Picture this: For the past two weeks you have felt continuously dejected. You have lost interest in what normally makes you happy. Perhaps you’ve slept poorly or lost your appetite. There is a risk that you have one of the most common maladies in the world: Depression.

You decide to see a doctor. She considers different treatments and finally she gives you a prescription for a small box of antidepressants. Whether they will help you is unclear. Some patients report an effect after two or three weeks, others don’t notice any change at all. Some even get even more depressed.

More depressed? If it is actually a healthy person who doesn't have clinical depression, it's certainly possible. 

Measurements at BESSY II have shown how spin filters forming within magnetic sandwiches influence tunnel magnetoresistance - results that can help in designing spintronic components. In doing so, the teams enhanced our understanding of processes that are important for future TMR data storage devices and other spintronic components.

A study that assessed the impact of urban land use on the initiation of thunderstorms from 1997 to 2013 in the humid subtropical region of the southeast United States found that isolated convective initiation events occur more often over the urban area of Atlanta compared with its surrounding rural counterparts.

The findings confirm that human-induced changes in land cover in tropical environments lead to more thunderstorm initiation events.

Nicotine's primary metabolite supports learning and memory by amplifying the action of a primary chemical messenger involved in both, researchers report.

"This is the first hint of what the mechanism of the metabolite cotinine might be," said Dr. Alvin V. Terry, Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University and corresponding author of the study in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

While the findings show therapeutic promise for a metabolite once thought to be inactive, cotinine's benefits don't hold up across all learning and memory systems so Terry is already looking at analogues that would be even more broadly effective and equally safe.

Is a new diet or exercise program working for a friend? If so, there's a good chance that you will try it, too.

A person who finds success in a wellness program is more influential in getting friends to sign up than a charismatic, but less successful pal, according to a study by University at Buffalo occupational health researcher Lora Cavuoto.

The study, "Modeling the Spread of an Obesity Intervention through a Social Network," was published in the Journal of Healthcare Engineering.

Image:Brad Perkins,CC BY-SA

Every year massive amounts of valuable resources are deemed “waste” and consigned to landfill. Take the UK – around 540 million tonnes of products and materials enter the country annually, but only 117 million tonnes are recycled.