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.
    Very interesting compilation of articles and research about sleep over at Farnam Street. 
    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.
    Some interesting ideas. Notably, if you consider that the brain only controls movement, then fear and apprehensiveness will definitely be “readable” from your walk. 
    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.
    New research on how memory works is indeed very interesting. 
    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.
    Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories, an interesting article over at the NYT for those interested in knowing the latest research about this particular topic. 

    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.

    The Destructive Influence of Imaginary Peers

    The Destructive Influence of Imaginary Peers

    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