UF study suggests schools boost empty calories to raise test scores
...ave shown that students perform better at academic tasks in the several hours following a large dose of glucose or empty calories, which improves knowledge or cognitive ability in addition to boosting energy. Figlio and Joshua Winicki, an economist with the American Institutes for Research, did a detailed...$24-million grant funds local researchers to create encyclopedia of the innate immune system
...d ISB that will centralize and enhance some of the tasks common to the dozens of researchers with independently funded research projects at the institutions. The grant will help generate information and materials for the research community at large by funding a large database with free data access. Bi-mon...Researchers identify key pathway in the pupils response to light
...ternal light cycles, and probably are essential to tasks such as recovery from jet lag or adapting to working the late shift. "This study doesn't definitively demonstrate that cryptochromes are the key photopigment that ganglion cells use, but we think it does demonstrate that they are part of an importa...Facing extreme ice conditions, coast guard, NSF deploy second icebreaker to Antarctica
... southernmost continent. The icebreakers' primary tasks are to open a channel from the ice edge to McMurdo Station and to ensure that the supply ships safely navigate the narrow channel in and out of the station. Normally, a single icebreaker, either the Polar Sea or its sister ship, the Polar Star, is s...Monkeys show sophisticated learning abilities
... responses that mimicked human responses to memory tasks and number discrimination tasks. In the distance effect, the monkeys' responses were slower when two images were close together in the original list (e.g., A and B) and faster when the images were farther apart in the original list (e.g., A and D). ......BDNF) performed worse on tests of episodic memory tasks like recalling what happened yesterday. They also showed differences in activation of the hippocampus, a brain area known to mediate memory, and signs of decreased neuronal health and interconnections. These effects are likely traceable to limited m...Braille found to be essential, regardless of age of blindness
...b generation to Braille read nouns except that the tasks are identical except for input word modality, i.e....lind persons performing nonvisual tasks. Auditory tasks were used in several prior studies of early blind individuals. These tasks included the following: ...Brain imaging study sheds light on inner workings of human intelligence
...ked to perform the word and face "mental juggling" tasks while lying inside an fMRI scanner. Each task tested a kind of short-term memory known as "working memory." To get a sense of how the task works, ask a friend to read the following words to you at a rate of about one word every 2.5 seconds: dog, cat...Rutgers researcher advances understanding of attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia
...of the brain are involved in both simple cognitive tasks such as the identification of a new object inserte...into a series of similar objects, and more complex tasks such as decision-making and event perception. Most cognitive events occur in hundredths of a second...Rockefeller, Weill Cornell researchers find link between estrogen, brain structure changes
...omen to remember word lists and other experimental tasks varies during a normal monthly estrous cycle, which is characterized by the ebb and flow of estrogen. Further animal investigation revealed a dramatic decrease in dendritic spine density in rats whose ovaries were removed and thus were relatively low...St. Jude researchers decipher structure, activity of enzyme key to biochemical pathways of life
...uld be chaotic and wouldn't be able to perform the tasks it is supposed to do in the body." Each type of E1 activating enzyme coordinates a specific function to make sure it occurs at precisely the right time, she says. The complex series of reactions that control each function begins when a specific E1 a...Study provides new insights into the functional neuroanatomy of motor imagery
...there has been some diversity among the behavioral tasks studied as motor imagery. Motor imagery is defined...s The findings revealed that movement and imagery tasks were based on the same operational rules and stimuli, and obviously shared many processes. These in......age in research, to relieve them of administrative tasks and to make it easier for them to take on highly qualified junior scientists. Scientists from any field may be nominated for the prize. From the many candidates put forward for the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the DFG nomination committee primari...Obesity prevention program aimed at second graders
... family physical activity. Each challenge included tasks to increase physical activity and diabetes knowledge. Students were rewarded points for completing the challenges with their families. These points were converted to miles to complete a virtual trek from Fort Collins, CO to Disney World, Fl. Resul...Executive functioning in children prenatally exposed to alcohol
...frontal lobes have difficulty on just the kinds of tasks used in this study," noted Noland. "The brain change associated with alcohol exposure could be in the frontal cortex or another closely related area of the brain that supports the frontal cortex." Canfield added that future research would need to di...Discovery of gene for premature aging syndrome reported in Science
...challenge will be to better understand the various tasks that the lamin proteins carry out, according to Lvy. MAD was the first laminopathy found to affect multiple tissue types, as progeria does. The mechanisms underlying the differences among laminopathies is a mystery. "We don't know enough about how la...'Work stinks': It's more than just a slogan among ants, researchers find
...er ants, we found a further subdivision: Different tasks smell different." Foragers and patrollers In the... "What this confirms is that an ant can assess the tasks of another ant using hydrocarbons that are specific to that task. It's not an intellectual achieveme...Good News: Cognitive decline after bypass surgery mostly temporary and reversible
...ty to think, remember and learn, and are slower at tasks like writing and drawing immediately following surgery than they were before surgery. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins concerned about the lasting mental effects of bypass surgery have discovered that they are generally reversible and last for no m...Gene enhances prefrontal function at a price
...rform better on working memory and other cognitive tasks known to depend on the prefrontal cortex. They fu...d other "executive" (abstract reasoning, planning) tasks while their brain activity was monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) . In...Memory for music: Musicians don't have to hear themselves perform after they learn a song
... while learning it. The music-related interference tasks caused worse recall than did ...emory for music and for other tasks such as speech this study showed many similarities, Palmer said. ...