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Should you quit taking vitamins?
Yahoo News UAE: I'm a big fan of vitamins. And judging by the size of the vitamin and supplement industry - $20 billion in annual sales, a quarter of that in multivitamins - so are you. Pop one pill and you get a day’s worth of nutrients. What’s not to love? Well, there is this: A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that taking multivitamins and other supplements may actually shorten your life. Uh-oh. Researchers in the study collected information from nearly 40,000 women (but say the findings apply to men too) several times over 22 years. They asked about all sorts of health issues, including vitamin and supplement use.
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Mindfulness is the best antidote to stress
Zee News: Washington: The best antidote to stress is mindfulness, existing in the here and now, not in the past or future, suggest meditation gurus. Researchers have now drawn a framework of four key components to help explain these positive effects. Mindfulness, an essential part of Indian yoga traditions, has entered the mainstream as people try to find ways to combat stress and improve their quality of life. It is suggested the meditation can have benefits for health and performance, including improved immune function, reduced blood pressure, and enhanced cognitive function. But how is it that a single practice can have such wide-ranging effects on well-being?
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Decoding the Brain’s Cacophony
The New York Times: ST. HELENA, Calif. — The scientists exchanged one last look and held their breath. Everything was ready. The electrode was in place, threaded between the two hemispheres of a living cat’s brain; the instruments were tuned to pick up the chatter passing from one half to the other. The only thing left was to listen for that electronic whisper, the brain’s own internal code. The amplifier hissed — the three scientists expectantly leaning closer — and out it came, loud and clear. “We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine ....” “The Beatles’ song! We somehow picked up the frequency of a radio station,” recalled Michael S.
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Happiness Associated With Longer Life
Science: Happy people don't just enjoy life; they're likely to live longer, too. A new study has found that those in better moods were 35% less likely to die in the next 5 years when taking their life situations into account. The traditional way to measure a person's happiness is to ask them about it. But over the past few decades, psychologist and epidemiologist Andrew Steptoe of University College London (UCL) says, scientists have realized that those measures aren't reliable. It's not clear whether they "assess how they're actually feeling or how they remember feeling," he says.
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The New Science Behind Your Spending Addiction
Newsweek: Like many colleges, Washington University in St. Louis offers children of its faculty free tuition. So Leonard Green, a professor of psychology there, did all he could to persuade his daughter to choose the school. He extolled its academic offerings, praised its social atmosphere, talked up its extracurricular activities—and promised that if Hannah chose Washington he would give her $20,000 each undergraduate year, plus $20,000 at graduation, for a nest egg totaling $100,000. She went to New York University. Read the full story: Newsweek
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Keep smiling… the world is doing fine, say American authors
The Guardian: A rash of optimistic books is being published in the US, as authors do their best to lift the gloom created by a news agenda dominated by world recession, wars, floods and famine. The latest to appear is The Secret Peace by Jesse Richards, with its controversial theory on the modern human condition: the world is a nice place and getting better. When the Observer met Richards last week, he remained steadfast in his lonely insistence on a state of optimism when it comes to the human race's progress. "It is easy to relate to a short-term disaster. It is harder to understand larger, long-term statistics.
