Both the FTC and FDA are turning up the heat on nutrition-oriented companies and websites, resorting to arrests at gunpoint to enforce "nutritional illiteracy" across America by imprisoning those who accurately describe the health benefits of nutritional products they sell.

It was only days ago that the FTC attacked a church over its dietary supplements. NaturalNews covered the legal battle in a feature article and an exclusive audio interview with health freedom attorney Jim Turner.

The latest victim of this state-sponsored oppression and censorship agenda is Stephen Heuer of Cocoon Nutrition who advertised natural health products as treatments for depression and other health conditions. It remains the position of the FDA that there is no such thing as an herb, vitamin or superfood that has any ability to prevent, treat or cure any disease or health condition whatsoever. (In other words, the FDA ridiculously believes foods and herbs are chemically inert.)

Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

He emerged from the metro at the L'Enfant plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

Researchers have identified a biochemical switch required for nerve cells to respond to DNA damage. The finding, scheduled for advance online publication in Nature Cell Biology, illuminates a connection between proteins involved in neurodegenerative disease and in cells' response to DNA damage.

Most children with the inherited disease ataxia telangiectasia are wheelchair-bound by age 10 because of neurological problems. Patients also have weakened immune systems and more frequent leukemias, and are more sensitive to radiation.

The underlying problem comes from mutations in the ATM (ataxia telangiectasia mutated) gene, which encodes an enzyme that controls cells' response to and repair of DNA damage.

ATM can be turned on experimentally by treating cells with chemicals that damage DNA. After other proteins in the cell detected broken DNA needing repair, scientists had thought that the ATM protein could activate itself directly. Emory researchers have shown that an additional step is necessary first.

Jenny has not returned my calls in roughly a year. She has, however, sent me a poinsettia, poked me, and placed a gift beneath my Christmas tree. She's done all this virtually, courtesy of Facebook.com, the online social networking site where users create profiles, gather "friends," and join common interest groups, not to mention send digital gifts. Though Jenny has three children, ages 4 to 14, and rarely finds time for visits, phone calls or even e-mail, the full-time mom in upstate New York regularly updates her status on Facebook ("Jenny is fixing a birthday dinner," "Jenny took the kids sledding") and uploads photos (her son in the school play). After 24 years, our friendship is now filtered through Facebook, relegated to the online world. Call it Facebook Recluse Syndrome, and Jenny is far from the site's only social hermit.

Though Facebook started as an online hub for college students, its fastest-growing demographic is the over-25 crowd, which now accounts for more than half of the site's 140 million active members. Why is Facebook catching on among harried parents and professionals? "It makes me feel like I have a grip on my world," says Emily Neill, a 39-year-old single mother of two. Neill isn't a techie, per se - "I'll never have a phone that does anything but make calls," says the fashion consultant in Watertown, Mass. - but stays logged on to Facebook all day at work, and then spends an hour or two, or lately three, at night checking in with old acquaintances, swapping photos with close friends, instant messaging those who fall somewhere in between. "It makes you feel like you're part of something even if you're neglecting people in the flesh," she says.

Experiments at Johns Hopkins have found that the gradual maturing of embryonic cells into cells as varied as brain, liver and immune system cells is apparently due to the shut off of several genes at once rather than in individual smatterings as previous studies have implied.

Working with mouse brain and liver cells, as well as embryonic stem cells, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine professor Andrew Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H., led an investigation of a kind of epigenetic modification to histones, the molecular "spools" that DNA winds around in the cell nucleus. This modification is a variety of the so-called epigenetic changes that alter the function of cells without directly altering the nuclear DNA in the cells.

Other scientists had previously found that histone modifications appear to silence individual genes in the DNA that coils around affected histones. But when Feinberg and his team compared the activity of thousands of genes in the liver and brain cells, they found that a particular modification - in which two methyl groups clip onto histones - seemed to silence long stretches of DNA containing many genes at once. The findings will publish in Nature Genetics online on Jan. 18.

"Alcoholism, alcohol consumption and violence are clearly related," said Roope Tikkanen, a researcher in the department of psychiatry at Helsinki University Central Hospital and corresponding author for the study. He noted that crime statistics show that most impulsive homicides occur among adolescent and middle-aged groups rather than among the elderly, and habitually violent-impulsive offenders are often expected to "grow out of their difficulties" with increasing age. "Surprisingly little accurate information, however, is available on this aging-impulsive aggression issue," he said.

Some of the hottest results in the nascent field of social neuroscience, in which emotions and behavioural traits are linked to activity in a particular region of the brain, may be inflated and in some cases entirely spurious.

So say psychologist Hal Pashler at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues, who examined more than 50 studies that relied on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, many published in high-profile journals, and questioned the authors about their methods.

Pashler's team say that in most of the studies, which linked brain regions to feelings including social rejection, neuroticism and jealousy, researchers interpreted their data using a method that inflates the strength of the link between a brain region and the emotion or behaviour.

The claim is disputed by at least two of the critiqued groups. Both argue that Pashler has misunderstood their results and that their conclusions are backed by other studies.

The eyes may be the windows to the soul, but they also make pretty good peepholes into the brain. Thanks to an optical version of ultrasound, it is becoming possible to locate and monitor the growth of brain tumours, and to track neurodegenerative conditions like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease - all by peering into the eye.

The brain is connected to each eye by an optic nerve, so any degeneration of the brain caused by such diseases can also damage cells along the nerve and in the retina, says Helen Danesh-Meyer, an eye surgeon and neuro-ophthalmologist at the University of Auckland Medical School in New Zealand. Indeed, a loss of visual function is one of the first symptoms in many people with a neurodegenerative condition.

Although evidence of a link between degeneration of the optic nerve and diseases such as Alzheimer's has been around since the late 1980s, without instruments capable of measuring the retinal changes accurately it is only recently that this knowledge could be put to use, says Danesh-Meyer.

About 30 percent of the influenza viruses that have spread across the country this winter seem to be resistant to treatment with Tamiflu, the drug most commonly prescribed for flu, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said Friday.

Because Tamiflu is so widely used in medical institutions across the country, the ministry has alerted them to the situation and advised additional care be taken in choosing which drugs to use to treat flu. The virus confirmed to be resistant to Tamiflu is influenza A virus subtype H1N1, which accounts for an estimated 36 percent of three main strains of flu spreading in the country today.

Over 100 students and staff at the Singapore Sports School have experienced stomach ache, diarrhea and vomiting since Wednesday.

When symptoms first started appearing among the students, some were sent to see a doctor.

A spokesman for the school said that some of the students then went home, others went back to the school.

Students board at the school from Monday to Friday and eat at the school's dining hall. The food is prepared by the school caterer.

As of yesterday, a total of 108 students and two staff members have been afflicted by the symptoms.