After 12 years of living with debilitating pain in his face, James Tomasi decided to kill himself.
The former pastor from Oklahoma City, Okla., never understood what compelled men to jump from windows and take their own lives until he was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia (TN), a notoriously painful nerve disorder that causes sudden shock-like facial pains, typically near the nose, lips, eyes or ears.
"It's like being Tasered in the face," Tomasi said of the condition, which, for him, started after a root canal and continued off and on for more than a decade.
On a recent evening at twilight, I was sitting on the grass in Regent's Park - one of London's most manicured public spaces - when I heard the fierce, melancholy sound of a lion's roar.
I wasn't dreaming: it was coming from the zoo. Listening to it, I began to reflect on predators - and us.
On returning home, I did some reading. I discovered that between 1990 and 2004, lions attacked 815 people in Tanzania, killing 563. Some of the victims were pulled out of bed during the night after lions forced their way inside huts. Between January 2000 and March 2004, crocodiles in Namibia attacked 35 people, killing 23. In the 34 months from January 2005 to October 2007, leopards in the Indian state of Kashmir attacked 18 people, killing 16. In the Sundarban swamps of Bangladesh, tigers killed at least 20 people last year. Dig around, and you can also find records of deaths from attacks by bears, cougars, sharks and a number of other wild beasts.
It's hard to imagine how terrifying such a death must be. To be asleep in bed and to wake to hear a rustling sound, to see an animal leaping, to feel its breath on your face - think of the sweat, the panic, the contraction of your gut, the pounding of your heart, the gasping screams.
For many of our fellow creatures, such terrors are part of daily life: other animals exist in a world of threat that humans today rarely glimpse. These days, thankfully, we are not used to being hunted. Most of us are more likely to be struck by lightning than we are to die at the paws of a bear or the teeth of a shark. And so we spend little time in that dark, primeval place of alarm, fear, adrenaline and (perhaps) gory death. For us, death usually comes in other forms.
We're a month into the school year and it's the time of year when it seems our kids are spending more days sick than well.
Please don't be fooled into thinking that this winter is so different from previous winters.
Swine Flu does not pose a realistic risk to your family: There will be millions of cases reported and rare fatalities highly publicized.
Sarah Gilbert
WalletPopWed, 14 Oct 2009 16:56 UTC
In yet one more reason why the national dialog has changed from "health care reform" to "health insurance reform," Grand Junction, Colo. native Alex Lange was denied insurance coverage by Rocky Mountain Health Plans. Lange has never smoked, drank alcohol, nor has he ever been diagnosed with a chronic disease. In fact, he's only been to the doctor a few times for checkups, and has never missed a day of school or work in his life.
That impressive track record can be credited to the fact that Alex is just four months old and, in his short life, he has been fed nothing but breast milk. Nevertheless, he was denied health coverage because, according to growth charts, he's obese.
A new cancer gene has been discovered by a research group at the Sahlgrenska Academy. The gene causes an insidious form of glandular cancer usually in the head and neck and in women also in the breast. The discovery could lead to quicker and better diagnosis and more effective treatment.
The study is published October 13 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The cancer caused by this new cancer gene is called adenoid cystic carcinoma and is a slow-growing but deadly form of cancer. The research group can now show that the gene is found in 100% of these tumours, which means that a genetic test can easily be used to make a correct diagnosis.
"Now that we know what the cancer is down to, we can also develop new and more effective treatments for this often highly malignant and insidious form of cancer," says professor Göran Stenman, who heads the research group at the Lundberg Laboratory for Cancer Research at the Sahlgrenska Academy. "One possibility might be to develop a drug that quite simply turns off this gene."
© Paul EkmanSubjects in a recent study responded to these images of happy or fearful body postures and facial expressions even though they were not aware of what they were seeing.
Seeing is believing when it comes to emotions. We smile, we gasp, we yawn when we see others do the same - a phenomenon called emotional contagion.
A new study published last week in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that emotional contagion occurs even if the "seeing" step is bypassed. The blind patients in the study could not consciously see images of the faces of happy or fearful people that they were shown. Although their eyes and optic nerves were functional, the region of their brains involved in visual processing had been damaged. Instead, other parts of the brain took over, allowing the subjects to still respond normally with their own happy or scared facial expressions. These patients also made the appropriate happy or fearful face in response to emotions that were communicated through bodily expressions, suggesting that blind empathy can happen even without a facial template to imitate.
"We're actually infected by the emotions of others. [This study shows] this phenomenon can be carried out in the absence of visual awareness," says Marco Tamietto, a neuroscience researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. "We can say that emotional contagion cannot be reduced to a simple mimicry."
They have been hailed as the future of smoking and a non-cancerous alternative to cigarettes that don't fall foul of the ban.
But serious safety concerns have been raised about electronic cigarettes as their popularity continues to grow.
And there are fears children could get hooked on nicotine by using the so-called e-cigs, electronic cigarettes are not liable to age restriction because they do not contain tobacco.
Some are being marketed as appetite suppressants while others are promoted as the choice of fashion-conscious young celebrities
Boston - It is being reported that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have banned the sale of electronic cigarettes in America.
Electronic cigarettes look similar to a regular ciggy, but actually are quite different operating with a battery and a vaporless odor, in place of a lighter and dangerous omitted toxins.
The electronic cigarettes come in an array of flavors, making them very appealing for young people and this fact was one that made it easy for the tobacco companies to target young people.
Altruistic behavior, self-sacrifice among strangers has more to do with nurture than nature, or culture more than genes, U.S. researchers suggest.
Adrian V. Bell and colleagues of the University of California, Davis, say behaviors that help unrelated people while being costly to the individual and creating a risk for genetic descendants could not likely be favored by evolution -- at least by common evolutionary arguments.
The researchers used a mathematical equation -- the Price equation -- that describes the conditions for altruism to evolve. This equation motivated the researchers to compare the genetic and the cultural differentiation between neighboring social groups.
Using previously calculated estimates of genetic differences, they used the World Values Survey -- questions are likely to be heavily influenced by culture in a large number of countries -- as a source of data to compute the cultural differentiation between the same neighboring groups.
Imaging study finds similar brain function among devout, nonreligious
When it comes to religion, believers and nonbelievers appear to think very differently. But at the level of the brain, is believing in God different from believing that the sun is a star or that 4 is an even number?
While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief. Nor is it known whether religious believers differ from nonbelievers in how they evaluate statements of fact.
In the first neuroimaging study to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, UCLA and University of Southern California researchers have found that while the human brain responds very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain.
The study also found that devout Christians and nonbelievers use the same brain regions to judge the truth of religious and nonreligious propositions. The results, the study authors say, represent a critical advance in the psychology of religion. The paper appears Sept. 30 in the journal PLoS ONE.
