Caffeine: Three Cups of Coffee Makes You Three Times More Likely to Hallucinate (via Gizmodo)

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 | No Comments

Caffeine: Three Cups of Coffee Makes You Three Times More Likely to Hallucinate

That explains a lot… lol

MIT’s portable ‘seeing machine’ for the blind enters testing – (via Engadget)

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 | No Comments

MIT’s portable ‘seeing machine’ for the blind enters testing – Engadget

Totally amazing!

Finger Ratio: Science or Palm Readings? (via ABC News)

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | No Comments

Researchers Find Finger Length May Predict Financial Success

By LAUREN COX

Men who have a shorter index finger relative to their ring finger proved to be better at high-stakes, fast-paced stock trading than men with relatively longer index fingers, according to a new study.

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HRT ‘can shrink women’s brains’ (via BBC News)

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | No Comments

Some forms of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) can slightly shrink the brains of post-menopausal women, a US study has suggested.

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Preventing colds may be as easy as vitamin ZZZ (via !Yahoo News)

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | No Comments

By CARLA K. JOHNSON

CHICAGO – Fluff up the pillows and pull up the covers. Preventing the common cold may be as easy as getting more sleep. Researchers paid healthy adults $800 to have cold viruses sprayed up their noses, then wait five days in a hotel to see if they got sick. Habitual eight-hour sleepers were much less likely to get sick than those who slept less than seven hours or slept fitfully.

“The longer you sleep, the better off you are, the less susceptible you are to colds,” said lead author Sheldon Cohen, who studies the effects of stress on health at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University.

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A Love Vaccine? (via the NYTimes, Tiereny Lab)

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | No Comments

By John Tierney

Would you rather have a love potion that made you more likely to become attached to someone else, or a love vaccine that stopped you from falling in love with the wrong person?

In my Findings column, I make the case for a love vaccine and discuss an essay about the neurochemistry of love in the new issue of Nature by Larry Young, a neuroscientist who studies prairie voles at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centers at Emory University. He says that pair-bonding in humans (as in voles, one of the few other monogamous mammals) can be enhanced or suppressed by tinkering with brain hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin, and predicts that we’ll be seeing new drugs to do just that.

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Oxytocin – Hidden Dangers, lol (via NYTimes)

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | One Comment

Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss

By JOHN TIERNEY

In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding — and, not incidentally, explaining humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts — Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.

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C-Section Babies Before 39 Weeks May Suffer (via ABC News)

Friday, January 9th, 2009 | No Comments

By AUDREY GRAYSON

ABC News Medical Unit

Jan. 7, 2009—

When 37-year-old Alicia Cooney of Cleveland was pregnant with her first child in October 2007, her doctor expressed no concern about scheduling her Caesarian delivery, or C-section, just 38 weeks into the pregnancy.

But when Cooney became pregnant with her second child last April, her doctor was singing a different tune about when to schedule a C-section.

“I did notice a change within the hospital that they really wanted to make sure my C-section wasn’t before 39 weeks,” Cooney explained.

Cooney said that her doctor expressed concern about the increased risk of wet lung — or an accumulation of fluid in the newborn’s lungs — in babies delivered by C-section before 39 weeks of gestation.

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GAHP (via Dan’s Blog) – December 2008 – You Can Change The World Now

Friday, January 9th, 2009 | One Comment

A lot of very exciting things have happened since GAHP’s pilot field trip to Bali, Indonesia nearly one year ago.
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A Graphic Representation of Housing Prices for the Last 100 Years…

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 | No Comments