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Daily meditation app may improve focus and memory

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Scientists at UC San Francisco have developed a personalized digital meditation training program that significantly improved attention and memory in healthy young adults—a group already at the peak of brain health—in just six weeks. The intervention, called MediTrain, utilizes a closed-loop algorithm that tailors the length of the meditation sessions to the abilities of the … Read more

Physicists can predict the jumps of Schrodinger’s cat (and finally save it)

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Yale researchers have figured out how to catch and save Schrödinger’s famous cat, the symbol of quantum superposition and unpredictability, by anticipating its jumps and acting in real time to save it from proverbial doom. In the process, they overturn years of cornerstone dogma in quantum physics. The discovery enables researchers to set up an … Read more

Combination of water scarcity and inflexible demand puts world’s river basins at risk

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Nearly one-fifth of the world’s population lives in a stressed water basin where the next climate change-driven incident could threaten access to an essential resource for agriculture, industry and life itself, according to a paper by University of California, Irvine researchers and others, published today in Nature Sustainability. The study’s authors analyzed trends in global water … Read more

Mapping groundwater’s influence on the world’s oceans

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Researchers at The Ohio State University have created high-resolution maps of points around the globe where groundwater meets the oceans–the first such analysis of its kind, giving important data points to communities and conservationists to help protect both drinking water and the seas. In a study published June 3 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the … Read more

An island haven for frogs in a sea of extinctions

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New Guinea is one of the only places in the world where frogs are safe from the species-destroying chytrid fungus. An international team of scientists has published a new paper that shows how to keep it that way, but they need help to carry out their plan. The chytrid fungus has wiped out more than … Read more

Explorers and soldiers don’t worry — anesthesia works in Antarctica!

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New research presented at this year’s Euroanaesthesia congress (the annual meeting of the European Society of Anaesthesiology) in Vienna, Austria (1-3 June) shows that commonly used anaesthetic drugs still work, even after exposure to the extreme environmental conditions of the Antarctic. The study was conducted by Professor Major Ricardo Navarro-Suay of Hospital Central de la … Read more