When a baby starts sniffling and sneezing, the type of bacteria in their nose may predict how long the cold will last, a new study finds. Babies with a wide variety of bacteria in the nose recover faster from their first cold than those with less variety, the researchers said. “It’s well known that different types of bacteria live in our gut. The respiratory tract is also home to a wide variety of bacteria,” said study author Roland Neumann, of University Children’s Hospital of Basel, Switzerland. “We are beginning to understand that the types and numbers of these bacteria, what we refer to as the microbiota, can influence our respiratory health,” he added. For the study, the researchers took nose swabs from 183 babies as soon as they developed symptoms of their first cold, and again three weeks later. On average, the babies’ cold symptoms lasted about two weeks. Babies whose symptoms lasted three weeks or longer had less variety of bacteria in their noses. Also, their nose bacteria was more likely to be dominated by the Moraxellaceae or Streptococcaceae families. Some of those bacteria are known to be linked with respiratory disease. The study was published Dec. 2 in the journal ERJ Open Research. The findings could help improve understanding of the role respiratory tract bacteria plays in infections and long-term conditions such as…  read on >

Intimacy plays a larger role in casual sex among college students than previously thought, a new U.S. study reports. Researchers analyzed the results of an online survey that asked several hundred students at a university in the Northeast about their romantic relationships and casual sex. As expected, affectionate and intimate activities — such as cuddling, spending the night, eye gazing and foreplay — were more common in relationship sex than in casual sex, but the rate of these acts in casual sex was much higher than anticipated. While women were more likely to engage in intimate acts, there were no gender differences in terms of eye gazing and foreplay. “We have a stereotype that casual sex [hookups] are just about meaningless sex, but this research shows this is not necessarily true,” said study author Ann Merriwether, a developmental psychologist and lecturer at Binghamton University in New York. The study “shows intimacy is important and desired by many people, especially those who prefer hookups to more traditional relationships,” she added in a university news release. A survey question that asked students if they prefer casual sex or sex in a long-term relationship led to a surprising finding. “Young adults who indicated they prefer casual sexual encounters over relationship sex were more likely to want affection and intimacy from them. This suggests they seek to meet their…  read on >

Those Sunday crossword puzzles may not prevent the aging brain from slowing down — but they might protect it in a different way, a new study suggests. Researchers looked at the “use it or lose it” theory on brain health. The concept holds that mentally engaging activities — from reading to crosswords to board games — may help the brain resist dementia later in life. In this study, older adults who said they enjoyed those pastimes were no less likely to show signs of mental decline over time, versus other older folks. But they did, on average, score higher on standard tests of mental sharpness. That means that while they did decline over time, they did so from a higher “starting point,” the researchers explained. “The results indicate that a lifetime of engagement lifts you to a high point from which you decline, and that can be considered as passive cognitive reserve,” said lead researcher Roger Staff, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. “Starting from a high point,” he said, “will mean that the threshold at which you are considered impaired will be farther into the future.” “Cognitive reserve” can be seen as the brain’s ability to find alternative ways to get things done. In theory, a person with greater cognitive reserve may be able to withstand pathological changes in the brain for a…  read on >

More than 10,000 nerve fibers — many more than expected — power the human clitoris, according to Oregon researchers who were able to count them for the first time while performing gender-affirming genital surgery. That’s about 20% more than previous estimates, they said. “It’s startling to think about more than 10,000 nerve fibers being concentrated in something as small as [the] clitoris,” said Dr. Blair Peters, a plastic surgeon from the Transgender Health Program at Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU) in Portland. He said it’s particularly surprising if you compare the clitoris to other, larger parts of the body, including the human hand. “Even though the hand is many, many times larger than the clitoris, the median nerve only contains about 18,000 nerve fibers, or fewer than two times the nerve fibers that are packed into the much-smaller clitoris,” Peters said in a university news release. The clitoris’ only job is enabling pleasurable sensations. It consists of the highly sensitive glans outside the body and more tissue internally. Internal parts of the clitoris include the dorsal nerve, which is the main one responsible for sensation. Peters collected samples of dorsal nerve tissue from seven transmasculine (assigned female at birth but do not identify as female) volunteers who were undergoing gender-affirming genital surgery. A small amount of the tissue is typically trimmed during phalloplasty, a…  read on >  read on >