Hot MedFax

FOMO. No, it's some new cereal or chocolate drink. And it's making millennials freak out and desperately try to avoid it. It's Fear of Missing Out . And this new behavior angst is quickly taking a toll on Generation Y—and it’s probably causing damage to your own life, according to newswise.com. Do you have trouble sitting through a movie without obsessively checking your phone? Does your family complain about your constant social media habit? If you panic at the thought of not having a window to the world, you may be experiencing FOMO—which was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. Living our lives through this virtual filter isn’t really living at all—it only fuels an anxious mindset that we must be ‘missing out,' the web site reports. But it's not just limited to millennials.  I find myself panicking, too, when I can't get to my email or my texts.   With at least 24 percent of teenagers online ‘almost constantly,’ it’s no sur...

I've always shied away from those Internet quizzes that make you answer questions to determine how old you are, not chronologically but healthwise.  Some of my half-century friends get in the 30s but I still stay away. Now how would you like to know when you'll die?  I can't imagine anything more gruesome! I've always lived my life based on serendipity -- you know, the things you never expect to happen but do, like meeting my husband after talking to a woman on a boat in the Bahamas who happened to live near me and going out on singles' weekends with her, then up to the Catskills to meet a husband for her, only I met mine. Those kinds of things. But a new study purports that a computer can tell you how old you will be when you die. I'd kind of like it to be a surprise. Maybe because I've fought cancer twice, death doesn't scare me so much (okay, maybe it's that I've been cancer-free for almost 10 years that does it).  But statisticia...

Want to get pregnant?  Don't shop so much. Really. Competition for social status may be an important driver of lower fertility in the modern world, suggests a new study, as reported by newswise.com. "The areas were we see the greatest declines in fertility are areas with modern labor markets that have intense competition for jobs and an overwhelming diversity of consumer goods available to signal well-being and social status," says senior author Paul Hooper, an anthropologist at Emory University. "The fact that many countries today have so much social inequality - which makes status competition more intense - may be an important part of the explanation." Across the globe, from the United States to the United Kingdom to India, fertility has gone down as inequality and the cost of achieving social status has gone up. "Our model shows that as competition becomes more focused on social climbing, as opposed to just putting food on the table, pe...

I can so relate to this. A new study says that many of us baby boomers may not be able to retire at 65 and maintain our style of living because we're afraid to think about dying . Say what? Yup.  Roughly 52 percent of American households will not have enough retirement income to maintain their standard of living if they retire at 65.The reason? People are afraid of thinking about their own death, according to newswise.com.   Fear of death tempts people to avoid making decisions about how to manage their savings during retirement. Researchers from Boston College in Massachusetts decided to investigate why so few people choose to invest in annuities, a guaranteed steady stream of income during retirement. The public's lack of interest in annuities, known as the "annuity puzzle," has stumped researchers for decades. The investigators explored a new solution to the annuity puzzle: What if people avoid this option because it evokes thoughts about mortali...

Did you know there's a face everyone of every nationality recognizes? It's the furrowed brow, pressed lips and raised chin, and because we make it when we convey negative sentiments, such as “I do not agree,” researchers are calling it the “not face.”  Or call it the frown, though it's not completely that scowling look.  It's more a pout, like when your kid says, "You're not the boss of me." You've seen it.   The look proved identical for native speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and American Sign Language (ASL). It's a universal facial expression that is interpreted across many cultures as the embodiment of negative emotion. Researchers found that we all instinctively make the “not face” as if it were part of our spoken or signed language, according to newswise.com. What’s more, the researchers discovered that ASL speakers sometimes make the “not face” instead of signing the word “not”—a use of facial expression in ASL tha...

Cows can read. Chocolate makes you lose weight.  Sunbathers live longer. I know, I know.  If only.  But it's actually true..  Sunbathers live longer. New research is looking into the paradox that women who sunbathe are likely to live longer than those who avoid the sun, even though sunbathers are at an increased risk of developing skin cancer, newswise.com reports. An analysis of information on 29,518 Swedish women who were followed for 20 years revealed that longer life expectancy among women with active sun exposure habits was related to a decrease in heart disease and non-cancer/non-heart disease deaths, causing the relative contribution of death due to cancer to increase. Whether the positive effect of sun exposure demonstrated in this observational study is mediated by vitamin D, another mechanism related to UV radiation, or by unmeasured bias cannot be determined, so researchers believe additional research is warranted. I run outside year-r...

Do you really see what you think you see? Guess what?  You don't. Perception experts have long known that we see much less of the world than we think we do, according to newswise.com. A person creates a mental model of their surroundings by stitching together scraps of visual information gleaned while shifting attention from place to place. Counterintuitively, the very process that creates the illusion of a complete picture relies on filtering out most of what's out there. Kind of like focusing on just what's in front of you when you're trying to ignore distractions.   "The visual system really cares about objects," says postdoctoral fellow J. Eric T. Taylor, who is the lead author on the paper reporting this. "If I move around a room, the locations of all the objects - chairs, tables, doors, walls, etc. -- change on my retina, but my mental representation of the room stays the same." Objects play such a fundamental role in how we...