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Hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters across the United States caused $95 billion in damage last year, according to new data, almost double the amount in 2019 and the third-highest losses since 2010.

Those losses occurred during a year that was one of the warmest on record

“Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,”

Frequent memory lapses are likely to be noticeable because they tend to interfere with daily living.

What’s being forgotten?

may cause individuals to get lost in a familiar place or put something in an inappropriate place because they can’t remember where it goes (think car keys in the refrigerator).

What’s unique about COVID-19 is that it actually is not nasal congestion or that nasal inflammatory response that is causing the smell loss. The virus actually crosses the blood-brain barrier and gets into the nervous system.

Some people recover their ability to smell within a few days or weeks, but for some people it’s been going on for much longer.

Food doesn’t taste good anymore because how you perceive taste is really a combination of smell, taste and even the sense of touch. Some people are reporting weight loss due to loss of appetite, and they’re just not able to take pleasure in the things that they’ve previously found pleasurable.

No matter how much I pay attention to the sunk cost fallacy, I still naturally gravitate towards it.

The reason we can’t ignore the cost, even though it’s already been paid, is that we wired to feel loss far more strongly than gain.

They asked subjects to assume they had spent $100 on a ticket for a ski trip in Michigan, but soon after found a better ski trip in Wisconsin for $50 and bought a ticket for this trip too. They then asked the people in the study to imagine they learned the two trips overlapped and the tickets couldn’t be refunded or resold. Which one do you think they chose, the $100 good vacation, or the $50 great one? Over half of the people in the study went with the more expensive trip. It may not have promised to be as fun, but the loss seemed greater.

While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various metabolic and hormonal changes while it’s losing weight, the Australian team detected something new. A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.

worried about her memory, wondering if she could have the beginnings of dementia

no more difficulty than the rest of us her age in remembering events, names and places, her physician suggested that, given her level of concern, she should have things checked out

two days of tests of her cognitive abilities

What is wrong with the economies of the West—and with economics?

With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades—mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia—have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end. The setback has cost the less advantaged not only a loss of income but also a loss of what economists call inclusion—access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect.

The classical idea of political economy has been to let wage rates sink to whatever level the market takes them, and then provide everyone with the “safety net” of a “negative income tax,” unemployment insurance, and free food, shelter, clothing, and medical care

Regulators on Friday said a new version of a popular diabetes medicine could be sold as a weight-loss drug in the U.S.

In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing.

"With existing drugs, you're going to get maybe 5% to 10% weight reduction, sometimes not even that,"

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year led to a devastating loss of jobs and income across the global south, threatening hundreds of millions of people with hunger and lost savings and raising an array of risks for children,

, in the journal Science Advances, found "staggering" income losses after the pandemic emerged last year, with a median 70% of households across nine countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America reporting financial losses.

By April last year, roughly 50% or more of those surveyed in several countries were forced to eat smaller meals or skip meals altogether, a number that reached 87% for rural households in the West African country of Sierra Leone.

Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”

That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption

“We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”

In people it is called episodic memory, and it involves a sense of self. In animals, it’s called episodic-like memory, because it’s difficult to try to plumb something as elusive as self without the aid of language.

Dr. Fugazza and colleagues reported online in Current Biology that this showed that the dogs remembered an event they hadn’t been concentrating on, the trainer’s action. She said one aspect strengthened that conclusion: The dogs tended to lie down immediately when they got back to the mat, suggesting that their heads were in “lie down” mode, not “do it” mode.

He said human episodic memory is lost in Alzheimer’s disease and he and others study animal memory in hopes of learning how to combat that loss. The work on dogs offers a new technique that could be very useful, he said.

When presented with potential gains, highly loss-averse participants showed intensifying activity in their ventral striatums, and their game play improved. But when they had an opportunity to win $100, their performance declined precipitously. They choked. Their counterparts with low loss aversion — who ought to have been unfazed by the prospect of losing their money — did better in all of their games, except when they were faced with losing $100. Then they choked, consistently.

People supposed to be strongly hostile to losing choked only when they might win; people supposed to be unfazed by losses fell apart only when faced with losing.

But the results indicate that how someone frames a high-pressure situation, and whether winning or losing is emphasized, affect performance.

General anesthesia has transformed surgery from a ghastly ordeal to a procedure in which the patient feels no pain.

“integrated-information theory,” which holds that consciousness relies on communication between different brain areas, and fades as that communication breaks down.

neural markers of consciousness—or more precisely, the loss of consciousness—a group led by Patrick Purdon

Some people just aren’t bothered by the cold, no matter how low the temperature dips. And the reason for this may be in a person’s genes. Our new research shows that a common genetic variant in the skeletal muscle gene, ACTN3, makes people more resilient to cold temperatures.

Our recent study, conducted alongside researchers from Lithuania, Sweden and Australia, suggests that if you’re alpha-actinin-3 deficient, then your body can maintain a higher core temperature

While only 30% of participants with the alpha-actinin-3 protein reached the full 120 minutes of cold exposure, 69% of those that were alpha-actinin-3 deficient completed the full cold-water exposure time.

By 2021, it is forecast that there will be around 3 billion active monthly users of social media. From the statistics alone, it’s clear that social media has become an integral (and to a large extent, unavoidable) part of our lives.

One implication of social media’s rapid rise, that of its relationship with young people’s mental health, has gathered a significant amount of attention in recent years.

So-called ‘social media addiction’ has been referred to by a wide variety of studies and experiments. It is thought that addiction to social media affects around 5% of young people, and was recently described as potentially more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes

s the coronavirus pandemic continues to cut a wide swath through American communities, many have started to ignore it or, worse, rationalize the country’s mounting losses as a “sad but unavoidable” fact of life.

the pandemic has disproportionately affected populations that are mostly out of sight and mind for the majority of Americans: elderly in care homes, minorities, farm and food workers, and prisoners.

More alarming is the sentiment that these deaths are a price worth paying to get the economy reopened since the elderly in nursing homes already face low life expectancies.

I, a conservative female, have spent years defending the Republican Party against claims of sexism. When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in.

Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I – and other female conservatives – said you were & back down like cowards.

I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc. You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door.

There is no mystery about Barack Obama’s greatest presidential achievement: He stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. True, he had plenty of help, including from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and from the top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. But if Obama had made one wrong step, what was a crushing economic slump could have become something much worse.

It is Obama’s unfortunate fate that the high-water mark of his presidency occurred in the first months, when the world flirted with financial calamity. The prospect of another Great Depression — a long period of worsening economic decline — was not far-fetched.

In the first quarter of 2009, as Obama was moving into the White House, monthly job losses averaged 772,000. The ultimate decline in employment was 8.7 million jobs, or 6.3 percent. Housing prices and stock values were collapsing. From their peak in February 2007 to their low point, housing prices dropped 26 percent. Millions of homeowners were “underwater” — their houses were worth less than the mortgages on them. Stock prices fell roughly by half from August 2007 to March 2009.