By Steve Connor, Science Editor Millions of people who suffer from post-traumatic stress after a harrowing experience could benefit from mind-altering drugs that can rid the brain of bad memories, a legal scholar has suggested. Yet the prospect of using drugs to dampen the memory of a distressing episode in someone's life is being thwarted by unfounded concerns about their misuse, according to Adam Kolber, professor of law at Brooklyn Law School in New York. In a commentary published in the science journal Nature, Professor Kolber says there is a need for a more open attitude to the development and use of drugs that can alter memories, which many ethicists have opposed on the grounds that destroying memories risks altering peoples' personalities. "The fears about pharmaceutical memory manipulation are overblown. Thoughtful regulation may some day be appropriate, but excessive hand-wringing now over the ethics of tampering with memory could stall research into preventing post-traumatic stress in millions of people," Professor Kolber says. "Delay could also hinder people who are already debilitated by harrowing memories from being offered the best hope yet of reclaiming their lives." Recent studies on laboratory animals have revealed fascinating insights into how memories can be manipulated with chemicals. One drug called ZIP, for instance, has been shown to block the ability of cocaine-addicted rats to remember the places where they had regularly been given cocaine. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 15692 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By Rob Stein Nearly one in 10 U.S. children is being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a new analysis of federal data released Thursday. The percentage of U.S. children between ages 5 to 17 who were diagnosed with ADHD increased from about 7 percent to 9 percent between 1998 and 2009, according to the analysis by the National Center for Health Statistics. As expected, the condition was more common among boys than girls, according to the analysis. The prevalence of ADHD increased from 9.9 percent to 12.3 percent among boys and from 3.6 percent to 5.5 percent among girls. The condition, which is marked by difficulty paying attention, impulsive behavior and hyperactivity, varies by race and ethnicity, according to the report. But the gap between whites and blacks narrowed during that time period, according to the report. The prevalence of the condition increased from 8.2 percent to 10.6 percent among whites compared to an increase from 5.1 percent to 9.5 percent among blacks. Puerto Rican children had about the same rate as blacks, while the rate among Mexican Americans remained lower, according to the analysis. The prevalence also varied by region of the country, with the rates being higher in the South and Midwest than the Northeast and West. © 2011 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 15691 - Posted: 08.20.2011

Gayathri Vaidyanathan Thump! Thump! Thump! As the hollow sound echoes through the Liberian rainforest, Vera Leinert and her fellow researchers freeze. Silently, Leinert directs the guide to investigate. Jefferson 'Bola' Skinnah, a ranger with the Liberian Forestry Development Authority, stalks ahead, using the thumping to mask the sound of his movement. In a sunlit opening in the forest, Skinnah spots a large adult chimpanzee hammering something with a big stone. The chimpanzee puts a broken nut into its mouth then continues pounding. When Skinnah tries to move closer, the chimp disappears into the trees. By the time Leinert and her crew get to the clearing, the animal is long gone. For the past year, Leinert has been trekking through Sapo National Park, Liberia's first and only protected reserve, to study its chimpanzee population. A student volunteer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, Leinert has never seen her elusive subjects in the flesh but she knows some of them well. There's an energetic young male with a big belly who hammers nuts so vigorously he has to grab a sapling for support. There are the stronger adults who can split a nut with three blows. And there are the mothers who parade through the site with their babies. They've all been caught by video cameras placed strategically throughout Sapo. Chimpanzees in the wild are notoriously difficult to study because they flee from humans — with good reason. Bushmeat hunting and human respiratory diseases have decimated chimpanzee populations1, while logging and mining have wiped out their habitat. Population numbers have plunged — although no one knows by exactly how much because in most countries with great apes, the animals have never been properly surveyed. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15690 - Posted: 08.20.2011

Jo Marchant Hyenas can count up to three. Researchers playing recorded calls to the wily carnivores found that wild spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) responded differently depending on whether they heard one, two or three individuals. The result adds numerical assessment to the list of cognitive abilities that hyenas share with primates, and supports the idea that living in complex social groups — as both primates and hyenas do — is key to the evolution of big brains. Sarah Benson-Amram, a zoologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, and her colleagues played recordings of hyena calls, or whoops, to members of two hyena clans in the Masai Mara National Reserve in southwestern Kenya1. The recordings were made in Tanzania, Malawi and Senegal, so the calls were unfamiliar to the Kenyan clans, and would have been interpreted as belonging to potential intruders. The recordings each consisted of three bouts of whooping, from one, two or three different animals. In 39 trials involving resting adults — mostly lone females — Benson-Amram measured how vigilant the animals became while the recordings were playing by comparing the amount of time they spent facing the speaker with the amount of time they spent looking away or resting. Although some females became equally watchful in response to all of the recordings, most of the animals distinguished between one, two or three intruders, their attentiveness increasing with the number of unique calls they heard. The finding is published in Animal Behaviour. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15689 - Posted: 08.20.2011

by Virginia Morell Highly social and clever and cooperative with tools, elephants are often near the top of the brainiest creatures list. Now, scientists have added a new talent to elephants' mental repertoire: The ability to solve a problem using insight—that aha! moment when your internal light bulb switches on and you figure out the solution to a puzzle. Previously, only a limited number of species, including certain primates, crows, and parrots were known to have this ability. Elephants had failed other tests for insightful problem solving because they were asked to use their trunks as we do our hands, says Preston Foerder, the lead author of the new study and a graduate student in comparative psychology at the City University of New York. For example, Foerder first tested whether three Asian elephants (two females and one male) at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., would use sticks placed just outside their enclosure to retrieve food that was out of reach of their trunks. "They didn't have any trouble getting or using the sticks," Foerder says. "They hit them on walls and toys; one even stuck his stick into the opening of his cage door," as if using a crowbar, "but they never used any of these methods to try to get food." That's when Foerder had an aha! moment of his own. Elephants don't use sticks to get food because they must hold the stick with their trunk, which, despite being able to grasp things, is really an appendage for smelling and eating. When an elephant is asked to hold a stick with its trunk to get food, the trunk loses its primary olfactory function, which is also needed to locate food. "It would be like having an eye in the palm of your hand," Foerder says, "and then being asked to hold a tool and find food. You wouldn't be able to do it." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 15688 - Posted: 08.20.2011

If you think addiction is all about booze, drugs, sex, gambling, food and other irresistible vices, think again. And if you believe that a person has a choice whether or not to indulge in an addictive behavior, get over it. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) blew the whistle on these deeply held notions with its official release of a new document defining addiction as a chronic neurological disorder involving many brain functions, most notably a devastating imbalance in the so-called reward circuitry. This fundamental impairment in the experience of pleasure literally compels the addict to chase the chemical highs produced by substances like drugs and alcohol and obsessive behaviors like sex, food and gambling. The definition, a result of a four-year process involving more than 80 leading experts in addiction and neurology, emphasizes that addiction is a primary illness—in other words, it’s not caused by mental health issues such as mood or personality disorders, putting to rest the popular notion that addictive behaviors are a form of "self-medication" to, say, ease the pain of depression or anxiety. Indeed, the new neurologically focused definition debunks, in whole or in part, a host of common conceptions about addiction. Addiction, the statement declares, is a “bio-psycho-socio-spiritual” illness characterized by (a) damaged decision-making (affecting learning, perception, and judgment) and by (b) persistent risk and/or recurrence of relapse; the unambiguous implications are that (a) addicts have no control over their addictive behaviors and (b) total abstinence is, for some addicts, an unrealistic goal of effective treatment.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15687 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By Maria Popova Far from a mere motherboard, the brain has swollen into one of humanity's greatest obsessions. We have been trying to visualize it since antiquity, we have written countless books about it, we've even enlisted it in our pop culture satire. The brain, in fact, has become a pop culture fixture in and of itself. That's exactly what Davi Johnson Thornton explores in Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Popular Media -- a fascinating account of the rhetoric and sociology of cognitive science, exploring our culture's obsession with the brain and how we have elevated the vital organ into cultish status, mythologizing its functions and romanticizing the promise of its scientific study. The brain, it seems, has become a modern muse. (As Jonah Lehrer brilliantly notes in his Wired interview with Thornton, "If Warhol were around today, he'd have a series of silkscreens dedicated to the cortex; the amygdala would hang alongside Marilyn Monroe.") From the media's propensity for pretty pictures like PET and fMRI scans, often misinterpreted or presented out of context to the misappropriation of the language of neuroscience in simplistic self-help narratives to the "anxious parenting" triggered by the facile findings of developmental cognitive science, Thornton offers a refreshing lens on the many contradictions in how we think about the brain as we continue to hope that making the brain calculable and mappable would also make it manipulable in precisely the ways we need it to be. What makes Thornton's take most compelling is the lucidity with which she approaches exactly what we know and don't know about the brain. Every day, we're bombarded with exponentially replicating headlines about new "sciences" like neuromarketing, which, despite the enormous budgets poured into them by the world's shortcut-hungry Fortune 500, remain the phrenology of our time, a tragic manifestation of the disconnect between how much we want to manipulate the brain and how little we actually know about its intricately connected, non-compartmentalizable functions. © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15686 - Posted: 08.20.2011

Roger Highfield, editor, New Scientist magazine This hyperaggressive rat is a legacy of a remarkable experiment started in the former Soviet Union in 1972 by Dmitry Belyaev. Like Charles Darwin before him, he was interested in the process of domestication. But while Darwin thought the process must be "insensibly slow", Belyaev suspected otherwise. He caught wild rats around the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and selectively bred two colonies on a farm a few kilometres away, hoping to mimic the process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated animals. One colony was selected for tameness, the other for aggression. Belyaev died in 1985, but the experiment was continued by his successor, Lyudmila Trut, at the city's Institute of Cytology and Genetics. In 2003, geneticist Svante Pääbo visited Novosibirsk and the experiment. He was stunned by the vast changes in the animals' behaviour and how quickly these had been induced. The rats bred for tameness were incredibly easy to handle, while the aggressive ones were so prone to scream and bite that Pääbo said: "I got the feeling that 10 or 20 of them would probably kill me if they got out of the cages." Since returning to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Pääbo and colleague Frank Albert have been researching which of the rats' genes were selected for by the domestication process. They have now found several key regions of the genome that have a strong effect on tameness and suspect at least half a dozen genes are involved. The next step is to locate individual genes that influence tameness and aggression. "We're currently pursuing several approaches to home in on the genes and all of them are in their early days," says Albert. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15685 - Posted: 08.16.2011

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR For migraine sufferers, summer can be a perilous time of year. Oppressive heat and spikes in temperature have long been thought to precipitate attacks in people prone to chronic headaches. One large study in the journal Neurology even showed that the risk of migraines jumps nearly 8 percent for every nine-degree rise in temperature. But a simple step that may lower the risk, especially in warm weather, is to stay properly hydrated. Dehydration causes blood volume to drop, researchers say, resulting in less blood and oxygen flow to the brain and dilated blood vessels. Some experts suspect that a loss of electrolytes causes nerves in the brain to produce pain signals. Anyone who has ever woken up dehydrated after a night of heavy drinking knows this feeling as a hangover. But migraine sufferers may be more sensitive to the effects of dehydration. In one study, also published in Neurology, scientists recruited migraine sufferers and divided them into two groups. Those in the first group were given a placebo medication to take regularly. The others were told to drink 1.5 liters of water, or about six cups, in addition to their usual daily intake. At the end of two weeks, the researchers found that those in the water group had increased their fluid intake by just four cups a day. But on average they experienced 21 fewer hours of pain during the study period than those in the placebo group, and a decrease in the intensity of their headaches. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15684 - Posted: 08.16.2011

In a move that researchers called a victory for science, a lawsuit that threatened scientists who use mouse models in Alzheimer’s research has been dismissed. In February 2010, the Alzheimer’s Institute of America (AIA) in Kansas City, Kansas, filed a lawsuit against the Jackson Laboratory of Bar Harbor Maine, and other institutes and companies. The suit claimed that Jackson Lab and the other defendants had infringed on patents covering a genetic mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. In June, the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, intervened on the Jackson Lab's behalf; this week, that intervention led to the dismissal of the suit against the lab. Litigation against the other defendants continues. In a statement, NIH director Francis Collins said today, “We applaud today’s news in the legal battle over mouse models critical to Alzheimer’s disease research. This action ensures that researchers worldwide will have the tools they need as they strive to understand, treat, and, ultimately, defeat this devastating disease.” The suit is the latest in almost a decade of legal fights that have had a chilling effect on the Alzheimer’s research field. But the suit against the Jackson Lab was especially troubling because it aimed at the heart of basic research on the disease, alleging that the lab was breaking the law by distributing 22 mouse models that carry the mutation to academic researchers. Researchers said that stopping distribution of the mouse models would have been a serious blow to science.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15683 - Posted: 08.16.2011

Analysis by Marianne English There's more to picking up math concepts than paying attention in class, according to recent research. It turns out kids' math performance may be better for those with a natural knack for sensing number quantities. Previous studies looked at how sensing numbers affected performance, but researchers didn't know whether the natural ability to sense numbers or proficiency seeing numbers as symbols limited math skills. Pinpointing which factor affects learning in children will help teachers and researchers develop better programs for kids who may enter formal education at a disadvantage. For example, flashing a number of dots -- some blue, others red -- and asking someone to determine which group of objects there was more of is a common way to measure people's ability to sense numbers. The dots appear and disappear so quickly that it becomes impossible to count, so the amounts have to be sensed instead. Also called the Approximate Number System (ANS), this innate ability has been studied in adults, children, infants and even non-human animals. So far, researchers suggest that the accuracy of a person's ANS improves throughout childhood. The concept also falls within a larger area teachers and researchers refer to as "number sense," or the ability to count, discern quantities, pick up on number patterns and "to rule out unreasonable results to arithmetic operations," according to the paper. Specifically, people and animals subitize, or perceive and estimate the number of objects by glance. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Attention; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15682 - Posted: 08.16.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Stabilizing the ties that bind a protein important in Parkinson’s disease to its buddies might help fend off the disease, a new study of the protein’s structure suggests. Alpha-synuclein builds up in tough aggregates in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease. Researchers thought that this protein was normally a floppy, snakelike molecule. But now, neuroscientist and neurologist Dennis Selkoe of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and his colleagues show that alpha-synuclein normally forms bands of four molecules in living cells. These quartets (scientists call them tetramers) of alpha-synuclein molecules resist the clumping that leads single molecules of the protein down the path to brain cell destruction, Selkoe and colleagues report online August 14 in Nature. Discovering that alpha-synuclein works in groups of four could be important in treating or preventing Parkinson’s disease, says Patrik Brundin, a neuroscientist at Lund University in Sweden. The findings suggest that loner alpha-synuclein molecules could be “part of the ‘bad guy’ pathway, and stabilizing it as a tetramer might help avoid the disease,” he says. No one yet knows whether quartets of alpha-synuclein disintegrate into single molecules in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease, leading to big brain-cell-killing plaques. Studies comparing normally aging brains with those of people with the disease may help answer those and other questions raised by the study, Brundin says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15681 - Posted: 08.16.2011

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature Same-sex pairs of monogamous birds are just as attached and faithful to each other as those paired with a member of the opposite sex. The insight comes from a study of zebra finches - highly vocal, colourful birds that sing to their mates, a performance thought to strengthen the pair's bond. Scientists found that same-sex pairs of finches sang to and preened each other just like heterosexual pairs. The study is reported in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology. A displaying pair of king penguins Male king penguins have been seen to "flirt" with other males in the colony Lead researcher Julie Elie from the University of California Berkeley said that the research showed that "relationships in animals can be more complicated than just a male and a female who meet and reproduce, even in birds". Dr Elie and her colleagues are interested in zebra finches' behaviour. The birds establish life-long relationships and are highly social; males sing to their mates, the birds preen each other and pairs share a nest. "I'm interested in how animals establish relationships and how [they] use acoustic communication in their social interactions," Dr Elie told BBC Nature. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15680 - Posted: 08.16.2011

An obesity scoring system developed in Edmonton to help predict the risk of dying for overweight and obese people could be used to prioritize patients for weight-loss surgery. The Edmonton Obesity Staging System (EOSS) is modeled on similar scores used to predict the extent and severity of other diseases such as a cancer, heart disease and mental illness. The new model emphasizes how at-risk the patient is, not how much they weigh, says Dr. Arya Sharma.The new model emphasizes how at-risk the patient is, not how much they weigh, says Dr. Arya Sharma. The new scale includes five stages of obesity based on traditional measurements such as body mass index and waist-to-hip ratios, as well as clinical measurements of medical conditions tied to obesity, such as Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. In Monday's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Dr. Arya Sharma of the University of Alberta and his co-authors used the tool to predict death with data from a U.S. population survey of 8,143 people who were followed for 16 years. About 77 per cent of them were overweight or obese. 5 stages of obesity scale The obesity scale has five stages. Criteria include: Stage 0: No apparent obesity-related risk factors (e.g., high blood pressure, cholesterol and/or glucose levels), no physical symptoms or limitations. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15679 - Posted: 08.16.2011

By Genevra Pittman Siblings of kids with autism have a higher risk of being diagnosed with the disorder than previously believed, suggests a new study. The analysis of more than 600 three-year-olds with an older autistic sibling found that almost one in five of them had an autism spectrum disorder, which includes Asperger’s syndrome and similar conditions. That suggests pediatricians need to keep an extra eye on those siblings, even as toddlers -- because early interventions with therapy and extra support might help keep their symptoms to a minimum, researchers said. “We know that the brain at young ages is more amenable to change,” said study author Wendy Stone, of the University of Washington Autism Center in Seattle. “When children are showing signs (of autism) even before the diagnosis is official, we need to start thinking about, how can we help parents within the course of their everyday activities to promote their child’s social and emotional development?” she told Reuters Health. The findings, she said, also show that autism rates -- now estimated at about one in every 110 U.S. kids -- probably aren’t going to decrease anytime soon. Previous studies estimated that between 3 and 14 percent of autistic kids’ younger siblings also had the condition. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15678 - Posted: 08.16.2011

By Bruce Bower Now hear this: A mother’s encouraging words heard over the phone biologically aid her stressed-out daughter about as much as in-person comforting from mom and way more than receiving instant messages from her. That’s consistent with the idea that people and many other animals have evolved to respond to caring, familiar voices with hormonal adjustments that prompt feelings of calm and closeness, say biological anthropologist Leslie Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and her colleagues. Written exchanges such as instant messaging, texting and Facebook postings can’t apply biological balm to frazzled nerves, the researchers propose in a paper published online July 29 in Evolution and Human Behavior. Seltzer’s group found that 7- to 12-year-old girls who talked to their mothers in person or over the phone after a stressful lab task displayed drops in levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, accompanied by the release of oxytocin, a hormone linked to love and trust between partners in good relationships. Girls who instant messaged with their mothers after the lab challenge showed no oxytocin response and their cortisol levels rose as high as those of girls who had no contact with their mothers. “At least in our subjects, instant messaging falls short of the endocrine payoff of speech or physical contact with a loved one after a stressful event,” Seltzer says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15677 - Posted: 08.13.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer Think you can tell if an object is moving? Think again. This illusion created by Ikuya Murakami from the University of Tokyo, Japan, shows that we can perceive a wobble when an object is actually static. In the video above, fix your eyes on the yellow dot in the first animation. As the ring flickers, the static centre of the circle seems to wobble. In the second demo, a similar effect is perceived once your eyes have adapted to a flashing pattern. After staring at a yellow dot for about 30 seconds, a static version of the moving pattern suddenly appears. The centre of the circle, which wasn't previously moving, should seem to wobble briefly. Murakami and his team found that we perceive this effect because of tiny eye movements that occur when we fix on a static point. We're not usually aware of these movements because our visual system automatically counteracts the shake when it processes what we see. However a static pattern surrounded by a flickering one seems to confuse our brain because eye movements are registered differently between flickering and static regions. Murakami's work is the first to show that our visual system needs to have constant access to the speed of our eye movements to compensate for them. Our vision evolved to make the correction so that we can quickly spot motion in our environment - an approaching predator, for example. But the illusion shows that it has problems dealing with flicker. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15676 - Posted: 08.13.2011

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Although baby humans and baby chimpanzees both start out with undeveloped forebrains, a new study reports that the human brain increases in volume much more rapidly early on. The growth is in a region of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex and is part of what makes humans cognitively advanced compared with other animals, including the chimpanzee, our closest relative. The prefrontal cortex plays a major role in decision-making, self-awareness and creative thinking. Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a zoologist at Kyoto University in Japan, and his colleagues performed magnetic resonance imaging scans on three young chimpanzees over about six years, starting when the chimps were 6 months old. The researchers compared these scans with M.R.I. scans taken of human infants and children. They found that the white matter in the prefrontal cortex of chimpanzees does not grow as rapidly as it does in humans. Their findings appear in the journal Current Biology. That the brains of both animals undergo significant growth indicates that brain development in both is shaped by life experience. This may be why human babies and chimp babies share some similarities — like the impulse to smile at caregivers. But the rapid development of the prefrontal cortex in humans may contribute to superior skills in communication and social interaction. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 15675 - Posted: 08.13.2011

Women with depression may also be at increased risk of having a stroke, US researchers suggest. A study of over 80,000 women found those with a history of depression had a 29% increased risk of stroke. The research, in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association, said doctors should be aware people with depression may neglect their general health. UK stroke experts said depression alone was unlikely to increase stroke risk. Indicator The women, all aged 54-79, who were all taking part in the long-running Nurses' Health Study which has been following women across the US since the mid 1970s. In this study, the researchers looked at data from 2000 to 2006. None had had a stroke before the study began, while 22% had been diagnosed with depression. Compared to women without a history of depression, depressed women were more likely to be single, smokers and less physically active. They were also slightly younger, had a higher body mass index and conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Depression; Stroke
Link ID: 15674 - Posted: 08.13.2011

By Laura Beil When it comes to the safety of dyeing food, the one true shade is gray. Artificial colorings have been around for decades, and for just about as long, people have questioned whether tinted food is a good idea. In the 1800s, when merchants colored their products with outright poisons, critics had a pretty good case. Today’s safety questions, though, aren’t nearly so black and white — and neither are the answers. Take the conclusions reached by a recent government inquiry: Depending on your point of view, an official food advisory panel either affirmed that food dyes were safe, questioned whether they were safe enough or offered a conclusion that somehow merged the two. It was a glass of cherry Kool-Aid half full or half empty. About the only thing all sides agree on is that there would be no discussion if shoppers didn’t feast with their eyes. Left alone, margarine would be colorless, cola wouldn’t be dark, peas and pickles might not be so vibrantly green, and kids cereals would rarely end up with the neon hues of candy. But as the 1990s flop of Crystal Pepsi showed, consumers expect their food to look a certain way. Some of the earliest attempts to dye food used substances such as chalk or copper — or lead, once a favorite for candy — that turned out to be clearly harmful. Most of the added colors in use today were originally extracted from coal tar but now are mostly derived from petroleum. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 15673 - Posted: 08.13.2011