Research from the United Kingdom revealed that watching someone scratch an itch fires up itch related areas of the observer’s brain—a contagious itch, the researchers claim—which is more associated with neurotic than empathic characteristics.
As discovered by a team of Chinese and Australian researchers, a horrible looking eight-inch-long creepy crawly “Chinese red-headed centipede” makes a short peptide venom that, at least for mice, is a better painkiller than morphine, adding to the six peptides derived from other venoms which are effective painkillers already approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
An earlier study, challenged by industry, has been reproduced, demonstrating that drinking water in northeastern Pennsylvania within a kilometer of fracking wells is contaminated with hydrocarbons, including methane, at much higher concentrations than water further from the wells.
Academic researchers involved in developing materials to protect astronauts from DNA-damaging radiation in space, which would block setting up a station on Mars in 2030, claim that solving the problem is sometimes just a question of money.
Collaborative experiments conducted at the University of Warwick, Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of British Columbia, demonstrate that the stress associated with money-dependent-decision-making for poor people leads to making poor decisions arising from the “consumption of mental resources,” which is limited in all of us but not used up as quickly when money is not an issue.
Are you surprised by results of research from the London Institute of Fiscal Studies and from the Rand Corporation, reported in the April 12, 2011 issue of the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, which demonstrate that “psychological health disorders” in childhood have a much larger effect than physical disorders on adult capacity to earn money and happiness in general?
Research demonstrates that mother knows best in fruit flies and in monarch butterflies, with adult fruit flies, which have seen parasitic wasps, laying their eggs on substrates with high ethanol content, which is known to protect their offspring against infective wasp parasites, while adult butterflies infected with a protozoan lay their eggs predominantly on milkweed plants containing a toxin retarding the protozoan growth.
Swedish researchers demonstrated that a psychiatric drug, which is an environmental pollutant in waterways, causes unhealthy behavioral changes in wild perch, such as in their feeding and in the social relationships between individual perch, and that the drug studied, oxazepam, even when in minute concentrations in the water, accumulates in the fish muscle to levels causing these changes.
Greatly surprising results of research at McGill University, which appear to be important to a wide range of animal experiments, and perhaps may even have an effect on us, demonstrate that much less pain is felt in the presence of a male than a female experimenter, which is hypothesized to arise from foreign male scent associated with fear and therefore stress, which is known to repress pain.
Infanticide is widely seen in various mammals with the male’s intention to activate the female’s breeding cycle, with the most effective response by the female found to be sexual promiscuity so that no male knows if the infants are his.
http://sciencefromaway.com .
