All posts tagged "Featurespecialenscience"

If you have nightmares, the experience of waking up and being too scared to go back to sleep will be all too familiar. There are ways around that though, say sleep scientists. You just need to imagine the nightmare ending in a positive way, explains German sleep researcher Michael Schredl in a recent podcast. For the most part, nightmares end when you wake up - meaning you never finish them, and they occur again in some or other form. His approach rests on revisiting the nightmare while you are awake. For example, you might dream that you are being chased by someone. In that case, you should t......

Like it or not, experts assume that for the time being, the coronavirus cannot be eradicated. But does that mean we will have to keep living under it's shadow, as we have for the last 18 months? A team of scientists recently grappled with this question in an article in the journal Nature. They start off optimistically enough, by saying that a realistic expectation is that the pandemic will be brought under control thanks to global efforts to vaccinate. However, as the team of authors point out, there will still be developments and uncertainties that are unforeseeable at the moment. Of the thre......

Optimism about the extraordinary effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines is growing and causing even the most cautious health experts to stop wearing face coverings in more settings. Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the University of California, San Francisco Department of Medicine, said he ate indoors last weekend at a restaurant with out-of-town friends. Wachter had previously been concerned about the rare chance that he would encounter an unvaccinated infected person who could transmit the virus to him, and then the virus "breaking through" his vaccine-induced immunity. While he was confident th......

A surge in the coronavirus' Indian variant is raising concerns in Britain, with some areas seeing a rise in infections and experts warning against loosening lockdown rules too soon. In Scotland, epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani on Friday warned of a "loss of control" and urged the government not to lift restrictions prematurely, according to the PA news agency. "In Scotland as a whole we've actually seen the number of new cases double in the last week," Gurdasani said. "This is what early exponential rises look like." Public health experts have warned that a spike in coronavirus infections in G......

We should all know by now that too much salt in our food is bad for our health. So why are 3 million people around the world dying every year from the consequences of excessive salt consumption? World Health Organization (WHO) member states had set a target in 2013 of reducing salt consumption by 30 per cent on average until 2025. However according to the WHO’s Global Nutrition Report 2020, salt consumption only decreased by 0.2 per cent that year instead of the 2.4 per cent necessary. Therefore, this target is unlikely to be met, according to the WHO. Now, in a renewed effort to reduce the am......

In front of the Hospital Ronaldo Gazzola in the north of Rio de Janeiro there are 30 mats, made to look like beds with sheets and pillows, with roses lying on them. They're meant to symbolize the hospital beds in which Covid-19 patients are treated. Many stop by to lay a rose for someone who has died here during the pandemic. But it's not just about remembrance. "We're here to demand the basics: a crisis cabinet, a joint effort by the president of the republic, the governors and the mayors," Antonio Carlos Casto, head of the non-governmental organization Rio de Paz, says. Brazil, a country of ......