The image of a stoner always having the munchies is a stereotype because it's true - and it's true, say researchers, because it has a basis in biology.
Daniele Piomelli, Nicholas DiPatrizio and colleagues found that fats in foods like potato chips and french fries trigger a biological mechanism - and that is driven by natural marijuana-like chemicals in the body called endocannabinoids.
In their study, they discovered that when rats tasted something fatty, cells in their upper gut started producing endocannabinoids but sugars and proteins did not have this effect.
Long before "Star Wars", science-fiction had talked of robot walkers. In "War of the Worlds", even aliens from Mars had giant, mechanized tripeds and they got killed by a few germs.
But the real world worked on them also. Now on display at the US Army Transportation Musem at Fort Eustis is GE’s Pedipulator, or “Walking Truck", which was developed for the U.S. Army in the mid-‘60s. This quadroped first lumbered through testing paces Pittsfield, Massachusetts, circa 1962.
Growing human, perfectly matching organs inside a pig and then transplanting them into humans is not a new idea - it may revolutionize medicine - but a new discovery may also allow pig tissue to be transplanted directly into humans. The research in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology may lead to filling the short term lack of organs for human transplantation.
Altering or overexpressing the human programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) molecule in the endothelial cells of pig arteries reduced the conditions that lead to rejection, it says. This strongly suggests that successful Xenotransplantation means humans could receive altered porcine organs with fewer complications.
We've all had an Asian person say, 'All you Americans look alike' - but they aren't being racist, there may be some biology at work.
The brain works differently when memorizing the face of a person from one's own race, according to a study which used EEG recordings to measure brain activity and which may shed light on one of the most replicated psychology findings - that people are less likely to remember a face from a racial group different from their own.
If you pay a lot of taxes and get little to show for it, you don't have much trust in government, but if you are in a disaster-prone area, you have more confidence in government than most, say researchers in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.
Here's a way to make the bloated costs of health care reform seem more palatable to opponents - it will knock 220,000 illegal immigrants out of the health care system just in California alone.
A new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research says up to 20 percent of all uninsured children in California are those of illegal immigrants, but even some who are here legally may not apply because of confusing rules in The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) , known colloquially, thanks to pundits like Bill Maher and detractors in the debate, as ObamaCare.
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