Researchers from the University of Liverpool have published a study highlighting the effectiveness of using positive memories and images to help generate positive emotions.

It has been suggested that savouring positive memories can generate positive emotions. Increasing positive emotion can have a range of benefits including reducing attention to and experiences of threat.

The study, supervised by Dr Peter Taylor from the University's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, investigated individuals' emotional reactions to a guided mental imagery task focussing on positive social memory called the 'social Broad Minded Affective Coping (BMAC)' technique.

Humans may have the most complex breast milk of all mammals. Milk from a human mother contains more than 200 different sugar molecules, way above the average 30-50 found in, for example, mouse or cow milk.

The role of each of these sugars and why their composition changes during breastfeeding is still a scientific puzzle, but it's likely connected to the infant immune system and developing gut microbiome. 

A typical mouse laboratory is kept between 20 and 26 degrees C, but if the mice had it their way, it would be a warm 30 degrees C. While the mice are still considered healthy at cooler temperatures, they expend more energy to maintain their core temperature, and evidence is mounting that even mild chronic cold stress is skewing results in studies of cancer, inflammation, and more. 

HANOVER, N.H. - Virtual and augmented reality have the potential to profoundly impact our society, but the technologies have a few bugs to work out to better simulate realistic visual experience. Now, researchers at Dartmouth College and Stanford University have discovered that "monovision" -- a simple technique borrowed from ophthalmology that dates to the monocle of the Victorian Age - can improve user performance in virtual reality environments.

Scientists from Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania have identified a biological pathway that could explain why current asthma therapies often prove ineffective.

The discovery has the potential to lead to new treatments for many of the 25 million people in the U.S., including seven million children, who suffer from the chronic condition.

Researchers Reynold A. Panettieri, inaugural director of the clinical and translational science institute at Rutgers, and Edward E. Morrissey, director of the Penn Center for Pulmonary Biology, determined that when certain genes in mice were inactivated, the mice developed an asthma-like condition, exhibiting airway hyper-responsiveness, or AHR, a classic sign of asthma.

A recent study has identified specific intake levels of xanthohumol, a natural flavonoid found in hops, that significantly improved some of the underlying markers of metabolic syndrome in laboratory animals and also reduced weight gain.

Laboratory mice were fed a high-fat diet, and given varying levels of xanthohumol. Compared to animals given none of this supplement, the highest dosage of xanthohumol given to laboratory rats cut their LDL, or "bad" cholesterol 80 percent; their insulin level 42 percent; and their level of IL-6, a biomarker of inflammation, 78 percent.