Lifeboat Foundation

Serious psychological distress among U.S. adults remained fairly steady between April and July 2020, according to a research letter published online Nov. 23 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Emma E. McGinty, Ph.D., from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and colleagues conducted two waves of the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Civic Life and Public Health Survey (April 7 to April 13, 2020, and July 7 to July 22, 2020). Changes in psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic was evaluated among 1,337 U.S. adults.

The researchers found that 13 percent of respondents reported serious distress in July 2020 versus 14.2 percent in April 2020, with 72 percent of adults reporting serious distress in both waves. The prevalence of serious distress was highest among adults aged 18 to 29 years (25.4 percent in April versus 26.5 percent in July), those with income less than $35,000 (20.2 percent in April versus 21.2 percent in July), and Hispanic individuals (17.9 percent in April versus 19.2 percent in July) at both time points. Among those with serious distress, the most common stressors were concerns about contracting COVID-19 (65.9 percent) and pandemic effects on employment (65.1 percent) and finances (60.6 percent). Educational interruptions were a stressor among adults with serious distress attending college and/or with school-aged children (69 percent).

There has been a spike in severe psychological distress in young Australian adults under 35, according to new analysis from The Australian National University (ANU).

The study—which tracked 3,155 Australians—is the first-of-its-kind to compare mental health data before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Young Australians aged 18 to 24 and those aged 25 to 34 are significantly worse off in terms of mental health than those who are older,” Associate Professor Ben Edwards, from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, said.

When the novel coronavirus roared into the U.S., mental health took a back seat to physical health. The number one priority was making sure hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed and that as many lives as possible could be saved.

Schools closed, remote work became the norm, restaurants shuttered and getting together with friends was no longer possible. The news cycle spun with story after story highlighting the ever-increasing number of cases and deaths, while unemployment soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression.

Any one of these shifts could be expected to cause an increase in mental health issues. Put together, they created a a perfect storm for a crisis.

Many Australians have welcomed the gradual easing of coronavirus restrictions. We can now catch up with friends and family in small numbers, and get out and about a little more than we’ve been able to for a couple of months.

All being well, restrictions will continue to be lifted in the weeks and months to come, allowing us slowly to return to some kind of “normal”.

This is good news for the economy and employment, and will hopefully help ease the high levels of distress and mental health problems our community has been experiencing during the pandemic.

For centuries, people have been using mindfulness meditation to try to relieve their pain, but neuroscientists have only recently been able to test if and how this actually works. In the latest of these efforts, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine measured the effects of mindfulness on pain perception and brain activity.

The study, published July 7, 2022 in Pain, showed that mindfulness meditation interrupted the communication between brain areas involved in pain sensation and those that produce the sense of self. In the proposed mechanism, pain signals still move from the body to the brain, but the individual does not feel as much ownership over those pain sensations, so their pain and suffering are reduced.

“One of the central tenets of mindfulness is the principle that you are not your experiences,” said senior author Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “You train yourself to experience thoughts and sensations without attaching your ego or sense of self to them, and we’re now finally seeing how this plays out in the brain during the experience of acute pain.”

Elon Musk announced he will walk away from his tumultuous $44 billion offer to buy Twitter, leaving the deal on the verge of collapse. The Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter’s board Friday saying he is terminating the acquisition.

But Twitter isn’t accepting Musk’s declaration. The chair of Twitter’s board, Bret Taylor, tweeted in response that the board is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

Twitter could have pushed for a $1 billion breakup fee that Musk agreed to pay under these circumstances. Instead, it looks ready to fight to complete the deal, which the company’s board has approved and CEO Parag Agrawal has insisted he wants to consummate.

The discovery will help us understand more about the evolution of our galaxy and learn about fast-moving central stars.

For the function of many biomolecules, their three-dimensional structure is crucial. Researchers are therefore not only interested in the sequence of the individual building blocks of biomolecules, but also in their spatial structure. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), bioinformaticians can already reliably predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. For RNA molecules, however, this technology is still in its infancy. Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) describe a way to use AI to reliably predict the structure of certain RNA molecules from their nucleotide sequence in the journal PLOS Computational Biology on July 7, 2022.

For the work, the teams led by Vivian Brandenburg and Professor Franz Narberhaus from the RUB Chair of Biology of Microorganisms cooperated with Professor Axel Mosig from the Bioinformatics Competence Area of the Bochum Center for Protein Diagnostics.

Curiosity is important for human development and learning and encourages an exploration for new information. New research published in the Journal of Individual Differences found that high dispositional curiosity is related to greater general knowledge, but not necessarily related to fluid intelligence.

Curiosity is important for both crystallized intelligence (i.e., one’s general knowledge) and fluid intelligence (i.e., one’s ability to reason and use novel information). “Seeking out new environments, being more attentive, and exploring more and more comprehensively might, in turn, also increase the probability of gaining new information,” explain study author Freda-Marie Hartung and colleagues. “Thus, it is plausible to assume that interindividual differences in epistemic curiosity are related to interindividual differences in general knowledge.”

Thus, the researchers were interested in how dispositional curiosity influences one’s acquisition of knowledge and how fluid intelligence affects this relationship. Hartung and her colleagues recruited 100 participants during lectures at a German University to complete a self-report questionnaire on the relevant personality traits (i.e., curiosity, conscientiousness, social anxiety). They also completed measures assessing their general knowledge (i.e., geography, history, math, natural sciences) and fluid intelligence (i.e., reasoning and memory tasks).