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Exercise Cures Depression: Mens Sana In Corpore Sano
Exercise has long been recommended to alleviate depression, but now scientists from Yale University have isolated a gene (VGF) within the hippocampus area of the brain which is responsible for these effects, leading to hope of a new, more effective cure for depression.
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Dirty work but someone hasn’t got to do it anymore
Today’s UK papers trumpet articles on robots made in Japan to do the ‘D-work’ — dirty, dangerous and difficult. The tone is upbeat with a slight sense of amusement reserved for futuristic ideas. Yet these developments may not be so ridiculous, and may be the thin edge of a difficult wedge.
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Unjustified asymmetries in the debate on GM crops
In his valedictory speech as Government’s chief scientific adviser on November 27th , David King said there was a "moral case" for the UK and the rest of Europe to grow genetically modified crops as the technology could help the world’s poorest. A research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…
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Honest Opinions or Bullying?
Recently the website SpickMich.de that allows German pupils to anonymously rate their teachers defeated a legal challenge from teachers claiming invasion of personal privacy. This was just the latest of a series of legal victories for the site. German courts have found that freedom of speech trumps teacher concerns about privacy and mobbing. Rating teachers,…
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Feeling good about the failure of others
The journal Science last week published a study indicating that the reward centres in our brains are highly sensitive to the success of others. In the study, 19 pairs of subjects were presented with a task involving the estimation of the number of dots on a screen, and were then provided with feedback about their…
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Our Obligations to the Poor
The relationship between the rich and the poor countries of the world has been questioned in a number of ways today. Oxfam have released a report, Investing for Life, which suggests that pharmaceutical companies are missing an important opportunity by not focussing their attention on the large health problems of the poorest countries. At the…
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The importance of life extension
One of the most important ideas in public health is that we can never really save lives: we just extend them. If a doctor ‘saves the life’ of a 60 year old patient who later dies at 90 years of age, then she hasn’t actually stopped the patient dying, but has extended the patient’s life…
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Is this the end of the debate for human embryo research?
Two landmark papers published this week have demonstrated that stem cells (“Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells”) capable of developing into a wide range of different tissues can be made from human skin cells. It has been claimed in some quarters that this breakthrough will end the debate about the use of embryonic stem cells. This news…
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Hands off my non-existent furniture!
The BBC recently reported that a Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing €4,000 worth of virtual furniture from virtual hotel rooms in Habbo Hotel, a social networking website.
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It is 10 O’clock, do you know what your cells are?
BBC File On 4 recently learned that “millions of pounds of charity donations and taxpayers’ money have been wasted on worthless cancer studies”. Labs have been using contaminated cell lines – rather than experimenting on the cancer cells they thought they had researchers have been studying other kinds of cancers or even mice cells. Perhaps…