The NIH entrance to Bethesda Trolley Trail, a popular walking and biking path, is the NIH designated smoking area. The level of stupid here is only rivaled by the smokers themselves.
Category: Science
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How Caffeine Can Boost Your Memory
How Caffeine Can Boost Your Memory
Caffeine is known to confer a number of brain-boosting benefits, but its influence on our ability to store and recall information has never been properly explored. A new study corrects this oversight, showing that caffeine can help us recall certain memories — and it’s an effect that lasts for at least 24 hours.
GizmodoCaffeine is known to confer a number of brain-boosting benefits, but its influence on our ability to store and recall information has never been properly explored. A new study corrects this oversight, showing that caffeine can help us recall certain memories — and it’s an effect that lasts for at least 24 hours.
Caffeine is considered a cognitive enhancer on account of its stimulant properties. Though the effects are subtle, it’s known to improve mood and mental and physical performance. Studies have also shown that, in conjunction with L-theanine (a common amino acid found in green tea), caffeine can (slightly) boost working memory. But prior to this new study, which was conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of California-Irvine, it wasn’t known if caffeine has an enhancing effect on long-term memory in humans.
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The Effect of Caffeine on Your Body
If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something out of you.
via QOTD
How psychiatrists may be giving their patients too many drugs
Psychiatrists who prescribe drugs for their patients today usually give more than one at a time, often with little scientific basis, researchers said.
Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 – 1519
via QOTD
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Sarcasm: Evolutionary Survival Skill
Neurophysiologists at the University of California have recently discovered that sarcasm plays an important part in human social interaction. Subsequently, people who don’t get sarcasm may have…
Data shows that Splenda is excreted by humans nearly 100 percent unchanged, and can persist in the environment for years. Some scientists say the substance could change organisms’ feeding behaviors and interfere with plant photosynthesis. They report, for example, that it could possibly shut down CO2 uptake in algae.
Artificial Sweetener Persists in the Environment
Reports from Sweden and Norway show high levels of sucralose in wastewater effluent and surface waters. Sucralose, the sugar substitute better known to Canadians and Americans as Splenda, hit Norwegian food markets in 2005. A year later, scientists from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU) found the chemical to be omnipresent in the environment-in Oslo Fjord and in raw and treated wastewater. Now, scientists in Sweden report (PDF: 1.3 MB) finding it completely unchanged in wastewater effluent in Stockholm and elsewhere in Sweden.