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Mindfulness is everywhere these days. Mindfulness headlines like “Healthy Mind, Healthy Life” or “The Medicine of the Moment” are trumpeted from grocery store checkout stands, right next to celebrity gossip and thinner thighs. In many ways, this is a good thing: mindfulnessis improving lives the world over. Recent studies have found mindfulness benefits everyone from emergency room nurses to law students waiting for their bar exam results to pregnant women—to the extent that their babies later showed less negative social-emotional behavior than the babies of less mindful women....

Social media is linked to depression—or not. First-person shooter video games are good for cognition—or they encourage violence. Young people are either more connected—or more isolated than ever. Such are the conflicting messages about the effects of technology on children’s well-being. Negative findings receive far more attention and have fueled panic among parents and educators. This state of affairs reflects a heated debate among scientists. Studies showing statistically significant negative effects are followed by others revealing positive effects or none at all—sometimes using the same data set....

The Omicron subvariant BA.2 is replacing its sister version, BA.1, as the dominant form of SARS-CoV-2 in many countries, which has led scientists to wonder whether the COVID-19 pandemic is about to throw these regions into disarray yet again. But a study published on 13 March shows that mRNA vaccines offer a similar degree of protection against the two strains—although protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and symptomatic disease wanes within months of a third dose....

Dear EarthTalk: I don’t eat meat, for a variety of ethical and environmental reasons, and I’d rather not feed it to my cat, either. Do cats have to be carnivores? – John McManus, Needham, MA Unlike dogs and other omnivores, cats are true (so-called “obligate”) carnivores: They meet their nutritional needs by consuming other animals and have a higher protein requirement than many other mammals. Cats get certain key nutrients from meat—including taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A and vitamin B12—that can’t be sufficiently obtained from plant-based foods....

A while back, I received a message on Facebook from listener Lindsey. She said: “In another episode you talked about how aerobic exercise and weight lifting affect each other, but I’m not sure I understood. As a runner, can I run to the gym to lift weights and run home again or should I keep the cardio and weights on separate days? Thanks for your help!” After thanking Lindsey for her great question, I promised that I would do a deeper dive in the near future....

When investors are deciding who to allocate capital to, they of course look at “hard data”—things like company financials, product or service quality, the size of the market opportunity, and other indicators of business viability—but, research shows, they also draw heavily from their perceptions of the entrepreneur and the founding team. Though they want to be investing in a great product, it is perhaps even more important that when a founder faces adversity (as inevitably happens), they have the wherewithal to persevere....

Neurological conditions that can cause paralysis, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and strokes in the brain stem, also rob many patients of their ability to speak. Assistive technologies enable keyboard control for some of these individuals (like the famed late physicist Stephen Hawking), and brain-computer interfaces make it possible for others to control machines directly with their thoughts. But both types of devices are slow and impractical for people with locked-in syndrome and other communication impairments....

It was 4 P.M., and Andrew* had just bought 10 bags of heroin. In his kitchen, he tugged one credit-card-sized bag from the rubber-banded bundle and laid it on the counter with sacramental reverence. Pain shot through his body as he pulled a cutting board from the cabinet. Slowly, deliberately, he tapped the bag’s white contents onto the board and crushed it with the flat edge of a butter knife, forming a line of fine white powder....

Ten stories above New York’s Central Park, one of the nation’s largest collections of brains sits preserved in the lab of Yasmin Hurd. A neuroscientist and the Director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai, Hurd studies the brains of deceased drug addicts, the majority of whom succumbed to heroin. What she sees in these brains is jumbled genetic expression. Epigenetic tags that control the genes’ on/off positions are in disarray: certain genes that should be switched on, expressed, are turned off, and some genes that are off should be on....

More women than ever before are earning Ph.D.s and pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), yet they remain largely underrepresented in senior positions—especially women of color and other ethnic minorities. In STEM academia, women receive about half of doctoral degrees, but only a third become full professors. Evidence collected over past decades shows that gender bias partially explains this gender imbalance in STEM, but another contributing factor has received less attention: motherhood....

People suffering from physically debilitating illnesses such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and traumatic brain injuries often find themselves trapped inside their own bodies, unable to speak, gesture or otherwise communicate with the outside world. Scientists have shown they can create computer interfaces that sense, interpret and display a locked-in person’s brain waves, eye movements or facial expressions, but the challenge has been to find cost-effective ways of harnessing this technology for consumer use....

From Quanta (Find original story here). Developmental biologist Cassandra Extavour sings classical and baroque music on stage with the Handel and Haydn Society at Symphony Hall in Boston. Blessed with a beautiful soprano voice, she could easily have chosen to pursue a career as a singer. But a summer working in a developmental genetics laboratory as an undergraduate tipped the scales in favor of science, and Extavour is now an associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University....

The observation that the human brain churns out new neurons throughout life is one of the biggest neuroscience discoveries of the past 20 years. The idea has captured immense popular and scientific interest—not least, because of hopes the brain’s regenerative capacity might be harnessed to boost cognition or to treat injury or disease. In nonhuman animals the continued production of new neurons has been linked to improved learning and memory, and possibly even mood regulation....

What is happening in Paris next week? Diplomats from more than 190 countries will gather on an airfield in Le Bourget, just outside the French capital, to negotiate a new international agreement on climate change through the United Nations. About 20,000 people, including business leaders, environmental activists and journalists, have been accredited to attend the proceedings, and the talks will draw an estimated 20,000 more to Paris for a series of clean energy and other events happening on the sidelines....

By Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will dramatically expand the Papahnaumokukea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii on Friday, the White House said, an action that will ban commercial fishing from more than 582,500 sq miles (1.5 million sq km) of the Pacific Ocean. Obama will visit the protected area on Sept. 1 to draw attention to the threat that climate change poses to oceans, traveling to Midway Atoll - a remote coral reef that was the site of a pivotal World War Two battle and is now known for its sea turtles, monk seals, and millions of seabirds....

Since the time of Louis Pasteur, vaccines have worked on the principle that injecting dead or weakened pathogens into the body allows the immune system to learn to fight them. But vaccines from weakened microbes require constant refrigeration until use, and those from microbes killed by heat or chemicals provoke a weaker immune response, requiring occasional boosters. But new research reviving an old concept–killing microorganisms via gamma radiation–seems to show that such irradiated vaccines can trigger powerful immunity....

Japan is set to build the largest neutrino detector in history, after a cabinet committee approved billions of yen for its construction on 13 December, according to scientists involved in the project. Hyper-Kamiokande will hold 260,000 tonnes of ultrapure water—more than five times the amount contained by its already enormous sibling, the Super-Kamiokande. The new detector will be built inside a gigantic cavern to be dug next to Hida City’s Kamioka mine, and will, physicists hope, bring ground-breaking discoveries about these ubiquitous particles....

There is a saying in the field of artificial intelligence: “Hard things are easy; easy things are hard.” Called Moravec’s paradox, after Hans Moravec, founder of robotics company Seegrid, it is explained in detail in a recent book by computer science professor Melanie Mitchell entitled Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Activities that most people find very hard, such as playing chess or doing higher mathematics, have yielded fairly readily to computation, yet many tasks that humans find easy or even trivial resist being conquered by machines....

If all goes according to plan, the touchdown of NASA’s next Mars rover will be the most documented planetary landing in history. The space agency’s 2020 Mars rover will carry special cameras and microphones to capture stunning views and sounds of its dramatic descent to the Red Planet’s surface in 2021. (The robot will launch in 2020, hence the name.) These cameras “are going to produce some of the most exciting imagery I think a planetary mission has ever provided,” said Mars 2020 rover deputy project manager Matthew Wallace, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California....

A controversial push to expand the US government’s use of commercial Earth-observing satellites is about to kick into high gear. Early next month, aerospace start-up Spire Global of Glasgow, UK, will send a mini-satellite into space aboard an Indian government rocket. This ‘cubesat’ will join 16 others that are beaming a new type of atmospheric data back to Earth — and some scientists worry that such efforts are siphoning funding away from efforts to push forward the science of weather forecasting....