ScienceDaily: Living Well News

Mental speed -- the speed at which we can deal with issues requiring rapid decision-making -- does not change substantially over decades. Psychologists have come to this conclusion. They evaluated data from a large-scale online experiment with over a million participants. The findings of the new study suggest that the speed of cognitive information processing remains largely stable between the ages of 20 and 60, and only deteriorates at higher ages.

A new study provides evidence that construction workers, in particular, are at high risk of inadvertently tracking a host of other toxic metals into their homes. The study identifies and measures the highest number of metals --30-- in construction workers' homes, to date.

Treating babies with antibiotics in the first week of life is linked with a decrease in healthy bacteria necessary amongst others to digest milk and an increase in antimicrobial resistance, research suggests. Experts say that clinicians should consider using antibiotics in a way that causes least harm to the newborns microbiome - the community of microbes that live in our body.

Fat tissue plays an important role in human health. However, our fat tissue loses function as we age, which can lead to type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer and other ailments. High levels of lifelong exercise seem to counteract this deterioration.

By linking human population studies with experiments in cell and animal models, researchers have provided evidence that complex mixtures of endocrine disrupting chemicals impact children's brain development and language acquisition. With their novel approach, the scientists show that up to 54 per cent of pregnant women were exposed to experimentally defined levels of concern. While current risk assessment tackles chemicals one at a time, these findings show the need to take mixtures into account for future risk assessment approaches.

Conducting a meta-analysis of 3,000 patients over 36 studies (carefully vetted from more than 1,200 studies in all), psychologists were able to find that specific exercise helps episodic memory -- 3 times a week for 4 months, with greater improvements among those who are age 55 to 68 years.

Repetitive headers and accidental head impacts in soccer are leading to changes in blood patterns, linked to brain signalling pathways and potential alterations -- the latest study to assess potential dangers of heading in soccer shows.

A new model for animal foraging considered 'valence-dependent optimism bias' -- a lopsided learning process in which information about bad outcomes is discounted or ignored. The model shows that when faced with decisions, foraging animals that gave mental weight to positive outcomes had an on-the-ground caloric advantage.