NEW YORK:

A new study has shown that women remember the locations of items such as fruits and vegetables in a market better than men.

The finding is based on a study of about 86 adults, including both women and men, who were tested for their ability to remember the location of food stalls in a farmers’ market. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara led the study participants to certain stalls in Santa Barbara’s large Saturday farmers’ market.

They were then taken to a location in the centre of the market from where the stalls could not be seen.

The researchers then asked the participants to point to each stall’s location. The women were better at this than the men, reported the online edition of the New Scientist. Men hunted, women gathered. That is how the division of labour between the sexes is supposed to have been in the distant past. The new study confirmed that modern women are also genetically superior at this task because of adaptation during our hunter-gatherer past. — HNS

Reduced blood pressure

MELBOURNE: A new study suggests that reduction of blood pressure may cut down the risk of death for people suffering from Type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is a life threatening disease caused by high levels of sugar in the blood and scientists say that death rates could be cut by around one-fifth if patients took a combination of two blood pressure lowering drugs. People having Type 2 diabetes face a high risk of suffering from many serious complications including heart disease, blindness, nerve damage and kidney damage. The four-year study of 11,000 people with Type 2 diabetes shows that patients get benefits from the blood pressure lowering treatment, irrespective of whether the patient has got high blood pressure or not, reported the online edition of Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News.

“We got a 10 percent proportional reduction in the risk of having a serious complication and almost double that reduction in the risk of dying from a serious event like a stroke or a heart

attack,” Bruce Neal, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Sydney said. — HNS