The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent. ‘When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. ‘It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.’ The new study, published […]
NEW YORK — The tortoiseshell and white cat spends its days pacing from room to room, rarely spending any time with patients except those with just hours to live Photo: AP Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the New England nursing home wrong in their predictions over which patients were close to death. The cat, now five and generally unsociable, was adopted as a kitten at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Providence, Rhode Island, which specialises in caring for people with severe dementia. Dr Dosa first publicised Oscar’s gift in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007. Since then, the cat has gone on to double the number of imminent deaths it has sensed and convinced the geriatrician that it is no fluke. The tortoiseshell and white cat spends its days pacing from room to room, rarely spending any time with patients except those with just hours to live. If kept outside the room of a dying patient, Oscar will scratch on the door trying to get […]
WASHINGTON — Healthy older adults need less sleep than their younger counterparts and, even with less sleep under their nightcaps, are less likely to feel tired during the day, a study published Monday showed. The time spent actually sleeping out of eight hours in bed declined progressively and significantly with age, the study published in SLEEP, the official journal of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, said. Older adults, aged 66-83, slept about 20 minutes less than middle-aged adults (40-55 years), who slept 23 minutes less than young adults aged 20-30, the study said. The older adults woke up significantly more often and spent more time awake after initial sleep onset than younger adults. Deep, or slow-wave sleep, thought to be the most restorative phase of sleep, decreased with age, the study said. But although older adults slept less deeply and less overall, and their sleep was less continuous than their younger counterparts’, they also showed less need for a quick kip during the day. The study was conducted at the Clinical Research Centre of the University of Surrey in England and involved 110 healthy adults without sleep disorders […]
In the ten years since hybrid electric vehicles first hit the highways and byways of America, they have come to represent 2.5% of new car sales. Yet, in places like Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC, every other car seems to be a Toyota Prius. That is because hybrids like the Prius have sold overwhelmingly where well-heeled early adopters reside. Expect the new generation of ‘Post-Prius’ electrics-plug-in hybrids like the Chevrolet Volt from General Motors and those relying only on a battery such as the Nissan Leaf-to end up nosing around the same upscale neighbourhoods. With more than a dozen plug-in and pure-electric models arriving in showrooms over the next year or so, sales are expected to outstrip even those enjoyed by the Prius and other hybrids in their early days. A couple of million of the new electric vehicles could be bought by early adopters during the first few years. That would be a problem. Unlike the Prius and its ilk-which use their petrol engines, along with energy recovered from braking, to recharge their batteries while motoring-plug-in hybrids and pure electrics have to be recharged direct from the grid. The popular assumption is […]
Practicing clinicians have traditionally played a central role in research, advancing breakthrough treatments for innumerable diseases, from smallpox and cholera to heart disease and cancer. While their insights remain important as ever, recent years have seen the role of the physician-scientist become greatly diminished. Explaining the reasons for this shift as well as potential solutions is a new book called ‘The Vanishing Physician-Scientist?’ (Cornell University Press) by Dr. Andrew I. Schafer, the E. Hugh Luckey Distinguished Professor and chairman of the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and physician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. ‘In the last 30 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of non-physicians Ph.D.s conducting medical research that starts in a laboratory, while the number of physicians in academic medical centers conducting research has declined,’ says Dr. Schafer. ‘This is a major shift from the previous era when physicians often initiated research based on patient observations and led the research effort from clinical studies to laboratory work.’ He attributes the change to a variety of factors, principally explosive advances in basic biomedical sciences such as genomic and molecular medicine, whose pace has outstripped clinical observation and has […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
