Our ability to Focus may Falter after eating one meal high in Saturated fat

Study participants’ loss of focus after a single meal was eye-opening for the researchers.
Photo: Shutterstock.com

Study also looks at effect of leaky gut on concentration. Fatty food may feel like a friend during these troubled times, but new research suggests that eating just one meal high in saturated fat can hinder our ability to concentrate – not great news for people whose diets have gone south while they’re working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study compared how 51 women performed on a test of their attention after they ate either a meal high in saturated fat or the same meal made with sunflower oil, which is high in unsaturated fat.

Their performance on the test was worse after eating the high-saturated-fat meal than after they ate the meal containing a heal...

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Breakthrough study of Perplexing Stellar Pulsations

Sound waves bouncing around inside a star cause it to expand and contract, which results in detectable brightness changes. This animation depicts one type of Delta Scuti pulsation — called a radial mode — that is driven by waves (blue arrows) traveling between the star’s core and surface. In reality, a star may pulsate in many different modes, creating complicated patterns that enable scientists to learn about its interior.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Astronomers have detected elusive pulsation patterns in dozens of young, rapidly rotating stars thanks to data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)...

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Surplus Antioxidants are Pathogenic for Hearts and Skeletal Muscle

3d rendered illustration of a jogger's muscles.
This discovery may have clinical importance in management of heart failure.

This discovery may have clinical importance in management of heart failure. Oxidative stress can be pathological. Now researchers report that the other end of the redox spectrum, reductive stress, is also pathological. Reductive stress causes pathological heart enlargement and diastolic dysfunction in a mouse model.

Many heart diseases are linked to oxidative stress, an overabundance of reactive oxygen species. The body reacts to reduce oxidative stress — where the redox teeter-totter has gone too far up — through production of endogenous antioxidants that reduce the reactive oxygen species. This balancing act is called redox homeostasis.

But what happens if the redox teeter-totter goes too far down, crea...

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Speeding up Long-Range Coherent LiDAR

Johann Riemensberger, Anton Lukashchuk, Maxim Karpov, Wenle Weng, Erwan Lucas, Junqiu Liu, Tobias J. Kippenberg. Massively parallel coherent laser ranging using soliton microcombs, Nature 13 May 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2239-3

LiDAR is a technique used for measuring distances with laser light. Researchers now show a new way to speedup a type of LiDAR engine by using photonic circuits. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) comprised an array of techniques using laser light to measure distances by multiplying the time delay between transmitted and received optical signals with the speed of light. Modern 3D LiDAR sensors combine high lateral/vertical and radial resolution, and are key components in the ongoing revolution of level 4 and 5 self-driving cars.

The prominence of 3D LiDAR...

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