Patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are having trouble finding anyone to fill their prescriptions for drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin. Meanwhile, there is concern that a growing number of college students are using the stimulants to get high and stay up all night, even if they don’t really have ADHD.
The same neurochemical, dopamine, which activates the brain’s learning centres, is released during periods of positive emotion. Children, doctors, and salespeople all experience better performance after being primed by remembering a happy moment in their life.
Three astonishing facts about running:
1. Mexican tribesmen, peaceful and healthy, run 150 miles at a time.
2. “Women get stronger as distances get longer.”
3. Peak speed is at 27 years of age, but 64 year-olds run as fast as 19 year-olds.
…the pilot project here is about more than just manufacturing skin. The process is meant to pave the way for a new era, one in which human tissue becomes an industrial product. The miracle of incarnation, which once only took place in the darkness of the uterus, is now happening under the cold neon light of an assembly facility controlled by robots.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,756809,00.html
“The heart produces around 1 or 1.5 watts of hydraulic power, and we want to take maybe one milliwatt,” [mechanical engineer Alois] Pfenniger explains. “A pacemaker only needs around 10 microwatts.” At the Microtechnologies in Medicine and Biology conference in Lucerne, Switzerland, earlier this month, Pfenniger presented results from a trial in which a tube is designed to mimic the internal thoracic artery, a millimeters-wide vessel that doctors sometimes cannibalize for surgery because it is redundant. The most efficient of the three off-the-shelf turbines he tested produced around 800 microwatts, which could run devices much more power hungry than today’s pacemakers.
A drug that seems to dampen bad memories, while leaving other memories intact, may one day be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Previously, scientists knew that a stress hormone called cortisol affects people’s ability to form new memories and decrease negative emotions that might have been associated with them. But they thought once memories had solidified, they could no longer be affected by cortisol.
A new study led by researchers at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress, affiliated with the University of Montreal, shows that in fact, metyrapone, a drug that temporarily alters cortisol levels can be used to dampen an old, negative memory for days and possibly the long term.
http://www.cbc.ca/m/rich/news/story/2011/05/26/science-drug-memories-ptsd.html
Children who spent their early years in state-run Romanian orphanages have shorter telomeres than children who grew up in foster care… Shorter telomeres are associated with a raft of diseases in adults from diabetes to dementia… [A] follow-up study might also help to answer the question of whether shorter telomeres are a cause or an effect of poor health.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110517/full/news.2011.298.html