A new study finds that the kitchen floors in most U.S. homes
are laced with pesticides -- including pesticides known to cause cancer or
disrupt the normal functioning of the human hormonal system. Sure, but if you don't use pesticides yourself, you're safe -- right?
Wrong.
© AlamyScientists are debating whether stimulants are an acceptable means for people to boost their brain's performance
In the middle of the exam season, the offer of a drug that could improve results might excite students but would be likely to terrify their parents. Now, a distinguished professor of bioethics says it is time to embrace the possibilities of "brain boosters" - chemical cognitive enhancement. The provocative suggestion comes from John Harris, director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, and editor-in-chief of the
Journal of Medical Ethics.
Paula Crossfield
Civil EatsWed, 17 Jun 2009 22:44 UTC
The head of the World Food Program
announced on Friday that an additional 105 million more people have become hungry in 2009, adding to the one billion plus who were already food insecure. The day before, Secretary Clinton
gave a speech about hunger in the world, speaking in broad strokes: "[H]unger belies our planet's bounty. It challenges our common humanity and resolve. We do have the resources to give every person in the world the tools they need to feed themselves and their children."
In the next sentences, she gives a clue about what "tools" she might be referring to by praising the Green Revolution - without noting the
depleted water table,
reduced soil fertility,
massive farmer debts and
increased rates of farmer suicides left in the wake of the failed experiment in India.
Amino acids are the chemical building blocks of protein and could be called the building blocks of life. Structurally, your body is mainly compromised of proteins developed from amino acids. From twenty amino acids, the body manufactures more than 50,000 different types of protein that play vital roles in our bodies. Amino acids contribute significantly to the health of the nervous system, muscular structure, hormone production, vital organs and cellular structure. They are absolutely crucial for good health.
If you aren't getting enough amino acids in your diet, your health may be affected. Low levels of important amino acids are linked to symptoms like irritability, poor concentration, fatigue, depression and hormonal imbalances to name a few.
Nestle's U.S. baking division said on Friday that it was voluntarily recalling its Toll House refrigerated cookie dough products after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned of the risk of contamination with E. coli bacteria.
Nestle said the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were investigating reports of illnesses caused by E. coli O157:H7 in consumers who also reported having eaten raw cookie dough. E. coli can cause abdominal cramping, vomiting and diarrhea, the FDA said.
Since March, the FDA said, there have been 66 reports of illness across 28 states. Twenty-five people were hospitalized, according to the FDA, and no one has died.
"We want to strongly advise consumers that raw cookie dough should not be eaten," Nestle said in a statement. "This message also appears prominently on our packaging."
Neural "noise" may cause you to miss important changes in your environment when you are concentrating on something else, new research indicates.
The research by Sam Ling, a postdoctoral researcher in Vanderbilt University's Psychology Department, and Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, is currently in press at Psychological Science.
"We found that when the brain actively ignores the presence of an object in the environment, it does so in a way that weakens and degrades residual information about that object," Ling said. "We found that the brain's neural representation of an object outside your window of awareness is not only weaker, but also 'noisier.' It's as if the brain turns down the contrast on your mental television and also adds static noise into the image."
The new research explored what is happening to an ignored stimulus during binocular rivalry, which occurs when the two eyes view radically different images. The brain temporarily rejects, or suppresses, one of those images in favor of the other. The image that commands our visual awareness switches between the two over time. This fluctuation in visual awareness enables cognitive neuroscientists to study the neural correlates of awareness and consciousness.
Naps with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep refresh the brain's empathetic sensitivity for evaluating human emotions by decreasing a negative bias and amplifying recognition of positive emotions, according to a research abstract that will be presented on Wednesday, June 10, at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.
Results show that the emotional brain is not stable across the day, resulting in marked changes in emotional reactivity. Naps with REM sleep objectively and bi-directionally modify specific emotions. Individuals who took a 60 to 90 minute nap with REM sleep displayed increased receptiveness to happy facial expression following sleep. People who did not take a nap during the day displayed an amplified reaction to anger and fear.
Lead author Ninad Gujar, senior research scientist at the University of California in Berkley, said that findings of the study emphasize the importance of sleep for the most basic yet psychologically and socially important brain process.
They sit on the grocery store aisles, appearing rather innocent. They are clear and odorless - mainly because they have been bleached and deodorized with chemicals after high-heat processing has turned them rancid. And, interestingly enough, they are touted as a health food that can save your heart.
They are polyunsaturated oils like soybean, canola and corn oil. They are industrialized oil, and they have reared their ugly heads at the health of modern society.
Sewage treatment plants fail to remove artificial sweeteners completely from waste water. What's more, these pollutants contaminate waters downstream and may still be present in our drinking water. Thanks to their new robust analytical method, which simultaneously extracts and analyses seven commonly used artificial sweeteners, Marco Scheurer, Heinz-Jürgen Brauch and Frank Thomas Lange from the Water Technology Center in Karlsruhe, Germany, were able to demonstrate the presence of several artificial sweeteners in waste water.
Their findings are published online this week in Springer's journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry.
In this video, Jean-Michel Cousteau explains why the common practice of farming carnivorous fish like salmon is devastating marine life, and why fish farming in general is a bad idea. Farmed fish is now so common, if you bought fish in the supermarket recently or ordered one in a restaurant, chances are it was born in a pen. About the only ones that don't use farmed fish as their primary fish source are specialty fine-dining fish restaurants. But these oceanic feedlots, acres of net-covered pens tethered offshore that were once considered a wonderful solution to over-fishing, may in fact not be such a great idea after all.
