Tag Archive | psychology
LabBook November 2, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
Helping Your Fellow Rat
If you called someone a rat, they probably wouldn’t take it as a compliment. But in a clever new study published today in Science, a team of University of Chicago neurobiologists show that rodents could serve as role models for how humans should behave. Rats were given a difficult choice between heart and stomach: either […]
Lonely Hearts, Disrupted Sleep
Loneliness has had a tough run of late, with a growing body of research blaming it for everything from high blood pressure to heart disease to depression and cognitive decline. The research group of John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, has been among the leaders […]
Breast Cancer in Isolation
Loneliness can be deadly. In humans, there is a statistical relationship between social interaction and mortality – the more isolated you are, the lower your chances of living a long life. Rats kept in social isolation their entire life die at a younger age than littermates who lived in groups closer to their natural social […]
Linkage 8/26: Abortion Access, Bronchial Thermoplasty & Facebook
Since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, abortion has been a woman’s legal right (with ever-changing state-specific restrictions) in the United States. But one factor often trumps the legal status of abortion: access. Though abortion training is required for medical residents studying to become obstetrician-gynecologists, physicians are not required to perform the procedure or […]
Linkage 7/15: Chest Scan Caution & Under the Influence of Flags
Cancer used to be a black box, a disease that physicians could only monitor through surgical biopsies and indirect measures. But for the last thirty years, the use of computed tomography imaging, better known as CT scans, has allowed oncologists and cancer researchers to keep close watch on the growth or shrinkage of a tumor […]
Linkage 7/1: How to Do Heart Surgery, A Visit from Delilah, & More
Popular Mechanics typically offers step-by-step guides for changing your oil or building a bookcase. But in a recent feature they seriously upped the instructional ante with an “Extreme How-To” – How to Perform Open Heart Surgery. The expert chosen to guide their readers through this don’t-try-this-at-home process was Medical Center cardiac and thoracic surgeons Jai […]
The Genetics of Normal
In the 11 years since the blueprint of human life was decoded by the Human Genome Project, much of the focus has been on when those instructions fail. Scientists have used our newfound genetic knowledge to look for the roots of common and rare diseases, the gene or genes that can increase the risk of […]
An Eating Disorder Iceberg, Revealed
For some diseases, taking a census is easy. Most people who have cancer are diagnosed with the disease before they die and seek treatment, allowing for the collection of detailed national cancer statistics. But other diseases tend to hide in the shadows, undetected and under-counted due to infrequent diagnosis or an unwillingness of patients to […]
Can a Warm Room Melt Climate Change Skepticism?
As Chicago digs out from under two feet of snow and summer feels a million years away, it’s time for the usual jokes doubting the existence of global warming to come from certain quarters of society. It’s apparently a human reflex to start questioning the gradual climb of Earth’s temperatures while shivering knee-deep in snow […]
