ScienceDaily: Living Well News

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• Paying closer attention to attention
• Take the bat, leave the candy: The food environment of youth baseball
• Take notes by hand for better long-term comprehension
• Genetics explain why some kids are bigger than others
• Luck affects how we judge reckless actions
• Vitamin D supplements have little effect on risk of falls in older people
• Pain curbs sex drive in female mice, but not in males

Paying closer attention to attention Posted: 24 Apr 2014 08:27 AM PDT There may be an overreporting of attention problems in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), simply because parents and teachers are using a misplaced basis for comparison. They are testing and comparing children with FASD with children of the same physical or chronological age, rather than with children of the same mental age, which is often quite a lot younger.

Take the bat, leave the candy: The food environment of youth baseball Posted: 24 Apr 2014 08:27 AM PDT "Take me out to the ballgame" doesn't exactly conjure up images of apple slices and kale chips. The more likely culprits include French fries, soda and the occasional box of Crackerjacks. Unfortunately for children who play youth baseball, eating unhealthy food during practices and games may be contributing to weight problems, according to researchers.

Take notes by hand for better long-term comprehension Posted: 24 Apr 2014 07:28 AM PDT Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks: research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. "Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended -- and not for buying things on Amazon during class -- they may still be harming academic performance," says a psychological scientist involved in the study.

Genetics explain why some kids are bigger than others Posted: 23 Apr 2014 07:14 PM PDT The influence of genetic factors on differences between children's Body Mass Index increases from 43 percent at age four to 82 percent at age 10, reports a new study. The researchers studied 2,556 pairs of twins from the Twins Early Development Study. Data were collected in England and Wales in 1999 and 2005 when the twins were four and 10 years old respectively.

Luck affects how we judge reckless actions Posted: 23 Apr 2014 07:12 PM PDT A person, who acts immorally or recklessly but is "lucky" by escaping dire consequences, is judged less harshly than an "unlucky" person, even when both have committed the same act. "Moral luck" is a term used in philosophy that describes situations in which a person is subjected to moral judgments by others despite the fact that the assessment is based on factors beyond his or her control, i.e. "luck."

Vitamin D supplements have little effect on risk of falls in older people Posted: 23 Apr 2014 07:12 PM PDT A new meta-analysis concludes that there is no evidence to suggest that vitamin D supplements prevent falls, and that ongoing trials to test this theory are unlikely to change this result. Falls can be devastating for older people, and strategies to reduce fall risk are urgently needed as the global population ages. The results of trials that have investigated the ability of vitamin D to prevent falls -- and those of previous meta-analyses -- have been mixed. It is unclear how vitamin D supplements might prevent falls but, until now.

Pain curbs sex drive in female mice, but not in males Posted: 22 Apr 2014 05:20 PM PDT Pain from inflammation greatly reduced sexual motivation in female mice in heat -- but had no such effect on male mice, a study concludes. "We know from other studies that women's sexual desire is far more dependent on context than men's -- but whether this is due to biological or social/cultural factors, such as upbringing and media influence, isn't known," says a corresponding author of the study. "Our finding that female mice, too, show pain-inhibited sexual desire suggests there may be an evolutionary biology explanation for these effects in humans -- and not simply a sociocultural one."

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