Health & WellnessS


Cow Skull

Scary Era of Playing God with Medicine Unleashed: FDA Approves Blood Thinner Drug from Genetically Engineered Goats

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Matthew Perrone
Yahoo News
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 23:57 UTC
FDA OKs blood thinner made with milk from bioengineered goats, approval is a first for US

Washington -- The Food and Drug Administration made history Friday as it approved the first drug made with materials from genetically engineered animals, clearing the way for a new class of medical therapies.

GTC Biotherapeutics said regulators cleared its drug ATryn, which is manufactured using milk from goats that have been scientifically altered to produce extra antithrombin, a protein that acts as a natural blood thinner.

The drug's approval may be the first step toward new kinds of medications made not from chemicals, but from animals altered by scientists. Similar drugs could be available in the next few years for a range of human ailments, including hemophilia.
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Attention

Nigeria: 84 children dead from teething formula

Edward Harris
Associated Press
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:35 UTC
The number of deaths from a tainted Nigerian teething formula has more than doubled, with 84 children killed by the syrup that contained a thickening agent normally used in brake fluid and antifreeze, the Health Ministry said.

The victims have ranged in age from 2 months to 7 years old, the ministry said in a statement late Thursday. It indicated that about 75 percent of the 111 children who had been sickened since the poisonous batch of My Pikin Baby Teething Mixture hit shelves in November have died.
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The Muddled Tracks of All Those Tears

Benedict Carey
The New York Times
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:54 UTC
Cry
© Jonathon Rosen
They're considered a release, a psychological tonic, and to many a glimpse of something deeper: the heart's own sign language, emotional perspiration from the well of common humanity.

Tears lubricate love songs and love, weddings and funerals, public rituals and private pain, and perhaps no scientific study can capture their many meanings.

"I cry when I'm happy, I cry when I'm sad, I may cry when I'm sharing something that's of great significance to me," said Nancy Reiley, 62, who works at a women's shelter in Tampa, Fla., "and for some reason I sometimes will cry when I'm in a public speaking situation.

"It has nothing to do with feeling sad or vulnerable. There's no reason I can think of why it happens, but it does."
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Hourglass

When Dreams Come True

Bruce Bower
Science News
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:44 UTC
People interpret dreams in ways that affect their waking lives, especially when those dreams support pre-existing beliefs.

Dreams don't just bubble up at night and then evaporate like morning dew once the sun rises. What you dream shapes what you think about your upcoming plans and your closest confidants, especially if nighttime reveries fit with what's already convenient to believe, a new report finds.

In an effort to understand whether people take their dreams seriously, Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Michael Norton of Harvard University surveyed 149 college students attending universities in India, South Korea or the United States about theories of dream function.

People across cultures often assume that dreams contain hidden truths, much as Sigmund Freud posited more than a century ago, Morewedge and Norton report in the February Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In fact, many individuals consider dreams to provide more meaningful information regarding daily affairs than comparable waking thoughts do, the two psychologists conclude.
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Info

Recognizing Toxic Chemicals in Body Care Products

Jo Hartley
Natural News
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:59 UTC
A common belief among consumers is that products labeled "natural" must be safe and beneficial to consume or use. Often the ingredient lists on these "natural" products contain chemicals that are unrecognizable and unfamiliar to most people. The bad news is that the products that are labeled as "natural" by manufacturers are usually far from natural and safe. The good news is that it is possible to be an informed consumer with the information necessary to avoid these products. Learning about these toxic chemicals is the first step toward avoiding them and this is quite simple to do, using the Internet as a tool.
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Cognitive Training Can Alter the Biochemistry of the Brain


PhysOrg
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:59 UTC
Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have shown for the first time that the active training of the working memory brings about visible changes in the number of dopamine receptors in the human brain.

The study, which is published in the prestigious scientific journal Science, was conducted with the help of PET scanning and provides deeper insight into the complex interplay between cognition and the brain's biological structure.

"Brain biochemistry doesn't just underpin our mental activity; our mental activity and thinking process can also affect the biochemistry," says Professor Torkel Klingberg, who led the study. "This hasn't been demonstrated in humans before, and opens up a floodgate of fascinating questions."

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key part in many of the brain's functions. Disruptions to the dopamine system can impair working memory, making it more difficult to remember information over a short period of time, such as when problem solving. Impaired working memory has, in its turn, proved to be a contributory factory to cognitive impairments in such disorders as ADHD and schizophrenia.
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Health

US: Crews to clean up mystery mercury

Paula Horton
Tri-City Herald
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:55 UTC
A mercury mystery has prompted Richland, Washington fire crews and state and federal officials to block off a four-foot area in a yard on Gage Boulevard.

The state Department of Health, state Department of Ecology and the federal Environmental Protection Agency will meet today to determine how to clean up the mercury spill, said Richland fire Battalion Chief Todd Ricci.

The mercury, which looks like thick water or aluminum foil in a liquid state, was found around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in a yard behind 631 Gage Blvd. The yard is between two businesses and an apartment complex.

About an ounce of mercury, equal to about one or two tablespoons, was found on the ground.
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The Improvising Brain: Getting to the Neural Roots of the Musical Riff

Lesley Bannatyne
PhysOrg
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:12 UTC
Aaron Berkowi
© UnknownAaron Berkowitz at the keyboard.
What's involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process? Is it possible to determine how improvisation occurs?

Aaron Berkowitz, a Harvard graduate student in ethnomusicology, and Daniel Ansari, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, recently collaborated on an experiment designed to study brain activity during musical improvisation in order to get closer to answering these questions. The Harvard Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative awarded the collaborators a grant to look at musical improvisation in trained musicians, utilizing brain scans done with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. A resulting paper, "Generation of Novel Motor Sequences: The Neural Correlates of Musical Improvisation," was published in the journal NeuroImage, and received the journal's 2008 Editor's Choice Award in Systems Neuroscience.

"There are essentially two basic questions in music cognition," says Berkowitz. "First, how does the brain 'do' music? That is, what parts of the brain are involved, and how do they interact, when people listen to or perform music? Second, what can studying music tell us about the brain? When music is heard or played, the brain calls on many more general cognitive processes, for example, perceiving patterns in sounds or converting visual information [in a musical score] to auditory or motor information."
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How Teenagers Find Themselves

Charles Q. Choi
Scientific American
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:29 UTC
The development of a key brain area leads to self-consciousness.

Teens are notoriously self-conscious. Now brain-imaging experiments are revealing how this adolescent predilection might be the result of changes in brain anatomy linked with the self, and the findings may hint at how the sense of self develops in the brain.

One way we build a sense of self is by reflecting on how others perceive us, a concept psychologists have dubbed "the looking-glass self." To see how teenagers reacted to what other people thought of them, researchers asked adolescent girls ages 10 to 18 to imagine a variety of scenarios involving onlookers that were designed to evoke social emotions such as guilt or embarrassment - for example, "You were quietly picking your nose, but your friend saw you."

Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of University College London and her colleagues found that when compared with scenarios describing basic emotions that did not involve the opinions of others, such as fear and disgust, girls who thought about onlookers' opinions engaged a brain region known as the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) more during social emotional scenarios than adult women did. This area is one of the last regions to develop before adulthood, and it is known to activate in adults when they think about themselves, about other people and even about the personality traits of animals.
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The Origins of Suicidal Brains

Melinda Wenner
Scientific American
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:00 UTC
Certain life experiences may lead to brain changes in suicide victims.

Suicide rates in the U.S. have increased for the first time in a decade, according to a report published in October by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But what leads a person to commit suicide? Three new studies suggest that the neurological changes in a brain of a suicide victim differ markedly from those in other brains and that these changes develop over the course of a lifetime.

The most common pathway to suicide is through depression, which afflicts two thirds of all people who kill themselves. In October researchers in Canada found that the depressed who commit suicide have an abnormal distribution of receptors for the chemical GABA, one of the most abundant neurotransmitters in the brain. GABA's role is to inhibit neuron activity. "If you think about the gas pedal and brakes on a car, GABA is the brakes," explains co-author Michael Poulter, a neuroscientist at the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario.
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