From Los Angeles to Portland to New York City, political protests have become common. That provides data for what may be happening in brains and how engaged people can avoid becoming a Tyler Robinson or Luigi Mangione or Antifa in Oregon.The US is not special when it comes to protests, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says there have been over 140 mass demonstrations globally in the...
read moreObesity is closing in on smoking and alcohol as the top killer among lifestyle diseases. Over 25 percent of the world is overweight and in countries like the UK and US, that number is approaching 70 percent. It is correlated to things like heart disease.Is it a genetic issue, and therefore exculpatory? A new paper hopes to show that. The authors analyzed brain scans of 1,351 young...
read moreFor decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging, looking at changes in the brain's blood oxygen, has over-promised and under-delivered, which made it a punching bag in the science community. People in the field tried to claim changes in pretty pictures meant more neurons working and suggested that meant X part of the brain controls Y behavior. It was never a valid link. By 2009, a paper...
read moreNeuroscience is still in its infancy, despite claims by people using fMRI to suggest links between lots of things, but a few things are established, like that fear 'resides' in the amygdala.Linking that same part of the brain to obesity in mice, and therefore humans, in a new paper warrants more skepticism. Mice are, as famously stated when science was science, not tiny people. We do have things...
read moreEvery pharmacy has a section devoted to products that are not scientifically known to do anything at all, they could never pass FDA scrutiny on their claims, but they don't need to and pharmacies are in business to make money. And in places like Washington, DC, California, and New York, the public overwhelmingly believes in supplements as alternatives to medicine, so carrying fish oil, ginkgo,...
read moreEvery pharmacy has a section devoted to products that are not scientifically known to do anything at all, they could never pass FDA scrutiny on their claims, but they don't need to and pharmacies are in business to make money. And in places like Washington, DC, California, and New York, the public overwhelmingly believes in supplements as alternatives to medicine, so carrying fish oil, ginkgo,...
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