Do you have a soul?

Even if you do, psychologists say, free will is a conscious choice. 

This is nothing new. Religious people of 400 B.C. debunked atomic determinism because they believed in free will, just like they debunked genetic determinism of the early 20th century. To scholars, there has always been a difference between mind and soul but an article in Consciousness and Cognition rehashes ancient metaphysical arguments and use results from  Amazon Mechanical Turk volunteers to do so, which means it is not a representative sample.

When it comes to e-cigarettes, critics seem to prefer regular cigarettes. Or snuff. Or snus. Or they just want to ban behavior. And the biggest tool they have is the precautionary principle. Sure, there are no known health effects but that is easy to fix - speculate about unknown potential ones.

Smoking is, of course, bad. E-cigarettes are not smoking, it is instead a nicotine vapor. The number of people who have gotten lung cancer from nicotine vapor is zero, which is not evidence for much, but it is certainly not evidence it is harmful. Since even among lung cancer patients, up to 50 percent have never smoked, smoking itself is only a risk factor for the disease. E-cigarettes are not even that.

Puberty is the defining process of adolescent development and it leads to  variety of changes throughout the body - even including the brain.

Writing in 
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), researchers find that cerebral blood flow (CBF) levels decreased similarly in males and females before puberty, but then diverge sharply in puberty, with levels increasing in females while decreasing further in males, which could give hints as to developing differences in behavior in men and women and sex-specific pre-dispositions to certain psychiatric disorders.

May 27, 2014 – A groundbreaking new study published today in Obesity, the journal of The Obesity Society, confirms definitively that drinking diet beverages helps people lose weight.

"This study clearly demonstrates that diet beverages can in fact help people lose weight, directly countering myths in recent years that suggest the opposite effect – weight gain," said James O. Hill, Ph.D., executive director of the University of Colorado Anschutz Health and Wellness Center and a co-author of the study. "In fact, those who drank diet beverages lost more weight and reported feeling significantly less hungry than those who drank water alone. This reinforces that if you're trying to shed pounds, you can enjoy diet beverages."

Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, have identified how a specific stretch of DNA controls far-off genes to influence the formation of the face. The study, published today in Nature Genetics, helps understand the genetic causes of cleft lip and cleft palate, which are among the most common congenital malformations in humans.

"This genomic region ultimately controls genes which determine how to build a face and genes which produce the basic materials needed to execute this plan", says François Spitz from EMBL, who led the work. "We think that this dual action explains why this region is linked to susceptibility to cleft lip or palate in humans."

I reported here a few days ago about a very nice challenge issued by the ATLAS experiment: find Higgs boson decays to tau lepton pairs in a sample containing signal as well as background events, using a training sample with correct signal and background labels per each event.

The challenge consists of solving a typical classification problem in a highly multidimensional space (30 dimensions) better than all other participants - the metric to judge being an "approximate median significance" of the subset of events that the user classifies as "signal". This is given by the formula

AMS = sqrt {2 * [(s+b+10) * log(1 + s/(b+10)) - s] }

Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have discovered a signaling pathway in cancer cells that controls their ability to invade nearby tissues in a finely orchestrated manner. The findings offer insights into the early molecular events involved in metastasis, the deadly spread of cancer cells from primary tumor to other parts of the body. The study was published today in the online edition of Nature Cell Biology.

Michael Lewis's bestselling book "Flash Boys" describes how some brokers, engaging in high frequency trading, exploit fast telecommunications to gain fraction-of-a-second advantage in the buying and selling of stocks. But you don't need to have billions of dollars riding on this-second securities transactions to appreciate the importance of fast signal processing. From internet to video streaming, we want things fast.

BOSTON, MA – A new research study from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) that compares low-dose oral estrogen and low-dose non-hormonal venlafaxine hydrochloride extended release (XR) to placebo were both found effective in reducing the number of hot flashes and night sweats reported by menopausal women. The study is the first clinical trial to simultaneously evaluate estrogen therapy (ET), known as the "gold standard" treatment for hot flashes and night sweats, and a non-hormonal treatment, venlafaxine, a first-line treatment in women who are unwilling or unable to use ET.

The study titled, "Randomized Controlled Trial of Low-Dose Estradiol and the Serotonin-Norepinephrine" is published in the May 27 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.

Children with bronchiolitis (a common respiratory tract infection that can result in hospitalization) who were treated in the emergency department showed less clinical improvement after receiving nebulized 3 percent hypertonic saline (HS) than infants who received normal saline (NS).  

Nebulized HS has been shown to increase mucociliary clearance (the clearing of mucus) in healthy people and in those patients with conditions such as asthma and cystic fibrosis because it is believed to lower the viscosity of mucus secretions. Other studies have suggested HS may reduce the length of hospital stays and lessen severity in children with bronchiolitis.