Doctors have less respect for their obese patients than they do for patients of normal weight, a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests. The findings raise questions about whether negative physician attitudes about obesity could be affecting the long-term health of their heavier patients. As patients had higher body mass index (BMI), physicians reported lower respect for them, according t...

Contrary to what was previously assumed, being overweight is not increasing the overall death rate in the German population. Matthias Lenz of the Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Natural Sciences of the University of Hamburg and his co-authors present these and other results in the current issue of Deutsches Ärtzeblatt International. Most Germans are overweight, with a body mass ...

In the September issue of the journal Behavior Therapy, University of Vermont psychologist Kelly Rohan presents the first published research study of the long-term effects of different treatments for seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a form of severe depression that occurs annually in the fall and winter seasons. The first year Rohan randomized 69 people with SAD into one of four groups: light th...

So accustomed are we to the sunshine, rain, fog and snow of our home planet that we find it next to impossible to imagine a different atmosphere and other forms of precipitation. To be sure, Dr. Seuss came up with a green gluey substance called oobleck that fell from the skies and gummed up the Kingdom of Didd, but it had to be conjured up by wizards and was clearly a thing of magic. Not so the at...

Soybeans contain high levels of several health-beneficial compounds including tocopherols, which have antioxidant properties. These molecules can be used in the development of functional foods, which have specific health-beneficial properties and can be used in the treatment or prevention of diseases. Tocopherols exist in four forms (α, β, γ, and δ) of which γ-tocopher...

Your fingers start to burn after picking up a hot plate. Should you drop the plate or save your meal? New research suggests that it is your consciousness that resolves these dilemmas by serving as the brain`s Wi-Fi network, mediating competing requests from different parts of the body. Published recently in the journal Emotion, the study also explains why we are consciously aware of some conflicti...

Tiny organisms that covered the planet more than 250 million years ago appear to be a species of ancient fungus that thrived in dead wood, according to new research published October 1 in the journal Geology. The researchers behind the study, from Imperial College London and other universities in the UK, USA and The Netherlands, believe that the organisms were able to thrive during this period bec...

Many of us learn a foreign language when we are young, but in some cases, exposure to that language is brief and we never get to hear or practice it subsequently. Our subjective impression is often that the neglected language completely fades away from our memory. But does “use it or lose it” apply to foreign languages? Although it may seem we have absolutely no memory of the neglected...

Reading a book by Franz Kafka –– or watching a film by director David Lynch –– could make you smarter. According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka`s "The Country Doctor" or Lynch`s "Blue Velvet" enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning...

A postgraduate researcher at the University of Hertfordshire has found that Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) results in greater language impairments in more highly-educated than less learned patients. The research also revealed that women with the disease fare worse on language tasks, which have been traditionally associated with better performance in healthy women. Amy Duncan, who will graduate on ...