Is the obesity epidemic due to the addictive qualities in food or that a lot more food is cheap and plentiful than ever before in history?

A paper presented at the 2013 Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience - Association Canadienne des Neurosciences (CAN-ACN), says the problem is addiction rather than food wealth - the authors claim that high-fructose corn syrup can cause behavioral reactions in rats similar to those produced by drugs of abuse such as cocaine.  It's the "Food Addiction" hypothesis that has recently become popular, which posits that we could be addicted to food just like drugs.  

Do you see music the same way as your neighbor? Apparently so.  U.C. Berkeley psychologists say people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors, suggesting that humans share a common emotional palette – when it comes to music and color – that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers. They suggest that
our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel 

When comparing men and women who have dyslexia to non-dyslexic control groups, researchers found significant differences in brain anatomy, suggesting that the disorder may have a different brain-based manifestation when it comes to gender.

An estimated 5 percent of the U.S. population has restless legs syndrome, a disruptive, overwhelming nocturnal urge to move the legs even while sleeping, which can lead to many sleepless nights.

Why do patients with restless legs syndrome  still have insomnia when the condition is treated successfully with medication?

Researchers were able to controll seizures in epileptic mice with a one-time transplantation of medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cells into the hippocampus, which inhibit signaling in overactive nerve circuits.

Cell therapy has become a focus of epilepsy research, in part because current medications, even when effective, only control symptoms and not underlying causes of the disease, according to Scott C. Baraban, PhD of UC San Francisco, who led the new study. In many types of epilepsy, he said, current drugs have no therapeutic value at all.

The Whale, The Torpedo And Cruelty To Animals,

a brief history of the use of electricity in medicine and the development of the pacemaker.

Part 2: The Age Of The Electricians

Part 1, was about early uses of electricity in medicine.  The 'torpedo' of the title was once recommended as a cure for headaches.

The Whale, The Torpedo And Cruelty To Animals,

A brief history of the use of electricity in medicine and the development of the pacemaker.

Neuroscientists have long demonstrated that neuronal connections in the brain can be strengthened with neuronal activity in the process known as neuroplasticity, and that brain training can be the ideal remedy to sharpen the human mind and to slow down the progress of neurodegeneration. However, recent studies revealed that too much thinking can actually be detrimental to the brain, causing profound DNA damage often dubbed as the DNA double-stranded breakages (DSBs).

DSBs are identified by the accumulation of gH2A.X histone- a recruiter of the DNA-repair machinery- at the site of breakage, and are previously thought to be caused only by cell stress.