Science | The Guardian.

"How to optimise the cognitive benefits of dreams and sleep."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents. Accessed on 13 January 2025, 0106 UTC.

Content and Source: https://www.theguardian.com

Please check link or scroll down to read your selections. Thanks for joining us today.

Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

Dreaming is vital to our mental health – and it is possible to use them for our own good Dreams are pure emotional and cognitive gold. Those often surreal, fragmented images and plot lines that can instantly evaporate when we open our eyes, allow us not only to explore the themes and challenges of our day, but to step into the what-ifs of tomorrow. Whether we remember our dreams or not, our brain

The big menopause swizz: do hormone supplements really work?

Science | The Guardian / 13h

The global market for menopause products is worth £16.93bn, the majority of that spent on dietary supplements – but is there any evidence they do anything? I had just turned 40 when it started. Suddenly, the ads on my social-media feeds changed. The algorithms decided I was now officially middle-aged and crumbling – by their metrics – and it was time for me to start buying hormone-supporting supp

The deadliest beings on the planet: can the bacteriophage help in our fight against superbugs?

Science | The Guardian / 10h

Antimicrobial resistance threatens many of the gains of modern medicine, making even routine surgery much riskier. Some scientists believe phages, lurking in every corner of the planet, offer hope Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Humans have been visiting Merri Creek for millennia. The waterway snakes from Wallan,

Today

At-home ECGs will detect early heart issues and save thousands, say doctors

Science | The Guardian / 12h

Colour-coded output from smartwatch device would be easy for public to read They remain some of the most complex diagnostic procedures carried out by doctors. To take an electrocardiogram, or ECG, they first have to attach 10 or more electrodes to a patient’s chest, arms and legs to measure the heart’s electrical activity. Then, once these signals have been recorded, a cardiologist has to interpr

Music sounds better with you? How your listening habits affect your love life

Science | The Guardian / 12h

Psychologists say that singing, dancing and song preferences play a key role in the viability of romantic relationships “What’s the one thing your readers should do to help them use music to find and catch the partner of their dreams?” asks Patrick Savage, a senior research fellow in psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. “Go to karaoke and sing a duet. Go and sing A Whole New W

Yesterday

The 10 rules of friendship: show up, go beyond banter, learn the boring details

Science | The Guardian / 16h

Writers, therapists and academics give advice on how to make, and strengthen, meaningful bonds with mates and friends Emma Reed Turrell , psychotherapist, author and host of the podcast Friendship Therapy You can keep balance in friendship by showing your working out, rather than making assumptions and mind-reading. This might sound like: “I’d like to invite you to a party but I’m wondering if it

From the Beatles to biologics – how Liverpool became a life science hotspot

Science | The Guardian / 18h

The city has a long history with tropical medicine and is now home to one of the largest biotech clusters in Europe Tucked away in the village of Leasowe, near Moreton on the Wirral peninsula west of Liverpool, the US pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) is building a new £35m glass-clad laboratory building. It is part of a growing life sciences cluster in and around Liverpool , one

UK can be ‘AI sweet spot’: Starmer’s tech minister on regulation, Musk, and free speech

Science | The Guardian / 1d

Technology secretary Peter Kyle has the task of making Britain a leading player in the AI revolution, but says economic growth will not come at the cost of online safety With the NHS still struggling , a prisons crisis still teetering and Britain’s borrowing costs soaring , there are few easy jobs going in Keir Starmer’s cabinet at present. But even in such difficult times, the task of convincing

Is a brain-stimulation headset the answer to depression?

Science | The Guardian / 1d

The makers of a device that delivers small electrical impulses to the brain are hailing the technology as a groundbreaking mental health treatment, but others are sceptical “Flow helps the vast majority of people to improve their depression,” reads the latest marketing email from Flow Neuroscience, a Swedish-based company that has been making headlines over the past year with what it describes as

‘I think there is life there. Today’: the race to put a human on Mars – in pictures

Science | The Guardian / 1d

Ever since the first fuzzy images of its surface were captured in 1964, Mars has sparked imaginations worldwide. As Nasa publishes its photographic archives of the red planet, will Elon Musk’s wild predictions of a crewed flight in four years come true? Last September, Elon Musk used the social media platform he had bought for £35bn to remind the world that he had bigger things on his mind than t

Jan 10, 2025

From oatzempic to mouth taping: does science back up TikTok health tips?

Science | The Guardian / 2d

Here are some of the more curious health hacks circulating on the social media platform – and what the evidence says The deluge of improbable health hacks on TikTok can only mean it’s the start of a new year. Here we look at some of the more curious tips and the evidence, where there is any, behind them. Continue reading...

Jan 9, 2025

Collaborative research on AI safety is vital | Letters

Science | The Guardian / 2d

If we are to take seriously the risk facing humanity, regulators need the power to ‘recall’ deployed models, as well as assess leading, not lagging, indicators of risk, writes Prof John McDermid Re Geoffrey Hinton’s concerns about the perils of artificial intelligence ( ‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December ), I believe these concern

The ‘mad egghead’ who built a mouse utopia – podcast

Science | The Guardian / 2d

John Calhoun designed an apartment complex for mice to examine the effects of overcrowding. It was hailed as a groundbreaking study of social breakdown, but is largely forgotten. So what happened? By Lee Alan Dugatkin Continue reading...

Bezos’s Blue Origin schedules, then delays first orbital launch

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket launch

•

Science | The Guardian / 3d

New Glenn launch is delayed until at least 12 January due to conditions in the Atlantic, where booster is slated to land Jeff Bezos ’s Blue Origin announced it would launch its first orbital rocket “no earlier than Friday”, a pivotal moment in the commercial space race currently dominated by Elon Musk ’s SpaceX . Then the Amazon founder’s rocket company delayed the launch until at least Sunday 12

Jan 8, 2025

Are you falling for wellness misinformation online? Here’s how to tell

100+Science | The Guardian / 3d

Social media is rife with alarming advice and warnings – experts share red flags to avoid Wellness advice abounds on social media: warnings about “toxic foods”, assertions that parasites are driving your sugar cravings, or claims about solving the “root cause” of bodily complaints with unproven remedies. “Wellness woo” appears in many domains, like nutrition, dermatology, parenting and psychology

The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury review – keep the glass half full

Science | The Guardian / 3d

A powerfully inspiring study of optimism that avoids farcical good cheer Humans are unrealistically optimistic about the world and the future; we systematically underestimate our chances of experiencing unpleasant diseases, going through a divorce, or losing a loved one. About the only people who don’t see the world through the lens of this “optimism bias” are the clinically depressed. Depressiv

Where did our attention spans go, and can we get them back? – podcast

Science | The Guardian / 3d

The Oxford English Dictionary announced its word of the year at the end of 2024: brain rot. The term relates to the supposedly negative effects of consuming social media content, but it struck a chord more widely with many of us who feel we just don’t have the mental capacity we once did. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying our waning

Bizarre Australian mole even more unusual than first thought, new research reveals

Marsupial mole's DNA secrets revealed

•

Science | The Guardian / 4d

Experts say marsupial mole DNA shows they are closely linked to bandicoots and bilbies and their ancestors probably evolved in rainforests Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast New research into one of Australia’s most specialised and bizarre animals has revealed the marsupial mole’s biology is as unusual as its appeara

AI-generated ‘slop’ is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it? | Arwa Mahdawi

200+Science | The Guardian / 4d

Low-quality ‘slop’ generated by AI is crowding out genuine humans across the internet, but instead of regulating it, platforms such as Facebook are positively encouraging it. Where does this end? How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the species homo sapiens . We’re talking a 100% flesh-and-blood person operating in meatspace over here; I am absolutely not an

My 90,000 shots of the sun: Andrew McCarthy’s best photograph

Science | The Guardian / 4d

‘I took all the images with a precisely tuned telescope then joined them up. Use the wrong type of telescope and you’ll blind yourself and burn your house down’ I bought a telescope on a whim in 2017, thinking back fondly to when my dad used to show me Jupiter and Saturn through his. I thought: “Why not revisit some of those memories, now that I can afford to spend a few hundred bucks on essentia

Outdated guidelines mean doctors failing to spot heart condition in women

Science | The Guardian / 4d

Research finds hypertrophic cardiomyopathy testing that overlooks sex differences and body size is inadequate Doctors are failing to diagnose women with a potentially deadly heart condition because tests rely on outdated studies from the 1970s and do not account for natural differences in sex and body size. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a genetic condition where the muscular wall of the he

Sweat-wicking and radiative cooling: can new fabrics make living through extreme heat more bearable?

Science | The Guardian / 4d

How a team of researchers is reducing skin temperature under clothes and energy bills with some forward fashion thinking Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email This year is on track to be the hottest in recorded history. With rising temperatures and more intense and frequent heatwaves , keeping cool in summer will get harder. Air conditioning can only go so far , especially when extreme heat

Look at the underside of a log, and you’ll find my new obsession: the beautiful, bonkers world of slime moulds | Lucy Jones

Science | The Guardian / 4d

These tiny organisms matter. They have been used to map dark matter and improve transport networks, and they’re living all around us A few years ago, I started looking at the underside of logs and it changed my life. I found a secret carnival of the most bodacious and interesting organisms I had ever seen. Bubbles of candy-pink gloss on stilts ( Comatricha nigra ), bunches of rainbow iridescence

Daily glass of milk may cut bowel cancer risk by fifth, research finds

Science | The Guardian / 4d

Largest study into diet and disease suggests extra 300mg of calcium a day is associated with a 17% lower risk Having a large glass of milk every day may cut the risk of bowel cancer by nearly a fifth, according to the largest study conducted into diet and the disease. Each daily 300mg of calcium, about the

Hawaii Science Journal