Health, features and articles | Educational Science

Oct 31, 2005

Key to a Good Memory: Predict What You Need to Remember

It's one thing to stuff a lot of facts into your brain. Marking them as important is a whole other talent. Yet this predictive ability is a key to having a good memory, a new brain-imaging study suggests. While one part of the brain was very active when study subjects...

Oct 31, 2005

Creative Types Have More Sex Partners

Talk about creativity. Professional artists and poets hook up with two or three times as many sex partners as other people, new research indicates. A study of 425 British men and women found the creative types averaged between four and ten partners, while the less creative folks had typically had...

Aug 31, 2005

Long Live The Klotho Mice

Klotho, a gene in both mice and men, has a definite effect on aging, according to Dr. Makoto Kuro-o. Stimulating the Klotho gene seems to delay many of the effects of old age, like weakening of bones, clogging of the arteries and loss of muscle fitness. For their current study,...

Aug 31, 2005

Fine Line Revealed Between Creativity and Insanity

History suggests that the line between creativity and madness is a fine one, but a small group of people known as schizotypes are able to walk it with few problems and even benefit from it. A new study confirms that their enhanced creativity may come from using more of the...

Aug 31, 2005

Nuclear Tests Leave Mark in Teeth, Reveal Age

Aboveground testing of nuclear bombs during the 1950s and 1960s produced large amounts of radioactive carbon that diffused around the globe. One of the places this radioactive element ended up is in our teeth, a new study reports. Carbon 14 (C14) is a radioactive form of carbon that makes up...

Aug 31, 2005

People Respond to Computer's Flattery

Humans love flattery so much they warm to it even when it comes from a computer, and even when they don't realize it's occurring. Researchers built head-and-shoulders computer agents, then had them present an argument to various study subjects. In some cases, the computer agent's head movements mimicked the listener...

Jul 31, 2005

Surprise! 1-in-25 Dads Not the Real Father

About 4 percent of men may unknowingly be raising a child that really belongs to the mailman or some other guy, researchers speculate in a new study. Here's the real news: With modern methods, the truth will become known more frequently. Researchers pawed through a host of scientific articles published...

Jul 31, 2005

Doctor's Advice: Have Your Heart Attack During Normal Business Hours

No time is a good time to have and survive a heart attack. But a new study finds that normal business hours are your best bet. Heart attack victims who arrive at a hospital during off-hours or on the weekend wait longer for help and are at a higher risk...

Jul 31, 2005

Scientists: You Learn Without Knowing It

You can learn without realizing what your are doing, a new study finds. The process is similar to how other animals learn, scientists suspect. The idea is that humans have a robust capacity for habit learning, independent of conscious memory, said Larry Squire of the University of California, San Diego....

Jul 31, 2005

Hormone Therapy Prevents Wrinkles, Scientists Say

Post-menopausal women who use hormone therapy for long periods have fewer wrinkles, a new study found. These benefits were seen in women who had consistently used hormone therapy and had been in menopause for at least five years, said Hugh Taylor of Yale School of Medicine. We don't believe hormone...

Jun 30, 2005

Women Suffer More than Men

Which is the weaker sex when it comes to pain? It may be hard to say since women and men have different experiences with pain. New research has found that women report more pain throughout their lifetime. Compared to men, women feel pain in more areas of their body and...

Jun 30, 2005

Golfers with Pain are Weaker, Study Finds

Low back pain makes life miserable for anyone who has it. For golfers, it can take the fun out of life. Even Tiger Woods has dealt with it, though he can hardly be compared to the average duffer, since he managed a 4-under-par performance last year during a round in...

Jun 30, 2005

Why We Blink Without Noticing

Scientists have figured out why we rarely notice our own blinking. Our brains simply miss it, they say. The quest for the new discovery began in the 1980s, when researchers found that visual sensitivity starts decreasing just before we blink. But what goes on in the brain remained a mystery....

Jun 30, 2005