While cultural pundits are worried about the health impact of obesity and which foods need to be more regulated to prevent chronic disease, a new analysis has found that incidents of ischemic stroke, the most common type of stroke caused by a clot in the blood vessels of the brain, has declined among most during the past decade. 

The nature of hypnotically suggested changes in perception has been controversial throughout the history of hypnosis. 

The major current hypotheses of hypnosis hold that we always actively use our own imagination to bring about the effects of a suggestion - for example, the occurrence of visual hallucinations always requires active use of goal directed imagery and can be experienced both with and without hypnosis. In other words, it isn't really hypnosis, but people susceptible to suggestion become more so when drowsy.

Sociologists have challenged the perception that there is a "new and pervasive hookup culture" among contemporary college students that is substantially greater than a generation ago.

Excavations of tools at two neighboring Paleolithic sites in southwest France have made the blurred lines between modern humans and Neanderthals more blurry. 

Two research teams from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands have jointly reported the discovery of Neandertal bone tools unlike any others previously found in Neandertal sites - but similar to a tool from later modern human sites and still and still used even today. 

Near-death experiences may have found a new grounding in science.

Whether and how the dying brain is capable of generating conscious activity has been vigorously debated but the near-death experiences reported by cardiac arrest survivors worldwide may be verifiable, according to a new paper.

Approximately 20 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report having had a near-death experience during clinical death. These visions and perceptions have been called "realer than real" but it remains unclear whether the brain is capable of such activity after cardiac arrest.

A new paper found that shortly after clinical death, in which the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing to the brain, rats display brain activity patterns characteristic of conscious perception.

Researchers have measured light emitted by photoluminescence from a nanodiamond levitating in free space. 

Their paper describes how they used a laser to trap nanodiamonds in space, and – using another laser – caused the diamonds to emit light at given frequencies.

The experiment, led by Nick Vamivakas, an assistant professor of optics at the University of Rochester, demonstrates that it is possible to levitate diamonds as small as 100 nanometers (approximately one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair) in free space, by using a technique known as laser trapping.  Specifically, nitrogen vacancy (NV) photoluminescence (PL) from a nanodiamond suspended in a free-space optical dipole trap.