Boston University Researchers have shown that intermittent access to fatty and sugary foods induces changes in the brain that are comparable to those observed in drug dependence. The findings, reported in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help explain how abstinence from these foods contributes to relapse eating among dieters as well as related eating disorders.

The researchers used 155 rats to measure the neurobiological responses. The first group, the diet cycled subjects, repeatedly ate standard rat chow for five days, followed by a highly palatable, high-sugar, chocolate-flavored chow for two days.

The first human embryonic stem cell treatment approved by the FDA for human testing has been shown to restore limb function in rats with neck spinal cord injuries – a finding that could expand the clinical trial to include people with cervical damage.

Results of the cervical study currently appear online in the journal Stem Cells. UCI scientist Hans Keirstead hopes the data will prompt the FDA to authorize clinical testing of the treatment in people with both types of spinal cord damage. About 52 percent of spinal cord injuries are cervical and 48 percent thoracic.

Everybody has memories they'd like to forget forever. Now, thanks to research conducted by scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, there might be a pill for that.

According to their study recently published in Science, it may soon be possible to control fear memories with extinction-based drug therapies.

The Researchers studied proteins in mice known as extracellular matrix chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans and discovered that they form 'neural nets' in the brain which protect against the erasure of fear memories. By giving the mice a drug called chondroitinase ABC, the researchers say they were able to degrade these perineuronal nets and render subsequently acquired fear memories susceptible to erasure.

In July 1999, Medicare began increasing coverage for people needing a simultaneous kidney/pancreas transplant in hopes of addressing racial and economic disparities that existed. But increased Medicare dollars have not translated into more access for African Americans or Hispanics, and researchers from Georgetown University claim they know why.

The team says that racial bias among physicians may prevent black and Hispanic patients from receiving necessary kidney/pancreas transplants at the same rate as similar patients in other racial groups. Their research is published in the November issue of the American Journal of Transplantation

One of my favorite zoologist habits is to gesture on one's own body when describing an animal's anatomy. The weirder the animal, the funnier the implicit analogy.

"These worms have a ventral nerve cord," I explain, drawing a line from my collarbone to my navel. "This mollusc has gills on its dorsal surface," reaching over one shoulder to pat my back.

Easy to do in front of a class, harder on the printed page. There we rely on diagrams to indicate dorsal (top), ventral (bottom), anterior (front), and posterior (back). For example, here's a squid:

A good part of basic research in fundamental physics focuses on the definition, the prediction, and the measurement of quantities which put the current theory -the standard model- to the test in the most stringent way possible. The choice of the quantities on which to base our comparisons between theory prediction and measurement is critical: it entails understanding what may make the comparison imprecise (i.e. experimental systematics affecting the measurement) or fruitless (i.e. theoretical assumptions or a bad definition of the quantity to measure).

One clear example, which I used last week in my lessons of Subnuclear Physics to undergraduates in Padova, is the measurement of the W and Z boson cross sections at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider.

Recently I was interviewed by Pouria Nazemi, Science Editor of the Jam-e-Jam Daily Newspaper.  Jam-e-Jam is the principal Iranian newspaper and is controlled by the government.  In the wake of Iran shutting down its leading business newspaper last week and three pro-reform newspapers in October I thought this would be interesting to readers, since it appeared between these two events.

In an earlier article titled What is Life?, I took the reader through a reasoning process to finally arrive at the conclusion that, contrary to general expectation, finding a definition of life is not an overwhelmingly difficult problem at all because life  is a remarkably simple concept – independent spontaneous cooperation.
I think that finding a definition has been seen as difficult because those considering it have confused the definition with the underlying significance of life, which some might call life’s purpose, when the two are almost separate questions.
This confusion, this perception that life is just too hard to explain, has reduced our most inspiring thinkers to the status of mere mortals.

David Chalmers is a philosopher of mind, best known for his argument about the difficulty of what he termed the “hard problem” of consciousness, which he typically discusses by way of a thought experiment featuring zombies who act and talk exactly like humans, and yet have no conscious thought (I explained clearly what I think of that sort of thing in my essay on “The Zombification of Philosophy”).