If you think the mind grinds to a halt when you’re doing nothing, think again. Spontaneous thought processes – including mind-wandering, but also creative thinking and dreaming – arise when thoughts are relatively free from deliberate and automatic constraints. Mind-wandering is not far from creative thinking.
It’s no secret that using tobacco is bad for you, but what has been a mystery until now is how tobacco causes increased inflammation throughout the body. Now, a team of researchers has learned why. Scientists show that nicotine activates certain white blood cells, called neutrophils, which in turn release molecules that lead to increased inflammation.
A protein that plays a critical role in the expression of cytokines and chemokines has been identified by researchers. They have noted that decreasing this protein suppresses the expression of these secreted factors. This suggests that there may be ways of promoting the positive effects of senescence while suppressing its negative effects.
The adrenergic nervous system controls when white blood cells circulate through the body, boosting the immune response by retaining T and B cells in lymph nodes at the time of day when they are most likely to encounter foreign antigens, scientists have discovered.
Results of a large-scale, multicenter study found that treatment with two thin-strut drug-eluting stents were both non-inferior to a durable polymer drug-eluting stent and showed favorable clinical outcomes at one year in treating an all-comers population with a high proportion of patients with acute coronary syndromes.
Although percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is most commonly guided by angiography alone, results from a new study investigating adjunctive imaging modalities showed that the use of a novel optical coherence tomography (OCT)-based stent sizing strategy results in similar minimal stent area (MSA) compared to intravascular ultrasound (IVUS)-guided PCI. Imaging-guided PCI (with both OCT and IVUS) also resulted in improved stent expansion and acute stent-based procedural success compared to angiography-guided PCI.
More than 50 percent of Americans changed their minds about intentions to smoke marijuana based on ramifications — or lack thereof — set forth by their state of residency, according to new research.
