Month: April 2012

BILBAO (Reuters) – sleep contributes to fix in the brain the knowledge acquired during the day and serves to improve the skills language, according to the conclusions of the work of the Belgian researcher, Nicolas Dumay, of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) San Sebastian. Dumay research sought to delve into functions that develops the brain while sleep, an issue on which science does not have a complete answer. His experiments, says, show that during the hours of sleep brain check the words learned during the day, and those fixed in the linguistic memory. The BCBL scientist used the learning of new words to prove his hypothesis on brain activity during sleep, says a press release from the International Basque Research Center. According to Dumay, who developed the experiment with English vocabulary, “the words fighting among them for access to memory in our brain”, and this experiment shows that “only after sleeping words newly learned achieved the status of assimilated word”. “Somehow, sleep makes real the words,” adds. The research of Dumay, published in the journal Cognition, specializing in the study of the brain, proved that during the hours of sleep the brain reviews the words learned during the day, improves language skills and sets the learned words. Undergoing experimental, developed at the University of York, in United Kingdom, researcher of the BCBL showed 36 new...

(Reuters) – many things are faster now that 50 years ago, but the arrival in the world of a baby in a natural way seems to not be one of them, according to a study of the U.S. Government. Compared to the 1960s, American women have taken in the last two years or three hours longer in giving birth, according to the researchers of the National Institute of American health care, which they said the finding suggests that doctors may need to rethink the definition of what is a “normal” birth. According to data published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, additional time is derived from the first stage of labor – the longest part of the process, before the stage of “push”. Mothers are also different. On average, they are older and weigh more, and their newborn infants are also larger. “But even when we take into account these demographic changes, childbirth is even longer,” said principal researcher Katherine Laughon, of the National Institute of child health and human development. Although Laughon said that the study could not fully identify possible reasons for the difference, one partial explanation could be the relief of pain of the anesthesia epidural, which is much more common today than 50 years ago. It is known that the epidural may slow delivery between 40 and 90 minutes. Data are based on...