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Here is what we are reading today:
“Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.”
“The findings, recently reported in the June 2012 issue of the journal, Cell Metabolism, reveal that high doses of the vitamin precursor, nicotinamide riboside (NR) — a cousin of niacin — prevent obesity in mice that are fed a fatty diet, and also increase muscle performance, improve energy expenditure and prevent diabetes development, all without side effects.
The Swiss researchers, led by Dr. Johan Auwerx, performed the mouse experiments, while the ability to give the animals sufficient doses of NR was made possible by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers, who played key roles in uncovering the biological story of NR.”
“”The research concerned with the face-in-the-crowd effect essentially deals with the question of how we detect social signals of friendly or unfriendly intent in the human face,” said author Gernot Horstmann, PhD, of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Department of Psychology at Bielefeld University, Germany. “Our results indicate that, contrary to previous assertions, detection of smiles or frowns is relatively slow in crowds of neutral faces, whereas toothy grins and snarls are quite easily detected.””
“”We found moments of high correlation (between brainwave activity during separate viewings) and moments when this did not occur,” said Dr. Lucas C. Parra, Herbert G. Kayser Professor of Biomedical Engineering in CCNY’s Grove School of Engineering, and a corresponding author. “By looking at patterns of oscillation we could tell at which moments a person was particularly engaged. Additionally, we could see whether the correlation occurred across subjects and repeated viewings.””
“An international team of researchers’ study of the spatial patterns of the spread of obesity suggests America’s bulging waistlines may have more to do with collective behavior than genetics or individual choices. The team, led by City College of New York physicist Hernán Makse, found correlations between the epidemic’s geography and food marketing and distribution patterns.”
“To clarify the sensory origins of phantom limbs, Matthew Longo at Birkbeck, University of London, and colleagues enlisted the help of CL – a 38-year-old woman born without a left arm, who periodically feels she has a phantom hand. They asked her to place her right hand beneath a board and indicate where she believed her fingertips and knuckles were. She then repeated the exercise imagining that her phantom left hand was beneath the board instead.”
“There’s potential danger that comes with the promise of a superior pain drug. Total pain blockers with few side effects could be abused by athletes or others who want to ignore an injury, allowing them to do even more damage. Such drugs might also quiet warnings of a new and serious condition, such as an intestinal obstruction or a stroke. As with the Pakistani children, living pain-free might even result in severe trauma and early death.
“If we have a really effective block, it could be dangerous,” Halegoua says. “We need pain.””
“Anyone who trains character strengths increases their sense of well being, a large-scale study conducted by a team of psychologists from the University of Zurich has concluded. It proved for the first time that this kind of training works. The largest impact was evident in training the strengths “curiosity,” “gratitude,” “optimism,” “humor” and “enthusiasm.””
“The study found that women who each day consumed the recommended amount of folic acid (600 micrograms, or .6 milligrams) during the first month of pregnancy experienced a reduced risk of having a child with autism spectrum disorder, specifically when the mother and/or her child had a specific genetic variant (MTHFR 677 C>T) associated with less efficient folate metabolism. The study will be published in the July issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.”
“The testing policies, adopted a year ago by the International Association of Athletics Federations and now under consideration by the International Olympic Committee, call for using testosterone levels to decide whether an athlete is “feminine” enough to compete as a woman. The problem, the authors explain, is that there is insufficient evidence to set a benchmark for a normal testosterone levels in elite female athletes, let alone persuasive research showing that testosterone levels are a good predictor of athletic performance.”
