Health & Medicine
- Health & Medicine
Psychiatric meds can bring on rapid weight gain in kids
Drugs that alleviate severe mental disorders can also result in troubling metabolic changes.
- Health & Medicine
Redefining self, phantom self
Amputees who feel phantom limbs can learn to do physically impossible body tricks
- Health & Medicine
Skin bacteria different in diabetic mice
An excessive number and low diversity of skin bacteria could explain why wounds in diabetics are slow to heal
- Humans
A gene critical for speech
Scientists argue a newly discovered stretch of DNA essential for larynx development may have allowed the evolution of language.
- Life
Estrogen helps ward off belly fat
Hormone is one reason that men and women carry weight differently
- Animals
Junk food turns rats into addicts
Bacon, cheesecake and Ho Hos elicit addictive behavior in rats similar to the behavior of rats addicted to heroin.
- Life
People can control their Halle Berry neurons
Researchers pinpoint individual brain cells that respond to particular people and objects.
- Agriculture
Report tallies hidden energy costs
The average retail cost of U.S. coal-fired electricity was 9 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). But there are health and environmental costs of that power that consumers don’t pay, at least as part of their electric bill. According to a new report, accounting for those costs would double the true cost of shooting some electrons through the nation's power grid.
- Health & Medicine
Exercise helps brains bounce back
Study of rhesus monkeys shows running protects dopamine neurons from death.
- Agriculture
Of swine flu, pigs and a state fair
To date, federal monitoring has yet to turn up any U.S. pigs infected with the killer swine flu strain known as H1N1. But Agriculture Department Secretary Tom Vilsack announced yesterday that his agency’s veterinary labs would be reexamining whether any of the apparently healthy pigs exhibited last August 16 to Sept. 1 at the Minnesota state fair might have been infected with the virus. Why? “An outbreak of 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza occurred in a group of children housed in a dormitory at the fair at the same time samples were collected from the pigs,” USDA notes
- Psychology
Mental disorders don’t hinder headache treatment
Headache patients may benefit from drug treatment even if they also suffer from depression or anxiety.
- Chemistry
Tongue’s sour-sensing cells taste carbonation
A protein splits carbon dioxide to give fizz its unique flavor.
