What's it like inside a factory farm? If the livestock and meat industries have their way, what little view we have inside the walls of these animal-reviewing facilities may soon be obscured. For the second year in a row, the industry is backing bills in various statehouses that would criminalize undercover investigations of livestock farms. The Humane Society of the US, one of the animal-welfare groups most adept at conducting such hidden-camera operations, counts active "ag gag" bills in no fewer than nine states. Many of them are based on a model conjured by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded group that generates industry-friendly legislation language for state legislatures, Associated Press reports.

To understand the stakes of this battle, consider this 2010 Food and Drug Administration report on conditions in several vast egg-producing facilities in Iowa owned by a man named Jack Decoster. I teased out some highlights at the time of its release; in short, it involves flies, maggots, rats, wild birds, tainted feed, workers ignoring sanitary rules, and lots and lots of chickenshit. The report portrays the facilities as a kind of fecal nightmare, with manure mounding up in eight-foot piles - providing perches for escaped hens to peck feed from teeming cages - overflowing in pits, and seeping through concrete foundations.

It was, in short, a blunt and damning portrayal, an example of a federal watchdog agency training the public gaze on the misdeeds of a powerful industry. The investigation led the FDA to ban the offending operations from selling fresh eggs for several months.

Salad labelled as "ready-to-eat" is more dangerous than beefburgers, one of Britain's top food experts has said, following a spate of Cryptosporidium infections linked to the product.

Certain types of bacteria found in the pre-cut salad bags can be almost impossible to kill, Professor Hugh Pennington said, unless the leaves are irradiated - a process the public would oppose.

His claim follows a Health Protection Agency investigation into an outbreak of salad-linked Cryptosporidium infections that affected around 300 people in England and Scotland in May.

In the analysis of the exposure to different salad vegetables a significant statistical association was found between infection and the consumption of pre-cut spinach.

When specific retailers were included in the analysis, the strongest association with infection was found to be with consumption of ready to eat pre-cut mixed salad leaves from a major supermarket chain.

"Together these findings suggest that one or more types of salad vegetables could have been contaminated," said the HPA.

Food deprivation in infancy may promote negative traits at age 40

Malnutrition in the first year life, even when followed by a good diet and restored physical health, predisposes people to a troubled personality at age 40, new research suggests.

The study of 77 formerly malnourished people represents the first evidence linking malnutrition shortly after birth to adult personality traits. The traits in some cases may foretell psychiatric problems, says a team led by psychiatrist Janina Galler of Harvard Medical School in Boston and psychologist Paul Costa of Duke University Medical Center in Durham.

Compared with peers who were well-fed throughout their lives, formerly malnourished men and women reported markedly more anxiety, vulnerability to stress, hostility, mistrust of others, anger and depression, Galler's team reports March 12 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Survivors of early malnutrition also cited relatively little intellectual curiosity, social warmth, cooperativeness and willingness to try new experiences and to work hard at achieving goals.

Veteran New York Times journalist Michael Moss entered the world of food reporting when he covered a salmonella outbreak in a Georgia peanut factory, a story he came to see as being about "loss of control by the food industry." He followed up on that theme with an investigation of E. coli-tainted Cargill hamburger, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Around that time, he says, a close source told him, "As bad as these contamination incidents are, there's this other public-health crisis out there that's caused by the stuff we intentionally put it into processed foods, and have absolute control over." Meaning, of course, salt, sugar, and fat - the "holy trinity" of processed-food ingredients, and the namesake of Moss' new book.

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us traces how these ingredients worked their way into our food in ever-larger amounts, not by accident but as part of a concerted effort by food companies to make their products as irresistible and addictive as possible. Moss profiles the food scientists whom corporations like Kellogg and Kraft pay to formulate exact combinations of ingredients that target consumers' "bliss point": where food is as tasty as possible without being so satisfying that we stop wanting more. Think junk food like Cheez-Its, movie-theater popcorn, and Oreos: You can kill a whole bag of the stuff without even noticing.

The United States is one of only two countries, the other being New Zealand, that allows drugs to be advertised on TV, and it's not difficult to understand why nearly every other country has given such ads the boot.

As with all commercials, the ads are intended to influence you to buy their products. In the case of prescription medications, the "product" is a potentially dangerous chemical drug that is loaded with side effects.

In a 2009 Harris Poll, 51 percent said that drug ads encourage them to ask questions when they go to their doctor, and a whopping 44 percent actually believe drug ads make them more knowledgeable about treatments for their ailments.

Now, a new study assessing the effect of direct-to-consumer drug advertising has concluded that TV ads for statins may be a driving factor of overdiagnosis of high cholesterol and overtreatment with the drugs.¹

The reason is clear. People who dutifully ask their doctors about a drug advertised on TV usually end up receiving a prescription...

Is it any wonder then that one in four Americans over the age of 45 is now taking a statin drug, despite the fact that there are over 900 studies proving their adverse effects, which run the gamut from muscle problems to diabetes and increased cancer risk.

Odds are likely greater than 100 to 1 that if you're taking a statin, you don't really need it. The ONLY subgroup that might benefit are those born with a genetic defect called familial hypercholesterolemia, as this makes them resistant to traditional measures of normalizing cholesterol.

This week we revisit the topic of psychopaths but from the angle of the women who have fallen "in love" with them and suffered the consequences.

Our guest will be Sandra L. Brown. Sandra holds a master's degree in counseling with a former specialization in personality disorders/pathology. She is a program development specialist, lecturer, community educator, and award-winning author.

Sandra is also a writer for Psychology Today and has been interviewed in magazines such as Seventeen. She has appeared in more than 50 television shows including Anderson Cooper's daytime show, "Anderson". She has provided consultation to film producers regarding pathological love relationship dynamics based on her books.

Sandra's books include the award-winning Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of inevitable Harm With Psychopaths, Sociopaths & Narcissists and How to Spot a Dangerous Man Before You Get Involved

Running Time: 02:05:00

Download: MP3

Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories -- A man from Canada's Northwest Territories said he had a 3-inch knife blade embedded in his back for three years without doctors noticing.

Billy McNeely, 32, of Fort Good Hope, said he repeatedly complained about pain in his back following a stabbing, but doctors never took X-rays and told him the pain was from nerve damage, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported Wednesday.

"I've done some jail time in the past. The guards rub over you with a metal wand detector, and every time it hit my back in the jail it went off," he said.

McNeely said a lump formed in the painful spot on his back and earlier this week he touched it and felt something odd.

Every day it seems like some new discovery is revealed about the microbial life on our bodies, in our bodies and around our homes. The tendency in writing about such studies is to make sweeping conclusions about what is and is not and, of course, how we should live and what we should do. But the truth is that these new studies are part of a big lunge science is making into a great darkness. The lights we are shining are revealing treasures and discoveries, but no one has a lens big enough to see the whole picture, not yet anyway. The temptation is to stand at the site of each new discovery and try to make the prediction about what is next. I'm going to do something else here. I'm going to try to predict not the next discovery but instead the next ten years.

You can check back in ten years to tell me whether I was full of it. I probably am, but what fun is a blog if you can't speculate a bit. For what it is worth, these wild ideas come largely from extrapolating what we know about ecology of non-human species in general and applying it to humans and the microbes around us. In other words, if humans obey the ecological regularities the last fifty years of ecology have revealed then it will be discovered that...

Sleep plays an important role in the brain's ability to consolidate learning when two new potentially competing tasks are learned in the same day, research at the University of Chicago demonstrates.

Other studies have shown that sleep consolidates learning for a new task. The new study, which measured starlings' ability to recognize new songs, shows that learning a second task can undermine the performance of a previously learned task. But this study is the first to show that a good night's sleep helps the brain retain both new memories.

Starlings provide an excellent model for studying memory because of fundamental biological similarities between avian and mammalian brains, scholars wrote in the paper, "Sleep Consolidation of Interfering Auditory Memories in Starlings," published in the current online edition ofPsychological Science.

"These observations demonstrate that sleep consolidation enhances retention of interfering experiences, facilitating daytime learning and the subsequent formation of stable memories," the authors wrote.

The paper was written by Timothy Brawn, a graduate researcher in psychology at UChicago; Howard Nusbaum, professor of psychology; and Daniel Margoliash, professor of psychology, organismal biology and anatomy. Nusbaum is a leading expert on learning, and Margoliash is a pioneer in the research of brain function and its development in birds.

For the study, the researchers conducted two experiments using 24 starlings each. They played two recorded songs from other starlings and tested the birds' ability to recognize and repeat the two songs. After learning to recognize the two songs, the birds were later trained to recognize and perform a different pair of songs.