Science
Deep sleep enhances memory
It’s a truism that getting a good night will help you function better the next day, but a study by out of Holland done by Ysbrand van der Werf and his colleagues, published in Nature Neuroscience, explicitly shows effects of differing types and amount of sleep. Most clearly they show that uninterrupted deep sleep greatly [...]
Stay grumpy and you’ll have a more realistic worldview…
A 2008 paper out of Australia, entitled “Can bad weather improve your memory? An unobtrusive field study of natural mood effects on real-life memory” attempts to show the effects of mood on subjects ability to recall items recently seen in a shop.
Using weather as a proxy for mood, what they found was those who were [...]
Holiday medical myths
An article posted on the BMJ site clears up a few myths peripherally related to the holidays, including:
Sugar causes hyperactivity in children
Suicides increase over the holidays
Poinsettia toxicity
Excess heat loss in the hatless
The first I’ve known for a while, but it’s refreshing to have a few more tidbits available for debate when the need arises.
In a [...]
Children have innate numeracy
A excellent article from the Economist describes a variety of studies - but primarily one by Brian Butterworth - that show that the ability to count, or more simply, the ability to recognize the number differences in small collections of objects is built in. From Dr. Butterworth’s paper:
Here, using classical methods of developmental psychology, we [...]
Global warming duds…
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy represented an article from the Melbourne Herald Sun entitled Top 10 Dud Global Warming Predictions.
While I would rank myself as a skeptic of global warming, especially of the histrionic man-bear-pig Al Gore variety, articles like this entertain me for reasons other than the debunking.
Global Warming, or Climate Change as [...]
Economic Manhattan Project or simple creative destruction?
In the latest Edge newsletter is an article proposing and discussing an economic Manhattan Project where a group of good scientists would get together and “solve” the current economic crisis. On the surface this doesn’t sound completely bad when the initial description is:
The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried [...]
iPhone proving itself out as a real computing platform
I got an email from a friend of mine last week that showed a new app for the iPhone. I’ve been slightly resistant to portable computing platforms as I’ve played with Blackberries in the past and am a current owner of a Nokia N800 - both of which a reasonable cool, epsecially the resolution on [...]
Change diapers often! (just in case you didn’t know)
Best study conclusion I read this past week:
Among infants wearing disposable diapers, there is an increased risk of [Urinary Tract Infection] as the frequency of changing diapers decreases.
Boy am I glad I read the study, I was getting this diaper changing thing all wrong…
addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.saucecaptain.com%2F2008%2F12%2Fchange-diapers-often-just-in-case-you-didnt-know%2F’;
addthis_title = [...]
National Geographic is poor with stats
… or at least with their headlines. From an article at National Geographic this week, comes this headline:
Oceans Ten Times More Acidic Than Thought
If this were true then the expected pH of the Ocean at about 8 would probably be acidic enough to eat through most anything. Though exactly what a 10 times increase in [...]
Asymptomatic animals capable of infecting humans
Ok, this really isn’t what I normally blog about but I had to throw this one out. In yesterday’s Post, on the front page was an article that mentioned that animals can carry diseases that do not make them sick, but can make humans sick.
Now, unless I’m mistaken this has been known for decades if [...]
Parents are confused about how to measure children’s weight
A study by Pene Schmidt, released last month, has the plug: 4 In 10 Parents Wrong On Whether Their Child Is Under Or Overweight. While this is an interesting statistic it seems that the study also identified that:
…different methods of assessing children’s weight – such as BMI or waist circumference – result in different rates [...]
