Culture

Adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) is linked to lower death rates in a low-income population in southeastern US.

In a low-income population from the southeastern US, higher adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) was linked with 14%-23% lower mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other diseases, according to a study published by Wei Zheng and colleagues from Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

In order to provide farmers and anyone else involved in managing agricultural ecosystems with a tool enabling them to assess the impact of their farming practices on the health of their crops and soils, the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development NEIKER-Tecnalia has created its new TSEAs or ‘Agricultural Ecosystem Health Cards’.

If you grew up in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s, sectarianism pervaded every aspect of your everyday life. In fact, such is the pervasiveness of sectarianism that it’s almost been normalised. These days, it’s sometimes not even recognised or regarded as a problem.

Why do good people do bad things? It's a question that has been pondered for centuries, and new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology may offer some insights about when people succumb to versus resist ethical temptations.

If it feels like you forget new information almost as quickly as you hear it, even if you write it down, that’s because we tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. If we take notes effectively, however, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive.

The stronger our memory is of a certain food, the more likely we are to choose it - even if it is the more unattractive option. Psychologists at the University of Basel conducted a study on how memory influences our choices by offering various foods and using scans to track brain activity. The researchers were able to show that the influence of memory is mediated by increasing communication between the relevant brain areas. The study has been published in the scientific journal Neuron.

Many undocumented workers from Latin America risk migrating to the United States to take jobs in which they will be exploited because they are fleeing from desperate situations and see opportunities to help their families.

That scenario, says Gerardo F. Sandoval of the University of Oregon, emerged from a long-running case study in which under-the-radar networks driven by economic and political pressures were documented. These shadow networks tie workers to low-paying, labor-intensive jobs in new communities and to the towns they left.