Good Sleep may well enhance Undergrads' Learning ability

A new study finding reports that the sufficient sleep improves college students' ability to learn.

The study included 102 university undergraduate students who had never taken an economics course and were given an introductory lecture on supply and demand microeconomics. Those tested on the material after they got adequate sleep over a 12-hour period had better scores than those who took the test after being awake for 12 hours.

The findings show that sleep can help college students retain and integrate new information needed to solve problems on an exam.

"Our findings demonstrate the importance of sleep to the ability to flexibly combine distinct concepts to solve novel problems. This ability is critical to classroom learning," lead author Michael Scullin, a doctoral candidate in the Behavior, Brain and Cognition program at Washington University in St. Louis, said in an American Academy of Sleep Medicine news release.

Change in diet can slow cancer growth | A Study

A study has suggested that eating a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may reduce the risk of cancer and slow the growth of tumors already present. The study has been published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research

The study was conducted in mice, but it will be effective on humans says the scientists involved in the study.

"This shows that something as simple as a change in diet can have an impact on cancer risk," said lead researcher Gerald Krystal, a distinguished scientist at the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre.

Krystal and his colleagues implanted various strains of mice with human tumor cells or with mouse tumor cells and assigned them to one of two diets. The first diet, a typical Western diet, contained about 55 per cent carbohydrate, 23 per cent protein and 22 per cent fat.

The second, which was somewhat like a South Beach diet but higher in protein, contained 15 per cent carbohydrate, 58 per cent protein and 26 per cent fat. They found that the tumor cells grew consistently slower on the second diet.

As well, mice genetically predisposed to breast cancer were put on these two diets and almost half of them on the Western diet developed breast cancer within their first year of life while none on the low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet did.