By CLIFFORD KRAUSS VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Four decades ago, a wave of American draft dodgers fled to Canada rather than fight in Vietnam. Some turned to planting marijuana seeds to make a living and spurred an underground industry that is now booming across British Columbia. Over the last year or so, a new generation of Americans has flocked into western Canada, fleeing the Bush administration's crackdown on the clubs that say they provide marijuana to sick people, particularly in California. A handful who face drug charges and convictions in the United States have applied for political asylum. Hundreds more American marijuana smokers live underground existences here, local marijuana advocates say. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 2606 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Severin Carrell Chemists have discovered a potential cure for smoking – inspired by cannabis's ability to make people hungry. The new drug, called Rimonabant, has another potentially valuable side effect from the cannabis link: people who take the drug have not only been found to give up smoking, but they quickly lose weight as well. In a month-long trial of 360 smokers who were trying to quit, Rimonabant's takers lost an average of 2.5lb in weight while a control group given a placebo drug gained more than 2.5lb in weight. © 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 2605 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Montana man had symptoms similar to mad cow disease David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Researchers at UC San Francisco are analyzing the brain tissue of a Montana elk hunter who died last month with symptoms of a rare human disorder similar to mad cow disease in cattle and the chronic wasting disease that has felled elk and deer in the Midwest and Rocky mountains. Last October, 50-year-old Gary Padgham of Bozeman first showed the stumbling gait, the dementia and the impaired vision and memory loss that are typical of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, known also as CJD. He was taken to a hospital in Seattle where doctors first diagnosed his illness as Huntington's disease, and then as CJD. Padgham was later moved to Monterey where his family lives, and after he died in August his body was taken to UCSF for a specialized autopsy. ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 2604 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Skimping on sleep may be bad for your health Kristin Cobb As bleary-eyed college students in exam week will attest, lack of sleep impairs mood, performance, and judgment. They might guess, however, that the fast food and candy gobbled down during an all-nighter are far worse for bodily health than are the lost hours of slumber. After all, scientists have long been preaching that too many Big Macs and too few workouts are bad for you, but they have yet to demonstrate any definitive health costs of chronic sleep loss. Bolstered by new evidence, however, some scientists are suggesting that poor sleep habits are as important as poor nutrition and physical inactivity in the development of chronic illness. They say that this country's sleep debt may be contributing to its current epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. People in the United States sleep an average of 7.0 hours on weeknights, 1.5 hour less than they did a century ago, according to the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, D.C. One-third of the population sleeps 6.5 or fewer hours, far less than the 8 hours that many sleep specialists recommend. From Science News, Vol. 162, No. 10, Sept. 7, 2002, p. 152. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 2603 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nathan Seppa Scientists have developed an unusual vaccine that prevents some strokes in laboratory rats. The treatment works by desensitizing the animals' immune system to a protein residing within their blood vessels. When displayed on a blood vessel's lining, the protein, called E-Selectin, facilitates the binding of white blood cells to the vessel wall and elicits an inflammatory reaction that can lead to a stroke. By continually exposing rats to human E-Selectin using a nasal spray, researchers short-circuited that inflammatory process. The researchers tested the nasal vaccine in rats bred to have high blood pressure and hence an elevated risk of stroke. Rats receiving repeated doses of the nasal spray over their lifetime remained significantly less susceptible to stroke than were rats getting sprays containing saline mist or an innocuous chicken protein. From Science News, Vol. 162, No. 10, Sept. 7, 2002, p. 147. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 2602 - Posted: 06.24.2010

TORONTO, -- A Canadian Senate committee has proposed that Canada legalize marijuana, allow it to be grown by licensed dealers and perhaps be sold in corner stores to people 16 or older. Such a policy would make Canada one of the world's most tolerant countries toward the drug. In a report, the committee found that marijuana was less harmful than alcohol and should not be treated as a criminal problem, but as a public health issue. The report called for amnesty for people convicted of marijuana possession. "Whether or not an individual uses marijuana should be a personal choice that is not subject to criminal penalties," Sen. Pierre Claude Nolin, chairman of the committee, said at a news conference. "But we have come to the conclusion that, as a drug, it should be regulated by the state much as we do for wine and beer." © 2002 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 2601 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jane Elliott BBC News Online Health Staff To Ian Stewart the machinations of office politics are a complete mystery. Facial expressions leave him bemused and he cannot lie, not even little white lies. For Mr Stewart is autistic and he admits he finds the world a baffling place. "I just feel I am living on the wrong planet. I find the world a very strange place. "It is like being a pilot without radar, you cannot see a missile coming." Autism is a developmental disability that affects the way a person communicates and interacts with other people. (C) BBC

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2600 - Posted: 09.06.2002

The debate about a possible link between autism and the MMR jab has hampered research into the disorder, a leading expert has said. Christopher Gillberg, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at St George's Medical School, London, told the BBC there is little to suggest that MMR has anything to do with autism. And the intense focus on the effect of the triple vaccine has stymied potentially far more fruitful avenues of research into a condition which is still little understood. His comments come as the Department of Health launches a website to provide information to parents about MMR. A 1998 study showed one in 1,000 children were affected by autism. Experts say the figure is set to rise. But Professor Gillberg, who will present a review of 40 major studies of the causes of autism to the annual conference of the National Autistic Society (NAS) in London on Friday, said that was because diagnosis and awareness had improved, not because there were more cases. (C) BBC

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2599 - Posted: 09.06.2002

A Surrey scientist claims to have an answer to what is often considered to be the hardest problem in science (sometimes just known as the “Hard Problem”): why we are aware. Johnjoe McFadden, Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, has previously proposed that consciousness is generated by the brain’s electromagnetic field, the cemi field. The cemi field theory – that our thoughts are electric fields in the brain – has generated a lot of interest both in the UK and across the world. In McFadden’s theory nerve signals – the wires of the brain – are responsible for driving our unconscious actions (like walking or driving to work every day, when our conscious mind seems to be elsewhere) but our conscious thoughts are the electric fields that ebb and flow through the brain. Nerves and wires can only encode (know) ones and zeros but fields can encode the complexity of our thoughts. Now, in a paper published in the latest issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies (Johnjoe McFadden, 2002 “The Conscious Electromagnetic Information (Cemi) Field Theory: The Hard Problem Made Easy?”) McFadden proposes an answer to the hard problem, claiming that awareness is electromagnetic field information, viewed from the inside. J. J. McFadden. The Conscious Electromagnetic Information (Cemi) Field Theory: The Hard Problem Made Easy? Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, 2002 (current issue: http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs_9_8.html). © AlphaGalileo 2002

Keyword: Attention; Intelligence
Link ID: 2598 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Monkey neurons can recognize numbers. JOHN WHITFIELD When a monkey looks at two dots, apples or other monkeys, single nerve cells recognize the groups' 'twoness', researchers have found1. The discovery shows that the brain's ability to deal with abstract concepts can be traced right down to individual cells. Some neurons respond to one item, others to two, or three, and so on, say Earl Miller and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. The discovery "decodes the brain's code for number", says neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene of Frédéric Joliot Hospital in Orsay, France. The neurons respond to numbers in the same way that whole monkeys - or people - do. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Intelligence; Vision
Link ID: 2597 - Posted: 06.24.2010

STANFORD, Calif. - Researchers at Stanford University Medical Center report that they have tried - and failed - to coax adult blood-forming stem cells in mice into forming tissues other than blood and immune cells. This research, published in the Sept. 5 issue of Science Express, an advance online publication of the journal Science, strikes another blow at the idea that stem cells taken from adults have the same developmental potential as those taken from embryos. This work contributes to a growing debate over the fate of embryonic stem cell research. Several researchers have claimed that stem cells taken from adult bone marrow have the same potential to form all adult tissues as do embryonic stem cells. With that in mind, some policy-makers want to ban embryonic stem cell research in favor of similar research using less controversial adult stem cells. Irving Weissman, MD, the Karel and Avice Beekhuis Professor of Cancer Biology at Stanford and lead author of the current study, has long argued that only embryonic stem cells have the ability to form all adult tissues. The latest paper reinforces that view.

Keyword: Stem Cells; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2596 - Posted: 09.06.2002

For years, doctors who work in maternal and fetal medicine have had no way to detect brain activity in unborn children. Now, for the first time, researchers using a unique scanning device have shown that they can detect fetal brain activity in response to flashes of light transmitted through the mother's abdomen. With refinement, this technique may help physicians detect and prevent fetal brain damage resulting from maternal hypertension, diabetes, and other conditions. The work was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and appears in the September 7, 2002, issue of The Lancet.* The study is one of the first tests of a new device designed to study maternal and fetal physiology, including fetal brain activity, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) of the womb. It also is the first MEG study to use light, rather than pulses of sound, to stimulate the fetus. "Though this work is preliminary, it is a promising indication of how MEG may help researchers understand the fetal brain," says Giovanna Spinella, M.D., a pediatric neurologist at NINDS.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2595 - Posted: 09.06.2002

'A thousand points of light' no longer a metaphor ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Enabling the blind to see - a task once thought the province of miracles - is the goal of a technical team that includes Sandia National Laboratories, four other national labs, a private company, and two universities. The idea, funded by a $9 million, three-year grant from the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research, is to create 1,000 points of light through 1,000 tiny MEMs [microelectromechanical systems] electrodes. The electrodes will be positioned on the retinas of those blinded by diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. These diseases damage rods and cones in the eye that normally convert light to electrical impulses, but leave intact the neural paths to the brain that transport electrical signals. Eventually the input from rods and cones ceases, but 70 to 90 percent of nerve structures set up to receive those inputs remain intact. "The aim is to bring a blind person to the point where he or she can read, move around objects in the house, and do basic household chores," says Sandia project leader Kurt Wessendorf. "They won't be able to drive cars, at least in the near future, because instead of millions of pixels, they'll see approximately a thousand. The images will come a little slowly and appear yellow. But people who are blind will see."

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 2594 - Posted: 09.06.2002

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Children's Center report that adults born with ambiguous genitalia - or malformations that make it difficult to determine sex of rearing - were generally content with the gender assigned to them at birth by their parents and doctors. A companion study showed that almost half of adult intersex patients knew little about their condition, and would like to know more. The studies, which appear in the online version of the September issue of Pediatrics, could help families and doctors make better therapeutic and counseling decisions about gender assignment, says lead researcher Claude Migeon, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist at Johns Hopkins Children's Center. Migeon and his colleagues recruited their study subjects from the archives of the pediatric endocrinology clinic at Johns Hopkins, where their subspecialty was founded in the mid-1940s. Because many of the clinic's patients have reached adulthood, researchers are now able to gauge the outcome of gender assignment choices made decades ago among what may be the world's largest cohort of intersex patients. Researchers judged success or of gender assignment on a variety of psychological, physical and sociological factors.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 2593 - Posted: 09.06.2002

WEDNESDAY, (HealthScoutNews) -- Medicine that mimics increased levels of the brain chemical dopamine could help extinguish a smoker's desire for cigarettes. That's the finding of a study, appearing in the September issue of Nicotine and Tobacco Research , that focused on 20 heavy smokers. They were given drugs that either increased or decreased their brain's dopamine levels. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that affects motor function and is believed to affect emotion. Animal studies show nicotine causes dopamine release in brain areas linked to feelings of pleasure. Copyright © 2002 ABCNEWS Internet Ventures.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 2592 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Many ethical and political issues could be averted if adult stem cells prove to be as successful at differentiating into all tissue types in the human body as their embryonic counterparts are. Numerous studies have so far reported success at coaxing adult stem cells into various cell types under different conditions. But a report published online today by the journal Science suggests otherwise. The findings indicate that stem cells cultivated from adult blood may resist change more strongly than previously thought.

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 2591 - Posted: 09.06.2002

A vaccine that interferes with inflammation inside blood vessels greatly reduces the frequency and severity of strokes in spontaneously hypertensive, genetically stroke-prone rats, according to a new study from the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). If the vaccine works in humans, it could prevent many of the strokes that occur each year. In the study, researchers used a nasal spray to deliver a protein that, under normal circumstances, contributes to inflammation of the cells that line the inner walls of blood vessels. Exposing rats to this substance, called E-selectin, programs blood cells called lymphocytes to monitor the blood vessel lining for the inflammatory protein. When these lymphocytes detect E-selectin, they produce substances that suppress inflammation. The vaccine is the first treatment to target inflammation in blood vessels as a possible means of preventing stroke, says senior author John M. Hallenbeck, M.D., chief of the Stroke Branch at NINDS. "Clinically, stroke is hard to treat. If we can prevent it from happening, that's clearly the way to go," he adds. The study appears in the September 2002 issue of the journal Stroke1.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 2590 - Posted: 09.06.2002

At least a third of the communicating cells in a front part of the brain critical for reasoning and planning seem adept at keeping track of the number of things seen, report scientists funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. What’s more, they even pick favorite quantities. Activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys trained to judge the number of dots on a computer screen reflected changes in quantity — peaking for a preferred number and then dropping off progressively as the discrepancy between numbers of dots increased, the researchers found. The study adds to mounting evidence showing how the prefrontal cortex categorizes information from the senses. Drs. Andreas Nieder, David Freeman and Earl Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, report on their findings in the September 6 2002 Science. “Judging the difference between the number of items we see is one way of categorizing and making sense of them,” explained Miller. “This capacity to quickly glean concepts and meaning from experience underlies the “executive” functions of the prefrontal cortex, which are disturbed in disorders like schizophrenia and autism.”

Keyword: Intelligence; Cerebral Cortex
Link ID: 2589 - Posted: 06.24.2010

National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) is the primary source of information on the prevalence, patterns, and consequences of drug and alcohol use and abuse in the general U.S. civilian non institutionalized population, age 12 and older. It is conducted by SAMHSA's Office of Applied Studies (OAS). Occasionally OAS produces methodology reports, detailed tables, and other NHSDA reports that are available only on the web. SAMHSA's Latest Household Survey: 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (HTML format) * Full Report (HTML format) * Volume 1: Results (PDF format) * Volume 2: Data Tables (PDF format) * Press Release * Highlights

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 2588 - Posted: 09.06.2002

By THE NEW YORK TIMES CHICAGO, — A 10-year-old who was the only girl in her suburban Chicago football league collapsed on the field on Friday after complaining of a headache and died at a hospital three days later. The Cook County medical examiner's office said the girl, Taylor Davison, of Bartlett, Ill., died from subdural hematoma, a blood clot caused by blunt trauma to the head. The death was ruled an accident. Taylor collapsed in a noncontact practice of the Bartlett Raiders Athletic Association, a league with about 400 players from dozens of schools. Her mother, Susan Davison, who was present, said Taylor had not been hit in the head at the practice. Copyright The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 2587 - Posted: 06.24.2010