Category: Research

Researchers confirmed what others have already established: The less time people spend alone, the greater their sense of well-being. But the point, and the important finding, is the relationship between well-being and substantive conversation over small talk. They found that people who have more deep conversations than chit-chat are happier. The happiest people spent less time alone and more time talking, but they also had more than twice as many substantive conversations and one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest people.
via . Chit-chat, happiness, and you

Hehe

Is Weight Loss Associated with Increased Risk of Early Mortality?

Category: Obesity Research
Posted on: March 15, 2010 11:42 AM, by Peter Janiszewski
The current recommendations from major health organizations stipulate that if an individual has a BMI in the obese range (>30 kg/m2), they should be counseled to lose at least 5-10% of their body weight. This advice appears to make some sense given that increasing body weight is generally associated with heightened risk of various diseases, and that reduction of body weight usually improves levels of risk factors for disease (e.g blood pressure, triglycerides, etc). However, the literature has been much more complicated in terms of the effect of weight loss on risk of early mortality.

Remember those professors in college who dumped 4 long exam results at the end of the last meeting, or even worse those professors who didn’t give results at all. Well there is now empirical evidence that they were hurting your performance.

Kettle and Haubl asked 271 students to give a four-minute presentation as part of a university course. Their performance would be judged by their peers and it would count towards their final grade. The students were told about the date of their presentation and when they would hear about the results, with waiting times ranging from a few hours to 17 days later.

The duo found that students who anticipated the quickest feedback achieved the higher grades. On average, those who knew they would hear back later on in the day scored within the top 40% of the group. Those who thought they would hear back 17 days later received scores that skirted the bottom 40%. It seems that even the anticipation of quicker feedback can boost performance.

via Quicker feedback for better performance : Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Everytime I read something like this. It reminds me of how much Bush II policies have paused stem-cell research’s success. I don’t know but I have a feeling that this may be his greatest blunder , and if you were awake the pass 10 years you know the blunders are immense.

Add one more name to the ever growing list of diseases that have been defeated by stem cell treatments: HIV. That’s right, according to a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, a stem cell transplant performed in Germany has unexpectedly removed all signs of HIV from a 42 year old American patient. The unnamed white male was treated two years ago for Leukemia with a dose of donor stem cells and his HIV RNA count has dropped to zero and remained there since. While the treatment was for Leukemia, Dr. Gero Hutter and colleagues at the Charite Universitatsmedizen in Berlin had selected the stem cell donor for his HIV resistant genes. While there are still many questions unanswered, this is the first such case of stem cells treating HIV that has been reported in a NEJM-caliber publication. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a “cure” for HIV/AIDS, but it is certainly a remarkable and promising find. There’s more you need to know about the situation, so read on.
via Stem Cell Transplant Defeats HIV? Patient Still HIV Free After 2 Years | Singularity Hub.

Nice interesting read.

Among other things, friends are people you count on to come to your aid when you need help. If you were at a bar and a stranger started acting aggressively towards you, for example, you would expect your friends to rush over to help you rather than just stand there, mojito in hand. Contrary to our feelings of human exceptionalism, however, ours is not the only species of primate to create and maintain friendships.
For years primatologists have been puzzling over “friendship” in baboons. Across baboon species lactating females keep up close social relationships with unrelated adult males. The females are not reproductively available, and by devoting much of their attention to these females the males significantly reduce their opportunities to mate with other females, so why are these males so concerned with mothers and infants? What is the function of this behavior?
Several hypotheses have been forwarded. Perhaps friendship is a defense against infanticide, a way to reduce harassment of mothers and their infants by other group members, or a way for mothers to get their infants to bond with particular males so that they will continue to reap social benefits (such as food sharing and support during fights) as they mature. Of these, however, friendship as an anti-infanticide mechanism appears to be best-supported, especially since infanticide is a major cause of mortality among infant Chacma baboons. Baboon social groups are centered around female families that stick together, but males often move from one group to another. As a result immigrant males occasionally supplant the group’s dominant male, and when this happens among Chacma baboons the new alpha picks off the group’s infants one-by-one (hence the group’s females come back into estrus sooner). In such situations a friendship between a male and female baboon can make the difference between life and death for her offspring.
via “You just call out my name…”: Friendships in Male and Female Baboons : Laelaps.