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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have used fMRI to examine what happens to a person’s brain when it is dehydrated, sharing their findings in a new study published by Physiological Reports. The team asked volunteers to perform a repetitive task—pushing a specific button when a yellow square appeared on a monitor—for 20 minutes without hydrating. Even when no dehydration is present, the authors noted that “exertion and heat” can have a negative impact on a person’s ability to function—when dehydration does kick in, it just makes that negative impact that much worse. “We wanted to tease out whether exercise and heat stress alone have an impact on your cognitive function and study the effect of dehydration on top of that,” principal investigator Mindy Millard-Stafford, PhD, a professor at Georgia Tech, said in a prepared statement. “We found a two-step decline.” Business Standard also covered the work here.