If you are not inclined to save for the future, you may also have a tendency to ignore your health as researchers have found that poor physical health and financial health are driven by the same underlying psychological factors.

The decision to contribute to a retirement plan predicted whether or not an individual will act to correct poor physical health indicators, the findings showed.

Insufficient retirement funds and chronic health problems are at least partially driven by the same time discounting preferences, the researchers showed.

"We find that existing retirement contribution patterns and future health improvements are highly correlated," said Lamar Pierce, associate professor of strategy at Washington University in St. Louis in the US.

The study appeared in the journal Psychological Science.

Malaria may alter the way people smell to make them more alluring to mosquitoes, according to a new finding that can help detect the deadly disease non-invasively through body odour.

An infection with malaria pathogens changes the scent of infected mice, making those infected more attractive to mosquitoes, researchers have found.

Malaria is and remains a formidable disease that is transmitted to humans by the anopheles mosquito. The pathogen is a protozoan of the genus Plasmodium. If left untreated, malaria can be deadly.

In order to complete its life-cycle, the plasmodium parasite must eventually be acquired by another mosquito, which occurs when the insect bites an infected person.

In a new study, researchers from ETH Zurich and Pennsylvania State University show that the plasmodium parasite appears to manipulate its host by changing the characteristics of the infected individual's body odour, which makes the carrier more attractive to hungry mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes were most attracted to infected mice with a high concentration of gametocytes, the plasmodium parasite's reproductive cells, in their blood.

When the mosquito consumes these cells along with the blood, a new development cycle starts in the mosquito's gut.

However, the pathogens do not appear to trigger the expression of unique scent components.

"There appears to be an overall elevation of several compounds that are attractive to mosquitoes," said Consuelo De Moraes, from ETH Zurich.

The researchers believe it is logical that infected people smell more attractive but do not form highly specific body odours, especially given that the malaria pathogen can also have adverse effects on mosquitoes.

"Since mosquitoes probably don't benefit from feeding on infected people, it may make sense for the pathogen to exaggerate existing odour cues that the insects are already using for host location," said study leader Mark Mescher.

What researchers found most surprising is the fact that the malaria infection leaves its mark on body odour for life.

Even when infected mice no longer had symptoms, their body odour showed that they were carriers of the pathogen.

However, not all stages of the disease smelled the same: the scent profile of the acutely ill differs from the profile found in individuals exhibiting later stages of malaria infection.

Although the findings cannot be directly transferred to human malaria, they suggest that similar effects might be involved in the attraction of mosquitoes to infected people.

In addition to aiding efforts to disrupt malaria transmission by mosquitoes, researchers hope that findings may also be used to develop new non-invasive diagnostic procedures that would facilitate effective screening of human populations for malaria infections, particularly in order to identify individuals who don't otherwise have symptoms but remain capable of spreading the disease.

The study was published in the journal PNAS.

A new study reveals that early exposure to stress can change the parts of developing children's brain.

The study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, found that chronic, toxic stress like poverty, neglect and physical abuse can have lasting negative impacts in children.

These kinds of stressors, experienced in early life, might change the parts of developing children's brains responsible for learning, memory and the processing of stress and emotion, researchers said.

These changes may be tied to negative impacts on behaviour, health, employment and even the choice of romantic partners later in life, they said.

The study, carried out by the researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was based on data from 128 children, aged around 12 years, who had experienced physical abuse, neglect or poverty early in life or came from low socio-economic status households.

Researchers conducted extensive interviews with the children and their caregivers, documenting behavioural problems and their cumulative life stress. The team also took brain scans of the children and compared them with brain scans of other children growing up in middle-class families who had not been maltreated.

Researchers found that children exposed to stress had changes in the amygdalas than children who had not.

They also found that children from low socio-economic status households and children who had been physically abused also had smaller hippocampal volumes. Putting the same images through automated software showed no effects.

Behavioural problems and increased cumulative life stress were also linked to smaller hippocampus and amygdala volumes.