Health & Vaccines

San Francisco Chronicle | Like alcohol and tobacco, sugar is a toxic, addictive substance that should be highly regulated with taxes, laws on where and to whom it can be advertised, and even age-restricted sales, says a team of UCSF scientists.

Imperial College | In the first study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 30 healthy volunteers had psilocybin infused into their blood while inside magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, which measure changes in brain activity. The scans showed that activity decreased in "hub" regions of the brain - areas that are especially well-connected with other areas.

NPR | Ketamine has been used as an anesthetic for decades. It's also a widely popular but illegal club drug known as "Special K." When administered in low doses, patients report a rapid reduction in depression symptoms.  There's no quick fix for severe depression.  Although antidepressants like Prozac have been around since the 1970s, they usually take weeks to make a difference. And for up to 40 percent of patients, they simply don't work.

BBC | A dose of ultrasound to the testicles can stop the production of sperm, according to researchers investigating a new form of contraception.  A study on rats published in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology showed that sound waves could be used to reduce sperm counts to levels that would cause infertility in humans.

Natural News | The pressure is on for researchers and pharmaceutical companies to develop drug-based, non-synthetic versions of marijuana for medical use, as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is poised to approve such varieties in the near future. But this potential approval appears to be reserved only for Big Pharma, as the marijuana plant itself could continue to remain a controlled substance at the federal level with no recognized health benefits.

CNN | The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will inject $750 million into the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced Thursday at the World Economic Forum.

TIME | Based on this idea, Huxley posited that ordinary consciousness represents only a fraction of what the mind can take in. In order to keep us focused on survival, Huxley claimed, the brain must act as a “reducing valve” on the flood of potentially overwhelming sights, sounds and sensations. What remains, Huxley wrote, is a “measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” necessary to “help us to stay alive.”

Huffington Post | That’s what U.S.-based agribusiness giant Monsanto has been accused of in India, where the government is planning to charge the company with violating the country’s biodiversity laws over a genetically modified version of eggplant.

Natural Society | The United States is threatening nations who oppose Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) crops with military-style trade wars, according to information obtained and released by the organization WikiLeaks. Nations like France, which have moved to ban one of Monsanto’s GM corn varieties, were requested to be ‘penalized’ by the United States for opposing Monsanto and genetically modified foods.

MSNBC | The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency abruptly changed its mind Saturday about delivering fresh water to residents of a northeastern Pennsylvania village where residential wells were found to be tainted by a natural gas drilling operation.

Scientific American | Deep depression that fails to respond to any other form of therapy can be moderated or reversed by stimulation of areas deep inside the brain. Now the first placebo-controlled study of this procedure shows that these responses can be maintained in the long term.

New York Times | Medicines to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are in such short supply that hundreds of patients complain daily to the Food and Drug Administration that they are unable to find a pharmacy with enough pills to fill their prescriptions.

Science Daily | A team of Weizmann Institute scientists has turned the tables on an autoimmune disease. In such diseases, including Crohn's and rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's tissues. But the scientists managed to trick the immune systems of mice into targeting one of the body's players in autoimmune processes, an enzyme known as MMP9. The results of their research recently appeared in Nature Medicine.

MSNBC | Medical milestone or privacy invasion? A tiny computer chip approved Wednesday for implantation in a patient’s arm can speed vital information about a patient’s medical history to doctors and hospitals. But critics warn that it could open new ways to imperil the confidentiality of medical records.

Daily Mail | Tumours were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical literature found.  A greater understanding of its origins could lead to treatments for the disease, which claims more than 150,000 lives a year in the UK.

Hydrogen peroxide is the only germicidal agent composed only of water and oxygen. Like ozone, it kills disease organisms by oxidation! Hydrogen peroxide is considered the worlds safest all natural effective sanitizer. It kills microorganisms by oxidizing them, which can be best described as a controlled burning process. When hydrogen peroxide reacts with organic material it breaks down into oxygen and water.

TIME | The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) may move to eliminate age restrictions for the morning-after emergency contraception pill, Plan B One-Step, according to several people involved with the deliberations who spoke with TIME Healthland.

Scientific American | A new breed of genetically modified mosquitoes carries a gene that cripples its own offspring. They could crush native mosquito populations and block the spread of disease. And they are already in the air—though that's been a secret

SC Tech | A blind man who thought he would never be able to read again has had his vision partially restored after being fitted with a 'bionic' eye.  Peter Lane, 51, is one of the first people in the world to have electronic receivers implanted into his eye which send signals mounted in a pair of glasses to
the brain.

Capital FM News | The measure bars GMOs — including seeds, livestock, and fish — from being imported for cultivation or to be raised locally.  Exceptions include the use of GMO products for research purposes in a closed environment, but those will be closely monitored, the legislature’s official news service said.

Bad Science | This week Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, apparently announced that computer games are causing dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information: but it comes to us from the opening of a new wing at an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference.

Doctor Tipster | French researchers were able to restore the youth of cells taken from people aged over 100 years, reprograming them to stem cells stage, demonstrating that aging is in fact reversible. The researchon the possibility to remove traces left by aging cells, published in the Genes & Development journal , marks a new stage in the regenerative medicine field, said Jean-Marc Lemaitre from Fonctionnelle Génomique Institute(INSERM / CNRS / Université de Montpellier), who led the study, informs AFP.

Science Blog | The team, based at McGill University in Montreal, University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the UCL Institute of Child Health in London looked for gene methylation associated with social and economic factors in early life.

No Patent On Seeds Organzation | Surprisingly, the European Patent Office (EPO) has just canceled a public hearing on the controversial patent on a broccoli scheduled for 26 October. A broad range of organisations had been preparing a demonstration against patents for plants and animals on that day. The broccoli protected by the patent EP1069819 was derived by conventional breeding methods. The rights to the patents are being held by US company Monsanto. The company Syngenta which had appealed against the patent, has now surprisingly proposed the cancellation of the planned hearing. The EPO is following this request from industry. This means that the patent for the broccoli, which is derived by traditional breeding methods, will now be upheld with only minor modifications.

Banquets Catering | Have you ever wondered how much sugar in your soda? I always remembered hearing it had 6 tablespoons of sugar within every can. Well, the wait is now over and you can find out how much sugar is inside all these food items. Were you surprised with the results? Please let us know in the comment section. Thank you

Medical Express | IQ, the standard measure of intelligence, can increase or fall significantly during our teenage years, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust, and these changes are associated with changes to the structure of our brains. The findings may have implications for testing and streaming of children during their school years.

Physorg | Cancer treatments are designed to compromise the DNA of cancer cells. But once the DNA is damaged, the PARP protein jumps into action to protect the cell. It attaches itself to the damaged areas and launches a repair process. The EPFL researchers have shown that metal-based compounds alter the PARP protein, thus inhibiting its repair function.

Science Daily | In findings with major implications for the genetics of cancer and human health, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and two other science teams in New York City and Rome have uncovered evidence of powerful new genetic networks and showed how it may work to drive cancer and normal development.

Mother Jones | The Occupy Wall Street protests grew out of anger at the outsized power of banks. But as they've expanded nationwide, the uprisings have evolved into a kind of running challenge to the way power is concentrated in all aspects of our economy—concentrated into the hands of people with an interest in maintaining the status quo.

Foresight Institute | Several decades from now we hope to have sophisticated medical nanorobots, produced by molecular manufacturing, that can enter cells, analyze the state of the cell, and initiate appropriate therapy, such as killing cancer cells.

End the Lie | In the wake of the horror of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, some independent chemists and toxicologists warned that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was using outdated testing procedures and was allowing seafood tainted with oil to make it to the consumer market.

LA Times | Trustees of the California Medical Assn., which represents more than 35,000 physicians statewide, adopted the position at their annual meeting in Anaheim late Friday. It is the first major medical association in the nation to urge legalization of the drug, according to a group spokeswoman, who said the larger membership was notified Saturday.

Truth Is Treason | As courts and bureaucrats continue to assert that citizens have no fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice, we find Monsanto lurking nearby.  The Wisconsin judge who recently ruled that we have no right to own a cow or drink its milk resigned to join one of Monsanto’s law firms.

New York Times | Rural Bangladeshi women often pour sweetened drinks through a piece of sari cloth to get rid of leaves, insects and other visible debris. But disease-causing micro-organisms are thousands of times smaller than the pores in the fabric and slip right through.

Medical Express | “These liver cells unambiguously cross tissue-type boundaries to become fully functional neural cells,” said Marius Wernig, MD, PhD assistant professor of pathology and a member of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. “Even more surprising, these cells also simultaneously silence their liver-gene expression profile. They are not hybrids; they are completely switching their identities.”

Health Freedom Alliance | A special HFA interview with Bridget Donovan, aka “The Lemon Tree Lady,” USDA’s Most Wanted. Or rather, her little beloved lemon tree was. Last week, we reported the story of the USDA demanding her tree three years after a quarantine, but the real USDA mode of operation is in the details below - we can’t make this stuff up!

The Guardian | The findings, published recently in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, suggest that manipulations of brain activity could be an effective way of obtaining truthful responses from defendants and criminal suspects, raising more ethical questions about the application of neuroscience technologies in the legal profession.

Investment Watch | "In response to a request from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the judge issued a clarification of his decision last week regarding his assessment of the constitutionality of food rights. The judge expanded on his original statement that such constitutional issues are “wholly without merit.”

Cracked | If there's one thing in the world the food industry is dead set against, it's allowing you to actually maintain some level of control over what you eat. See, they have this whole warehouse full of whatever they bought last week when they were drunk that they need to get rid of -- and they will do so by feeding it all to you. And it doesn't matter how many pesky "lists of ingredients" and consumer protections stand between you and them.

Science Daily | University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental toxicologist Edward Calabrese, whose career research shows that low doses of some chemicals and radiation are benign or even helpful, says he has uncovered evidence that one of the fathers of radiation genetics, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller, knowingly lied when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe level of radiation exposure.

BBC | Breathing in heavy traffic fumes can trigger a heart attack, say UK experts.  Heart attack risk is raised for about six hours post-exposure and goes down again after that, researchers found.  They say in the British Medical Journal that pollution probably hastens rather than directly cause attacks.

Al Jazeera | On September 19, the United Nations will convene a high-level meeting to consider the "international aspect of public health" for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), with a particular focus on the social and economic impacts for developing countries.

Reuters | Researchers have found a drug that can help the brain grow new cells and said their study may lead to ways to improve experimental Alzheimer's drugs.  The researchers' work, done on rodents, builds on findings that all mammals, including humans, make brain cells throughout their lives. Most of these die, but this drug helps more of the baby cells survive and grow to become functioning brain cells.

Popular Science | Cohibas Cuba is known for exporting cigars, but it might soon be known for exporting a lung cancer vaccine researchers say can turn advanced lung cancer into a manageable chronic illness. M Turner viaAs such it can turn aggressive later-stage lung cancer into a manageable chronic disease by creating antibodies that do battle with the proteins that cause uncontrolled cell proliferation, researchers say. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are still recommended as a primary means of destroying cancerous tissue, but for those showing no improvement the new vaccine could be a literal lifesaver.

Common Dreams | This weekend, the public will mourn a site of loss, recasting the painful memories and haunting fears that still hover over the aftermath at Ground Zero. But the people who worked and breathed that tragedy in the days and months following September 11 won't be at the primary commemoration ceremony for the families of victims.

Psychology Today | It is scary to contemplate, but I just started my 21st year teaching at a university.  Students use lots of techniques to try to get an advantage in their studies.  Obviously, some students resort to real cheating by trying to steal exams or to copy successful papers from past semesters.  Others try more subtle means.

Science Daily  | The researchers identified stem cells within the skin's fatty layer and showed that molecular signals from these cells were necessary to spur hair growth in mice, according to research published in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Cell.

Science Magazine | According to some estimates, more than 300,000 United States troops have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of these injuries have resulted from blasts from roadside bombs and other explosives planted by insurgents.

Medical Express | Princeton researchers developed a method to determine the probability of various words being associated with the object a person thought about during a brain scan. They produced color-coded figures that illustrate the probability of words within the Wikipedia article about the object the participant saw during the scan actually being associated with the object.

BBC | The virus attacked only tumours, leaving the healthy tissue alone, in a small trial on 23 patients, according to the journal Nature.  Researchers said the findings could one day "truly transform" therapies.  Cancer specialists said using viruses showed "real promise".