From the article: Now, a promising new drug has been developed that targets the nerve activity that causes both heart failure and sleep apnea. Researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand tested the drug, known as AF-130, on rats with chronic heart failure and sleep apnea. They found that AF-130 acted as an effective P2X3 receptor antagonist, normalizing the body’s respiratory response to hypoxia and substantially improving the amount of blood pumped by the heart (cardiac output). Breathing disturbances were eliminated.

“This drug does offer benefit for heart failure, but it’s two for the price of one, in that it’s also relieving the apnea for which there is currently no drug, only CPAP, which is poorly tolerated,” said Julian Paton, corresponding author of the study.

AF-130 was also found to reduce systemic inflammation, reduce the weight of the heart, and prevent fluid from gathering in the lungs (pulmonary edema), a common side effect of heart failure. It’s the first drug to control the brain-to-heart nervous activity that drives heart failure and associated sleep apnea.

The study’s findings support the notion that P2X3 receptors in the carotid arteries play a key role in the pathological mechanisms underlying cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

From the article: A recycling method developed by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) recovers up to 70% of lithium from battery waste without corrosive chemicals, high temperatures, and prior sorting of materials being required. The method combines mechanical processes with chemical reactions and enables inexpensive, energy-efficient, and environmentally compatible recycling of any type of lithium-ion battery. The results are reported in Communications Chemistry.

Lithium-ion batteries are omnipresent in our life. They are not only used for the wireless power supply of notebooks, smartphones, toys, remote controls, and other small devices, but also are the most important energy storage systems for the rapidly growing electric mobility sector. Increasing use of these batteries eventually results in the need for economically and ecologically sustainable recycling methods.

Presently, mainly nickel and cobalt, copper and aluminum, as well as steel are recovered from battery waste for reuse. Lithium recovery still is expensive and hardly profitable. Existing recovery methods mostly are of metallurgical character and consume a lot of energy and/or produce hazardous by-products. In contrast to this, mechanochemical approaches based on mechanical processes to induce chemical reactions promise to reach a higher yield and sustainability with a smaller expenditure.

From the article: A study of U.S. Special Operations Forces Veterans participating in an ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatment in Mexico showed that participants treated with these psychedelic substances showed a significant reduction in alcohol misuse 1 month after the start of the treatment. These effects persisted 6 months later and there was also a strong reduction in symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. The study was published in Military Psychology.

Participating in a war is a traumatic experience. Even for the highly trained personnel, elite soldiers chosen because of their outstanding physical and psychological resilience, exposure to combat situations, injuries and isolation have a profound adverse effect on health and well-being. To cope, many military veterans resort to drinking alcohol. Alcohol is the most misused substance by military personnel.

As a consequence of war experiences and psychological trauma caused by them, many veterans develop posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD. The most well-known symptoms of PTSD include intrusive memories of the traumatic event(s), the so-called flashbacks, bad dreams and frightening thoughts. Symptoms also include higher pain tolerance, emotional numbing and many others. Available treatments for PTSD and alcohol misuse are limited in their effectiveness.

“As a trauma psychologist, I have spent several years working directly with children, adolescents, and adults (including veterans) exposed to atrociously traumatic experiences,” said study author Stacey Armstrong, a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at The Ohio State University.

“In my clinical practice, it is essential that I utilize gold-standard, evidence-based treatments to address the functional impairment that often results from these events. However, while providing direct care to clients, many of whom were highly distressed, it became clear that too many were not responding to the established treatments. As I delivered these services, I became aware of and interested in the promising evidence from psychedelic-assisted therapy.”

From the article: The provisional political agreement, which was reached after nightlong negotiations between the EU parliament and states, seeks to raise the share of renewable energy to 42.5 percent, from 22 percent today.

The EU has set an ambitious target to become a "climate neutral" economy by 2050, with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The move also comes as the EU has sought to slash its dependence on Russian fossil fuels after Moscow cut gas supplies last year and the bloc placed bans on seaborne crude and other petroleum products from the country.

The figure is a compromise between the 45 percent share for renewables that was sought by EU lawmakers and the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, and the 40 percent preferred by the states.

The previous target for 2030 had been set at 32 percent.

The proposed directive seeks cutting red tape for renewable energy projects.

The goal is to "fast-track the deployment of renewable energies" as part of the EU's plan "to become independent from Russian fossil fuels, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine", said a statement from the Council of the EU which represents the bloc's governments.

Companies have complained that red tape has slowed the development of such infrastructure.

From the article: This is according to a new global analysis of trends in child and adolescent height and body mass index (BMI) led by Imperial College London and published in Nature.

The research, by a global consortium of more than 1500 researchers and physicians, analysed height and weight data from 71 million children and adolescents (aged 5 to 19 years) across urban and rural areas of 200 countries from 1990 to 2020.

Cities can provide a multitude of opportunities for better education, nutrition, sports and recreation, and healthcare that contributed to school-aged children and adolescents living in cities being taller than their rural counterparts in the 20th century in all but a few wealthy countries.

The new study found that in the 21st century, this urban height advantage shrank in most countries as a result of accelerating improvements in height for children and adolescents in rural areas.

The study also assessed children’s BMI - an indicator of whether they have a healthy weight for their height. The researchers found that on average children living in cities had a slightly higher BMI than children in rural areas in 1990. By 2020, BMI averages rose for most countries, albeit faster for urban children, except in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, where BMI rose faster in rural areas.

From the article: A new study of German couples has found that individuals with secure emotional attachment are more likely to forgive offences to their partners, but also to be forgiven. Persons with a preoccupied attachment style were more likely to forgive their partners, but were neither more nor less likely to be forgiven. The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Romantic couples experience many positive moments in the course of their romantic relationship. But these relationships also involve conflicts. Although typically unpleasant and stressful, conflicts are not necessarily negative. Conflicts can be resolved and forgiven, thus strengthening the relationship. Due to this, forgiveness after conflicts is a central aspect of healthy and happy relationship functioning.

“Forgiveness is defined as a prosocial change characterized by decreased retaliation motivation or estrangement from the offender and by increased conciliation. Forgiveness can be understood as a coping strategy, that is, a ‘process of neutralizing a stressor that has resulted from a perception of an interpersonal hurt.’ Thus, the end-point of the forgiveness process occurs when an individual experiences little or no stress resulting from the transgression,” the authors of the new study explained.

Forgiveness can improve the quality of the relationship and it can also be good for mental health and the overall well-being. However, in abusive relationships, forgiveness can be harmful as it can place the forgiving individual at risk of further harm.

Forgiveness might also be shaped by emotional attachment patterns. These patterns start to be shaped by experiences with the caregiver in infancy and continue to affect social relationships throughout life. Researchers typically distinguish secure attachment, characterized by reciprocity, closeness, intimacy and constructive behaviors in a conflict, and insecure attachment patterns, characterized by low trust and negative views of oneself.

From the article: Proposals to pay for broadband networks by imposing new fees on Big Tech companies "are built on a false premise," Meta executives wrote in a blog post today.

"Network fee proposals do not recognize that our investments in content drive the business model of telecom operators," Meta executives Kevin Salvadori and Bruno Cendon Martin wrote. Meta's comments came a few weeks after Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters spoke out against the proposal being reviewed by European regulators.

Meta executives said telecom operators and content application providers (CAPs) "are symbiotic businesses, occupying different but complementary roles in the digital ecosystem. Every year, Meta invests tens of billions of euros in our apps and platforms—such as Facebook, Instagram, and Quest—to facilitate the hosting of content. Billions of people go online every day to access this content, creating the demand that allows telecom operators to charge people for Internet access. Our investment in content literally drives the revenue and business model of telecom operators."

Internet service providers in the EU argue that Big Tech companies should pay a "fair share" toward network-building costs. In the US, Federal Communications Commission Republican Brendan Carr claims that "Big Tech has been enjoying a free ride on our Internet infrastructure while skipping out on the billions of dollars in costs needed to maintain and build that network."

Big Tech companies don't actually get free access to the Internet, though. Anyone distributing content over the Internet pays their own providers, builds their own network infrastructure, or does some combination of the two.

From the article: Researchers from the University of Cambridge have created a new type of neural implant that could restore limb function in paralyzed limbs.

The developed device works in sync between the brain and paralyzed limbs - it combines flexible electronics and human stem cells to "better integrate" with the nerve and drive limb function, according to a press release.

There have been former attempts at using neural implants to restore limb function, but these mostly failed. This is because scar tissue can envelop the electrodes over time, disrupting the connection between the device and the nerve.

"If someone has an arm or a leg amputated, for example, all the signals in the nervous system are still there, even though the physical limb is gone,” said Dr. Damiano Barone from Cambridge’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences, who co-led the research, said in a statement. "The challenge with integrating artificial limbs, or restoring function to arms or legs, is extracting the information from the nerve and getting it to the limb so that function is restored."

The researchers combined cell therapy and bioelectronics into a single device, improving functionality and sensitivity.

In this case, they sandwiched a layer of muscle cells that were reprogrammed from stem cells between the electrodes and the living tissue. This led to device integration with the host's body, preventing the formation of scar tissue. For the time time, the cells survived on the electrode for 28 days - the duration of the experiment.

First, the researchers designed a biocompatible flexible electronic device thin enough to be attached to the end of a nerve. According to the release, a layer of stem cells, reprogrammed into muscle cells, was then placed on the electrode.

From the article: A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that individuals are more likely to blame themselves when casual conversations become difficult. The findings reveal that the self-serving bias you find in many other human activities seems to disappear when engaging in casual conversation. This insight may be helpful to those who experience anxiety during small talk.

Informal conversations involve complex interactions between individuals that require coordination of turn-taking, eye contact, the anticipation of upcoming content, and interpretation of previous statements. The number of participants, cultural background, and goals can vary, and finding a balance between small talk and more personal topics can be difficult.

Despite the benefits of deeper conversations for mental well-being, people often overestimate the awkwardness of such interactions. Conversations can be challenging due to their inherent complexity, uncertainty, and broad scope.

Surprisingly, there is a lack of research in this area, given how crucial social connections are to our health and how conversations play a vital role in creating and sustaining these relationships. Researchers are working to address this gap in the literature by exploring whether individuals have a negative outlook on their conversational abilities compared to other everyday activities.

From the article: The study looked at the sleep habits of over 29,000 people aged between 37 and 73 and could provide the basis for helping to combat major diseases like dementia.

According to lead author and PhD candidate Dr Tergel Namsrai, it’s not just lack of sleep that can impair brain health.

“Getting more than nine hours of sleep a day or less than six hours were both associated with lower brain volume and cognitive measures – crucial for things like reaction time and memory,” Dr Namsrai said.

“Daytime dozing was also associated with some of these indicators of impaired brain health.”

Dr Namsrai said there needs to be greater focus on the links between sleep and brain health, as well as more research into ways to improve sleep.

“The mechanisms underlying the link between sleep and brain health are not well understood – there’s a lot of work to be done,” she said.

“But our study shows it could be an important target if we want to improve brain health into old age and delay the onset of dementia."

Dementia is among the world’s leading causes of death worldwide and is expected to impact 150 million people by 2050.

From the article: One of the papers presents results of a clinical trial in which approximately 40% of patients with acute leukemia subtypes had a complete response – a disappearance of all signs of cancer – to treatment with the drug revumenib. The other paper uncovers a molecular countermove by which leukemia cells come to sidestep the drug and reassert their growth.

The papers point to the promise of the targeted approach to acute leukemia treatment exemplified by revumenib and to the potential to extend its benefits with drugs that trip up the resistance mechanism, researchers say.

"The two genetic subtypes of acute leukemia involved in this research account for approximately 40% of all cases of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in children and adults," says Scott Armstrong, MD, PhD, president of the Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and co-senior author of the paper on revumenib resistance. "They're driven by a rearrangement of the MLL1 gene or a mutation in the NPM1 gene. Both types depend on a protein called menin to sustain their growth."

The first of the new Nature studies reports on a phase I/II clinical trial of the drug revumenib, which targets menin, in 68 patients with acute leukemia that wasn't responding other therapies. The trial, dubbed the AUGMENT-101 study, found that of 60 patients who could be evaluated, 53% responded to the drug and 30% had a complete response.

"For patients with acute leukemia who have undergone several previous treatments, this is a very encouraging result," Armstrong says. "However, after the second cycle of treatment, some patients did develop resistance to revumenib."

From the article: A University of Sydney-led review into the benefits of the Mediterranean diet in women has found women who followed a Mediterranean diet had up to 24 percent lower risk of heart disease and a 23 percent lower risk of death.

The researchers say to their knowledge this study is the first review to examine the association between the Mediterranean diet, cardiovascular disease and mortality specifically in women.

The findings, published in Heart Journal, examined data from 16 published studies where women were following the Mediterranean diet. The studies were between 2006 and 2021 and involved over 722,000 female participants.

Interestingly, further analysis of data found similar reduced risk applied in women of all ethnicities, with women of European descent having a 24 percent lower risk, and women of non-European descent (Asian, Native Hawaiian and African American) having a 21 percent lower risk.

The results will be invaluable in updating the dietary and clinical guideline recommendations such as the Australian dietary guidelines for diets in women, particularly to help prevent heart disease. The latest report comparing Australian women’s diet to national dietary guidelines found less than 1 in 10 Australian women are meeting fruit and vegetable intake guidelines.

University of Sydney PhD candidate at the Westmead Applied Research Centre (WARC) Ms Anushriya Pant said a Mediterranean diet – high in fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, legumes and healthy fats like olive oil and nuts, with a moderate intake of seafood and lean protein is known for its heart health benefits but its impact by sex has never been explored.

“The Mediterranean diet is known for its health benefits, especially for heart health, but most studies and research into diet and heart disease are done primarily in men,” said Ms Pant, who led the analysis.

From the article: A new study by Columbia University researchers suggests that cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins have the potential to reduce heart disease in people with obstructive sleep apnea regardless of the use of CPAP machines during the night.

CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) therapy improves sleep quality and reduces daytime fatigue in people with obstructive sleep apnea. But based on findings from several recent clinical trials, CPAP does not improve heart health as physicians originally hoped.

Alternative methods to reduce heart disease in sleep apnea patients are urgently needed, because the condition is known to triple the risk of having a heart attack, stroke, or another serious cardiovascular event.

Statins (a class of cholesterol-lowering drugs) may be one such method, according to the new study, led by Sanja Jelic, MD, associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

The study included 87 people with recently diagnosed obstructive sleep apnea who were being treated with CPAP. The patients were randomized to receive treatment with either statins or a placebo.

From the article: A new report published in Cell Reports Medicine has found that individuals who use assigned breathwork techniques experienced greater improvements in mood and lowered respiratory rates as compared to those practicing mindfulness meditation. These findings indicate that breathwork may be an important therapeutic tool for those experiencing depressed mood or an overactive nervous system.

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, breathwork has become a popular and cost-effective intervention for improving health and well-being through intentional breathing techniques. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated how we breathe affects our heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen levels, and ventilation. In addition, initial research has provided evidence that techniques like slow and nasal breathing can enhance the quality of life for asthma patients, reduce anxiety, and improve alertness and learning abilities in people.

From the article: Metastatic breast cancer has no cure and has proven stubbornly resistant to one of the most innovative and promising new cancer treatments: immunotherapy.

Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a way to treat the area surrounding breast tumors that have spread to bone so that such tumors become vulnerable to attack by the body’s immune system. When the researchers boosted the activity of certain immune cells, called T cells and macrophages, these immune cells worked together to clear metastatic breast tumors that had spread to the bones of mice, and continued to eliminate tumor cells that eventually returned.

The study is published March 8 in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Macrophages are myeloid immune cells that attack cancer cells through the body’s innate immune response to general threats, such as tumors or viruses. Such macrophages further activate T cells by showing the T cells what they should be looking for, thereby harnessing the adaptive immune response as well. In this case, these macrophages present T cells with bits of recognizable tumor — called tumor antigens — from dead cancer cells, and the antigens direct the killing activities of T cells.

“After breast cancer has spread to other parts of the body, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to treat; current therapies can only try to slow it down,” said senior author Sheila A. Stewart, PhD, the Gerty Cori Professor of Cell Biology & Physiology. “About 70% of patients with metastatic breast cancer have tumors that have spread to their bones. Our study suggests we may be able to use two treatments — one to sensitize the myeloid tumor microenvironment to immunotherapy, and one to activate T cells — to target these bone metastases in a way that eliminates the tumor, prevents the cancer from returning and protects against bone loss in the process.”

From the article: Meta is not quite finished streamlining its workforce, with plans for another culling of thousands of employees being considered by management. In November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company was laying off 13% of its workforce, equating to approximately 11,000 in job losses. It seems that another employment bloodbath is in the cards.

A new wave of layoffs are being planned, according to Bloomberg. Thousands more employees are expected to get let go, with the fresh round hitting as soon as this week.

While earlier rounds were apparently an attempt to flatten the organization's structure, complete with managerial buyout packages and cutting entire teams thought to be non-essential, the new round may be more money-motivated. People familiar with internal matters at Meta claim the next round is being driven by financial targets, and is separate from "the flattening."

As part of the process, directors and vice presidents have been asked to produce lists of employees that they deem could be let go.

The speed of the layoffs is in part due to Zuckerberg himself, with those working on the initiative aiming to prepare it all before the CEO goes off for parental leave.

From the article: It’s one of the most exciting areas of cancer research, but identifying the tumors through blood tests remains difficult, particularly for early-stage detection.

Despite breakthrough blood-test research for many types of cancers and specific sources such as lung and breast cancers, and the flourishing field of development of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) tests, screening generally still involves invasive biopsies of cells.

Researchers at the University of Technology (UTS) in Sydney, Australia, are hoping to change that, with the development of their new biotech, the Static Droplet Microfluidic (SDM) device. It can quickly detect circulating tumor cells (CTC) that have split from the cancer source to enter the bloodstream. It paves the way for very early detection, monitoring and treatment.

“A single tumor cell can exist among billions of blood cells in just one milliliter of blood, making it very difficult to find," said Majid Warkiana, professor from the UTS School of Biomedical Engineering. "The new detection technology has 38,400 chambers capable of isolating and classifying the number of metabolically active tumor cells."

The SDM can pick out tumor cells through a unique metabolic signature involving waste product lactate.

From the article: Importantly, the study found no evidence that the results varied based on the presence of a genetic variant associated with alcohol use disorder.

Topiramate is a medication that is commonly used to treat epilepsy and prevent migraine headaches. It works by regulating the activity of certain chemicals in the brain that can contribute to seizures or migraines. In recent years, topiramate has also been studied as a potential treatment for alcohol dependence, as it may help reduce cravings and symptoms of withdrawal. But scientists are not sure if a specific variation in the GRIK1 gene (rs2832407) affects how well topiramate works to reduce drinking.

“My research interests include personalizing substance use disorder treatments for people based on different characteristics, including why they use substances, co-occurring psychological disorders, and biological characteristics (e.g., genetics), among other considerations,” said study author Victoria Votaw, a PhD candidate and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism predoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico.

“Therefore, I was very interested in research showing that the effect of topiramate, a medication that has shown efficacy for treating alcohol use disorder, on alcohol use outcomes might vary by a type of genetic mutation called a single-nucleotide polymorphism. Upon doing a deeper dive into this literature, I realized the findings were mixed, and my co-authors and I decided to look at daily data reported via telephone from a trial of topiramate to further explore this research question.”

“Using daily data might help clarify how topiramate works for different people and provide more information regarding whether topiramate’s effectiveness depends on the genetic variant we examined.”

The study involved 164 people who wanted to stop or reduce their drinking. They were randomly divided into two groups: one group received topiramate, while the other group received a placebo (a “dummy” medication with no active ingredients). Participants were seen once a week for six weeks and the medication dosage was gradually increased from 25 mg/day to a maximum of 200 mg/day.

From the article: Scientists across multiple disciplines are working to create revolutionary biocomputers where three-dimensional cultures of brain cells, called brain organoids, serve as biological hardware. They describe their roadmap for realizing this vision in the journal Frontiers in Science.

“We call this new interdisciplinary field ‘organoid intelligence’ (OI),” said Prof Thomas Hartung of Johns Hopkins University. “A community of top scientists has gathered to develop this technology, which we believe will launch a new era of fast, powerful, and efficient biocomputing.”

Brain organoids are a type of lab-grown cell-culture. Even though brain organoids aren’t ‘mini brains’, they share key aspects of brain function and structure such as neurons and other brain cells that are essential for cognitive functions like learning and memory. Also, whereas most cell cultures are flat, organoids have a three-dimensional structure. This increases the culture's cell density 1,000-fold, meaning that neurons can form many more connections.

But even if brain organoids are a good imitation of brains, why would they make good computers? After all, aren't computers smarter and faster than brains?

"While silicon-based computers are certainly better with numbers, brains are better at learning,” Hartung explained. “For example, AlphaGo [the AI that beat the world’s number one Go player in 2017] was trained on data from 160,000 games. A person would have to play five hours a day for more than 175 years to experience these many games.” 

Brains are not only superior learners, they are also more energy efficient. For instance, the amount of energy spent training AlphaGo is more than is needed to sustain an active adult for a decade.

“Brains also have an amazing capacity to store information, estimated at 2,500TB,” Hartung added. “We’re reaching the physical limits of silicon computers because we cannot pack more transistors into a tiny chip. But the brain is wired completely differently. It has about 100bn neurons linked through over 1015 connection points. It’s an enormous power difference compared to our current technology.”

From the article: New research provides evidence that people who grew up in an unstable environment are more susceptible to food addiction. The findings, published in the journal Appetite, indicate that unpredictability in one’s earlier stages of life is associated with maladaptive patterns of food intake.

Food addiction is a term used to describe a problematic pattern of food intake characterized by a lack of control, unsuccessful attempts to eat less, and continuing to overeat despite negative consequences.

“Considering the deleterious consequences of food addiction (e.g., obesity and depression), the risk factors leading to adults’ food addiction warrant examination,” said study author Hope Zhou, a PhD student at the University of Macau.

“Understanding the psychological mechanism of food addiction from the perspective of life history may help evaluate and decrease one’s risks for food addiction. These results may yield a theoretical framework for the development of food addiction and practical insights for future food addiction intervention programs.”

The new study was based on life history theory, which seeks to explain how organisms allocate resources over their lifetime in order to maximize their reproductive success. The theory holds that one’s early life environment shapes internal strategies of how to allocate energy and resources.

From the article: “This animal is the opportunity to think about and develop new techniques or potential targets for making new drugs, because their [reproductive] cells have the same program that we have in mice and humans, but they’re behaving differently,” says Miguel Angel Brieño-Enríquez at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

Native to East Africa, naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) live for up to 37 years and form underground colonies with social structures similar to those of bees, including a single queen that produces offspring for her entire life. By contrast, mice only live for about four years and their fertility starts dropping when they are only 9 months old.

Curious about these differences in reproductive lifespans, Brieño-Enríquez and his colleagues looked at the ovaries of naked mole rats under a microscope when the animals were 1, 5, 8, 15, 28 and 90 days old. They used advanced staining and testing techniques to identify the different kinds of cells they saw. In particular, they were looking for germ cells that can divide and mature into oocytes – or eggs – through a process known as oogenesis.

In humans, mice and other mammals, oogenesis only occurs before birth and, in some species, shortly afterwards, leaving newborn females with a limited lifetime supply of eggs. Those eggs gradually die over time, leading to reduced fertility with age.

In the naked mole rats, though, Brieño-Enríquez and his colleagues found large numbers of germ cells at every stage of life they tested, with numbers steadily increasing throughout the first week of life. At 8 days old, the naked mole rats had an average of 1.5 million egg cells – 95 times more than 8-day-old mice, says Brieño-Enríquez.

Study

From the article: Being overweight is often linked to negatives in children’s physical health but how about to their cognitive health? A study published in PloS One suggests a link between excess weight in preschool children and declined executive functioning.

Overweight and obesity in children has become increasingly prevalent and problematic worldwide in the recent past. Though obesity is thought of commonly as simply being overweight due to poor nutrition and lack of exercise, it is a bit more complex than that. Obesity involves the entire body and can be affected by genetics, environment, and the way these two interact.

Risk factors for childhood obesity can include preterm birth and low birth weight. Cognitive factors, such as executive functioning, have been thought to be related to excess weight by affecting the mental control around healthy habits. A relationship between excess weight and executive functioning impairments has been shown in school-aged children, adolescents, and adults, but there is a gap in literature around preschool aged children, which this study seeks to address.

For their study, Narueporn Likhitweerawong and colleagues utilized 1,181 preschoolers aged 2 to 5 from seven private and public schools in Thailand to serve as their sample. Data was collected in 2021. Schools chosen represented predominantly middle-class socioeconomic status. Children who were underweight or diagnosed with neurodevelopmental or genetic disorders were excluded. Measures included an executive functioning inventory filled out by the participants’ parents, weight status, and pre-specified confounders, such as age, birth weight, breastfeeding status, sex, and more.

Results showed that children who had impaired executive functioning were more likely to be overweight. In particular, impaired inhibition and decreased working memory capacity were both significantly correlated with being overweight for preschoolers in this study.

From the article: People with and without anxiety disorders learn to fear a threat equally quickly, according to new research. However, people with anxiety disorders tend to have a harder time learning to stop being afraid on a physiological level (when the threat is gone) compared to healthy individuals. These trends can be detected by monitoring fear-potentiated startle responses.

The study was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

Learning to recognize threats is a capacity that is of extreme importance for survival. However, problems in these processes, such as situations when an individual easily learns to associate certain stimuli with danger but fails to extinguish this association once the stimuli in question are not longer associated with danger, have long been linked to the development and maintenance of pathological anxiety.

Some theorists have linked the fact that anxiety symptoms start developing in late childhood and early adolescence with variations in the maturation of neural circuitry supporting threat learning. This is often explored experimentally by using the so-called differential threat conditioning study plans.

From the article: More frequent smartphone checking behavior is associated with greater incidences of daily cognitive failures, according to new research published in the British Journal of Psychology. However, the new findings also indicate that some forms of screen time are actually associated with reduced cognitive failures.

There are concerns that smartphone use is related to the phenomenon of daily cognitive failures. Research has suggested that frequent smartphone use can lead to cognitive overload and decrease attentional control, which may contribute to cognitive failures such as forgetfulness, distraction, and mind wandering. Additionally, smartphone use can be highly distracting and interruptive, which may interfere with the ability to focus and complete tasks.

“This is a very interesting topic given that smartphone use has become ubiquitous in recent years and has dramatically changed the way people communicate and access information,” said study author Andree Hartanto, an assistant professor of psychology at Singapore Management University.

“It has been suggested that smartphone use may have negative effects on our cognitive processes, leading to daily cognitive failures such as forgetfulness and difficulty in paying attention. However, the evidence is mixed. Given the widespread use of smartphones and the potential impact on daily life, we believe that it is important to examine the relationship between smartphone use and cognitive failures rigorously with a better methodology using a daily dairy approach with objective measures of smartphone use.”

From the article: A new study explored reasons why some citizens of the former East Germany chose not to view files that the Stasi, the notorious secret police force, kept of them when the archives were opened in 1991. Aside from claiming that the information is not relevant, most people stated that they wanted to avoid finding out that one of their colleagues or family members was a Stasi informant and that viewing those files would impact their ability to trust others. The study was published in Cognition.

Curiosity, the desire to obtain knowledge, is one of the defining traits of human beings. Yet there are situations when people willingly choose not to know. This phenomenon — deliberate ignorance — has been attracting a growing interest from researchers in various scientific disciplines.

When a society faces a fundamental transition, such as moving from war to peace or from dictatorship to democracy, people must find ways to interpret, remember or ignore past experiences and include that interpretation into the collective memory of the group in a way that allows the society to move forward.