Humans news stories

Looking directly at the sun without the proper eye protection under any circumstances can cause serious damage to the retina and a decline in eyesight, even blindness. Even if one part of the sun is still visible behind the moon it can cause damage.  Only bonafide eclipse glasses or hand-held filters in good shape will protect your eyes while viewing the eclipse.  So don’t try viewing with regular sunglasses or home made filters.

A new study suggests that we are able to separate illusion from reality because our brain keeps tabs by constantly questioning its own past expectations and beliefs.  Hallucinations occur when this internal fact-checking fails.  Study findings confirm that, when it comes to how we perceive the world, our ideas and beliefs can easily overpower our senses.

A National Geographic guest blogger offers highlights and insights from a trip down the Rio Grand Gorge National Monument in New Mexico.  The people of northern New Mexico have deep roots in the landscape—they hunt, fish and gather nuts and firewood on these lands. The monument is a recognition of that connection and an effort to preserve it in perpetuity.

Scientists have long pondered why we sleep. Despite being nearly ubiquitous across the animal kingdom, the exact role of slumber remains an open question. While multiple studies suggest that, in both rodents and humans, it helps consolidate previously learned memories, the question of whether new information can be learned while snoozing has yet to be answered.

People who played action video games that involve first-person shooters, such as Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, experienced shrinkage in a brain region called the hippocampus, according to a study published Tuesday in Molecular Psychiatry. That part of the brain is associated with spatial navigation, stress regulation and memory. Playing Super Mario games, in which the noble plumber strives to rescue a princess, had the opposite effect on the hippocampus, causing growth in it.

Marijuana users had a higher risk of dying from hypertension. Compared to non-users, marijuana users had a 3.42-times higher risk of death from hypertension and a 1.04 greater risk for each year of use. There was no association between marijuana use and death from heart disease or cerebrovascular disease.

Cheers!—not to your health, but to your memory.

Drinking alcohol after learning information appears to aid the brain’s ability to store and remember that information later

Alcoholism has risen 49% in the US in just 11 years, national surveys find.

Americans are becoming increasingly heavy drinkers, with the greatest rise among women, older people and ethnic minorities, national surveys have shown.

The altered state of consciousness and temporary lack of ego that results from using psychedelic drugs could help some mental health patients recover from their symptoms, according to academics.

While driving and accelerating in his car, a patient in France suddenly had a bizarre sensation. He felt like he was outside his car, looking in at his physical self, which was still at the wheel.

The patient was part of a new study that links problems of the inner ear with eerie “out-of-body” experiences. These experiences arecurious, usually brief sensations in which a person’s consciousness seems to exitthe body and then view the body from the outside.

Are human beings hard-wired to be perpetually dissatisfied? Author Robert Wright, who teaches about the interface of evolutionary biology and religion, thinks so.

Wright points out that evolution rewards people for seeking out pleasure rather than pain, which helps ensure that human beings are frequently unsatisfied: “We are condemned to always want things to be a little different, always want a little more,” he says. “We’re not designed by natural selection to be happy.”

Scientists have discovered a new difference between the sexes: women’s brains seem to be more active than men’s brains, in terms of blood flow through specific regions.

Loneliness is deadlier than obesity and should be considered a major public health hazard, the biggest ever review into the problem has suggested.

Researchers in the US looked at 218 studies into the health effects of social isolation and loneliness involving nearly four million people.

A study published online in The FASEB Journal shows that parents’ own prenatal environment has a detectable impact on their children’s weight. Mothers who were malnourished in the womb tend to produce smaller babies, while a father’s malnourishment in utero results in his offspring being smaller by the time they are 2 years old.

More than 7000 people worldwide are thought to have bought parasitic worms online and ingested them in an attempt to treat conditions ranging from depression to inflammatory bowel disease.

A unusual social study has revealed that atheists are more easily suspected of vile deeds than Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists—strikingly, even by fellow atheists, researchers said Monday.