Education News: BSIP Scintists Analyse 4000-Year-Old Food Balls

Serum Institute of India may be the world’s best hope for producing enough vaccine to end the pandemic.

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

Archival footage married with part of a Christopher Hitchens speech, showing Saddam Hussein's final purge of the Iraqi Baath Party leadership. You'll notice a couple of small details are different than Hitchens remembers. The audience is larger, and the confessor does not come in wearing chains (metaphorically, perhaps, but not literally.) We don't know exactly how many hundreds of party members were killed in this purge in the whole of Iraq, but of the 68 taken out of this room on July 22, 1979, at least 22 were executed (by their fellow party members). Sadly, the bloodbath for Iraqis and ...

Here’s what’s become of them.

In 1900, a civil engineer called John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions about what the world would be like in 2000.

Personality traits have been found to be related to a variety of health outcomes. The aim of this study was to examine how personality traits were associated with adjustment to the COVID pandemic in college students. The sample included 484 first-year university students (76% female) attending a northeastern university who completed the Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality assessment at the beginning of a semester that was disrupted by the COVID pandemic. Using a phone-based app, students completed daily ratings of mood, perceived stress levels, and engagement in a number of health promotion activities (exercise, mindfulness, adequate sleep, etc.) throughout the semester both before and after the onset of the pandemic (e.g., a within-person longitudinal design). Results, as expected, showed that mood and wellness indices generally declined during the COVID period, although stress levels actually decreased. Further, irrespective of COVID, improved mood, less perceived stress and greater participation in health promotion activities were significantly associated with a number of personality traits including neuroticism (lower), extraversion (higher), agreeableness (higher), and conscientiousness (higher). Of primary interest, mixed-effects models were used to test how major personality traits interacted with any changes in daily ratings from the pre-COVID to COVID period. Significant interactions terms were found suggesting differential impacts of the COVID epidemic for students with low versus high levels of particular traits. Higher levels of extraversion, for example, were found to be related to decreases in mood as the pandemic progressed in contrast to those with lower extraversion, for whom there was a slight increase in mood over time. These data support the conclusion that personality traits are related to mental health and can play a role in a person’s ability to cope with major stressful events. Different traits may also be more adaptive to different types of stressors.