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Food Insecurity: 1 in 6 Americans Struggles to Buy Food
ABC News: The number of Americans struggling to put food on the table remains at record levels though the Obama administration says the government’s safety net has kept hunger from getting worse. The USDA reports about one out of every six Americans had trouble coming up with enough money to buy food at some point last year. That’s nearly 49 million people – 14.5 percent of the population – a figure virtually unchanged from previous year. That marks a second consecutive year that the USDA’s annual hunger survey has found ”food insecurity” at the highest levels since the government started the report in 1995.
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Breast-Feeding Makes Women ‘Mama Bears’
LiveScience: Like mama bears ferociously protecting their young, new research suggests human moms, at least those who are breast-feeding, can act more aggressively than others. In a controlled lab setting, breast-feeding moms were indeed more aggressive toward people who were rude to them. "Breast-feeding mothers aren’t going to go out and get into bar fights, but if someone is threatening them or their infant, our research suggests they may be more likely to defend themselves in an aggressive manner," study researcher Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, of the University of California in Los Angeles, said in a statement.
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Seeing is not always believing
The Times of India: Paying attention to keep a close watch may quite have the reverse effect. It actually distorts perception of where things are in relation to one another, says a research. "Figuring out where objects are in the world seems like one of the most basic and important jobs the brain does," says Yale University cognitive psychologist Brandon Liverence, who led the study. "It was surprising to discover that even this simple type of perception is warped by our minds," adds Liverence, the journal Psychological Science reports.
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The Cluelessness of the Psychopath
Hannibal Lecter is arguably the world’s most famous psychopath. I know—he’s not real. Still, the anti-hero of The Silence of the Lambs embodies the chilling constellation of traits generally associated with this rare mental disorder. A highly intelligent physician and psychiatrist, Lecter is superficially charming, even urbane—at least when he’s not cannibalizing his innocent victims. He is rarely emotional, and despite the brutality of his crimes, he shows absolutely no evidence of empathy or a guilty conscience. That’s what makes psychopaths so mysterious and incomprehensible—the lack of normal human feeling. How could somebody’s child develop into that kind of merciless automaton?
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Seeing Isn’t Believing
Pay attention! It’s a universal warning, which implies that keeping close watch helps us perceive the world more accurately. But a new study by Yale University cognitive psychologists Brandon Liverence and Brian Scholl finds that intense focus on objects can have the opposite effect: It distorts perception of where things are in relation to one another. The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Figuring out where objects are in the world seems like one of the most basic and important jobs the brain does,” says Liverence, a graduate student.
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The Sugary Secret of Self-Control
The New York Times: Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, Ulysses had himself tied to the mast, the grasshopper sang while the ant stored food and St. Augustine prayed “Lord make me chaste — but not yet,” individuals have struggled with self-control. In today’s world this virtue is all the more vital, because now that we have largely tamed the scourges of nature, most of our troubles are self-inflicted. We eat, drink, smoke and gamble too much, max out our credit cards, fall into dangerous liaisons and become addicted to heroin, cocaine and e-mail. Nonetheless, the very idea of self-control has acquired a musty Victorian odor.
