Chronic feelings of loneliness can be a stressor in your body with negative health effects — (No) epidemic? In 2017, US surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote ‘Work and the Loneliness Epidemic’ in the Harvard Business Review. He writes: Loneliness is a growing health epidemic. We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.

Research finds that headlines with negative words attract significantly more clicks than those with positive words — Click me, please The internet is a wonderful thing. All the world’s information at our fingertips, merely a click away. No wonder that over 80% of Americans get their news online. About half of them say that they get their news — at least sometimes — from social media. Uh oh. Now that…

A 19-year-old Chinese man has been diagnosed with ‘probable’ Alzheimer’s disease — Age & Alzheimer’s Age is the number one risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. The older we get, the higher the risk. As a result, most diagnoses are made in people’s 70s, 80s, or 90s. And yet, in about 5–10% of all cases, the diagnosis comes before the age of 65. This is known…

Should free speech have limits, and what should those be? — Pretty free speech On August 12th, 2022, writer Salman Rushdie was stabbed on his way to give a lecture in New York. …

An enzyme known as Tip60 regulates RNA splicing and might play a role in Alzheimer’s disease — The splice of life DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into a protein. There, the mystery of life, unraveled just for you. If only it was that easy. Reality is always more complicated than we think. For example, one RNA transcript can be translated into many different proteins. How? Splicing.

In our changing world, more and larger algal blooms are taking place in the blue lungs of our planet — Here comes the bloom At the base of aquatic food chains, we find tiny algae called phytoplankton. Sometimes, due to changes in the environment, populations of such phytoplankton ‘bloom’, aka the population grows a lot, fast. You might think that’s good. After all, fish and other organisms eat phytoplankton, so more plankton, more food.

Unless you’re already rich and unhappy — Can’t buy happiness A 2010 study by Novel-Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton settled it: what we’ve been told by our well-meaning teachers and parents turned out to be mostly true. Money only buys happiness up to a point (somewhere between $60,000 and $90,000, the researchers found), and after that, the curve…

Study suggests that democracies may not last — Foundation Between 1951 and 1953, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote a trilogy called the Foundation series. Later, he added prequels and sequels, almost as if he could predict the tricks of modern Hollywood. In total, there are now seven Foundation books and a recent TV series Throughout the entire tale…

We spend almost one-sixth of our lives on trying to improve our appearance — We’re so vain… Vanity is ingrained in human nature. Early Homo sapiens used pigments to decorate their bodies, and makeup, jewelry, flashy clothing, and complicated hairstyles were part and parcel of the upper classes of ancient civilizations to enhance their appearance. There are several evolutionary-tinted hypotheses that try to offer an explanation for…