A new study has found that engaging in a physical exercise regimen helps healthy aging adults improve their memory, brain health and physical fitness - a significant finding considering that, among adults 50 and older, "staying mentally sharp" outranks social security and physical health as their top concern.

In the summer of 2012 I wrote Celiac: The Trendy Disease For Rich White People, which annoyed a few people with celiac disease but a whole bunch of people who had latched onto a fad and craved medical or scientific legitimacy in doing so.

Yes, yes, we’ve covered this territory before. But you might have heard that Sam Harris has reopened the discussion by challenging his critics, luring them out of their hiding places with the offer of cold hard cash.

What do bullies and sex have in common?
  The same part of the brain reacts to both. 

In a recent study, researchers found that different types of fear are processed by different groups of neurons in mice, even if the animals act out those fears in the same way - which could have implications for addressing phobias and panic attacks in humans.

"We found that there seems to be a circuit for handling fear of predators – which has been described anatomically as a kind of defense circuit – but fear of members of the same species uses the reproductive circuit instead," says Bianca Silva of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Monterotondo, Italy, who carried out the work, "and fear of pain goes through yet another part of the brain."

Due to Budget constraints, registered nurses in European countries are often confronted with difficult decisions: They have to decide which care activities they can offer to their patients and which to omit. 

What usually gets cut is patient comfort or talk with patients or educating patients and relatives.

An analysis by the Institute of Nursing Sciences at the University of Basel shows that all European countries are affected and revealed a correlation between omitted nursing care and increased patient mortality.

You often see demonstrations of titration using an expensive glass burette, but you can build titration lab ware using a disposable serological pipette, a solder sucker bulb, and a ring stand or support stand. For this build I’m using my erector set support stand (I sometimes call it my Bunsen burner stand). Titration is the process of determining the unknown concentration of a solution by adding a known amount of a solution with a known concentration. For example, in an acid-base titration, you can determine the unknown concentration of an acid in a solution by adding a base solution of known concentration.

Germans: ‘We’ve found second solar system’

This sounds like something from a science fiction comic when I was young, back in the days when Dan Dare was with Spacefleet, which was effectively the RAF in Space before the Russians and Americans took over.

However, this bit of news is quite contemporary.  According to one of my favourite online newspapers*, a team of German scientists claim to have discovered a “second solar system” made up of seven planets orbiting a star similar to our own.

Gastric bypass surgery has become one of the most commonly performed procedures in the treatment of obesity. In most patients, it quickly produces substantial body weight loss and improved glucose tolerance. However, the metabolic improvements vary considerably from patient to patient.

A hormone test may be able to predict the extent of metabolic improvement caused by the gastric bypass. These are the results of a study on a rodent model conducted by Prof. Dr. Matthias Tschöp and his colleagues from the Institute of Diabetes and Obesity (IDO), Helmholtz Diabetes Center at Helmholtz Zentrum München together with a team of researchers led by Dr. Kirk Habegger at the Metabolic Disease Institute of the University of Cincinnati.

Basic ocean conditions such as current directions and water temperature play a huge role in determining the behavior of young migrating salmon as they move from rivers and hit ocean waters for the first time -  and how the fish fare during their first few weeks in the ocean has a profound impact on species' ability to survive into adulthood.

Late nights are not great for most people and especially roe children, according to a new paper. 
Teenagers who go to bed late during the school year are more prone to academic and emotional difficulties in the long run, compared to their earlier-to-bed counterparts.

The scholars analyzed longitudinal data from a nationally representative cohort of 2,700 U.S. adolescents of whom 30 percent reported bedtimes later than 11:30 p.m. on school days and 1:30 a.m. in the summer in their middle and high school years. By the time they graduated from high school, the school-year night owls had lower GPA scores, and were more vulnerable to emotional problems than teens with earlier bedtimes