What Comes After the Recession: A Fun Free Recovery

Even as Congress belatedly tackles legislation that would cut U.S. carbon emissions and international negotiators bickered over a global climate deal in Bonn, Germany, a new report by several federal agencies underscores the truths that too often risk getting lost in politics: global warming is real, it’s happening now, and if we don’t act soon, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic.

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Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams (and Sleep) Have Meaning

Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams — and, more so, sleep — are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotion. According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. “Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass,” says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Larks and Owls: How Sleep Habits Affect Grades

There are at least a few in every college dorm: students who seem to exist in their own time zone, in bed hours before everyone else and awake again at daybreak, rested and prepared for the morning’s first lecture. Sleep researchers refer to these early risers as larks , and new data presented this week at the annual Associated Professional Sleep Societies suggest that a student’s preferred sleeping schedule has a lot to do with his or her grade-point average in school. In one study, psychologists at Hendrix College in Arkansas found that college freshmen who kept night-owl hours had lower GPAs than early birds.

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Study: Why Diabetes Looks Different in Asia

For Asians, it seems, being young and thin isn’t enough to ward off Type II diabetes. Though the disease is typically associated with old age and obesity, a study published May 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that Asia’s growing number of diabetics are relatively young and well under weights traditionally matched with the disease

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Why India’s Communists Are Losing Ground

For decades, they have been a familiar sight in the sun-kissed Indian state of Kerala or the country’s crumbling eastern metropolis of Kolkata. The somber portraits of dead white men — a bearded Marx, a bespectacled Lenin, and Stalin, his moustache bristling — peer down at passers-by from banners strung up over palm trees or street-corner billboards, accompanied by the less-hallowed visages of local comrades. India’s Communists have been key players in the hurly burly of the world’s largest democracy, dominating the ballot box in states like West Bengal, where Kolkata is the capital, and where a Communist government has ruled for over thirty years.

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