Heart Medications Linked to Heart Attacks

According to a new study, patients taking beta-blockers and antiplatelet medications (such as aspirin) are at high risk of suffering a heart attack during very hot weather.

For people with coronary heart disease, beta-blockers are important medications that can improve survival and quality of life. Likewise, aspirin and other antiplatelet drugs can reduce the risk of a heart attack.

However, those protections could backfire during hot-weather events, a time when heart attacks are already more likely. A new study published on August 1 in the journal Nature Cardiovascular Research found that, among people suffering non-fatal heart attacks associated with hot weather, an outsize portion are taking these heart medications.

“Patients taking these two medications have higher risk,” said Kai Chen, an assistant professor in the Yale School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology (Environmental Health) and first author of the study. “During heat waves, they should really take precautions.”

Those safety precautions include cooling strategies like using air conditioning or visiting a public cooling center.

Air pollution, cold weather, and other external environmental factors can trigger heart attacks. There is growing evidence to suggest that hot weather can do so, too. However, epidemiologists are still working to identify which groups of people are most vulnerable to these environmental extremes.  READ MORE...

Restoring Cell & Organ Function After Death

Illustration of organ perfusion and cellular recovery with OrganEx technology. 

The cell-saving blood analog is delivered to vital organs one hour after death. 

Credit: Marin Balaic

Yale-developed technology restores cell and organ function in pigs after death, a potential organ transplant breakthrough.

Within just minutes of the final heartbeat, a cascade of biochemical events triggered by a lack of blood flow, nutrients, and oxygen begins to destroy a body’s cells and organs. However, a team of researchers at Yale University has discovered that massive and permanent cellular failure doesn’t have to happen so quickly.

Using a new technology the scientists developed that delivers a specially designed cell-protective fluid to organs and tissues, the team restored blood circulation and other cellular functions in pigs a full hour after their deaths. They report their findings in the August 3 edition of the journal Nature.

Their results may help extend the health of human organs during surgery and expand the availability of donor organs, the authors said.

“All cells do not die immediately, there is a more protracted series of events,” said David Andrijevic, associate research scientist in neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine and co-lead author of the study. “It is a process in which you can intervene, stop, and restore some cellular function.”  READ MORE...

Introverts Understand Better

Many of us tend to think of personality traits as either good or bad. Being anxious, for instance, is somewhere between unpleasant and debilitating. Extroversion generally helps people enjoy life and get ahead. But studies suggest things aren't nearly that simple. Almost every "good" trait also has drawbacks, and every "negative" one confers benefits.

Anxiety, for instance, can keep you from enjoying life and taking healthy risks. It also keeps you safe and improves your memory. Introversion is similar. Being quieter is definitely a handicap when it comes to standing out in a noisy world -- studies show that just talking a lot leads people to assume you're leadership material -- but as recent Yale research underlines, being an introvert also has big upsides.

Introverted folks, the study found, may not enjoy people as much as extroverts, but they understand them better. The shy and retiring actually have a much more accurate understanding of the psychology of others than those who spend more time socializing.

Introverts are better "natural psychologists"
Psychologists spend huge amounts of energy developing and carrying out studies to better understand the intricacies of human behavior. It turns out they could probably save themselves a lot of time just by asking the wallflower observing everyone from the corner at parties.

First, the Yale team tested nearly a thousand volunteers to see how accurately they could answer questions about well-established psychological truths -- questions like "Do people work harder in groups or individually?" or "Does taking out your frustrations on a pillow or stuffed toy make you feel better when you're angry?" (The research validated answers are "individually" and "no," if you're curious). Then they gave the volunteers a battery of personality tests. The shy and melancholy definitively outperformed the jovial and friendly.  READ MORE

Monkeys Have Conscious Experiences Too

 FROM YALE UNIVERSITY...

When humans look out at a visual landscape like a sunset or a beautiful overlook, we experience something — we have a conscious awareness of what that scene looks like. This awareness of the visual world around us is central to our everyday existence, but are humans the only species that experiences the world consciously? Or do other non-human animals have the same sort of conscious experience we do?

Scientists and philosophers have asked versions of this question for millennia, yet finding answers — or even appropriate ways to ask the question — has proved elusive. But a team of Yale researchers recently devised an ingenious way to try to solve this riddle.


Writing on March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they make the case that one non-human species — the rhesus macaque — also has a conscious awareness of the world around it.

“People have wondered for a long time whether animals experience the world the way we do, but it’s been difficult to figure out a good way to test this question empirically,” said Moshe Shay Ben-Haim, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and first author of the paper.

Researchers have known for a long time that people can be influenced by unconscious subliminal cues — visual stimuli presented just outside of our threshold for conscious awareness, said Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale who is co-senior author of the study along with her colleague Steve Chang, associate professor of psychology and of neuroscience, and Ran Hassin of Hebrew University.

“We tend to show different patterns of learning when presented with subliminal stimuli than we do for consciously experienced, or supraliminal stimuli,” she said.

If monkeys show the same “double dissociation” pattern that humans do, it would mean that monkeys probably experience the supraliminally presented stimuli in the same way as people do — as a conscious visual experience.

Ben-Haim, Santos, and their team thought of a novel way to explore whether macaques also exhibit a difference in learning when stimuli are experienced consciously versus non-consciously.

In a series of experiments, they had monkeys and humans guess whether a target image would appear on the left or right side of a screen. Before the target appeared, participants received a visual cue — a small star— on the side opposite of where the target would subsequently appear. The researchers varied whether the cue was presented supraliminally or subliminally. 

When the cue was presented for a few seconds, human participants successfully learned that the target would appear in the opposite location from the cue. But when the cue was presented subliminally — quickly enough that it escaped people’s conscious perception — participants showed a different pattern of performance; they continued to choose the side that was subliminally cued, failing to learn the rule that the cue predicted the opposite side.          READ MORE

Offering An Explanation

YALE UNIVERSITY

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Oxford University - The Crown Jewel of Education

If you had a PhD from any of these fine and upstanding universities you would be admired and revered and if you had more than more than one, your admiration might be doubled and you would have a GUARANTEED CHAIR at any university in our tiny little world that we refer to as EARTH in a WILD WILD WEST of a UNIVERSE...

BUT...  no matter how many PhD's you earned and were awarded, you still would not be able to give us a definitive answer as to how our universe was created and if there are other forms of life living out there in distant galaxies or if there has been time traveling aliens who have previously visited our earth...

What you would give us would be a highly educated OPINION...

a mere speculation or conjecture as to what you perceived was real...

and, even if you were in touch with a cosmic consciousness, you would not know how to harness it in such a way that it would provide you with the sum total of all knowledge...

as human beings and even with PhD's we are limited with our knowledge and understandings even though we pretend to students that is not the case at all...

Some now believe that there was a VOID in space and by definition VOIDS are empty of all matter...  yet, these VOIDS were in possession of DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY that when EXPLODED created our universe...  and because this dark energy is still around, our universe is continuing to expand into more VOIDS of non existence...

Excuse me for being relatively ignorant as Einstein might have once upon a time said, but this explanation makes no sense, in fact, it seems rather illogical to me that something from nothing could create you and me and all this other stuff around us.

Isn't some kind of CREATOR a more likely possibility...   I mean...  using OCCUM'S RAZOR as a precursor for our thoughts.