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Hungry?
There is a hormone called ghrelin that is produced in the lining of the stomach when it is empty. This hormone travels through the blood into the brain, where it triggers receptors in the hypothalamus...
View ArticleBuilding a better brain
There is a class of proteins in the brain called neurotrophic factors. Two of them are particularly interesting to me at the moment. They are GDNF and BDNF. What interests me about them today is that...
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The Sunshine Vitamin Fights Cancer
The sunshine vitamin is Vitamin D. Vitamin D comes in several forms. One of them is a steroid hormone known as Calcitriol or less commonly by its cute nickname...
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Vioxx and Bextra and Lawyers, Oh My!
The news has been full of reports recently about health problems related to Vioxx, Bextra, Celebrex, and other cox-2 inhibitor pain killers. Personal injury lawyers are putting up ads all over the...
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James D. Watson visits Google
Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA with Francis Crick in 1953, came to Google to talk to us about his current work on the genetic basis of autism. He talked first about...
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On Food and Cooking
Yesterday I had lunch with Harold McGee. He is the author of the classic book on the chemistry of cooking, titled “On Food and Cooking”. Lunch was great — we ate with the head of Google’s many cafes,...
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Lizards and Lyme
I took a long walk the other day with my friend the Google Doctor, and we watched a Sceloporus occidentalis guard his territory on a sunny rock. Commonly known as the “Bluebelly” lizard, or the...
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Immune to cancer — for life
Researchers Zheng Cui and Mark Willingham, and a team of eight others, have discovered a strain of mice that are immune to cancer. When cancer cells are injected into the mice, they are destroyed. But...
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Sleep diet
Because the bathroom scale is always just sitting there, and I am a curious person, I weigh myself before going to bed, and then again in the morning. I find that I lose about 1% of my body weight by...
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Kinky molecules
When plants make oils, they prefer kinky molecules. Molecules that are straight can pack together into dense solid clumps, while kinky molecules stay liquid. What makes the molecules kinky are cis...
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A gut feeling about mortality
Dr. Robert Ross has been studying abdominal fat and mortality. There are two components to abdominal fat. Subcutaneous fat lies just below the skin, and it is the fat you can pinch with your fingers....
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A bone to pick with cola
Bones are made of calcium phosphate, a molecule made when phosphoric acid combines with calcium. So one would think that phosphoric acid in the diet would be good for bones. Or maybe not. Phosphoric...
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Pray for me
Herbert Benson believes in the power of prayer. He has reason to — he’s been studying it scientifically for years. In a recent study, he and co-author Charles Bethea looked at whether there were any...
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Drinking soap for my health
My root beer contains yucca extract. It says so right on the label. As much as 12% of extracts of the plant Yucca schidigera are soap-like compounds called saponins. Saponins are natural detergents,...
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Round it goes
Cyclosporin is famous for its use in transplant surgery, where it suppresses the immune system to prevent rejection. It is made by the fungus Tolypocladium inflatum as a defensive weapon, as are many...
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Sweet tooth gene
When mutations cause genes to stop functioning, the effect can be caused by damage to the gene, or by damage to the genes that turn on the gene that is no longer expressed. Take the example of hen’s...
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Self-Igniting Dragon Fart Powder
Self-Igniting Dragon Fart Powder Kinetic MicroScience, the people who gave you the Gauss Rifle, the Plastic Hydrogen Bomb, the Three-Penny Radio, the World’s Simplest Steamboat, and many, many more...
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Lots of fun at SciFoo 2010
The annual SciFoo un-conference is always amazing, and 2010 did not disappoint. Physicist Garrett Lisi, executive editor of Scientific American Mariette DiChristina, and cosmologist Stephon Alexander,...
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