By JANE E. BRODY “Lose 8 to 10 pounds per week, easily ... and you won’t gain the weight back afterward.” "Lose up to 2 pounds daily without diet or exercise!” “You could lose up to 10 lbs. this weekend!” “Clinically proven to give you a better body without spending countless hours dieting or working out.” “Lose 10 lbs. and unwanted inches in 48 hours. Guaranteed!” Do these promises sound too good to be true? Well, they are. They are among hundreds of advertising claims and testimonials touted by sellers of over-the-counter weight-loss remedies. They appear in leading magazines and newspapers, on television infomercials and the Web. And millions of people succumb to the pie-in-the-sky promises every day, throwing away good money and, sometimes, their good health along with it. More than $1.3 billion a year is spent on dietary supplements for weight loss, most of which have had little or no scientifically acceptable testing for effectiveness and safety, especially when used for months. More than 20 percent of women and nearly 10 percent of men have used nonprescription weight-loss supplements, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10211 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Short of a Nobel Prize, there are few scientific honors that the biologist Susan L. Lindquist has not won. In The Lab Susan Lindquist and her team tested 5,000 genes to find a few that express a protein capable of saving a yeast cell from the Parkinson’s gene. Among other accolades, she is a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, a member of the National Academies of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2006 recipient of the Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement. It has all come her way because of her imaginative research into how proteins function. Dr. Lindquist, the former director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies how molecular proteins change shape in cell division. The process, called protein folding, can— when it goes wrong — lead to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Last June, Dr. Lindquist and a group of colleagues published a paper in the journal Science reporting new clues about how Parkinson’s develops and how it might be treated. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 10210 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. “Can I ask you a question?” the young woman ventured. “Have you ever been depressed? Do you have any idea how bad it feels?” The patient, a married woman in her late 20s, had been tearfully describing her symptoms of depression during a consultation when she suddenly popped this question. How could I possibly understand or help her, she seemed to be asking, if I had not personally experienced her pain? Her question caught me by surprise and made me pause. O.K., I’ll admit it. I’m a cheerful guy who’s never really tasted clinical depression. But along the way I think I’ve successfully treated many severely depressed patients. Is shared experience really necessary for a physician to understand or treat a patient? I wonder. After all, who would argue that a cardiologist would be more competent if he had had his own heart attack, or an oncologist more effective if he had had a brush with cancer? Of course, a patient might feel more comfortable with a physician who has had personal experience with his medical illness, but that alone wouldn’t guarantee understanding, much less good treatment. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Depression
Link ID: 10209 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Every dog lover knows how a pooch expresses its feelings. The muscles on either side of the tail apparently reflect emotions like fear and love registering in the brain. Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the body means “don’t mess with me.” Ears perked up, wriggly body and vigorously wagging tail means “I am sooo happy to see you!” But there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language that may surprise attentive pet owners and experts in canine behavior. When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left. A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy. “This is an intriguing observation,” said Richard J. Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It fits with a large body of research showing emotional asymmetry in the brain, he said. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Animal Communication
Link ID: 10208 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN TIERNEY ALEXANDRIA, Va. —William E. Hurwitz, the prominent doctor on trial here for drug trafficking, spent more than two days on the witness stand last week telling a jury why he had prescribed painkillers to patients who turned out to be drug dealers and addicts. But the clearest explanation of his actions — and of the problem facing patients who are in pain — came earlier in the trial. It occurred, oddly enough, during the appearance of a hostile witness, Dr. Robin Hamill-Ruth, one of the experts who was paid by the federal prosecutors to analyze Dr. Hurwitz’s prescriptions for OxyContin and other opioids. Dr. Hamill-Ruth, who noted that she never prescribed the highest-strength OxyContin tablet, said some of Dr. Hurwitz’s actions were “illegal and immoral” because he prescribed high doses despite warning signs in patient behavior that the opioids were being resold or misused. Then, during cross-examination by the defense, Dr. Hamill-Ruth was shown records of a patient who had switched to Dr. Hurwitz after being under her care at the University of Virginia Pain Management Center. This patient, Kathleen Lohrey, an occupational therapist living in Charlottesville, Va., complained of migraine headaches so severe that she stayed in bed most days. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10207 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PARIS: Online gambling presents a special peril for people with Parkinson's warn doctors, a disease that boosts compulsive risk-taking. Internet casinos, poker and other online games can result in secret debts that can destroy a family, they say in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Parkinson's, a disease of the nerve system, is commonly known for problems with motor function, causing trembling, shaking and jerkiness. But, the BMJ editorial points out, Parkinson's patients also have problems with pathological gambling and other addictive behaviours. The phenomenon is worsened by dopamine agonists - the drugs that many take to ease their symptoms. A study published last year in the journal Neurology found that the prevalence of gambling addicts among Parkinson's patients was 3.4 per cent, which more than doubled to 7.2 per cent among those who take dopamine agonists. By comparison, in the general British population, compulsive gambling afflicts just one per cent of people. "We have noted that our patients are often secretive about their gambling and may end up thousands of pounds (dollars, euros) in debt before the problem is realised," wrote co-authors Sui Wong and Malcolm Steiger, who are neurologists at the Walter Centre in Liverpool, England. ©2007 Luna Media Pty Ltd,

Keyword: Parkinsons; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10206 - Posted: 06.24.2010

In The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession, Ken Alder depicts the polygraph as an apparatus whose effectiveness as a lie detector rests on the gullibility of its audience, including those who have submitted to its use and those who have simply seen or heard of its existence. The narrative, however, does not center on the development of different versions of the polygraph, each attempting a more accurate detection of physiological changes, but on the actors and observers who have been touched by it. Consequently, the "machine" remains elusive, no more than a reflective glass for the intentions, aspirations, and fears of the diverse characters whose lives have intersected with its development. This treatment of the "machine" as no more than a specter diminishes the importance of the actual apparatus constructed for the purpose of detecting lies. Needless to say, a meticulous description of the different technical realizations of the polygraph is conspicuously and regrettably absent in Alder's narrative. Yet, the narrative remains intense because of the vividness of the characters that Alder casts from a history of newspaper articles and countless manuscripts discovered in public archives and private collections. Alder's masterful narrative relies not only on his clever selection of iconoclastic characters, which is mostly determined by the historical events in which they appear, but also on his detailed treatment of each character. The human figures that surround the polygraph are a heterogeneous collection, from peripheral actors who take a temporary but memorable central stage in the narrative to those that appear to shepherd the destiny of the apparatus throughout time. Nevertheless, they all appear concrete, almost touchable. © 2007 Maura Pilotti

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 10205 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Anna Gosline Implants buried deep inside the brain may provide the best hope yet for vision-restoring bionic eyes. Most visual prosthetics rely on implants behind the retina. These stimulate surrounding nerve tissue to generate points of light, called phosphenes, in the mind's eye. Such prosthetics require a detailed map of where phosphenes appear in response to electrical stimulation. Once this map is complete, digital images, captured by a camera, can be converted to electrical pulses that produce multiple points of light, allowing a blind person to "see" simple shapes. In patients with severe eye trauma, however, there may not be enough surviving retinal neurons to stimulate. Or a patient's retinas may simply have degenerated over time. An alternative is to place implants directly in the brain, within the visual cortex. But this is a large and complexly folded part of the brain, making access and mapping of the visual field a serious challenge. Now John Pezaris and colleague R. Clay Reid, both at Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, have shown that phosphenes can be produced by stimulating the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) – an area deep in the centre of the brain that relays visual signals from the retina to the cortex. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 10204 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford A migraine is not just a headache, it is an über-headache — a pounding, queasy, searing pain that can incapacitate its victims for hours on end. And as if the pain weren't bad enough, sufferers were also thought to show diminished memory and verbal skills. But new research now suggests that although migraines are sometimes associated with diminished cognitive skills, sufferers may in fact show less memory loss as they age than those who are migraine-free. The results are puzzling, admits Amanda Kalaydjian of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the study. "We originally hypothesized that migraineurs would be doing worse," she says, "so I was really surprised." More than 28 million people in the United States suffer from migraines, and women are three times more likely than men to have the condition. The cause is still unknown, and different theories have blamed nervous-system malfunctions, chemical imbalances, over-reactive blood vessels, or a combination of factors. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10203 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bob Holmes Nepotism is known to be important in chimpanzee society, but male chimps' ability to cooperate extends beyond family connections, new research reveals. This extra level of sophistication is yet another way in which the social behaviour of chimps parallels that of humans. Kevin Langergraber, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, US, and colleagues recorded alliances, meat-sharing and other cooperative behaviour among 41 male chimps in Kibale National Park, Uganda. The team also genotyped each animal to measure how closely they were related. Over a period of seven years, and over 5000 hours of observations, they observed 753 aggressive coalitions - where they cooperated to fight enemies – and 421 instances of meat sharing. Chimps who shared a mother were far more likely to cooperate with each other. In contrast, there was no evidence that the same applied to chimps with a shared father. This is probably because fathers do not stay with their offspring, so a chimp has no easy way to recognise his paternal brothers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10202 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN CLOUD Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time? The answer to both questions is yes. The study of psychedelics in the '50s and '60s eventually devolved into the drug free-for-all of the '70s. But the new research is careful and promising. Last year two top journals, the Archives of General Psychiatry and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, published papers showing clear benefits from the use of psychedelics to treat mental illness. Both were small studies, just 27 subjects total. But the Archives paper--whose lead author, Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr., is chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research Unit at NIMH--found "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" that remained for a week after depressed subjects were given ketamine (colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other study, a team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona gave psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic mushrooms) to obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom later showed "acute reductions in core OCD symptoms." Now researchers at Harvard are studying how Ecstasy might help alleviate anxiety disorders, and the Beckley Foundation, a British trust, has received approval to begin what will be the first human studies with LSD since the 1970s. © 2007 Time Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10201 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and BENEDICT CAREY The video testament that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC during the intermission in his killing spree offers a compelling peek into the troubles that shaped a gunman, experts in forensic psychology say. The clips suggest a person with holes in his soul, who lacked features like the emotional control and empathy for others that keep a lid on the violent impulses anyone might have. But can grainy, YouTube-ish video snippets offer real insight into the nature of Mr. Cho’s mental illness? A solid diagnosis requires time and access to the patient, whose history can be as important as his actions; and most people with mental illness are far more likely to harm themselves than others. There is a universe of possible labels, and the exercise can be an empty one, said Robert Hare, an expert in violent behavior who has been a consultant to the F.B.I. “Diagnoses are ill advised if they are made too quickly,” said Dr. Hare, who created one of the most authoritative models for detecting psychopathy. “After-the-fact explanations of this sort can go in about a thousand different directions.” Experts who have watched the videos say that while the picture may yet change, they did see sentiments and thought that hint at Mr. Cho’s mental landscape. Their opinions coalesce around a handful of conditions with names like “psychotic depression” and “avoidant personality disorder” and “schizophrenia-paranoid type.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 10200 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By STEPHANIE SAUL For many women, a birth control pill that eliminates monthly menstruation might seem a welcome milestone. But others view their periods as fundamental symbols of fertility and health, researchers have found. Rather than loathing their periods, women evidently carry on complex love-hate relationships with them. This ambivalence is one reason that a decision expected next month by the Food and Drug Administration has engendered controversy. The agency is expected to approve the first contraceptive pill that is designed to eliminate periods as long as a woman takes it. Doctors say they know of no extra risk to the new regimen, but some women are uneasy about the idea. “My concern is that the menstrual cycle is an outward sign of something that’s going on hormonally in the body,” said Christine L. Hitchcock, a researcher at the University of British Columbia. Ms. Hitchcock said she worries about “the idea that you can turn your body on and off like a tap.” That viewpoint is apparently one reason some already available birth control pills that can enable women to have only four periods a year have not captured a larger share of the oral contraceptive market. “It’s not an easy decision for a woman to give up her monthly menses,” said Ronny Gal, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10199 - Posted: 06.24.2010

14-year-old Ashley Chapin goes through the stresses of a regular teenager: feeling the peer pressure about what to wear, how to dress, how to do her hair. She has a great relationship with her mom, but admits it sometimes gets ugly. "We're at the store, right, and we're shopping around. And I'm looking at some black stuff, and she sees this skirt that she wants me to buy. And I'm like 'Oh my god, it's pink, I don't want to buy it,'" she says. Luckily her mom, neuroscientist Sheryl Smith, is an expert on teenage mood swings. She discovered that in female mice going through puberty, a hormone called THP that normally calms nerve cells, excites them instead. "It's the first time that we've seen a very specific effect of a hormone at puberty that has a different effect than it has in the adult," says Smith, who is an associate professor at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. THP, tetrahydroprogesterone, is a steroid that's derived from progesterone, a familiar hormone that has multiple effects in the reproductive and nervous systems, among others. Smith studied the effects of THP produced in the brain, and up to this time, THP has been seen as a stress-reducer. "It's released during stress," she says, "so it's believed that one of its functions is to help you calm down after a period of stress." Smith says that in high enough doses in adults, THP has been shown to work as a tranquilizer and anesthetic. © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 10198 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Stink bug mating is so lengthy and lively that egg-colonizing parasites actually eavesdrop on it to their advantage, according to a new study. The findings represent the first discovery of a parasite, in this case a wasp, eavesdropping on the vibratory sexual signals of another insect. Since some farmers use the parasite to control populations of stink bugs that feed on crops such as soybeans, the discovery might lead to better, natural pest removal methods. It is possible the wasp evolved the ability to detect stink bug mating, since other creatures — including people — can't. "Humans cannot hear stink bug vibratory songs without special equipment," lead author Raul Laumann told Discovery News. Laumann, a scientist at Embrapa Genetic Resources and Biotechnology in Brazil, explained that both male and female brown Neotropical stink bugs vibrate muscles linked to their abdomen and thorax, before and during copulation. Laumann and his colleagues obtained stink bug nymphs from a Brazilian laboratory colony. The researchers set the stage for mating by rearing the insects on a nutritious diet of sunflower seeds, soybeans, raw peanuts and green beans in a comfortable, humidity-controlled environment. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 10197 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Emma Young High temperatures can make an Australian lizard that is genetically male develop into a female. The finding throws new light on how sex is determined in reptiles. For most reptiles, a gene on a sex chromosome triggers an embryo to develop as either a male or a female. In some species, males have an X and a Y chromosome, while females are XX, as in mammals. In other species of lizards, males are ZZ while females are ZW, as in birds. But for a third group of reptiles, which includes all crocodiles, alligators and marine turtles, temperature, rather than a gene on a sex chromosome, triggers either male or female differentiation. Extreme low or high temperatures generally lead to more females. Now a team led by Alex Quinn at Canberra University in Australia has found that the central bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps) is susceptible to both types of sex trigger, and that temperature can override its genetic gender. When the team incubated eggs at relatively high temperatures – between 34°C and 37°C – the majority of embryos that had ZZ sex chromosomes (genetically male), hatched as females. The team thinks the bearded dragon represents a transitional form, in evolutionary terms, between the two main methods of sexual determination. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10196 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have devised a clever way to activate neurons in a living mouse by shining light on the surface of the animal's brain. The “light switch” that turns neurons on is actually a light-sensitive protein that is produced by algae. When this protein is genetically engineered into the neurons of living mice, researchers can precisely trigger those neurons with light, causing them to generate electrical impulses. The scientists who developed the new method believe it will change how researchers map the function of brain circuits in living animals. “We believe that this light-induced activation technique is a major technical breakthrough in the functional analysis of neural circuitry,” said the leader of the research team, Michael Ehlers, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at Duke University Medical Center. “This technique will soon become the standard method for these types of experiments.” The researchers published a research article describing the new technique in the April 19, 2007, issue of the journal Neuron. The research team included Ehlers and Duke colleagues Benjamin Arenkiel, Guoping Feng and George Augustine. Other co-authors were from the University of Coimbra and the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Portugal, and from Stanford University. © 2007 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10195 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The cause of high blood pressure may lie within the brain, rather than with problems relating to the heart, kidneys or blood vessels, research suggests. Scientists at Bristol University say the findings could lead to new ways of treating the condition, which affects about one in five Britons. They isolated a protein, JAM-1, in the brain which appeared to trap white blood cells, obstructing blood flow. This can cause inflammation and result in poor oxygen supply to the brain. Professor Julian Paton and colleagues believe these, in turn, trigger events that raise blood pressure, the journal Hypertension reports. Their studies in rats show JAM-1 is linked to raised blood pressure, but the exact mechanisms behind this are still unclear. They are now looking at the human brain to understand more. Professor Paton explained: "The future challenge will be to understand the type of inflammation within the vessels in the brain, so that we know what drug to use, and how to target them. JAM-1 could provide us with new clues as to how to deal with this disease. We are looking at the possibility of treating those patients that fail to respond to conventional therapy for hypertension with drugs that reduce blood vessel inflammation and increase blood flow within the brain." (C)BBC

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 10194 - Posted: 04.19.2007

Katharine Sanderson Red apes have an easy life: their preferred method of getting from one tree to the next in the jungle not only keeps them safe from harm, but also saves them a lot of hard work. A detailed investigation into how orangutans use the sway of branches to propel themselves from tree to tree shows that it is way more efficient than climbing down one tree and up the next. Susannah Thorpe at the University of Birmingham, UK, and her colleagues studied video footage of Sumatran orangutans. These are the largest primates known to live exclusively in the tree canopy, in part because of the Sumatran tiger and other predators that await them on the ground. Crossing the gaps between trees is crucial for these animals. But the shortest gaps are also where the branches are thinnest and most flexible. "If you put an orangutan on a flexible branch it's going to sink fast," Thorpe says. Orangutans have a strategy to avoid this problem: they go to stronger vertical branches nearer the tree trunk and, by shifting their body weight, sway them until the thin branches of the next tree are within reach. They can then either move over directly or use the thin branch to pull a stronger branch of the next tree towards themselves and cross over that way. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10193 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A commercial surgery robot that will allow doctors to perform microscopic operations on the brain using the most vivid visuals yet has been unveiled by Canadian scientists and engineers. NeuroArm is the first surgical robot to be compatible with MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), its makers claim. This will enable neurosurgeons to perform their riskiest work while patients lie within an MRI machine, giving a clear 3D picture of even the smallest nerves. However, doctors are still on hand to intervene if serious complications arise. The machine will let doctors use surgical techniques on afflictions such as brain tumours that unaided human surgeons are simply not dexterous enough to perform, says Garnette Sutherland, a neurosurgeon at the University of Calgary who heads the project. It is major step beyond the traditional view of just doctors and nurses operating on patients, he adds. "There's been tremendous collaboration, so we have now got in the operating room a whole host of engineers and scientists who are contributing to help make neurosurgery better," Sutherland told reporters as the robot, armed with surgical tools, fiddled with tiny objects behind him. The machine is expected to be used in its first operation this summer at Calgary's Foothills Hospital, site of the University of Calgary medical school's research facility. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Robotics
Link ID: 10192 - Posted: 06.24.2010