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Harry Potter And The Well Of Medical Research
Los Angeles Times: Who knew the world of Harry Potter was such a rich source of material for medical researchers? For more than a decade, the phenomenally popular series has provided grist for studies on topics ranging from genetics to social cognition to autism. PubMed, an online database of medical studies, lists 30 studies that invoke the young wizard — "Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele," "Harry Potter and the Structural Biologist's (Key)stone," even "Harry Potter Casts a Spell on Accident-Prone Children." That last study found that children's emergency department visits decreased significantly when new Harry Potter books went on sale.
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Share the love! Being aroused makes you more likely to send information to other people, study finds
Couriermail.com.au: Dear reader, You're an idiot. And you smell bad. And nobody likes you. And, according to one professor, you're more likely to share this story with your friends if you took those insults to heart. A new study published in Psychological Science suggests that being aroused makes people more likely to share information with others. "Being aroused", in this context, just means any state of agitation, either positive or negative, such as being angry, anxious or amused — anything that gets your pulse up.
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Nice girls finish last; ‘queen bees’ get paid
Central Florida Future: According to the U.S. Department of Education, despite having earned higher college GPAs in every subject, young women will take home, on average across all professions, just 80 percent of what their male colleagues do. What's worse is that a Harvard study found that women who demand higher starting salaries are perceived as "less nice," and thus are less likely to be hired. I cannot believe that, in 2011, women are still judged on how well they can play the nice girl role in order to be hired. The problem is that once you have the job, the nice girl role will not necessarily get you promoted.
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Is TV Teaching Kids to Value Fame Above All?
TIME: Is fame more important to tweens than it used to be? A new study suggests that young kids of this decade are vastly more familiar with and are more likely to value individualistic personality traits like fame, achievement and wealth than kids of past eras — way back before the term "tween" was even invented — largely because of popular TV shows and other types of media. The study, which was done by Yalda Uhls and Patricia Greenfield of the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the content of the two most popular TV shows with kids aged 9 to 11 once a decade from 1967 to 2007.
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Meditation changes brain activity
Times of India: Landscape artist Jane Anderson struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the winter months. She tried meditation and noticed a change within a month. "My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions," she says. Her experience inspired a new study which found changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training, the journal Psychological Science reports. But Anderson, who did this research as an undergraduate student, together with a team of University of Wisconsin-Stout faculty and students, wanted to know if there was a change in brain activity after a shorter period.
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Teaching The Neurons To Meditate
Studies show that Buddhist monks, who have spent thousands of hours of meditating, have distinct patterns of brain activity. But findings suggest brain activity could change after just a short period of practice.
