source of eggs for women who have been rendered infertile.

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By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and anthropologist, has spent four decades observing wild chimpanzees in Africa to see what their behavior might tell us about prehistoric humans. Dr. Wrangham, 60, was born in Britain and since 1989 has been at Harvard, where he is a professor of biological anthropology. He is about to publish another book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.” He was interviewed over a vegetarian lunch at last winter’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago and again later by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows.

Q. In your new book, you suggest that cooking was what facilitated our evolution from ape to human. Until now scientists have theorized that tool making and meat eating set the conditions for the ascent of man. Why do you argue that cooking was the main factor?

A. All that you mention were drivers of the evolution of our species. However, our large brain and the shape of our bodies are the product of a rich diet that was only available to us after we began cooking our foods. It was cooking that provided our bodies with more energy than we’d previously obtained as foraging animals eating raw food.

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By RONI CARYN RABIN

People with Type 2 diabetes may be at increased risk for developing dementia as they age, several studies have suggested. Now researchers say the higher odds may be linked to life-threatening drops in blood sugar, or hypoglycemia, usually caused by excess insulin.

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For more than 30 years, scientists have been intrigued by brown fat, a cell that acts like a furnace, consuming calories and generating heat. Rodents, unable to shiver effectively to keep warm, use brown fat instead. So do human infants, who do not shiver very well. But it was generally believed that humans lose brown fat after infancy, no longer needing it once the shivering response kicks in.

That belief, three groups of researchers report, is wrong.

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By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard, Ap Medical Writer

WASHINGTON – Severe depression may silently break a seemingly healthy woman’s heart. Doctors have long known that depression is common after a heart attack or stroke, and worsens those people’s outcomes. Monday, Columbia University researchers reported new evidence that depression can lead to heart disease in the first place.

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By JOHN TIERNEY

Suppose last night you had two dreams. In one, God appears and commands you to take a year off and travel the world. In the other, God commands you to take a year off to go work in a leper colony.

Which of those dreams, if either, would you consider meaningful?

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