Wednesdays - and not Mondays - are the most depressing day of the week, according to researchers.
Psychologists found that, on average, people's moods remain about the same on each day throughout the week.
But Wednesdays were the low point as people were furthest away from the weekend and bogged down with work.
The psychologists also found that although we look forward to it, the weekend does not actually improve our mood.
In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in "sacred mushrooms," produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.
Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.
"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," says lead investigator Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience.
In a related paper, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers offer recommendations for conducting this type of research.
Girls are no less competitive than boys, they simply employ more subtle tactics, a study of pre-schoolers suggests. While boys use head-on aggression to get what they want, girls rely on the pain of social exclusion.
To test the apparent differences in how very young children compete, Joyce Benenson at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts, US and her colleagues divided 87 four-year-olds into same-sex groups of three. In successive trials, each trio received either one, two or three highly prized animal puppets.
In the first study of its kind, researchers led by The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Ross Koppel, Ph.D. studied how hospital nurses actually use bar-coded technology that matches the right patient with the right dose of the right medication. The surprising result is that the design and implementation of the technology, which is often relied upon as a "cure-all" for medication administration errors, is flawed, and can increase the probabilities of certain errors.
Equally surprising is that the urgencies of care and the ingenuity of nurses to cope with these shortcomings have the unintended consequences of creating other medication errors. These findings appear in the July/August issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). The study also illustrates how adjustments to workflow and the technology can dramatically reduce the risk of these errors.
These barcode systems usually consist of handheld devices and computers that match machine-readable barcodes on patients and medications. If they match, and if they are consistent with the ordered medications, the medications are given. If not, usually a signal goes off telling the nurse of a discrepancy.
Standing on a vibrating platform can be beneficial for muscles and bones, particularly in older or sedentary adults.
Whole body vibration, or WBV, involves standing on a platform that sends mild vibratory impulses through the feet and into the rest of the body. It is claimed that the vibrations activate muscle fibers more efficiently than the conscious contraction of muscles during regular exercise.
Some studies have found that WBV increases bone density in the hip, and inhibit bone loss in the spine and hip areas.
Sources: *
Reuters June 12, 2008 *
Current Sports Medicine Reports May-June 2008; 7(3):152-7
The FDA has, for decades, ridiculously insisted that mercury fillings pose no health threat whatsoever to children. While dismissing hundreds of studies showing a clear link between mercury amalgam fillings ("silver fillings") and disastrous neurological effects in the human body, the FDA denied the truth about mercury and effectively protected the mercury filling racket that has brought so much harm to so many people. For over a hundred years, a cabal of "mercury mongers" made up of the American Dental Association, mercury filling manufacturers and indignant dentists have reaped windfall profits by implanting toxic fillings into the mouths of children, all while insisting that mercury -- one of the most toxic heavy metals known to modern science -- posed no health threat whatsoever.
They're in millions of mouths worldwide, but have been linked to heart disease and Alzheimer's. Now a report concedes they may have a toxic effect on the body
Amalgam dental fillings - which contain the highly toxic metal mercury - pose a health risk, the world's top medical regulatory agency has conceded.
Findings from what is believed to be the largest comparison of blood samples collected from healthy individuals and people with schizophrenia suggest that infection with the common Toxoplasma gondii parasite, carried by cats and farm animals, may increase the risk of schizophrenia.
A report on the study, conducted among U.S. military personnel by researchers from Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Johns Hopkins Children's Center appears in the January issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease, primarily carried by cats. It is transmitted to humans by eating undercooked meat or through contact with cat faeces. It is particularly dangerous for pregnant women, whose foetuses can be infected via the placenta, and those with a weakened immune system, such as people infected with HIV. In severe cases, toxoplasmosis can cause damage to the brain and eyes, and even death.
Now researchers from London and Geneva have determined, for the first time, the atomic structure of a key protein which is released onto the surface of the parasite just before it invades host cells in the human body. They found that the protein known as TgMIC1 binds to certain sugars on the surface of the host cell, assisting the parasite to stick to, and then enter the human cell.
Large numbers of the poorest Americans living in the United States are suffering from some of the same parasitic infections that affect the poor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, says the Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
In an article entitled "Poverty and Neglected Diseases in the 'Other' America," Professor Peter Hotez (George Washington University and the Sabin Vaccine Institute) says that there is evidence that the parasitic diseases toxocariasis, cysticercosis and toxoplasmosis as well as other neglected infections are very common in the United States, especially among poor and underrepresented minority populations living in inner cities and poor rural areas. Such infections are known as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) because they afflict mostly poor people and are often ignored by public health officials and political leaders despite their enormous medical importance.
