The taste of beer, even without any effect from alcohol, triggers a key reward chemical in the brain, according to a study on Monday that explores how people become hooked on booze.

Neurologists at the University of Indiana asked 49 men to drink either their favourite beer or Gatorade, a non-alcoholic sports drink, while their brains were scanned by positron emission tomography (PET).

The goal was to look at dopamine, a chemical in a part of the brain called the ventral striatum that gives the sensation of reward.

The beer was rationed out in tiny amounts - just 15 millilitres, or about one tablespoon, every 15 minutes - so that the brain could be scanned without the influence of alcohol.

Just a taste of the beer lit up dopamine receptors, and the effect was far greater than for Gatorade, even though many volunteers said they prefered the taste of the soda, the investigators found.

The dopamine effect was significantly greater among volunteers with a family history of alcoholism, they reported.

On the morning of May 3, 2010, three agents of the Food and Drug Administration descended upon the Houston office of Cetero Research, a firm that conducted research for drug companies worldwide.

Lead agent Patrick Stone, now retired from the FDA, had visited the Houston lab many times over the previous decade for routine inspections. This time was different. His team was there to investigate a former employee's allegation that the company had tampered with records and manipulated test data.

When Stone explained the gravity of the inquiry to Chinna Pamidi, the testing facility's president, the Cetero executive made a brief phone call. Moments later, employees rolled in eight flatbed carts, each double-stacked with file boxes. The documents represented five years of data from some 1,400 drug trials.

Pamidi bluntly acknowledged that much of the lab's work was fraudulent, Stone said. "You got us," Stone recalled him saying.

Based partly on records in the file boxes, the FDA eventually concluded that the lab's violations were so "egregious" and of such a "pervasive nature" that studies conducted there between April 2005 and August 2009 might be worthless.

A lawsuit brought against Denver surgeon Dr. Warren Kortz alleges he botched surgeries and left surgical instruments and sponges inside patients.

Kortz, a surgeon at Porter Adventist Hospital, was placed on precautionary suspension after 11 kidney surgeries he performed, some of which with a robotic surgical arm, resulted in complications.

The Colorado Medical Board filed 14 counts of unprofessional conduct against Kortz after patients suffered nerve damage and internal bleeding. One elderly patient suffered a torn aorta and was later taken off life support, CBS News reported.

The hospital began using a da Vinci Robot for surgeries in 2008. According to the suit, Kortz "told patients the safest, best option for the was the robot" and that he "never offered standard surgical procedure as an option for his patients." The Colorado Medical Board accused Kortz of "misrepresenting patients."

Making a vaccine to protect against the new H7N9 flu virus that has emerged in eastern China could prove to be problematic, influenza experts acknowledge.

There hasn't been enough time to produce even the seed strain to make H7N9 vaccine, let alone small batches of a prototype vaccine for testing. So researchers haven't had a chance to see how a vaccine against this new flu strain might work in people.

But clinical trials of vaccines made to protect against other viruses in the H7 family have shown the vaccines don't induce much of an immune response, even when people are given what would be considered very large doses.

"In all cases where these vaccines were trialed, it was found that the vaccines were poorly immunogenic," said Nancy Cox, the virologist who heads the influenza branch at the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control in Atlanta.

China's H7N9 bird flu virus spread to a new province on Sunday, with state media reporting two human cases in central Henan as the disease just west of the area where the disease has been centred.

Until Saturday, when one case was reported in the capital of Beijing, all other instances had occurred in the eastern city of Shanghai and nearby Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces hundreds of miles (kilometres) away.

Four new cases were reported in Zhejiang on Sunday by a provincial newspaper on its Weibo account, a service similar to Twitter.

In total 55 people have been infected and 11 have died of the disease since Chinese authorities announced two weeks ago they had found H7N9 in humans for the first time.

Experts fear the prospect of such viruses mutating into a form easily transmissible between humans, which would have the potential to trigger a pandemic.

But the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week there was as yet no evidence of human-to-human transmission of H7N9.

Bras do nothing to help support a woman's breasts and could even be doing damage, research has found.

For years, women have been taught the virtues of a good bra in order to make the most of their assets and defy the pull of gravity.

Now a French study has claimed that breasts gain no benefit from underwear support and that women would in fact do better to go without.

We're taught that if a food has a USDA organic label, then the produce is just about as good as it comes - that the ingredients have been through rigorous testing and are safe for human consumption, or at the very least the product is free from harmful pesticides and genetic engineering. While the USDA certified organic is indeed the way to go, not everything approved under their standards is good for you. On the contrary, some may be very harmful. Such is the case with a substance known as carrageenan.

Carrageenan: A Toxic Food Ingredient

Carrageenan is a substance extracted from seaweed. In food, they are used as gelling and thickening agents, most often in dairy and meat products. You'll find it in ice cream, cream, desserts, some beers, diet soda, veggie dogs, and processed meats. And although some organic food companies (Eden Foods, Oikos yogurt, Natural by Nature, and more) have sworn off the ingredient, others intend to play on the ignorance of the public and their friends in high places to keep carrageenan around.

In numerous animal studies carrageenan has been found to cause gastrointestinal issues and inflammation, and cancer. In addition, diets high in carrageenan have been linked to the development of intestinal ulcers and other digestive issues. The Cornucopia Institute (a nonprofit which supports food research and "justice for family scale farming") recommends anyone with inflammatory digestive issues like chronic diarrhea, IBS, or inflammatory bowel disease, to eliminate carrageenan from their diet altogether.

Interestingly, the USDA is aware of the studies of this popular food ingredient, though it maintains a spot on their "safe" list. Why is that? Well, let's look at who is approving the foods on this list.

As revealed in The Organic Watergate - White Paper from The Cornucopia Institute, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) is made up of several companies who have a vested interest in keeping organics as non-organic as possible. After all, making stricter organic regulations would cost them money.

In this second in our series of shows on the topic of science and its benefits and negative consequences for mankind, we took a look at the use and abuse of psychiatry and psychology.

From the psychotherapist's chair to anti-depressant drugs and diverse therapeutic modalities, psychiatry and psychology have come up with as many solutions for mental health issues as there are theories of what makes people tick.

While many individuals have benefited from some form of intervention or another, the application of psychological knowledge for propaganda purposes, mind control experiments and pure corporate greed has apparently left most people's psychological health more fragile than ever.

This week, we attempted to sort the good from the bad and the ugly by 'psychoanalyzing' some of the questionable practices and theories of the mind, and untangling the confusion produced by psychological terminology that frequently overlaps the same basic underlying problems people encounter in our stressful modern world.

Running Time: 02:16:00

Download: MP3

Parents who fail to vaccinate their children should face barriers to enrolling them in school and childcare centres, the Australian Medical Association says.

Only one state, NSW, requires childcare centres to ask for proof of vaccination when children enrol.

And Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory aren't required to ask about immunisation status when children enrol for school, the Federal Department of Health and Ageing has warned.

AMA president Dr Steve Hambleton says parents who don't vaccinate their children should be forced to produce a conscientious objection form.

This extra step is not currently required by schools.

''If they have to fill out a form it means they will have to make a conscious decision about whether they want to vaccinate or not,'' he says.

The act of asking parents to produce the form may be all that is required to prompt them to vaccinate their children, he says.

''We should make it difficult for parents so they do have to think twice about whether they vaccinate their children. As I say they have got a responsibility to their own children and they've got a responsibility to the community's children,'' he said.

The AMA's call came as new data on immunisation shows many local areas in Australia's big cities have such low immunisation rates children are at-risk of catching deadly diseases.

New parents can be overwhelmed taking care of a newborn, but one birth consultant thinks one way to help parents cope is by literally not cutting the cord.

Mary Ceallaigh, a birth consultant and doula from Austin, Texas, is preaching the benefits of "umbilical nonseverance" which involves letting the umbilical cord fall off naturally after birth.Ceallaigh, 47, says the practice is also called having a "lotus birth" can help mothers and babies bond.

"It is a trend getting more notice in western culture particularly among holistically inclined people," said Ceallaigh. "[It's] just as another way to create optimal beginnings for babies."

While the practice may seem like a new-age remedy gone haywire, Ceallaigh says the ritual actually comes from traditional Balinese practices. Parents care for the newborn, while also lugging around the baby's attached placenta.

"A lot of people they don't understand that the baby, the placenta, they're all made from the same cells," said Ceallaigh. "It's not some kind of waste material the body produces separately."

When the umbilical cord is not cut, it naturally seals off after about an hour after birth. The umbilical cord and attached placenta will fully detach from the baby anywhere from two to 10 days after the birth.