Curated Content For the Life Underwriting Professional
A new study has found that a common e-cigarette flavoring that has chemical characteristics similar to toxic chemicals found in cigarette smoke disrupts an important mechanism of the lungs’ antibacterial defense system.
Read the geeky stuff here.
You can access the first issue at this link.
People with a family history of alcohol use disorder (AUD) release more dopamine in the brain’s main reward center in response to the expectation of alcohol than people diagnosed with the disorder, or healthy people without any family history of AUD, reports a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
This explains a lot.
Read about this small interesting study here.
Meat brand Applegate finds that 47 percent of consumers are scared to discover the ingredients in hot dogs, while 24 percent of millennials never purchase them.
Read the survey results here.
I find surveys like this amusing. Interview 1000 people and extrapolate the findings to all Americans. The click bait title is great too. It’s so misleading I had to copy it verbatim.
A new study by Brown University epidemiologists found that children on the threshold of obesity or overweight in the first two years of life had lower perceptual reasoning and working memory scores than lean children when tested at ages five and eight. The study also indicated that IQ scores may be lower for higher-weight children.
“Excess early-life adiposity was associated with lower IQ, perceptual reasoning and working memory scores at school-age,” Li said.
The authors pointed out that the sample size of their study was limited and that further studies should be conducted to confirm their findings. Future work could also investigate the impact of early-life weight status on school performance, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnoses and special education use.
If these study results hold up in future studies then I’ll know just what the hell happened to me.
In mice.
Confirming and extending previous observations, the researchers showed that prolonged social isolation leads to a broad array of behavioral changes in mice. These include increased aggressiveness towards unfamiliar mice, persistent fear, and hypersensitivity to threatening stimuli. For example, when encountering a threatening stimulus, mice that have been socially isolated remain frozen in place long after the threat has passed, whereas normal mice stop freezing soon after the threat is removed. These effects are seen when mice are subjected to two weeks of social isolation, but not to short-term social isolation — 24 hours — suggesting that the observed changes in aggression and fear responses require chronic isolation.
Though the work was done in mice, it has potential implications for understanding how chronic stress affects humans.
Get out of the house. Socialize with friends and family. Leave the cell phone at home.
Social media is not social. It’s a serious public health problem for the brainwashed masses with addictive behaviors.
Read the source article here.
Vitamin B12 (known as cobalamin) is an essential dietary component but vegetarians are more prone to B12 deficiency as plants neither make nor require this nutrient.
But now a team, led by Professor Martin Warren at the University’s School of Biosciences, has proved that common garden cress can indeed take up cobalamin.
The amount of B12 absorbed by garden cress is dependent on the amount present in the growth medium, and the Kent team was able to confirm B12 uptake by showing that the nutrient ends up in the leaf.
I can’t wait for the silly money and marketers to grab this and run.
Read the source article here.
