BPSIC

Parents, teachers, and caregivers have long sworn the magic of storytelling to calm and calm children. Researchers working in pediatric intensive care units have now quantified the physiological and emotional benefits of a well-told story. "We know that narrative has the power to transport us to another world," says Guilherme Brockington, who studies emotions and learning at the Federal University of ABC of Brazil in São Paulo and was the lead author of the new article, published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences. Previous research suggested that stories help children process and regulate their emotions, but this was mainly carried out in a laboratory, with the subjects answering questions while lying inside functional MRI machines. "There are few studies on t...

If you look across cultures and history, there is a deity for just about anything. The sun, the ocean, the harvest, the rays, love, poetry, everything good. For some of us in American scientist, our favorite is the Thoth of the ancient Egyptians, god of science, knowledge, wisdom and writing. Thoth is often depicted as a baboon, making him the only god in the pantheon whose animal representative was not native to Egypt. Egyptologists have wondered where, exactly, the mummified baboons buried with the pharaohs came from and why a certain species was considered sacred. Now the primatologist Nathaniel J. Dominy analyzes how the behaviors of Papio hamadryas It fits into the theology of ancient Egypt and how the isotope analysis of these baboons points to the location of the lost kingdo...

When people hear "artificial intelligence", many imagine "big data". There's a reason for that: Some of the most prominent AI advancements of the last decade have been built on huge data sets. Image classification made great strides in the 2010s thanks to the development of ImageNet, a dataset containing millions of images classified by hand into thousands of categories. More recently, GPT-3, a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text, benefited from training in hundreds of billions of words of text online. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that artificial intelligence is closely related to "big data" in the popular imagination. But AI is not just about big data sets, and research into “small data” approaches has grown tremendously over the past decade...

In the middle of the pandemic, Texas resident Marilyn Santiesteban caught a bad cold. The illness left her severely dehydrated and, at the suggestion of a friend, she received an IV infusion from a local janitor. Santiesteban was so happy with the convenience and personalized experience that he switched from his traditional healthcare provider to concierge care, which allows patients unusually unlimited access to a doctor for a fee. The practice you use charges an annual membership fee that ranges from $ 600 to more than $ 1,000, depending on the plan, but patients will still be hooked on certain medical services that aren't covered by the fee. Concierge medicine has been under scrutiny since its inception more than two decades ago. However, there is still much confusion about what...

Editor's Note (11/18/21): This January story will be republished to provide background on a new plan by the Biden administration to help prevent perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from being released into the air, systems of drinking water and food. supply. A roadmap released by the Environmental Protection Agency outlines a series of actions over the next three years, “including steps to ... hold polluters accountable. [and] address impacts on disadvantaged communities, ”according to a White House fact sheet. “For too long, families across America, especially those in underserved communities, have suffered from PFAS in the water, air, or land that their children play on,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. , in a recent statement. "This comprehensive na...

Beginning in the spring of 2018, experts around the world were puzzled by strange seismic waves that no one really felt, but were recorded globally by seismometers. Volcanic activity on the seabed off the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean was quickly suspected because such series of seismic events, or "swarm earthquakes," regularly occur when volcanoes stir. In fact, the tremors could ultimately be traced to the eruption of a huge magma chamber in the region. The eruption is the largest ever recorded under the sea, write Nathalie Feuillet of the French National Center for Scientific Research and her team in Nature Geoscience. Since the beginning of the eruption, the new underwater volcano has grown to a height of around 820 meters in a place where there was hardly any ele...

In most countries, cardboard cigarette packs display images or text warning smokers of the increased risk of heart attacks, cancer, and pregnancy complications that accompany lighting. Many of these risks are associated with inhaling tobacco smoke through the mouth. But what stands out less often is the effect that smoking can have on the surface of the eyes. Smoking has been linked to age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and cataracts, some of the leading causes of blindness and severe vision loss worldwide. But these conditions occur in internal regions of the eye: the retina, the optic nerve, and the lens, respectively. Now, researchers have discovered how cigarette smoke and aerosols from heated tobacco devices, which bake tobacco leaves instead of burning them or vapori...