Hey, I'm back! I went to a
rockin' party and an
awesome conference and now I am full of interesting tales. Also, I am full of determination to finish my thesis this year, and an unfortunate byproduct of that resolution is a need to cut down on my blogging. Therefore, as you can see from my mutilated banner, squid-a-day is temporarily squid-a-week, until I finish my degree.
So once a week I will be delivering a concentrated dose of squid! Are you ready for the first? It's extra concentrated, since I had to cover the first twelve days of the new year . . .
Scientists have just identified several molecules capable of reversing the brain abnormalities of Parkinson’s disease (PD), while also uncovering new clues for its origin in a study just published in the journal Disease Models and Mechanisms (1). PD is characterised by abnormal deposits of a brain protein called alpha-synuclein throughout the damaged brain regions, but exactly what they do there is not clear.
The more hands of online poker a player wins, the more money that person is likely to lose, concludes a study conducted by a Cornell sociology doctoral student. The likely reason being that multiple wins are common for small stakes poker, and the more someone plays, the more likely he or she will eventually be walloped by occasional – but significant – losses.
Drinking green tea could modulate the effects of smoking on lung cancer, suggests a hospital-based, randomized study presented at the AACR-IASLC Joint Conference on Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer.
Researchers enrolled 170 patients with lung cancer and 340 healthy patients as controls. The team administered questionnaires to obtain demographic characteristics, cigarette smoking habits, green tea consumption, dietary intake of fruits and vegetables, cooking practices and family history of lung cancer. They also performed genotyping on insulin-like growth factors as polymorphisms on the following insulin-like growth factors: IGF1, IGF2 and IGFBP3, which have all been reported to be associated with cancer risk.
Blocking the function of an enzyme called cPLA2 with a specific kind of vitamin E can prevent nerve cells from dying after a stroke, new research published in the Journal of Neurochemistry suggests. Using mouse brain cells, scientists found that the tocotrienol (TCT) form of vitamin E stopped the enzyme from releasing fatty acids that eventually kill neurons.
Vitamin E occurs naturally in eight different forms. The best-known form of vitamin E belongs to a variety called tocopherols. The form of vitamin E in this study, tocotrienol or TCT, is not abundant in the American diet but is available as a nutritional supplement. It is a common component of a typical Southeast Asian diet.
No matter what you do for a living, you're likely to consistently feel better mentally and physically on the weekend, according to a study of daily mood variation in employed adults. Dubbed the 'weekend effect', this tendency to feel better on your days off is largely associated with the freedom to choose how you spend your time, the study's authors suggest.
While exerting willpower is an important part of losing weight, new evidence suggests that their may be more to successful dieting than simply trying to eat less. Cognitive scientists from Indiana University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin have found that the perceived complexity of diets themselves can also have a big influence on the pounds shed. Their research was published in the journal Appetite.
Policy makers and lobbyists who want to enact a carbon tax would do well to choose their words carefully, say Columbia University Psychologists. In a new study in Psychological Science, the research team suggests that since voters typically don't like higher taxes, policy proposals aimed at reducing CO2 emissions should be referred to as 'carbon offsets' in order to generate the most public support. The semantic trick even works on those who are most resistant to a political response to climate change--Republicans.
Giving up caffeine does not relieve tinnitus and acute caffeine withdrawal may actually add to the problem, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Audiology.
Parents are acutely aware of the influence that friends exert over their children's behavior -- how they dress, how they wear their hair, whether they drink or smoke. And now a new laboratory-based study has shown that friends may also influence how much adolescents eat.
The study appears online in the current issue of Annals of Behavioral Medicine and involved 54 overweight and non-overweight youth -- 24 boys and 30 girls -- between the ages of 9 and 11. Each was assigned randomly to bring a friend or to be paired with an unfamiliar peer. Study
participants worked on a computer game to earn points exchangeable for food or time to spend with their friend or with an unfamiliar peer.
