The Lewis Science, Health and Wellness Podcast

Exercise in almost any form can act as a stress reliever. Being active can boost your feel-good endorphins and distract you from daily worries.

Growing up in a Buddhist family, Lodro Rinzler found mindfulness at a young age. Here’s how the practice molded his worldview and guided life experiences into adulthood.

I've been meditating recently. And in my guided meditation practice, I'm asked to do a lot of things with my mind that I've never done. For instance, to try and widen my attention. In psychology courses, attention is often compared to a spotlight. A spotlight illuminates a particular area on the stage. Attention illuminates a particular spot in your visual field. If the discussion goes further, it might be to discuss just how large of an area the spotlight of attention illuminates. But the point is always to get objective answers about attention, never subjective ones. Meditation gives a subjective, experientially-based insight into the mind that complements the objective one provided by psychology.

The influence of different tracking schemes on detected tropical cyclone activity and responses in the Hurricane Working Group experiments is examined herein. These are idealized atmospheric general circulation model experiments aimed at determining and distinguishing the effects of increased sea surface temperature and other increased CO2 effects on tropical cyclone activity. Two tracking schemes are applied to these data and the tracks provided by each modeling group are analyzed.

Plant-based or plant-forward eating patterns focus on foods primarily from plants. This includes not only fruits and vegetables, but also nuts, seeds, oils, whole grains, legumes, and beans. It doesn’t mean that you are vegetarian or vegan and never eat meat or dairy. Rather, you are proportionately choosing more of your foods from plant sources.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has made the symptoms of COVID-19 crystal clear: fever, cough, and shortness of breath. But as more and more people develop the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus, experts are seeing a wide range of symptoms in patients—and they tend to overlap with the common cold, flu, and even allergies.

Research shows that
teenagers, more often than people of any other age, tend to follow their
short-term impulses rather than pursuing long-term goals. Why do teenagers have so much difficulty controlling their impulses? And how does this get better as you get older?

Young people may think that vaping does no harm—and that's a problem.

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Federal and state officials have reported hundreds of total possible cases of pulmonary disease and several deaths that may be related to vaping. Patients’ symptoms ranged from cough, chest pain and shortness of breath to fatigue, vomiting, diarrhea, and fever, according to the CDC.

5 Ways to Shut Off Your Brain Before Bed So You Get Restful Sleep

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A buzzing mind is often the reason we can't doze off — or sleep restfully. Fortunately, these activities help "shut off the brain," and they can be tailored to your own needs and circumstances.

CDC is responding to an outbreak of respiratory disease caused by a novel (new) coronavirus that was first detected in China and which has now been detected in more than 100 locations internationally, including in the United States. The virus has been named “SARS-CoV-2” and the disease it causes has been named “coronavirus disease 2019” (abbreviated “COVID-19”).

The ExoMars mission to find life on Mars moved a step closer to take-off this week after NASA unveiled the first results of an AI system that will support the search.

The former Space Race rivals of Russia and the US plan to use AI to scan rocks on the Red Planet for signs of life. Eventually, they aim to use the system in future missions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

For the first time in 55 years, a woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics — Prof. Donna Strickland. This win has publicly highlighted that women are still under-represented in science, particularly in physics.

Sure, emissions have fallen. But a closer look at how the global crisis is influencing the environment reveals some surprising dynamics.

As forests in California and the Western U.S. are hit by rising numbers of fires and disease outbreaks related to climate change, some experts argue that using dead and diseased trees to produce biomass energy will help to restore forests and reduce CO2 emissions.

Pollution and greenhouse gas emissions have fallen across continents as countries try to contain the spread of the new coronavirus. Is this just a fleeting change, or could it lead to longer-lasting falls in emissions?

Sunday, 11 February, is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. To mark the day, we asked female scientists from around the world to reflect on their experiences and offer their advice. 

Not only do I think we need to revolutionize the way we as patients and healers collaborate; I also think we need to redefine how we think about health.

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It's time to think BIG, baby. "Health" is simply too small, and you can't cram us into little boxes that don't even begin to contain the vast expansiveness of the brilliant beings we all are. We've gotta blow open the box and make room for all the parts of us that may be in need of healing.

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Usually, health gets diminished to the well-being of the physical body - things like physical fitness, good nutrition, and the absence of disease. In some cases, the health of the mind is included, and the absence of mental illness is wrapped into the definition.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen that people can adapt quickly to ensure that their social needs are met after being forced to isolate and socially distance. Many individuals turned immediately to music, as evidenced by pe

ople singing from balconies, watching live

concerts on social media, and groupsinging online. In this article, we show how these musical

adaptations can be understood through the latest advances in the social neuroscience of music an area that, to date, has been largely overlooked.

A large, self-sustaining, floating research lab as big as an island could be the next big thing in ocean cleanup.

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The 8th Continent, as it’s called, has won the 2020 Grand Prix prize for architecture and innovation of the sea, and is designed to allow the operators to live, work, eat, sleep, and study there full-time.

Amusement and pleasant surprises – and the laughter they can trigger – add texture to the fabric of daily life.

Those giggles and guffaws can seem like just silly throwaways. But laughter, in response to funny events, actually takes a lot of work, because it activates many areas of the brain: areas that control motor, emotional, cognitive and social processing.

As I found when writing “An Introduction to the Psychology of Humor,” researchers now appreciate laughter’s power to enhance physical and mental well-being.

Technical advances may be making it easier to build dangerous biological materials from scratch, with few regulations.

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If DNA is the code of life, then outfits like GeneArt are printshops — they synthesize custom strands of DNA and ship them to scientists, who can use the DNA to make a yeast cell glow in the dark, or to create a plastic-eating bacterium, or to build a virus from scratch. T

What’s happening in your brain and body when you are having an aesthetic experience?

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Where we come from, how we were raised, and our unique experiences all contribute to what we perceive as beautiful.

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