Researchers at the Department of Psychiatry, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technische Universität München, say they have shown that formal education diminishes the impact of Alzheimer’s disease on cognition even if a manifest brain volume loss has already occurred.

Dr. Robert Perneczky, Department of Psychiatry at Klinikum rechts der Isar explains, “We know that there is not always a close association between brain damage due to Alzheimer’s disease and the resulting symptoms of dementia. In fact, there are individuals with severe brain pathology with almost no signs of dementia, whereas others with only minor brain lesions exhibit a considerable degree of clinical symptoms.”

If you feel lethargic or that your memory is slipping, diet may be a factor.   A new research study says that in less than 10 days of eating a high-fat diet, rats had decreased ability to exercise and experienced significant short-term memory loss. The researchers say the results show an important link between what we eat, how we think, and how our bodies perform. 

A group of researchers from Indiana University's Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research (CHPPR) say they have found that support for government health insurance for individuals under age 65 remains virtually the same regardless of how the plan is described or how involved the government would be.   So support is not a 'framing' issue, public relations or political roadblocks, it seems to be a fundamental disagreement about what the government can and cannot effectively do - and that falls along political party lines.

The science is in and men are easy.

Men are far more interested in casual sex than women, according to Dr. Achim Schützwohl, from the Department of Psychology at Brunel University in the UK, and a team who published their results in Human Nature.  Their research showed that men are more likely than women to report having had casual sex and they express a greater desire for it than do women.

But men need to be exceptionally attractive to tempt women to consider casual sex, they say.

Biology has just gotten a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information, biology's equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics.

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their colleagues say this visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that models are accurate, efficient and readily understandable. The new standard, called the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), is published today in Nature Biotechnology.

100 years ago you had to be rich to be fat.  Now apparently you have to be rich to stay thin.  And women add more pounds being poor than anyone.

A nationwide study that followed participants for 14 years correlates the U.S. Food Stamp Program to obesity among its users.

Researchers found that the average user of food stamps had a Body Mass Index (BMI) 1.15 points higher than non-users. The link between food stamps and higher weight was almost entirely based on women users, who averaged 1.24 points higher BMI than those not in the program, the study found. For an average American woman, this would mean an increase in weight of 5.8 pounds.