NYTimes.com

Dieters are often advised to stop drinking alcohol to avoid the extra calories lurking in a glass of wine or a favorite cocktail. But new research suggests that women who regularly consume moderate amounts of alcohol are less likely to gain weight than nondrinkers and are at lower risk for obesity.

Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning -- on the order of 6 to 11 points -- and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people's behaviors come to be.

At some point in our lives, we've all cried "It's not fair!" In fact, it's human nature for us to dislike unequal situations, and we often try to avoid or remedy them. Now, scientists have identified the first evidence of this behavior's neurological underpinnings in the human brain.

The results show that the brain's reward center responds to unequal situations involving money in a way that indicates people prefer a level playing field, and may suggest why we care about the circumstances of others in the first place.

"Our study shows that the brain doesn't just reflect self-interested goals, but instead, these basic reward processing regions of the brain seem to be affected by social information," said study author Elizabeth Tricomi, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "That might explain why what happens to other people seems to matter so much to us, even when it might not actually directly affect our own situation."

Check out this report from NPR's Radiolab.

In his book How We Decide, and in a recent Wall Street Journal article, Jonah writes about an experiment by Stanford University professor Baba Shiv, who collected several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups.

In the WSJ article, Jonah writes:

"One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad."

And then he writes:

"Here's where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Professor Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a "cognitive load" — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation."

It turns out, Jonah explains, that the part of our brain that is most reasonable, rational and do-the-right-thing is easily toppled by the pull of raw sensual appetite, the lure of sweet. Knowing something is the right thing to do takes work — brain work — and our brains aren't always up to that. The experiment, after all, tells us brains can't even hold more than seven numbers at a time. Add five extra digits, and good sense tiptoes out of your head, and in comes the cake. "This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we're more likely to indulge in a pint of ice cream, or eat one too many slices of leftover pizza," Lehrer writes.

Older couples are more in love than most and continue to have satisfying sex lives, despite some physiological hurdles, according to Canadian researchers.

Positively stunning.

About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as "junk" DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some junk DNA may function in ways that are not currently understood. The conservation of some junk DNA over many millions of years of evolution may imply an essential function that has been "turned off." Now scientists say there's a junk gene that fights HIV. And they've discovered how to turn it back on.

The smarter the person, the faster information zips around the brain, a UCLA study finds. And this ability to think quickly apparently is inherited.

Researchers have only recently discovered an olfactory nerve that they believe is the route through which pheromones are processed. Nerve “O,” as it is called, slipped under the radar for many years because it is so tiny. However, when the nerve was discovered in a whale, scientists surmised that this little nerve might be found in humans as well. And it was!

So what is the role of Nerve “O”? Nerve “O” has endings in the nasal cavity, but the fibers go directly to the sexual regions of the brain. Indeed, these endings entirely bypass the olfactory cortex! Hence we know the role of Nerve “O” is not to consciously smell, but to identify sexual cues from our potential partners.

Story from The Guardian

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.

When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.

The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.

"Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed," says Kirsch. "This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported."

This study should prompt a re-examination of how such drugs make it to market and how the manufacturers cherry-pick the data that supports their claims. (Gee, kinda like our current president.) But the truth is, these companies have been doing it for years and the FDA has become a rubber-stamp office under this administration. So I'm not sure I can expect anything to change.

Female hammerhead sharks can reproduce without having sex, scientists confirm.

Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.

Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords' manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.

Materials researcher Peter Paufler and his colleagues at Dresden University, Germany, have taken electron-microscope pictures of the swords and found that wootz has a microstructure of nano-metre-sized tubes, just like carbon nanotubes used in modern technologies for their lightweight strength.

The tubes were only revealed after a piece of sword was dissolved in hydrochloric acid to remove another microstructure in the swords: nanowires of the mineral cementite.

Wootz's ingredients include iron ores from India that contain transition-metal impurities. It was thought that these impurities helped cementite wires to form, but it wasn't clear how. Paufler thinks carbon nanotubes could be the missing piece of the puzzle.

At high temperatures, the impurities in the Indian ores could have catalysed the growth of nanotubes from carbon in the burning wood and leaves used to make the wootz, Paufler suggests. These tubes could then have filled with cementite to produce the wires in the patterned blades, he says.

A bit of an inside joke to the few and proud who were there on the day of the great oobleck encounter at the White house.

Wikipedia

Oobleck was originally popularized as a fictional form of green precipitation described by Dr. Seuss in Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Oobleck was called down from the sky by a king bored with rain and snow. It proved so sticky that it gummed up the whole kingdom, which would have perished had not a page boy named Bartholomew Cubbins (previously renowned for his prolifically reproducing hats) saved the day.

The word has since been used to describe a substance that is used as a science aid to teach children about liquids and solids. This oobleck is created from cornstarch (1 part water to 1.5–2 parts cornstarch). Though initially it acts like a liquid or a jelly, squeezing it in your hand will make it appear to be a solid for a short time. The slimelike substance also behaves in an interesting manner when thrown in the air, molded, heated, or vibrated. Substances like this that become more viscous when agitated or compressed are a subset of non-Newtonian fluids called dilatants. An interesting comparison can be made between different "slimes" by making a batch of glurch (see below) and comparing the physical properties of oobleck and glurch.

Researchers believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code.

The genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. The second code, superimposed on the first, sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself.

The discovery, if confirmed, could open new insights into the higher order control of the genes, like the critical but still mysterious process by which each type of human cell is allowed to activate the genes it needs but cannot access the genes used by other types of cell.

I've gotta say, the encoding scheme reminds me of that sequence from Carl Sagan's novel 'Contact' where the scientists are decoding the superimposed messages to find the machine plans.

First there's this

A gardenia fruit extract used in Chinese medicine for centuries to treat adult onset diabetes is effective, scientists have found.

The US team found a chemical from the fruit blocks the action of an enzyme which stops the production of insulin.

Liquorice compounds could be a key component for cheaper, more effective liver cancer treatment, reports Lisa Richards in Chemistry & Industry magazine.

...

Studies in mice by Zhi Yuan and his team at Nankai University, China, revealed that the liquorice compounds, glycerrhetinic acid and glycerrhizic acid, preferentially accumulate in the liver. And when attached to anti-tumours drugs, they are more effective tissue-specific drug carriers than the traditionally used antibodies and oligopeptides (Polymer International DOI 10.1002/pi.2051). 'Our primary results show that they are effective as liver targeting carriers,

Lime and lemon juice could be potent weapons in the fight against AIDS in the developing world, some experts are suggesting.

The potency of these citrus fruits lies in their acidic nature, and in the lab their juices have been shown to be effective in killing the HIV virus, explained Roger Short, a reproductive biologist at Australia's University of Melbourne.

This property, Short points out, could be a boon in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with 25 million current HIV infections, and another three million new ones reported each year.

Short says that flushing the vagina or washing the penis with lemon or lime juice just after sex could significantly reduce new infections.

University of Pittsburgh scientists say they've genetically engineered an avian flu vaccine that has proven 100 percent effective in mice and chickens.

The vaccine was produced from the critical components of the deadly H5N1 virus that has devastated bird populations in Southeast Asia and Europe and has killed more than 80 people.

Since the newly developed vaccine contains a live virus, researchers say it may be more immune-activating than avian flu vaccines prepared by traditional methods. Furthermore, because it is grown in cells, it can be produced much more quickly than traditional vaccines, thereby making it an extremely attractive candidate for preventing the spread of the virus in domestic livestock populations and, potentially, in humans.

I think there is a good case to be made that the new Borneo animal is the allegedly extinct (since 1955) Hose's palm civet, and may be similar to the above photographed "underreported" unknown civet from Mount Murud Kecil.

In the dense central forests of Borneo, a conservation group has found what appears to be a new species of mammal.

WWF caught two images of the animal, which is bigger than a domestic cat, dark red, and has a long muscular tail.

Local people, the WWF says, had not seen the species before, and researchers say it looks to be new.