In a groundbreaking new study, researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have demonstrated that heart cells are able to regenerate themselves, overturning the conventional wisdom that the body cannot replace damaged heart cells.

Researchers immediately hailed the study as providing new hope for prevention and treatment of diseased hearts.

"I think this will be one of the most important papers in cardiovascular medicine in years," said Dr. Charles Murry, a heart researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. "It helps settle a longstanding controversy about whether the human heart has any ability to regenerate itself."

Unlike most cells in the body, heart cells mostly stop reproducing themselves relatively early in life. When injured, the heart tends to simply scar, rather than replacing damaged tissue the way other organs do. For decades, scientists assumed that the heart was simply incapable of natural regeneration.

A cup of hot cocoa may not do much to cool you down from the summer swelter, but it may cool down your blood pressure. According to a new report filed in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, hypertensive rats fed a moderate dose of powdered chocolate dropped their systolic blood pressure rates by an average of 50 mmHg after a single dose. The cocoa content was 70 percent.

The study's specimens were mice, some with normal blood pressure, others with high blood pressure. The rats were grouped in a fashion so that rats with normal blood pressure and high blood pressure received one of a range of cocoa doses (as low as 50 milligrams to as much as 600 milligrams of cocoa powder).

While the researchers did not observe any noticeable differences in blood pressure readings among the rats with normal blood pressure, the hypertensive rats that received 300 milligrams of cocoa powder had a systolic blood pressure reading that dropped 60 mmHg four hours after the dose.

Severe stomach cramps, nightmares, hallucinations, diarrhoea, strange behaviour, suicide, and death, these are all known side effects that have been linked with the antiviral drug Tamiflu, over the recent months. Despite being aware of the harm Tamiflu can cause however, this drug is regularly offered to patients displaying symptoms of Swine Flu.

TAMIFLU in the Askapatient database: There are 259 ratings for the drug. This website makes extremely disturbing reading.

Amyloid protein deposits in the brain play a role in disrupting the memory formation process long before a person shows symptoms of the memory impairment of Alzheimer's disease, a new study contends.

Previous research had suggested that clumps of amyloid protein, which damage neurons and are characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, begin appearing many years before Alzheimer's symptoms appear. But the link between the deposits and memory impairment had not been clearly demonstrated in humans.

In the new study, which appears in the July 30 issue of Neuron, U.S. researchers used medical imaging to examine the brains of older people who did not have significant memory impairment.

This case, reported in the UK Daily Mail, reminds me of that of Ken McElroy, recounted by Harry N Maclean in his book, 'In Broad Daylight'. Although the boy concerned is only 12 years old, his future 'career', based on his life up to now, will probably be very similar to McElroy's. He lives on a council housing estate in Hull, UK. 'Asbo' is an acronym for 'Anti-social behaviour order'.

The full report can be found here: 'Satan's child? He's just a little devil,' says mother of a one-boy crime wave.

Here's a few excerpts from the article:

Eight o'clock in the evening, and all is surprisingly calm in the home of Sonny Grainger, the 12-year- old who this week was labelled a 'one-boy wave of terror'.

You might expect that as his newly imposed curfew kicks in - the tag on his ankle ensures he is confined to the house until 7am - a child who prefers to spend evenings riding stolen motorbikes, starting fires and throwing stones at passers-by would be climbing the walls.

Instead, he sits quietly on the sofa, eating toast and watching The Bill until, at 8.45pm, with a kiss for his devoted mum, the 'tyrant' of Hull's Boothferry Estate retires to bed.

In the eyes of his neighbours, who have endured the campaign of violence, vandalism, theft and arson that earned him an Asbo and a reputation for excessive thuggery, he is nothing but a little hooligan whose mother has failed in her basic duty.

But to Nadine West - who admits that, prior to the Asbo [Anti-social behaviour order], she often didn't know his whereabouts from the moment he left the house after school until he had been rounded up by the police - he is a seriously misunderstood little boy.

Though even she has referred to her son - with brutal candour - as 'Satan's child', she insists his problem isn't a lack of discipline, but a psychiatric condition called ODD, or oppositional defiant disorder.

'He was diagnosed last October by experts, not by me,' she says. 'So when I hear people saying all these things about him - that he's got no respect for authority, that he's got anger management issues, that he's out of control - they don't make me think he's a bad kid, they just underline the symptoms of his condition.

'I think: "Yeah, he's got ODD. Now give us the help that we need." '

Among psychiatrists, ODD is a recognised condition, thought to affect between one and 16 per cent of school-age children, and Sonny seems to fit the profile.

Those affected are consistently surly, uncooperative, defiant and hostile towards authority figures.

They throw tantrums, they argue, they do the opposite of whatever is asked of them, they have an explosive temper and an inclination to seek revenge whenever they feel slighted.

Children whose mothers had morning sickness during pregnancy may go on to have sharper minds than their peers, a small study suggests.

Researchers found that among 121 Canadian children between the ages of 3 and 7, those whose mothers had suffered morning sickness scored higher, on average, on certain tests of IQ, memory and language skills.

In addition, mothers' use of the drug diclectin -- prescribed in Canada for morning sickness -- did not diminish the effects. In fact, children whose mothers had used the medication showed the highest average scores on certain tests.

Divorce can be emotionally devastating. But a new study suggests it may be physically damaging, too.

The study, to be published in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, analyzed data from close to 9,000 people aged 51 to 61 and found that divorced or widowed people have 20 percent more chronic health conditions than married people (such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer), and 23 percent had more mobility limitations (such as climbing stairs).

"Among the currently married, those who have ever been divorced show worse health on all dimensions," University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, who co-authored the study, told LiveScience.

Can we complete a historical circle by reviving trustful parenting?

Parenting, like essentially all human behaviors, must be understood in the context of the culture in which it is embedded. Parenting styles derive from broader cultural values, and they help to perpetuate those values.

In my last post, I talked about hunter-gatherers' playful style of parenting. That essay was part of a series on hunter-gatherers' playful approach to all of social life. I used the term playful there to refer to an attitude of treating others as equals rather than as superiors or subordinates. In the series I contrasted hunter-gatherers' playful approaches to government, religion, productive work, and parenting to the more dominance-based approaches that have held sway in all subsequent cultures.

We need a more holistic approach to our food system. We need to be sure that high yields and maximum profits for producers don't come with hidden price tags to consumers in terms of nutritional decline or environmental damage.

American agribusiness is producing more food than ever before, but the evidence is building that the vitamins and minerals in that food are declining. For example, take the two eggs shown at right. The one with the bright orange yolk is from a free-range chicken raised by Mother Earth News managing editor Nancy Smith, while the pale one is a supermarket egg from a hen raised indoors on a "factory farm." Eggs from free-range hens contain up to 30 percent more vitamin E, 50 percent more folic acid and 30 percent more vitamin B-12 than factory eggs. And the bright orange color of the yolk shows higher levels of antioxidant carotenes. (Many factory-farm eggs are so pale that producers feed the hens expensive marigold flowers to make the yolks brighter in color.)

"You have to know where your food is coming from." These words of warning were spoken by biologist and plant expert, Arpad Puszati at a gathering of concerned citizens in St. Catherine's, Ontario earlier this year.(1)

As far back as 1998, Dr. Puszati's research at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland showed that genetically modified potatoes caused health problems in rats, including a weakened immune system and abnormal growth. For blowing the whistle on Big Agra, he was dismissed from his job.