Brain

DALLAS – Sept. 14, 2009 – Blame your brain for sabotaging your efforts to get back on track after splurging on an extra scoop of ice cream or that second burger during Friday night's football game.

Findings from a new UT Southwestern Medical Center study suggest that fat from certain foods we eat makes its way to the brain. Once there, the fat molecules cause the brain to send messages to the body's cells, warning them to ignore the appetite-suppressing signals from leptin and insulin, hormones involved in weight regulation.

Antisocial and aggressive behaviours represent a widespread and expensive social problem. Recent research has convincingly shown that there is a strong interaction between genetic inheritance and environment for development of personality and behaviour. It appears to be common knowledge that childhood maltreatment often causes psychiatric problems (e.g. depression or anxiety) or behavioural problems (e.g. aggression or antisocial behaviour) later in life. The risk for such a development is, however, different between individuals and can to a large extent be explained by genetic factors.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers say that "teachable software" designed to mimic the human brain may help them diagnose cardiac infections without an invasive exam. Those findings are being presented today at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in San Francisco.

Previous research has shown that low self-esteem and emotional problems are found in people who are overweight or obese– but not which influences which. Research published today in the open access journal BMC Medicine, sheds light on this issue showing that children with emotional difficulties are at higher risk for obesity in adult life.

DURHAM, N.C. -- The prevalence of anxiety, depression and substance dependency may be twice as high as the mental health community has been led to believe.

It depends on how one goes about measuring.

Duke University psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi and colleagues from the United Kingdom and New Zealand used a long-term tracking study of more than 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 32 to reach the conclusion that people vastly underreport the amount of mental illness they've suffered when asked to recall their history years after the fact.

New York, NY (September 10, 2009): A new study published in the September 11, 2009 issue of Science by researchers at the NYU School of Medicine reveal a conceptually novel mechanism that plays an important role in making human pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus anthracis resistant to numerous antibiotics. The study led by Evgeny A.

PASADENA, Calif.—Economists and neuroscientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have shown that they can use information obtained through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurements of whole-brain activity to create feasible, efficient, and fair solutions to one of the stickiest dilemmas in economics, the public goods free-rider problem—long thought to be unsolvable.

It is a long, slow slog to treat major depression. Many antidepressant medications are available, but no single biomarker or diagnostic test exists to predict which one is right for an individual. As a result, for more than half of all patients, the first drug prescribed doesn't work, and it can take months to figure out what does.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- People who live through an extreme traumatic experience such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks or an airplane crash often have the capacity to bounce back or even grow to a higher level of functioning and personal strength, according to a University at Buffalo researcher and expert in the effects of horrifying trauma.

Three experiments were conducted, using different stimuli. In each, the students who had slept had fewer problems with false memory – choosing fewer incorrect words.

How does sleep help? The answer isn't known, Fenn said, but she suspects it may be due to sleep strengthening the source of the memory. The source, or context in which the information is acquired, is a vital element of the memory process.

Or perhaps the people who didn't sleep during the study were simply bombarded with information over the course of the day, affecting their memory ability, Fenn said.

Why are some pediatric cancers able to spontaneously regress? Prof. Michael Fainzilber and his team of the Weizmann Institute's Biological Chemistry Department seem to have unexpectedly found part of the answer. Further research towards a better understanding of the mechanism of action might hopefully lead, in the future, to the development of drugs that will be able to induce regression of certain tumors.

Philadelphia, PA, 10 September 2009 - Drug treatment options for depression can take weeks for the beneficial effects to emerge, which is clearly inadequate for those at immediate risk of suicide. However, intravenous (IV) ketamine, a drug previously used as an anesthetic, has shown rapid antidepressant effects in early trials.

The quality of a person's social life could have an even greater impact than diet and exercise on their health and well-being. There is growing evidence that being a member of a social group can significantly reduce the risk of conditions like stroke, dementia and even the common cold.

CLEMSON—Scientists from Clemson University and the University of Calgary have found that the self-severed tail of some geckos shows a complex pattern of repeating movements to distract the attacker. The research brings to light data about animal nervous systems, information that may lead to new insights into spinal injury in humans.

A new study by the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggests computers are now better at lip-reading than humans.

The peer-reviewed findings will be presented for the first time at the eighth International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (AVSP) 2009, held at the University of East Anglia from September 10-13.