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Brain Chemical Reduces Anxiety, Increases Survival Of New Cells


ScienceDaily
Wed, 13 May 2009 08:20 UTC
New research on a brain chemical involved in development sheds light on why some individuals may be predisposed to anxiety. It also strengthens understanding of cellular processes that may be common to anxiety and depression, and suggests how lifestyle changes may help overcome both.

The animal study, in the May 13 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, shows an important role for fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2), a chemical important in brain development, in anxiety. The findings advance understanding of cellular mechanisms involved in anxiety and illuminate the role of neurogenesis, or cell birth and integration in the adult brain, in this process. Together, these findings may offer new drug targets for the treatment of anxiety and potentially for depression as well.
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Shoe

The man who revealed the secrets of sweat

Rick Lovett
New Scientist
Wed, 06 May 2009 04:47 UTC
US infantry soldiers
© Eliot Elisofon/Time and Life Pictures/GettyUS infantry soldiers trudge across a hill in the desert in the El Guettar Valley, Tunisia, early 1943
On 17 August 1942, seven men set up camp near the isolated desert crossroads of Freda, California. Soon, a squad of soldiers arrived for what seemed a particularly brutal form of training. The troops worked and hiked up to 35 kilometres beneath the merciless sun. Then they did it all over again, periodically submitting to tests to see how their bodies were coping. The goal was to help win the second world war by learning how far a man could be pushed in the baking North African desert. Today the results remain vital for marathon runners, trekkers, and others who exert themselves in scorching heat.

California's lower Colorado desert is a forbidding place, particularly in the summer. It's a barren landscape of rocks and rattlesnakes, where little grows but creosote bushes and cactus. Midday temperatures top 43 °C and searing winds and afternoon sun combine to suck moisture from the body.

This is not the place for a midday march, but that is exactly what Edward Adolph had in mind when he took a group of soldiers and researchers there in the summer of 1942. Adolph, a physiologist at the University of Rochester in New York state, wanted to find out how people could live and work efficiently in the desert and how to get the best out of them.

He wasn't the first to ponder the effects of hot, dry conditions on the human body. The image of the traveller lost in the desert, crawling towards a shimmering mirage, is probably as old as desert travel itself. But earlier researchers always focused on survival. "They never looked at performance," says Timothy Noakes, an exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and veteran of some of the world's toughest ultramarathons.
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Pills

The science of voodoo: When mind attacks body

Helen Pilcher
New Scientist
Wed, 13 May 2009 04:07 UTC
voodoo doll
© Image Source/RexThere are numerous documented instances from many parts of the globe of people dying after being cursed
Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, emaciated and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders's family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders's stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.
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People

What Makes Us Happy?

Joshua Wolf Shenk
The Atlantic
Wed, 13 May 2009 22:12 UTC
Is there a formula - some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation - for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition - and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study's longtime director, George Vaillant.
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People

Flashback AIDS Ravages Russian Women


Moscow Times
Fri, 23 May 2008 16:18 UTC
When Moscow photographer Serge Golovach decided to present portraits of beautiful women for an HIV/AIDS awareness project, he was revealing a startling truth about AIDS in Russia today - it is quickly becoming a problem with a woman's face.

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in Russia, those infected were predominantly male. Unlike in much of the rest of the world, the vast majority of AIDS cases in Russia and the CIS were the result of intravenous drug use - a behavior usually associated with men. But of the 415,000 people infected with AIDS in Russia today, 135,000 of them - 32 percent - are women, according to the latest figures from the Federal Consumer Protection Service. A higher percentage of cases among women can be found only in Moldova or in African countries. In Moscow, the situation is even worse. Out of the 28,000 cases of HIV registered in Moscow as of January 2008, more than a half were women - up 14 percent from last year, according to the Moscow branch of the consumer protection service. More disturbing, most of the newly infected women are young and in their best reproductive years, from ages 20 to 29. Around 5,000 of these women found out that they were infected while undergoing blood tests as part of prenatal care.
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Magnify

Breakthrough in the Treatment of Bacterial Meningitis


PhysOrg
Wed, 13 May 2009 14:32 UTC
It can take just hours after the symptoms appear for someone to die from bacterial meningitis. Now, after years of research, experts at The University of Nottingham have finally discovered how the deadly meningococcal bacteria is able to break through the body's natural defence mechanism and attack the brain.

The discovery could lead to better treatment and vaccines for meningitis and could save the lives of hundreds of children.

Bacterial meningitis in childhood is almost exclusively caused by the respiratory tract pathogens Streptococcus pneumoniae, Neisseria meningitidis, and Haemophilus influenzae. The mechanism used by these lethal germs to break through the blood brain barrier (BBB) has, until now, been unknown.
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Magnify

Problem Solving Influenced By Body Movements

Diana Yates
Medical News Today
Wed, 13 May 2009 12:00 UTC
Swinging their arms helped participants in a new study solve a problem whose solution involved swinging strings, researchers report, demonstrating that the brain can use bodily cues to help understand and solve complex problems.

The study, appearing in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, is the first to show that a person's ability to solve a problem can be influenced by how he or she moves.

"Our manipulation is changing the way people think," said University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who conducted the study with Vanderbilt University postdoctoral researcher Laura Thomas, his former graduate student. "In other words, by directing the way people move their bodies, we are - unbeknownst to them - directing the way they think about the problem."
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Cow

Loophole Allows Canadian Farmers to Import Untested Antibiotics for Use in Livestock

Louis Lazaris
Natural News
Mon, 11 May 2009 13:00 UTC
A loophole in federal law is allowing Canadian farmers to import unapproved and untested antibiotics with little oversight, according to an article released on April 8 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). Seven years after experts called for stricter guidelines in antibiotic importing, a federal task force dominated by the livestock industry is recommending that Health Canada keep the loophole in place for another two years.

CMAJ says the loophole allows meat producers to bring in an estimated $100 million of medications into Canada each year - medications that include some not approved for use in Canada. Representatives of the livestock industry want the federal government to conduct a pilot study for two more years to evaluate the possibility of placing limited restrictions on the imports.
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Syringe

Best of the Web: WHO Investigates Possibility Swine Flu May Be Human "Error"

Jason Gale and Simeon Bennett
Bloomberg News
Wed, 13 May 2009 10:16 UTC
The World Health Organization is investigating a claim by an Australian researcher that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error.

Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu drug, said in an interview that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint.

"One of the simplest explanations is that it's a laboratory escape," Gibbs said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. "But there are lots of others."

The World Health Organization received the study last weekend and is reviewing it, Keiji Fukuda, the agency's assistant director-general of health security and environment, said in an interview May 11. Gibbs, who has studied germ evolution for four decades, is one of the first scientists to analyze the genetic makeup of the virus that was identified three weeks ago in Mexico and threatens to touch off the first flu pandemic since 1968.

A virus that resulted from lab experimentation or vaccine production may indicate a greater need for security, Fukuda said. By pinpointing the source of the virus, scientists also may better understand the microbe's potential for spreading and causing illness, Gibbs said.

Comment: Given that:

Pharmaceutical companies stand to make billions of dollars from vaccines against new strains of the flu virus

and

in order to make the vaccines pharmaceutical companies combine strains of the virus

what are the chances that any such release was "accidental"?

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Syringe

Flashback Smallpox vaccine 'triggered Aids virus'

Pearce Wright
The Times of London
Fri, 11 May 1990 07:10 UTC
The Aids epidemic may have been triggered by the mass vaccination campaign which eradicated smallpox.

The World Health Organization, which masterminded the 13-year campaign, is studying new scientific evidence suggesting that immunization with the smallpox vaccine Vaccinia awakened the unsuspected, dormant human immuno defence virus infection (HIV).
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