Eventyr

Perceived Exercise

The next time you're doing the housework, try donning a tracksuit, cranking up the Rocky sound-track and viewing the whole thing as an exercise session – doing so could have a positive effect on your health.
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A month later the health of the cleaners was assessed again. Crucially, those who had been reminded how much exercise they engage in at work, showed health improvements in terms of weight, body mass index, body-fat, waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure. The control cleaners showed no such improvements.
What caused this health boost? Those cleaners reminded that their work counted as exercise didn't change their smoking, drinking or eating habits over the month, nor did they start exercising more in their spare time. However, as intended, the intervention did lead them to perceive that they engaged in more exercise at work.

Is the benefit of exercise a placebo effect? (via Kevan)

I miss cleaning.  It was great exercise - at least I always thought so.

Amnesia

To find out, they trained rats to fear two different musical tones, by playing them at the same time as giving the rats an electric shock. Then, they gave half the rats a drug known to cause limited amnesia (U0126, which is not approved for use in people), and reminded all the animals, half of which were still under the influence of the drug, of one of their fearful memories by replaying just one of the tones.

When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats' memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.

LeDoux's team also confirms the idea that a part of the brain called the amygdala is central to this process - communication between neurons in this part of the brain usually increases when a fearful memory forms, but it decreases in the treated rats. This shows that the fearful memory is actually deleted, rather than simply breaking the link between the memory and a fearful response.

Greg Quirk, a neurophysiologist from the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, thinks that psychiatrists working to treat patients with conditions such as PTSD will be encouraged by the step forward. "These drugs would be adjuncts to therapy," he says. "This is the future of psychiatry - neuroscience will provide tools to help it become more effective."

Wipe out a single memory

Birthday Time

The effect was first noticed as far back as 1929, when Swiss psychologist Moritz Tramer reported that people born in late winter were more likely to develop schizophrenia. We now know that for people born in the northern hemisphere in February, March and April, the risk of developing schizophrenia is between 5 and 10 per cent greater than for those born at other times of the year. The effect has been replicated numerous times over the decades and is far from trivial. According to a study carried out at Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark, the increased risk of schizophrenia that comes with a winter birthday is almost twice the increase in risk linked to having a parent or sibling with the disorder.

Season of birth seems to be linked to other conditions, too. A recent study of more than 25,000 suicides in England and Wales found that 17 per cent more people who had committed suicide had birthdays in April, May and June than in the rest of the year. That’s late spring and early summer in the northern hemisphere. Similarly, people with anorexia in the northern hemisphere are 13 per cent more likely to have been be born between April and June than in other months. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s best to be born later in the year, however. Autumn birthdays are associated with an 8 per cent increase in the likelihood of suffering panic attacks, for example, and a small but significant increase in alcoholism in men.

Unhappy Birthdays (Via Kevan)

Unhappy Meals

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things — who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients — those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health — gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Maths and the New Way

In recent years, mathematicians such as Osinga have started knitting and crocheting concrete physical models of hard-to-visualize mathematical objects. One mathematician's crocheted models of a counterintuitive shape called a hyperbolic plane are enabling her students and fellow mathematicians to gain new insight into startling properties. Other mathematicians have knitted or crocheted fractal objects, surfaces that have no inside or outside, and shapes whose patterns display mathematical theorems.
Knitting Mathematics (Boing Boing)

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Maths is getting more interesting, 

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See also: Eros ex Math by Peter Miller where images are created entirely from mathematical algorithms and play on our interpretations.  (via Lost Garden)