Useful Articles

A nice juicy tenderloin might no longer be served with a side of guilt, at least in the health realm. Most people don't need to reduce their intake of red or processed meat for health benefits, unless they want to, according to a new set of guidelines from a group of international experts. The guidelines, which were published yesterday (Sept. 30) in the journal  Annals of Internal Medicine ,  contradict most other diet recommendations that typically advise people to eat less red or processed meat to reduce the risk of conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. While "there's evidence of a risk reduction in cancer, heart disease and diabetes ... it's a very small risk reduction and the certainty of evidence is low," said Bradley Johnston, lead author of the guidelines and an associate professor of epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. "So that means we're uncertain if there's actually a true effect." Still,

Yellow is usually the color of happy, joyful emotions. But according to a new study, not all people associate the sunshiney shade with good vibes. To find out what factors might play a role, researchers tested a new hypothesis: What if people’s physical surroundings affect their feelings about certain colors? For instance, if someone lived in cold and rainy Finland, would they feel differently about the color yellow from someone who lived near the Sahara Desert? The researchers looked at color-emotion data from an ongoing international survey of 6625 people in 55 countries. The survey asks participants to rate 12 colors on how closely they are associated with feelings including joy, pride, fear, and shame. Yellow is not so fun in the sun The darker the shade in the below map, the higher the likelihood of people associating the color yellow with joyful emotions. Overall, people were more likely to associate yellow with joy when they lived in rainier countries that lay farth

The brain has a way of repurposing unused real estate. When a sense like sight is missing, corresponding brain regions can adapt to process new input, including sound or touch. Now, a study of blind people who use echolocation—making clicks with their mouths to judge the location of objects when sound bounces back—reveals a degree of neural repurposing never before documented. The research shows that a brain area normally devoted to the earliest stages of visual processing can use the same organizing principles to interpret echoes as it would to interpret signals from the eye. In sighted people, messages from the retina are relayed to a region at the back of the brain called the primary visual cortex. We know the layout of this brain region corresponds to the layout of physical space around us: Points that are next to each other in our environment project onto neighboring points on the retina and activate neighboring points in the primary visual cortex. In the new study, researc

Researchers have solved the three-dimensional structure of a protein complex involved in vertebrate vision at atomic resolution, a finding that has broad implications for our understanding of biological signaling processes and the design of over a third of the drugs on the market today. The findings illuminate how signals from photons (particles of light) get amplified in the eye. More importantly, the study provides insights into how the largest family of cell membrane proteins -- G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) -- work in humans. "They're involved in almost all the biological processes in a human body -- how we perceive light, taste, smell, or how the heart rate is regulated or muscles contract -- and they are targets for over 30% of the drugs that are used today," said Yang Gao, co-first author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Richard Cerione, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and co-senior author. The

Some people can sit outside all summer long and not suffer from mosquito bites. Others turn into an itchy mess despite bathing in DEET and never leaving the purple glow of the bug zapper. What gives? It's mostly about the invisible chemical landscape of the air around us. Mosquitoes take advantage of this landscape by using specialized behaviors and sensory organs to find victims by following the subtle chemical traces their bodies leave behind. In particular, mosquitoes rely on carbon dioxide to find their hosts. When we exhale, the carbon dioxide from our lungs doesn't immediately blend with the air. It temporarily stays in plumes that mosquitoes follow like breadcrumbs. "Mosquitoes start orienting themselves to those pulses of carbon dioxide and keep flying upwind as they sense higher concentrations than the normal ambient air contains," said Joop van Loon, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Using carbon dioxide, mosquitoes can lock

Have you ever seen or heard something that turned out not to exist? Or have you ever thought something was happening that no one else noticed — perhaps thinking you were being followed, or that something was trying to communicate with you? If so, you may have had a psychotic experience. The good news is, you're not alone. Psychosis, also called a  psychotic experience or episode , is when someone perceives or interprets reality differently to the people around them. And it's estimated that around  5-10% of people  will have a psychotic experience in their lifetime. While they're different for each person, psychotic experiences often include hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren't there) or delusions (believing that something is happening that isn't real, or that others can't understand). It's worth noting, though, that having a psychotic experience doesn't mean you have a mental disorder. Many people have these experiences without ever