Bad news: Omega 3s don't confer any significant health benefits; good news: They're mostly harmless
But a wide-ranging, careful meta-analysis published in JAMA-Cardiology found no meaningful link between Omega-3s and reduced risk of heart disease. As Lifehacker points out, this joins reviews that show no benefit from taking Omega-3s for "dementia, depression, inflammatory bowel disease, or age-related macular degeneration."
There may be a small improvement in breast cancer, and a small increased risk for prostate cancer, and if you're seriously Omega-3 deprived, the supplements may be a good idea.
[Source: Boing Boing]
Humans need roughly one hour of sleep for every two hours they are awake, and the body innately knows when this ratio becomes out of whack.
How you move gives a lot away. Maybe too much, if the wrong person is watching. We think, for instance, that the way people walk can influence the likelihood of an attack by a stranger. But we also think that their walking style can be altered to reduce the chances of being targeted.
Memories, the new science suggests, are actually reconstructed anew every time we access them, and appear to us a little differently each time, depending on what’s happened since. Vision works in a similar way. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.
While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.
Pavlovian reactions aren’t just for dogs and learn about taste aversion, or why you should nail the dinner you’re cooking for your date.
Stanford neuroscientist Daniel Abrams determined that when different people listened to the same piece of music–in this case a little known symphony–their brains reflected similar patterns of activity. And those similarities were observed not just in areas of the brain linked with sound processing, but also in regions responsible for attention, memory and movement.
Everything is connected.
The Destructive Influence of Imaginary Peers
The Destructive Influence of Imaginary Peers
Michael Haines, the director of the Health Enhancement Services of the University of North Illinois had to find a way to reduce the drinking rate of his students. After various failed campaigns, he had to try something new. And he found that telling students the truth, because they mistakenly had a perception that their peers drank more than they actually did, was the solution.
But by then Haines had something new to try. In 1987 he had attended a conference on alcohol in higher education sponsored by the United States Department of Education. There Wes Perkins, a professor of sociology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Alan Berkowitz, a psychologist in the school’s counseling center, presented a paper that they had just published on how student drinking is affected by peers. “There are decades of research on peer influence — that’s nothing new,” Perkins said at the meeting. What was new was their survey showing that when students were asked how much their peers drank, they grossly overestimated the amount. If the students were responding to peer pressure, the researchers said, it was coming from imaginary peers.
The “aha!” conclusion Perkins and Berkowitz drew was this: maybe students’ drinking behavior could be changed by just telling them the truth.
Haines surveyed students at Northern Illinois University and found that they also had a distorted view of how much their peers drink. He decided to try a new campaign, with the theme “most students drink moderately.” The centerpiece of the campaign was a series of ads in the Northern Star, the campus newspaper, with pictures of students and the caption “two thirds of Northern Illinois University students (72%) drink 5 or fewer drinks when they ‘party.’” (See here for Haines’s thorough description of the campaign and here for lessons from a later, also successful, campaign at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.)
Haines’s staff also made posters with campus drinking facts and told students that if they had those posters on the wall when an inspector came around, they would earn $5. (35 percent of the students did have them posted when inspected.) Later they made buttons for students in the fraternity and sorority system — these students drank more heavily — that said “Most of Us,” and offered another $5 for being caught wearing one. The buttons were deliberately cryptic, to start a conversation. After the first year of the social norming campaign, the perception of heavy drinking had fallen from 69 to 61 percent. Actual heavy drinking fell from 45 to 38 percent. The campaign went on for a decade, and at the end of it NIU students believed that 33 percent of their fellow students were episodic heavy drinkers, and only 25 percent really were – a decline in heavy drinking of 44 percent.
Is the cure for cancer inside you?
A long yet fascinating story on Dr. Ralph Steinman, posthumous Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine and how he hacked his body to try and cure his cancer.
In the spring of 2007, Steinman, a 64-year-old senior physician and research immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, had come home from a ski trip with a bad case of diarrhea, and a few days later he showed up for work with yellow eyes and yellow skin — symptoms of a cancerous mass the size of a kiwi that was growing on the head of his pancreas. Soon he learned that the disease had made its way into nearby lymph nodes. Among patients with his condition, 80 percent are dead within the first year; another 90 percent die the year after that. When he told his children about the tumor over Skype, he said, “Don’t Google it.”
But for a man who had spent his life in the laboratory, who brought copies of The New England Journal of Medicine on hiking trips to Vermont and always made sure that family vacations overlapped with scientific symposia, there was only one way to react to such an awful diagnosis — as a scientist. The outlook for pancreatic cancer is so poor, and the established treatments so useless, that any patient who has the disease might as well shoot the moon with new, untested therapies. For Steinman, the prognosis offered the opportunity to run one last experiment.
Customers will pay more for less
Customers will pay more for less
Brilliant research made by Professor Chernev from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management published in the Harvard Business Review. Here’s the result:
In five experiments, respondents were shown a series of products—phones, jackets, backpacks, TVs, watches, shoes, luggage, bikes, wine, and sunglasses. Some were relatively expensive, others inexpensive. Respondents in one group were asked how much they would pay for each item by itself, and those in another group were asked how much they would pay for a bundle combining a high-priced and a low-priced item. Defying conventional wisdom, respondents shown the bundle were willing to pay less than those shown the more expensive product alone.