Postpartum depression affects about one in every seven women who give birth, but little is known about what happens in the brains of pregnant women who experience it. A new study begins to shed some light. Researchers scanned the brains of dozens of women in the weeks before and after childbirth and found that two…
Women’s brains are superior to men’s in at least in one respect — they age more slowly. And now, a group of researchers reports that they have found a gene in mice that rejuvenates female brains. Humans have the same gene. The discovery suggests a possible way to help both women and men avoid cognitive…
Imagine you are video chatting with a distant friend who is eating lunch, and your pal’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you could ask your friend to dip a sensor into the meal, and give you a taste? Remote snacking has moved a bit closer to virtual reality. In a paper on Friday in the…
There’s also some debate among scientists about whether epigenetic clocks are the best measure for aging, said Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. How to best measure biomarkers, and how to use them to predict future health, is an “evolving space in the scientific field,” she said. Epigenetic changes…
The English language is full of wonderful words, from “anemone” and “aurora” to “zenith” and “zodiac.” But these are special occasion words, sprinkled sparingly into writing and conversation. The words in heaviest rotation are short and mundane. And they follow a remarkable statistical rule, which is universal across human languages: The most common word, which…
