Culture

"It took human culture millennia to arrive at a mathematical formulation of non-Euclidean spaces", comments SISSA neuroscientist Alessandro Treves, "but it's very likely that our brains could get there long before. In fact, it's likely that the brain of rodents gets there very naturally every day".

A large new study in the New England Journal of Medicine examines the impact of growth in Medicare's hospice benefit among nursing home residents between 2004 and 2009. The researchers documented improvement in indicators of care quality, such as less reliance on intensive care and feeding tubes, but also found increased costs to Medicare of $6,761 per patient on average.

Insurance coverage has increased across all types of insurance since the major provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act took effect, with a total of 16.9 million people becoming newly enrolled through February 2015, according to an estimate based on a survey sample analyzed by RAND Corporation. That is even though coverage through individual non-marketplace policies declined by 1.9 million and coverage from other sources (Medicare, military insurance and state programs) declined by 10 million over the study period.

A new study examined the relationship between mandatory nap times in childcare and children's night-time sleep duration concurrently and then 12 months later.

"For the first time this study shows a relationship between observed naptime practices in childcare and children's night-time sleep," says Dr. Sally Staton of Queensland University of Technology. The study found children who were exposed to more than 60 minutes mandatory sleep at childcare slept worse at night which continued when they started school.

A statistical analysis of Job Corps data strongly suggests positive average effects on wages for individuals who participated in the federal job-training program.

Results of the analysis recently were included in an article in the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics . The study was conducted by Xuan Chen of Renmin University of China and Carlos A. Flores of California Polytechnic State University.

Job Corps is the country's largest and most comprehensive federally funded job-training program for disadvantaged youth.

A majority of American adults say they've tried dieting to lose weight at some point in their lives, and at any given time, about one-third of the adult population say they're currently dieting.

Yet 60 percent of American adults are clinically overweight or obese and more than 16 percent of deaths nationwide are related to diet and physical activity.

They may not be on Facebook or Twitter, but dolphins do, in fact, form highly complex and dynamic networks of friends, according to a recent study by scientists at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI) at Florida Atlantic University. Dolphins are known for being highly social animals, and a team of researchers at HBOI took a closer look at the interactions between bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) and discovered how they mingle and with whom they spend their time.

Adults who experienced multiple incidents of childhood maltreatment were more than two times as likely to have trouble sleeping than their counterparts who were not maltreated during childhood, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto, University of Ottawa, and Western University. The study appears online in the journal Sleep Medicine.

While U.S. educational policy emphasizes high-stakes testing and scripted lessons, the best teachers in the business are taking creative risks -- often drawing from their own interests and hobbies -- to help students learn, new research finds.

Examining the classroom practices of National Teacher of the Year winners and finalists, the study, by Michigan State University scholars, suggests successful educators aren't afraid to push the boundaries by incorporating real world, cross-disciplinary themes into their lessons.

Our view of what makes us happy has changed markedly since 1938.

That is the conclusion of the psychologist Sandie McHugh from the Univeristy of Bolton who has recreated a famous study of happiness conducted in Bolton in 1938. She will present her study today, Tuesday 5 May 2015, to the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society in Liverpool.

Acceptance of premarital sex is at an all-time high along with an acceptance of homosexuality, find researchers led by Jean M. Twenge from San Diego State University.

Uninsured people don't have any more difficulty getting appointments with primary care doctors than those with insurance, but they get them at prices that are likely unaffordable to a typical uninsured person, according to new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health-led research.

And payment options are not very flexible, with only one in five people told they could be seen without paying the whole cost up front, suggests the new study published in the May issue of the journal Health Affairs.

We all know that having health insurance can make it easier for people to a see a doctor, and with access to care, people can stay healthier. But socioeconomic inequalities in the United States affect access to health care, and thus treatment and patient outcomes as well.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government has created more health insurance options, expanded the federal Medicaid health program for people with low incomes, and installed an individual mandate to help provide health insurance to all American citizens. But are all forms of health insurance equal?

Stereotypes related to gender and appearance that burden women in the real world could follow them into virtual ones, according to researchers.

In a study of how people interacted with avatars in an online game, women received less help from fellow players than men when they operated an unattractive avatar and when they used a male avatar, said T. Franklin Waddell, a doctoral candidate in mass communications, Penn State.

In a 4-year study of 178 pre- and 329 postmenopausal women, investigators found that women's sexual functioning was moderately stable over time. The main predictors of changes in sexual functioning and satisfaction were desire and arousal, highlighting their role as the main "players" in women's sexual health.

The study also found that despite the potentially impairing effects of menopause and menopausal transition, sexual satisfaction and functioning in postmenopausal women can be improved and sexual problems can show spontaneous remission.