Birth Control Pills found to affect memory

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Birth control affects more than previously thought.

Women who use contraceptives like birth control pills experience memory changes, according to new UC Irvine research. Their ability to remember the gist of an emotional event improves, while women not using the contraceptives better retain details.

“What’s most exciting about this study is that it shows the use of hormonal contraception alters memory,” UCI graduate researcher Shawn Nielsen said. “There are only a handful of studies examining the cognitive effects of the pill, and more than 100 million women use it worldwide.”

She stressed that the medications did not damage memory. “It’s a change in the type of information they remember, not a deficit.”

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Lifespan of links on the Web

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How long is too long?

How long do links on the Web live? URL shortening service Bit.ly charted the average lifespan of 1,000 popular links on its website and found that most links shared online don’t live very long. Indeed, people stop clicking them after about 3 hours (if a news-related link, then after just 5 minutes)…

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Babies distinguish pain from touch at 35-37 weeks, research finds

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Discovering a babies pain threshold.

Babies can distinguish painful stimuli as different from general touch from around 35-37 weeks gestation — just before an infant would normally be born — according to new research…

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Why the Return Trip Always Seems Faster

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Driving ‘home’ has a different perspective.

Does getting home from a trip seem to take less time than getting there? There’s a scientific explanation for that!

NPR’s Morning Edition explains the psychological phenomenon called the “return trip effect”:

Here’s what van de Ven thinks is going on..

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Speculative fiction, and the art of predicting the future

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Is this what our future will look like?

John Schwartz has a nice piece in today’s New York Times on science fiction as a tool for predicting the future:

The dirty little secret of speculative fiction is that it’s hard to go wrong predicting that things will get worse. But while avoiding the nihilism of novels like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” in which a father and son wander a hopeless post-apocalyptic moonscape, a number of recent books foresee futures that seem more than plausible as the nation’s ambient level of weirdness rises…

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Seeing a Supernova could be the best part of Labor Day Weekend

After all the boozing and barbecuing on America day off from labor, take a sec to look up. What you’ll hopefully see is A supernova burning bright more than 21 million light years away.

The type 1a supernova is actually an exploding White Dwarf that scientists discovered last in the Pinwheel Galaxy, and it’s the youngest of its kind ever to be discovered…

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Woolly Rhino fossil discovery in Tibet provides important clues to evolution of Ice Age Giants

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A New Wooly Rhino Discovery.

A new paper published in the journal Science reveals the discovery of a primitive woolly rhino fossil in the Himalayas, which suggests some giant mammals first evolved in present-day Tibet before the beginning of the Ice Age. The extinction of Ice Age giants such as woolly mammoths and rhinos, giant sloths, and saber-tooth cats has been widely studied, but much less is known about where these giants came from, and how they acquired their adaptations for living in a cold environment…

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Scratch & Sniff business suit

According to Marc Abrahams, the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize and the Annals of Improbable Research, some Korean businessmen own special suits that emit a pleasant aroma when rubbed. These suits allow the owners to remain fresh after very long days at work and play. Here’s Abrahams demonstrating the effectiveness of his peppermint-scented suit to a test subject.

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.