cognitive scientist awards

A meningitis outbreak in Nigeria has claimed the lives of at least 26 people, while five students in Kerala, India, have shown signs of the illness. 200 suspected cases have been recorded since the start of the outbreak in January in the Nigerian state of Kebbi. Keralan health officials have sent samples for testing and are keeping an eye on any suspected cases among schoolchildren.   Two youngsters in Kochi, aged seven and eight, were admitted to two private hospitals today after it was determined that they had cerebral meningitis. According to reports, three more kids have shown symptoms of the disease. The patients are reported to be from the same private school in Ernakulam. According to health professionals, the status of the patients is currently stable. The school is temporarily closed as a precaution.  Masks have been asked to be worn by anyone who has close contact with the affected students. Authorities are also keeping a careful eye on the situation. Meningitis is c...

  Honoré de Balzac is undoubtedly one of the greatest French writers of all time. But that wasn’t always the case. You might even say he started out “bad” at writing. Only through an absurd degree of   discipline   over the course of ten years did he transform into one of the greats. From the age of 20 to 30, he chained himself to his desk, wore monks’ robes while writing, and refused to eat because he believed digestion would disturb his writing process. Finally, at the age of 31, he achieved his first commercial success— La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Donkey’s Skin).  Following this success, he only worked harder and harder. He spent the next 20 years writing and drinking gallons and gallons of coffee (often getting just two hours of sleep). In twenty years, he produced 90 literary novels, including his magnum opus series,  La Comédie humaine , which included 48 volumes and 3500 unique characters (a cast only rivaled by the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens). To ...

  Learn facts about cancer, in which abnormal cell growth destroys healthy body tissues. There are  tens of trillions of cells  in the human body, and new cells are constantly forming as older cells age and die. But sometimes, cell growth and replication doesn't stop when it should. These abnormal cells multiply too quickly, harming healthy tissue and interfering with bodily functions. This runaway cell growth and accumulation of abnormal cells is called cancer. There are more than  200 types of cancer , with about  20 million  new cases of cancer diagnosed globally each year. The most common type of cancer worldwide is lung cancer, which causes 1.8 million deaths annually. Of any cancer, lung cancer kills the most people worldwide each year. The earliest mention of cancer in  Homo sapien  history (though it was not yet called by that name) dates to  about 3000 B.C.  A medical textbook from ancient Egypt, known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus...

The acute intensive blood pressure (BP) lowering recommended after intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) did not increase small-volume infarcts compared with looser control in a small randomized trial. Of 79 patients in the ICHADAPT-2 study, a systolic BP target under 140 mm Hg yielded similar likelihood of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) lesions 48 hours after ICH compared with a target of less than 180 mm Hg (31% vs 38%; OR 0.74, 95% CI 0.12-4.64), according to a group led by Ken Butcher, MD, PhD, of the University of New South Wales and Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney. Similarly, no between-group difference emerged with regards to the number of DWI lesions (median 1-1.5 per person) or total DWI lesion volume (typically under 1 mL) on brain MRI, with the majority being small volume lesions. Nor did the more intensive target increase incident lesions on repeat MRI at 7 and 30 days, "despite a statistically significant, rapid, and sustained" systolic BP reduction, the researcher...