It's well known that eating too much salt can be harmful. Despite that fact, many people choose to consume more of it than they need, and that to many in the health community means that something must be done population-wide to reduce salt intake. The latest effort comes from the European Society of Cardiology, who says that a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine illustrates the need for laws that restrict the salt content of processed foods.

Research has documented that most men become much more jealous about sexual infidelity than they do about emotional infidelity. Women are the opposite. The prevailing theory is that the difference has evolutionary origins: Men learned over eons to be hyper-vigilant about sex because they can never be absolutely certain they are the father of a child, while women are much more concerned about having a partner who is committed to raising a family.

Scientists from the Université de Montréal are developing a weight loss pill composed of leptin, the protein that regulates appetite in mammals. The researchers say that leptin may be a good weight loss pill because its levels decrease when we fast and rise when we eat, meaning that increasing them could reduce people's urge to continue eating. The protein has also been proven to suppress appetite when administered intravenously to pathologically obese people.

"Taken orally, such a pill would provide obese people with the sensation of being full. They would eat less and in turn lose weight," says Dr. Cammisotto, one of the researchers on the project.

Putting A Lid On The Spread Of Infection

The common phrase "put a lid on it" can apply to stopping something or setting a limit to it.  For example, putting a lid on spending means the same as a cap on spending.  More generally, the phrase is a request to cease and desist, applied to behaviour such as persistent complaining or playing loud music.

How do you put a lid on the spread of infection?  The answer is simple, effective and quite literal: put a lid on it.

Research conducted at the University of Chicago shows that female elementary school teachers who are anxious about math often pass the phobia on to female students. Published in a recent edition of PNAS, the findings are the product of a year-long study on 17 first- and second-grade teachers and 52 boys and 65 girls who were their students. The researchers found that boys' math performance was not related to their teacher's math anxiety while girls' math achievement was affected.

To determine the impact of teachers' mathematics anxiety on students, the team assessed teachers' anxiety about math. Then, at both the beginning and end of the school year, the research team also tested the students' level of mathematics achievement and the gender stereotypes the students held.

Death By Fraud

Jim McCormick has been charged with fraud over his sales of a totally bogus explosives detection device, as reported in my earlier post  here.  I was beaten to the punch in writing about this bogus device by Barry Leiba back in November 2009.

When the menu boards at a McDonald's restaurant included the calorie content for the various meal options, parents chose lower calorie items for their children, according to a new study in Pediatrics. The authors say their study is the first to suggest that labeled menus may lead to significantly reduced calorie intake in fast food restaurant meals purchased for children.

Using high resolution genome sequencing, an international team of researchers has tracked a particularly virulent strain of MRSA as it traveled between South America, Europe and Southeast Asia. The findings shed light on how these deadly bacteria are able to spread from patient to patient in a single hospital and, on a larger scale of geography and time, between countries and entire continents. The results appear in a recent issue of Science.

Scientists from the University of Kentucky and the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya have discovered a new predatory thrips – Karnyothrips flavipes – which feeds on the eggs and larvae of the coffee berry borer Hypothenemus hampei.

The authors say the discovery could have important implications for the management of the coffee berry borer throughout the world. Their study, the first to quantitatively prove predation on the coffee berry borer, is published online in Naturwissenschaften - The Science of Nature.

A new study published in the Spanish Journal of Psychology indicates that in the West women experience much more guilt than men, and the primary reason is not that women feel too much guilt, but rather that many males feel too little. The authors say more needs to be done to "reduce the trend towards anxious-aggressive guilt among women and to strengthen interpersonal sensitivity among men."