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Men view half-naked women as objects, study finds

Doug Eshleman
The Daily Prinstonian
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:28 UTC
Some men may view scantily clad women as objects rather than as people, a recent study found. The research, conducted by Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara GS and Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, was performed on 21 undergraduate male students at the University who identified themselves as heterosexual. Fiske's team used an MRI machine to scan the brains of the students while they viewed a series of photographs of men and women, some of whom were fully clothed and others of whom wore only swimsuits.

The pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or "things you manipulate with your hands," Fiske said. The students also remembered the photos of the half-naked women better than they did any of the others, she added, noting that the subjects remembered the bodies, not the faces, most clearly. Fiske said the results indicated that some men may objectify or dehumanize partially clothed women, though further research is needed to confirm these findings.
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Syringe

FDA Broadens Interpretation of Restriction on Drugs in Supplements, Reclassifies Vitamin B6 as a Drug


FDA Week Vol. 15 No. 4
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:22 UTC
FDA recently gave its most thorough explanation of how it interprets a provision that prohibits drugs in dietary supplements, lawyers at Hyman Phelps & McNamara say, and industry is worried that interpretation will hurt the development of supplement ingredients. The supplement measure is nearly identical to a recently added restriction on food, and the lawyers predict food ingredient development will be similarly affected.
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Arrow Up

Soaring Autism Rates Linked to Environmental Causes

Reuben Chow
Natural News
Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:00 UTC
A study recently published in the journal Epidemiology has suggested that rapid increases in autism rates in California cannot be explained by migratory trends and looser diagnosis criteria, but is instead most likely down to environmental exposures. Not exactly news to those well versed in natural healing, but perhaps such findings will finally represent a breakthrough of sorts for the scientific and medical community.

Comment: An unhealthy gut and immune system, and a toxic environment triggers certain genes in people susceptible to autism. CheckThe UltraMind Solution by Mark Hyman, M.D. for more information on systemic body disorders that affect the brain.

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Magnify

Alzheimer's may hijack chemical mechanism

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:57 UTC
Chicago - U.S. scientists proposed a new theory on Wednesday of how Alzheimer's disease kills brain cells they said opens new avenues of research into treatments for the fatal, brain-wasting disease.

They believe a chemical mechanism that naturally prunes away unwanted brain cells during early brain development somehow gets hijacked in Alzheimer's disease.

"The key player we're focusing on is a protein called APP," said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, executive vice president of research drug discovery at the U.S. biotechnology company Genentech Inc, whose study appears in the journal Nature.

Tessier-Lavigne said amyloid precursor protein, or APP -- a key building block in brain plaques found in Alzheimer's disease -- is the driving force behind this process.
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Heart

The American Heart Disassociation

Nora W. Coffey
truthout.org
Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:33 UTC
Heart
© David Goehring
Heart disease was once thought to be less of a problem for women than for men. Research now indicates that heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death among women in the US (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Heart Disease Facts and Statistics, 2008), while confirming that women with an intact uterus have a lower incidence of heart disease because they benefit from the uterine advantage.

In his article, "Prostacyclin From The Uterus And Woman's Cardiovascular Advantage," James D. Shelton writes, "Prostacyclin emanating from the uterus is proposed as a major contributor to the reduced risk of coronary disease among women." He refers to the uterus as a "systemically active organ whose removal significantly increases subsequent risk of myocardial infarction" (Prostaglandins Leukotrienes and Medicine, 1982).

Comment: Of the 600,000 hysterectomies performed every year, two-thirds may be unnecessary, experts say. The truth: Several other approaches are available that may have fewer complications and shorter recovery times.

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Heart

Heart Attack Knowledge Can Save Women's Lives

Kathy Webster
The Kansas City Star
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:14 UTC
February is National Heart month and a good time to reflect on the strides that have been made in preventing and treating heart disease

However, heart disease remains the No. 1 killer of women and men. And since the 1980s, more women than men have died of heart disease in this country.

Women who have the most serious type of heart attack are less likely than men to receive proper hospital treatment and are less likely to survive.
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Health

Are bad sleeping habits driving us mad?

Emma Young
New Scientist
Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:58 UTC
Image
© Christopher Bissell / StoneMany people with psychiatric disorders don't sleep well, for instance being plagued with insomnia.

Take anyone with a psychiatric disorder and the chances are they don't sleep well. The result of their illness, you might think. Now this long-standing assumption is being turned on its head, with the radical suggestion that poor sleep might actually cause some psychiatric illnesses or lead people to behave in ways that doctors mistake for mental problems. The good news is that sleep treatments could help or even cure some of these patients. Shockingly, it also means that many people, including children, could be taking psychoactive drugs that cannot help them and might even be harmful.

No one knows how many people might fall into this category. "That is very frightening," says psychologist Matt Walker from the University of California, Berkeley. "Wouldn't you think that it would be important for us as a society to understand whether 3 per cent, 5 per cent or 50 per cent of people diagnosed with psychiatric problems are simply suffering from sleep abnormalities?"

First, we'd need to know how and to what extent sleep disorders could be responsible for psychiatric problems. In the few years since sleep researchers identified the problem, they have made big strides in doing just that.
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The Power of Suggestion: Researchers Look at Why Suggestive Therapy May Prompt False Memories


PhysOrg
Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:16 UTC
Psychologist Elke Geraerts of the University of St Andrews has carried out a study of the difference between memories recalled by patients through suggestive therapies, compared with more natural recollections.

The results lead to an important distinction between two different types of recovered memories and their underlying cognitive mechanisms.

Suggestive therapy is one of a range of methods used when treating a number of conditions such as depression or anorexia, which some therapists believe may be rooted in a childhood trauma.

Dr Geraerts explained, "Some therapists conclude that their patient¿s current symptoms must be explained by a childhood trauma. Using suggestive therapy techniques, patients are either hypnotized or instructed to imagine being abused. Often, gradually over the course of several weeks or even months, the patient may finally develop memories of abuse.
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Meningitis Bacteria Dress Up as Human Cells to Evade Our Immune System


PhysOrg
Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:30 UTC
The way in which bacteria that cause bacterial meningitis mimic human cells to evade the body's innate immune system has been revealed by researchers at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London.

The study, published in Nature, could lead to the development of new vaccines that give better protection against meningitis B, the strain which accounts for the vast majority of cases of the disease in the UK.

Meningitis involves an inflammation of the membranes covering the brain and the spinal cord as the result of an infection. The infection can be due to a virus or bacteria, but bacterial meningitis is much more serious with approximately 5% of cases resulting in death. The disease mainly affects infants and young children, but is also often found in teenagers and young adults. The disease is frightening because it can strike rapidly, with people becoming seriously ill within hours.
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Echoes Discovered in Early Visual Brain Areas Play Role in Working Memory


PhysOrg
Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:28 UTC
Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that early visual areas, long believed to play no role in higher cognitive functions such as memory, retain information previously hidden from brain studies. The researchers made the discovery using a new technique for decoding data from functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. The findings are a significant step forward in understanding how we perceive, process and remember visual information.

The results were published Feb. 18 online by Nature.

"We discovered that early visual areas play an important role in visual working memory," Frank Tong, co-author of the research and an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt, said. "How do people maintain an active representation of what they have just seen moments ago? This has long been a conundrum in the literature.

"Before, we knew that early visual areas of the cerebral cortex that are the first to receive visual information were exquisitely tuned to process incoming visual signals from the eye, but not to store this information," Tong said. "We also knew that the higher-order brain areas responsible for memory lack the visual sensitivity of early brain areas, but somehow people are able to remember a visual pattern with remarkable precision for many seconds, actually, for as long as they keep thinking about that pattern. Our question was, where is this precise information being stored in the brain?
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