ScienceDaily: Mind & Brain News

New research that tested possible triggers of a common heart condition, including caffeine, sleep deprivation and sleeping on the left side, found that only alcohol use was consistently associated with more episodes of the heart arrhythmia.

Just three minutes of exposure to deep red light once a week, when delivered in the morning, can significantly improve declining eyesight, finds a pioneering new study.

Good news for those of us who can't face the day without their morning flat white: a long-term study has revealed drinking higher amounts of coffee may make you less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.

Researchers report developing a database of speech samples from children ages 5 to 18 to explore two questions: What types of changes occur in children's voices as they become adults, and how do listeners adjust to the enormous variability in acoustic patterns across speakers? When they presented listeners with both syllables and sentences from different speakers, gender identification improved for sentences. They said this supports the stylistic elements of speech that highlight gender differences and come across better in sentences.

A team of evolutionary biologists and biomedical researchers lay out evolutionary and biomedical evidence showing that humans, who evolved to live many decades after they stopped reproducing, also evolved to be relatively active in their later years. The researchers say that physical activity later in life shifts energy away from processes that can compromise health and toward mechanisms in the body that extend it. They hypothesize that humans evolved to remain physically active as they age -- and in doing so to allocate energy to physiological processes that slow the body's gradual deterioration over the years. This guards against chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and even some cancers.

To successfully cooperate or compete with other people in everyday life, it is important to know what the other person thinks, feels, or wants. Researchers have explored which strategies people use to understand other people.

Riluzole, a drug approved to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease affecting nerve cells controlling movement, could slow the gradual loss of a particular brain cell that occurs in Niemann-Pick disease type C1 (NPC1), a rare genetic disorder affecting children and adolescents, suggests a study in mice.

Speech sounds elicit comparable neural responses and stimulate the same region in the brain of humans, macaques and guinea pigs, researchers report. The finding could help pave the way for better understanding and diagnosis of auditory processing deficits.

New highly sensitive quantum sensors for the brain may in the future be able to identify brain diseases such as dementia, ALS and Parkinson's, by spotting a slowing in the speed at which signals travel across the brain.