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Life’s Extremes: Math vs. Language
LiveScience: Do you know what "abecedarian" means? What about the solution to 250 x 11? Most people would agree they are better at verbal or math subjects in school, as grades usually do attest. Highly intelligent individuals often do well in both subjects, and may know the answers to both questions above, lickety-split, while less intelligent people can struggle. But a minority of us excels in the language department and bombs at mathematics, or vice versa. (As an adjective, abecedarian refers to something relating to the alphabet; 2,750 is the solution to the equation.) These extremes in ability speak (or equate) to the very makeup of our brains.
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HIV testing urged for teens
WXIA NBC: The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends that all teens 16 to 18 years old receive regular, routine HIV tests if they live in an area where the prevalence of HIV is greater than 0.1 percent of the population. The AAP also advises that adolescents of any age who are tested for other sexually transmitted infections also be tested for HIV. Previous guidelines recommended HIV testing only for teens who admitted to being sexually active. The new recommendations were outlined in a position paper released Monday that also advocates that the routine screening be done using a rapid response test that gives a diagnosis about 20 minutes after the test is conducted.
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Fatty Foods Addictive Like Cocaine in Growing Body of Scientific Research
Bloomberg: Cupcakes may be addictive, just like cocaine. A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks made by the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs. “The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.” The idea that food may be addictive was barely on scientists’ radar a decade ago. Now the field is heating up.
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Mothers buy into freeze-frame parenting
Los Angeles Times: Instructed to play with my baby, Max, for 20 minutes while he sat in an infant seat, no toys allowed, I pulled out every trick in the book. Sign language ABCs. An animated version of "Itsy Bitsy Spider." All the time, a camera was trained on my face, another on his. I returned a few weeks later to see the results: Aimee Wheeler, a therapist, had synched up the footage into one split-screen video and analyzed all the tiny interactions between us, frame by frame by frame. "Great narrative. Jenny gives Max space to acclimate to the room," says one page of Wheeler's notes. "Jenny's contact turns into a gentle invitation for play with stroking of feet," says another.
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Sports Fans Remember Victories Better Than Defeats: Study
U.S. News & World Report: You're more likely to remember the games that your favorite teams win rather than the ones they lose, a new study says. It included almost 1,600 baseball fans who followed or attended the 2003 and 2004 American League Championship baseball games between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. When questioned years later, fans of both teams remembered more details about their teams' wins than their losses, including the location of the games, winning and losing pitchers and whether the games went extra innings. The study is published in the October issue of the journal Psychological Science.
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Happiness: All Things Must End
Psychology Today: All good things must come to an end, and dwelling on that fact will just spoil the fun, right? Wrong. Research published in Psychological Science reveals that you savor a temporary experience more when you remind yourself of its imminent conclusion. Six weeks before graduation, researcher Jaime Kurtz of Pomona College asked University of Virginia seniors to spend two weeks writing about their college experience and what they felt grateful for.
