A high-fat, high-sugar diet alters the composition of bacteria in the gut, making it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it.

A high-fat, high-sugar diet does more than pump calories into your body. It also alters the composition of bacteria in your intestines, making it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it, research in mice suggests. And the changeover can happen in as little as 24 hours, according to a report Wednesday in the new journal Science Translational Medicine.

Many factors play a role in the propensity to gain weight, including genetics, physical activity and the environment, as well as food choices. But a growing body of evidence, much of it accumulated by Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, shows that bacteria in the gut also play a key role.

Lauren Johnson has been sneezing thousands of times a day for weeks

With metronomic regularity, the girl's right arm rises to her face, her hand balled into a fist and partially covered by her sleeve. If Lauren Johnson is talking, she stops when her hand arrives at her nose. Then she sneezes. It's not a big sneeze, but she has to stop to let it out. Then the hand drops and she resumes whatever she was doing. A few seconds later, the action is repeated.

Talk. Sneeze. Play. Sneeze. Sit still. Sneeze. Eat. Sneeze.

As many as 12 times a minute and 12,000 times a day, 12-year-old Lauren sneezes. And there's nothing that six professionals, including doctors, a psychologist and a hypnotist, have been able to do to stop it.

"It gets old after a while," said Lauren. Even that short sentence was bracketed by the sneezes that began on Nov. 1 and haven't stopped since.

New research reveals that children with developmental dyslexia have a deficit in a brain mechanism involved in the perception of speech in a noisy environment. The study, published by Cell Press in the November 12 issue of the journal Neuron, provides the first direct evidence that the human auditory brainstem exhibits remarkable moment-to-moment plasticity and undergoes a fine tuning that is strongly associated with noise exclusion.

Most people have little trouble carrying on a conversation with a friend in a noisy restaurant thanks to the highly adaptive auditory system which manages to focus in on the predictable, repeating pitch of the friend's voice and effectively tune out the random, fluctuating background noise. Although it may be a routine occurrence, exactly how the nervous system manages to accomplish this feat is still a mystery.

"Understanding the relationship between the adaptive auditory system and perception of speech in noise is clinically relevant because recent studies have demonstrated that the 5% of school-age children who are diagnosed with developmental dyslexia can be particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of background noise," explains senior study author Dr. Nina Kraus, who directs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University.

The long-held theory that our brains use different mechanisms for forming long-term and short-term memories has been challenged by new research from UCL, published in PNAS.

Neuroscientists formed this theory based on observation of patients with amnesia, a condition that severely disrupts the ability to form long-lasting memories. Typically, amnesia is caused by injury to the hippocampi, a pair of brain structures located in the depth of the temporal lobes.

Despite the condition devastating long-term memory, such patients are quite proficient in rehearsing a phone number over short periods of time, as long as their attention is not distracted. This led to a hypothesis that the hippocampus supports long-term but not short-term memory. However, the UCL study shows that this distinction now needs to be reconsidered.

The team studied patients with a specific form of epilepsy called 'temporal lobe epilepsy with bilateral hippocampal sclerosis', which leads to marked dysfunction of the hippocampi. They asked the patients to try and memorise photographic images depicting normal scenes, for example chairs and a table in a living-room. Their memory of the image was tested and brain activity recorded using MEG (magnetoencephalography) after a short interval of just five seconds, or a long interval of 60 minutes.

A teenage Virginia athlete is in a wheel chair now after suffering Guillain-Barre Syndrome within hours after receiving an H1N1 swine flu vaccine shot. 14-year-old Jordan McFarland developed severe headaches, muscle spasms and weakness in his legs after being injected. He will need "extensive physical therapy" to recovery, reports MSNBC. Plus, he'll need the help of a walker for four to six weeks.

Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) is the name given to anyone who exhibits a particular set of neurological symptoms including muscle weakness and muscle spasms. GBS is now increasingly occurring following H1N1 vaccine injections. It was diagnosed in thousands of patients following the 1976 swine flu vaccine scare, and it appears to be recurring here in 2009 as the swine flu vaccine makes it into more widespread distribution.

Health authorities, however, remain adamant that H1N1 vaccines are never the cause of GBS, and that such diagnoses are "pure coincidence." This blatantly unscientific P.R. tactic is designed to dismiss any and all concerns over the neurological side effects of H1N1 vaccines by simply denying they exist. To date, the CDC has received reports of five additional people being diagnosed with GBS following swine flu vaccinations, but it dismisses them all as coincidence. "It's much less than we'd expect," says CDC official Dr. Claudia J. Vellozzi. (Which is sort of interesting all by itself, because it reveals that the CDC expects a lot more people to get GBS following vaccine injections...)

Faced with a growing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, hospitals in the United Kingdom are adopting traditional medicinal techniques to fight infection, such as maggots and honey.

Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and other drug-resistant infections kill or hasten the death of 8,000 British patients per year, while MRSA now kills more people in the United States annually than AIDS.

At the Royal United Hospital in Bath, England, many wounds are now being disinfected with Manuka honey rather than pharmaceutical antibiotics.

"Honey has been used in healing for centuries, but now new products have overcome the problems associated with using conventional honey and bring it into a modern healthcare setting," said the hospital's Kate Purser.

According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), the Ginkgo biloba (G. biloba) is one of the oldest types of trees in the world. Ginkgo herbal treatments have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years to treat a host of ills including asthma, bronchitis, fatigue, and tinnitus (ringing or roaring sounds in the ears). Now 21st century scientists may have discovered yet another Ginkgo-based therapy.

According to a study just published in the International Journal of Low Radiation, antioxidant extracts of the leaves of the G. biloba tree may protect cells in the human body from radiation damage. The discovery could offer a way to protect cancer patients from side effects produced by radiotherapy. G. biloba might also offer protection from medical tests that involve radiation, such as X-rays.

Chang-Mo Kang of the Korea Institute of Radiological and Medical Sciences in Taegu and colleagues have been investigating well-known herbal remedies to see what actual medicinal effects they may have. They specifically decided to study extracts made from G. biloba leaves because these substances are known to contain several antioxidant compounds, called ginkgolides and bilobalides, that are thought to protect cells in the body from damage caused by free radicals and other reactive oxidizing species. Free radicals are generated by the body's normal metabolism and are also produced in excess as a result of certain diseases and from exposure to pollution or radiation. If left unchecked, they can damage proteins and DNA and even kill cells.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

"If the city requires this, we can't do it," Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. "The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem."

Children don't like school because they love freedom.

Someone recently referred me to a book that they thought I'd like. It's a 2009 book, aimed toward teachers of grades K through 12, titled Why Don't Students Like School? It's by a cognitive scientist named Daniel T. Willingham, and it has received rave reviews by countless people involved in the school system. Google the title and author and you'll find pages and pages of doting reviews and nobody pointing out that the book totally and utterly fails to answer the question posed by its title.

Willingham's thesis is that students don't like school because their teachers don't have a full understanding of certain cognitive principles and therefore don't teach as well as they could. They don't present material in ways that appeal best to students' minds. Presumably, if teachers followed Willingham's advice and used the latest information cognitive science has to offer about how the mind works, students would love school.

Talk about avoiding the elephant in the room!

Workers exposed to very high levels of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) were four to seven times more likely to report sexual function problems than were workers with no occupational exposure to the chemical, a new study shows.

Earlier research has linked BPA exposure to reproduction problems in animals, but the five-year study is the first to do so in humans.

Researchers with Kaiser Permanente compared self-reported sexual function scores among male factory workers in China who were and were not exposed to BPA on the job.

BPA levels among the occupationally exposed men were about 50 times higher than average levels among American men and Chinese men with no occupational exposure to the chemical, the researchers say.

Lower Sex Drive, Less Satisfaction

Compared to the unexposed factory workers in the study, BPA-exposed workers were four times more likely to report erectile dysfunction, low sexual desire, and less than optimal satisfaction with their sex lives. They were seven times more likely to report problems with ejaculation.

The findings must be replicated to prove the link between high levels of exposure to BPA and sexual dysfunction in men, Kaiser Permanente reproductive epidemiologist De-Kun Li, MD, PhD, tells WebMD.

"We also need to study lower levels of exposure closer to those consumers get," he says. "But up until this point the critics have dismissed the idea that BPA has health effects at any level because most of the research has been in animals. They can no longer do this."

BPA has been used for more than three decades to make plastic bottles and other products shatter resistant and clear. It is also used in the lining of many canned foods and a wide range of other commercial goods.

For nearly a decade, scientists have debated whether exposure to BPA through commercial products poses a health threat to humans.

The new study, published in the journal Human Reproduction, does not address this issue because BPA levels among the occupationally exposed men were so much higher than in the community at large.