You’re an ecosystem — a complicated one. Your cell phone is just one component of it — and an inescapable part of your biology. Fortunately, it’s one you can control. A recent UK survey from 12 separate districts found bacteria on 92 percent of cell phones — and only 82 percent of human hands. Fecal bacteria were found on one sixth of cell phones and human hands. The most feculent cell phones were found in London — 28 percent.
Times are tough. People are out of work and can’t find any, 15 percent of the country often goes to bed hungry, and the euro may crash and upend the world economy. Folks need a break.
Vitamin — the word itself conjures up healthiness, something vital for life. Without them we can’t live. But can we have too much of them? Yes. Just like we can have too much food
Dr. Matthew Edlund spoke Oct. 18, at Book1Store on Main Street about simple changes we can all make in our daily routines that will add years to our lives and keep us healthier. Dr. Edlund directs the Center for Circadian Medicine and is an internationally recognized expert on rest, biological clocks, performance and sleep. His [...]
Is eating fish the same as eating fish oil? If you believe advertising and the drumbeat of omega 3 supplement makers, you might think so. But the facts are different
June 25, 2009. I was rapidly scanning BBC News when I shouted “No” at the monitor and gasped before recognizing why. Michael Jackson was so young. How could he die? I gasped again when my Webmaster told me CNN Headline News was calling Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson’s personal physician at the time of his death, the “rest doctor.” Whatever Michael Jackson was getting before he died, it wasn’t rest…
Brain, your gut is calling. It’s got a lot to say — about, stress, anxiety and your mood. That’s the potential upshot of a recent study published in PNAS by Javier Bravo and company from the University College Cork and nicely described in the Sept. 3 edition of the Economist. The study emphasizes how the innumerable gut bacteria affect behavior
The data from this year’s American Sociological Association Meeting are troubling, though not surprising. Studying more than 10,000 men and women as part of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ’79, weight gain was common among both men and women in the two years after marriage
Why do we sleep? Evolution works in a fussy, erratic, back and forth way, taking information systems from one type of project and then applying it to another — and another. As animals moved from sea to land, fins become hands; when they returned to the sea, the hands became yet different fins
Some technologies are astonishing. Imagine this — you want to wake up an animal so quickly and efficiently that you do not change overall sleep, just cause brief arousals that don’t shift the amount of REM, deep sleep or how long you get to rest. And you do it by changing the animal’s genetics using viruses as finely etched probes that help stimulate a tiny group of neurons with direct light, brought by cables so small they don’t materially change brain function, all the while monitoring with second-by-second precision
