Here is what we’re reading today:
“Though the psychologists may have been surprised, many of the people with dyslexia I speak with are not. In our laboratory at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics we have carried out studies funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate talents for science among those with dyslexia. The dyslexic scientist Christopher Tonkin described to me his sense of this as a sensitivity to “things out of place.” He’s easily bothered by the weeds among the flowers in his garden, and he felt that this sensitivity for visual anomalies was something he built on in his career as a professional scientist. Such differences in sensitivity for causal perception may explain why people like Carole Greider and Baruj Benacerraf have been able to perform Nobel prize-winning science despite lifelong challenges with dyslexia.”
“Smoking during pregnancy has also been linked with miscarriage, premature birth, lower birth weight, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and learning problems.
The findings provide new information and also reinforce other research, said Dr. Len Horovitz, a pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“There’s no safe smoking,” he said, “and there doesn’t seem to be much safe second-hand smoking either.””
“Professor Jim Deuchars, Professor of Systems Neuroscience in the University of Leeds’ Faculty of Biological Sciences, said: “You feel a bit of a tickling sensation in your ear when the TENS machine is on, but it is painless. It is early days—so far we have been testing this on healthy subjects—but we think it does have potential to improve the health of the heart and might even become part of the treatment for heart failure.””
“Our work shows that there is also an association between the type of cognitive training performed and the resulting effect. This is true for healthy seniors who want to improve their attention or memory and is particularly important for patients who suffer from damage in specific areas of the brain. We therefore need to better understand the ways to activate certain areas of the brain and target this action to get specific results,” explained Sylvie Belleville, who led the research.”
“For dog lovers, comparative psychologists Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi have an unsettling conclusion. Many researchers think that as humans domesticated wolves, they selected for a cooperative nature, resulting in animals keen to pitch in on tasks with humans. But when the two scientists at the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna studied lab-raised dog and wolf packs, they found that wolves were the tolerant, cooperative ones. The dogs, in contrast, formed strict, linear dominance hierarchies that demand obedience from subordinates, Range explained last week at the Animal Behavior Society meeting at Princeton University. As wolves became dogs, she thinks, they were bred for the ability to follow orders and to be dependent on human masters.”
Check out some of the most unbelievable correlations!!
2 Comments
ksomasek · October 5, 2014 at 12:24 pm
I found the “Dry roasting could help trigger peanut allergy” article to be quite interesting because the concept of dry roasted peanuts being more likely to trigger an allergy to peanuts is something that I would have never even considered. It is intriguing to think that just a different form of the same food can elevate chances of being allergic to the raw version of the food. I found the biological interpretation of this discovery to be even more interesting as it stated that the high temperatures of dry roasting are detected by one’s immune system and “primes” the body to react with an allergic immune response to peanuts.
One question I encountered in this article was about this reaction the body has to the high temperatures of dry roasting. The article stated that people in the East have less peanut allergies because they more commonly fry or boil their peanuts as opposed to dry roasting them. If high temperatures is really the instigator of peanut allergies, how do the high temperatures of boiling and frying of the peanuts not affect the Eastern population in developing peanut allergies? It would be great for me to look into this a bit more and see if I am overlooking the exact definition of “high temperature” in this particular context. Overall this was a great read and definitely has led me to find out more about this research finding!
mariecote · November 25, 2016 at 4:59 pm
I read the article about wolves and dogs. By domesticating dogs, we selected for characteristics that are beneficial to humans rather than other dogs. We selected against cooperation, and opted for obedience to humans. I had never considered this before, but it seems rather obvious now that this may not have been the best way to domesticate dogs. In a way, by inhibiting dogs’ independence, we are inhibiting their instinctual and cooperative behavior. Obedience in dogs may have some benefits, but it clearly has negative impacts on the way dogs socialize with other dogs. I thought it was interesting that when the wolf pack was presented with food, even the subordinate dogs were able to eat, but in the dog group, practically only the dominant dogs were able to eat.