Even social smokers are out of excuses. A recent study finds that it doesn’t matter whether you smoke every day or only on the weekends — at least when it comes to damaging your memory. For the study, researchers from Northumbria University recruited 84 students. A third of students were “social smokers,” who smoked about 20 cigarettes once or twice a week, usually on weekends. Another third were regular sm ...

Letting your mind wander from time to time can actually help your brain process information, and can serve as a workout for your "working memory," or your mental capacity for handling multiple thoughts and dealing with competing issues simultaneously. In fact, a new study published in the journal Psychological Sciencesuggests that if you frequently catch yourself daydreaming, you may have a strong working m ...

For something we spend half our life doing, a lot of us are pretty awful at sleeping. Here are our top 10 tips for falling asleep faster, getting quality rest, and waking up easier in the morning. 10. Prepare a Worthy Bed While your bed probably isn't the primary cause of insomnia, snoring, or other sleep problems, it can certainly contribute to your comfort at night. Make sure you're using the right pillow ...

In a blog post, Robert Krulwich of the public radio show Radiolab noted that there is no pink in the colors of the rainbow. Pink is actually a combination of red and violet, two colors, which, if you look at a rainbow, are on the opposite sides of the arc. Remember the old colors of the rainbow mnemonic ROYGBIV? The R (red) is as far as it can get from V (violet). That’s where the trouble lies. Pink can’t e ...

Breakfast can help prevent strokes, heart attack and sudden death. Advice on not to skip breakfast! For those who always skip breakfast, you should stop that habit now! You've heard many times that "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." Now, recent research confirms that one of the worst practices you can develop may be avoiding breakfast. Why? Because the frequency of heart attack, sudden death ...

Studies have shown that women outlive men. Across the industrialized world, women still live 5 to 10 years longer than men. Among people over 100 years old, 85% are women, according to Tom Perls, founder of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University and creator of the website LivingTo100.com. Time.com asks him why. Q: Why do women live longer than men? A: One important reason is the big delay — ...

When astronomers discovered the planet known as GJ 1214b a couple of years ago, they knew they had an oddball world on their hands. They just weren't certain what form the oddness took. Whirling around a star some 40 light-years from Earth, GJ 1214b was about 2.7 times as wide as our home planet, with about 20 times the volume, making it a "super-Earth," about midway in size between Earth and Neptune. It wa ...

About 165 years ago, Eta Carinae mysteriously became the second brightest star in the sky. In 20 years, after ejecting more mass than our sun, it unexpectedly faded When the sun finally dies some 5 billion years from now, the end will come quietly, the conclusion of a long, uneventful life. Our star will, in a sense, go flabby, swelling first, releasing its outer layers into space and finally shrinking into ...