Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that causes people to fall asleep uncontrollably during the day. It also includes features of dreaming that occur while awake. Other common symptoms include sleep paralysis, hallucinations and cataplexy.

About one out of every 2,000 people is known to have narcolepsy. The chance that you have narcolepsy is higher when a relative also has it. It is very rare for more than two people in the same family to have this sleep disorder. It affects the same number of men and women.

Puzzling? It sure is - but Susumu Tanaka, PhD, of the Tokyo Institute of Psychiatry in Japan has written the first report to identify the biological markers of narcolepsy using gene expression in white blood cells.

Inside the body, our organs are elegantly kept apart by slick membranes. Inside our smallest components, our cells, a similar separation is upheld with the help of electrical charges. In the same way that reversed magnets repel each other, gauzes of negative charges prevent proteins, genetic material, and fats from sticking to each other in the wrong way.

Mikael Oliveberg, professor of biochemistry at Stockholm University in Sweden, describes how disturbances in these functions underlie the hereditary form of the motor-neuron disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Learning to fly is easy, if you are a bird. But why is it that birds learn so easily how to fly? It is well known that birds learn through practice, and that they gradually refine their innate ability into a finely tuned skill.

According to a new theory by Dr Stone of Sheffield University, skills such as flying are easy to refine because the innate ability of today's birds depends indirectly on the learning that their ancestors did, which leaves a genetically specified latent memory for flying.

The theory has been tested on simple models of brains called artificial neural networks, which can be made to evolve using genetic algorithms.

Whilst these networks do not fly, they do learn associations, and these associations could take the form of a skill such as flying.

In a recent survey conducted by the University of Maryland’s Center for Food Nutrition and Agriculture Policy, consumers listed tuna, salmon and shrimp as the fish with the highest levels of mercury. But when the question was reversed — which fish had the lowest levels of mercury? — the responses were identical: tuna, salmon and shrimp.

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I stumbled on SLD when I, after a sinus-infection, lost my ability to smell and therefore also taste the flavor of the food I was eating. I could only tell if the food was sweet, sour or salty. I was devastated especially after reading that it could very well be permanent. During those days I noticed how much the flavor of the food means to me but also how my appetite was affected. I just didn´t want to eat. After 3-4 days my ability to smell started to return slowly slowly to my great joy and so did my appetite.

After lung and stomach cancer, liver cancer is the third largest cause of cancer deaths in the world. A new study on the relationship between coffee drinking and the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) confirmed that there is an inverse association between coffee consumption and HCC.

At least eleven studies conducted in southern Europe and Japan have examined the relationship between coffee drinking and the risk of primary liver cancer. The current study, led by Francesca Bravi of the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri in Milan, Italy, was a meta-analysis of published studies on HCC that included how much coffee patients had consumed.

Forsyth Institute scientists have discovered an important mechanism for controlling the behavior of adult stem cells.

Research with the flatworm, planaria, found a novel role for the proteins involved in cell-to-cell communication. This work has the potential to help scientists understand the nature of the messages that control stem cell regulation ¯ such as the message that maintain and tells a stem cell to specialize and to become part of an organ e.g.: liver or skin.

In recent years, planarians have been recognized as a great model system to molecularly dissect conserved stem cell regulatory mechanisms in vivo. Planarians have powerful regeneration capability that makes them ideal for studying this process.

Stars don’t shine forever. How long a star lives depends on how big and heavy it is. The bigger the star, the shorter its life.

When a star significantly heavier than our sun runs out of fuel, it collapses and blows itself apart in a catastrophic supernova explosion. A supernova releases so much light that it can outshine a whole galaxy of stars put together. The exploding star sweeps out a huge bubble in its surroundings, fringed with actual stellar debris along with material swept up by the blast wave. This glowing, brightly-coloured shell of gas forms a nebula that astronomers call a ‘supernova remnant’.

Scientists from the Animal Ecology and Cell Biology Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover were able to develop a many-headed jellyfish when Cnox genes were deactivated.

These genes are closely related to the Hox genes of the “higher” animals and are responsible for forming the body along the main body axis, from the anterior to the posterior.

Multiple-headed animals were recognized as a rare developmental anomaly of unknown origin in various animals. Now for the first time, having many heads is shown to be an inducible and reproducible development when a single regulatory gene is experimentally deactivated.

Disorders of arousal (i.e., sleepwalking, confusional arousals and sleep terrors) have sometimes been associated with violent behaviors against other individuals. A preliminary review of possible triggers for violence during disorders of arousal finds that violent behavior most frequently appears to follow direct provocation by, or close proximity to, another individual.

The review, authored by Mark R. Pressman, PhD, of Sleep Medicine Services at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood, Penn., was based on a review of 32 cases drawn from medical and legal literature.