Category: Brain

8 Attorney Generals Investigate TikTok’s Impact on Youth’s Mental Health

Tom Patriot

TikTok has grown to 80 million US users in its six years of existence. According to Statista, 25% of these users are in the age bracket of 10-19 years old. The average TikTok user spends over 25 hours each month. That number surpasses time spent on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Aside from TikTok’s capabilities to hold a user’s attention, critics also believe that the social media platform may be doing long-term harm to children’s mental health. These claims caught the attention of the public.…

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Your spending data may reveal aspects of your personality

Tom Patriot

How you spend your money can signal aspects of your personality, according to research published in Psychological Science. Analyses of over 2 million spending records from more than 2,000 individuals indicate that when people spend money in certain categories, this can be used to infer certain personality traits, such as how materialistic they are or how much self-control they tend to have. “Now that most people spend their money electronically – with billions of payment cards in circulation worldwide – we can study these spending patterns at scale like never before,”…

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Legalized recreational marijuana a substitute for alcohol, but not tobacco

Tom Patriot

The recent wave of recreational cannabis legalization across the U.S. could generate $22 billion in sales per year, but not everyone is happy about it. New research to be published in an upcoming edition of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, titled, “Asymmetric Effects of Recreational Cannabis Legalization,” shows the alcohol industry could be impacted when the substance is legalized. “It appears the alcohol industry has a valid reason to be concerned about legal marijuana and may need creative strategies to avoid market decline if it passes,” said Pengyuan Wang, an assistant…

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Copper compound shows further potential as therapy for slowing ALS

Tom Patriot

A compound with potential as a treatment for ALS has gained further promise in a new study that showed it improved the condition of mice whose motor neurons had been damaged by an environmental toxin known to cause features of ALS. ALS patients are categorized either as familial – meaning two or more people in their family have had the disease, which in their case is linked to inherited genetic mutations – or sporadic, which accounts for about 90% of the cases. Sporadic means the cause or causes are unknown.…

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Two hours a week is key dose of nature for health and wellbeing

Tom Patriot

Research study led by the University of Exeter, published in Scientific Reports and moneyed by NIHR, discovered that people who spend at least 120 minutes in nature a week are substantially most likely to report good health and greater mental wellbeing than those who don’t visit nature at all during an average week. Nevertheless, no such advantages were found for individuals who visited natural settings such as town parks, woodlands, nation parks and beaches for less than 120 minutes a week. The research study used information from almost 20,000 individuals…

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