If you aren’t enjoying your meditation practice, a small new study suggests a possible reason why: You aren’t doing the method that’s right for you. Researchers from the San Francisco State University Institute for Holistic Health Studies found that not all people prefer the same kind of meditation practices. The study suggests that the best…
Diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans, such as bird flu and tuberculosis, can wreak havoc on the health of both organisms. Now researchers have found 13 so-called zoonoses are responsible for 2.2 million human deaths every year. The study, detailed in the report “Mapping of Poverty and Likely Zoonoses Hotspots,” shows the…
Traumatic events are well known for producing a sense of unreality as we watch a disaster unfold. Most of us can also produce this state far more pleasurably, by getting drunk, for example. For the less fortunate, though, it is also a known, if quite controversial, psychiatric diagnosis of dissociation. This comes in two main…
Spacefaring worms undergo genetic changes associated with longer lives in their Earth-bound cousins, research has shown. A number of Caenorhabditis elegans worms were carried aboard a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) and brought back for study. Researchers found reduced activity of five genes in the worms that, when suppressed in the species on…
Coral reefs may be able to recover from disaster, according to a study that provides a bit of reassurance about the future of these endangered ecosystems. Coral reefs around the world are at risk as the ocean’s temperature continues to rise. Those trends could kill not only coral but also the fish and other species…
Traffic is easing as more Americans are deciding to drive less, sell their cars or not buy one at all
It is often assumed that processes such as visual perception work in the same ways in all people, but research now suggests that how we see things may be influenced by our expectations and opinions. Cognitive neuroscientist Yair Pinto and his colleagues asked 45 white Dutch people to perform a binocular rivalry task — a…
A century after Albert Einstein came up with his theories of relativity, a constellation of Global Positioning System satellites is orbiting Earth, making practical use of his ground-breaking understanding of time. If the discovery of the Higgs boson particle pans out, will even more mind-bending technologies result? It’s theoretically possible, says Arizona State University physicist…
Two safeguards for communities’ rights to resources can help implement the Nagoya Protocol, argues biodiversity specialist Krystyna Swiderska. As the recent UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) showed, intergovernmental negotiations on the environment and development can be slow processes that lack ambition. But that is nothing new. One of the outcomes of the original Rio…
A neuroscience team has successfully translated signals in the brains of six healthy volunteers into letters to enable them to spell messages. Likened to a “typewriter for the brain,” the advance may help paralyzed people use their brains to communicate. Some of these paralyzed patients have been forced to rely on eye blinks or muscle…