Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are afflicting far more Americans than ever before. An alarming new report by the Alzheimer’s Association shows that one in three seniors have dementia when they die, and deaths from the disease increased nearly 70 percent between 2000 and 2010. “It’s an epidemic, it’s on the rise, and currently there is no way to […]
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A new study has found that when you use your GPS you may be turning off some of your brain functions. The study looked at 24 participants, scanned their brains while they took a simulated drive around London. The University College London found that activity in the hippocampus that controls your memory and navigational functions increased when the drivers had […]
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A vicious racist ideology is taking hold in Myanmar, said Burmese blogger Maung Zarni. A “neo-Nazi Buddhist movement” known as 969, led by “fascist monks,” is trying to drive the Ro-hingya Muslims out of the country. Nobody is stopping these fundamentalists—not the military, and certainly not opposition leader and human-rights advocate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been photographed wining […]
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Neanderthals, a sturdy hominid species closely related to Homo sapiens, lived in Europe for about 270,000 years until humans arrived on the continent, about 30,000 years ago, at which point they quickly disappeared. The latest theory for their puzzling extinction is that humans exterminated, and maybe even ate, their Neanderthal cousins. French anthropologist Fernando that the bacterial disease was present […]
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The lower you go on the generational totem pole, the more ethnically diverse you get. Young adults between 18-24 (so-called Millennial) don’t like racial labels because they don’t recognize the dividing lines of the past—they are the vanguard of a “colorblind” culture. But their wildly . diverse life experiences have created an almost-random pattern of values and beliefs, including: • […]
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Young people who are randomly stopped for questioning by the police—even if they’ve done nothing wrong—are more likely to engage in criminal behavior later than those who aren’t stopped, a new study has found. University of Missouri researchers say that “stop-and-frisk” programs intended to deter crime may actually create more criminals. Researchers followed 2,600 students for seven years and recorded […]
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It’s a little bit less certain that the inner planets— Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—will still be around to die that way. “There is a one percent chance the inner solar system will go dramatically unstable during the next five billion years,” says Laughlin. The problem is a weird long-distance connection between Jupiter and Mercury. When Jupiter’s closest approach to […]
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Newtown, Conn. Newtown shooter Adam Lanza may have been trying to compete with Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik when he carried out the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December. Citing law enforcement sources, CBS reported this week that Lanza wanted to beat Breivik’s “score” of 77—the number of deaths in his 2011 killing spree in Oslo and on […]
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As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to evolve, comparisons have been drawn to influenza. Both cause respiratory disease, yet there are important differences between the two viruses and how they spread. This has important implications for the public health measures that can be implemented to respond to each virus. How are COVID-19 and influenza viruses similar? Firstly, COVID-19 and influenza […]
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Drinking sugary sodas has been proved to lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks. Now researchers have found evidence that the drinks could also speed up the body’s aging process. One of the signs of the aging process is that the caps on the end of people’s chromosomes, known as telomeres, tend to shrink. When scientists at the University of […]
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