By Laura Spinney He is taking part in an experiment which I have been invited to watch, at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. At one point, the scientist running the experiment, Beatrice de Gelder, asks me to stand on the white line, in the man’s path. I mustn’t move or make a sound. When he is about a metre away, he comes to a halt and asks: “Is somebody there?” TN, as the blind man is known, suffered a stroke in 2003 which destroyed an area at the back of his brain that processes visual information: the primary visual cortex. The stroke affected only one hemisphere of his brain. What places TN in a category of his own, at least as far as the annals of science are concerned, is that about a month later he suffered a second stroke which wiped out the primary visual cortex on the other side of his brain. Suddenly, though his eyes were healthy, he became blind. TN’s blindness is unusual, however, because he can still see in some situations, although he is unaware that he does so – a phenomenon known as blindsight. The most striking demonstration of this came two years ago, when de Gelder, a neuropsychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Harvard Medical School in the US, and neuropsychologist Alan Pegna of Geneva University and others, asked him to walk down a corridor which they had arranged like an obstacle course, having littered it with tripods, filing trays and boxes. He navigated his way successfully through the obstacles, though he said he saw none of them. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 14496 - Posted: 09.27.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Pod people may look a lot like the real thing, but — as the fictional town of Santa Mira finds out in Invasion of the Body Snatchers — they are disastrously different. The same may be true for reprogrammed stem cells. These cells are designed to mimic embryonic stem cells and are grown in lab dishes by researchers, not pods by aliens. But scientists now worry that reprogrammed cells, like the duplicates that invaded Santa Mira, may not be wholly satisfactory replacements. New research suggests that important differences may separate the two kinds of cells. Such differences could impair the ability of reprogrammed cells to make other cell types, which doctors hope to use to repair diseased and damaged tissues. Other limitations of the reprogramming process could leave transplanted cells more susceptible to diseases such as cancer, some scientists fear. Every lab has its own recipe to convert mature skin and blood cells to a reprogrammed state — and comparisons show that some of these procedures work better than others. Time and patience, one study finds, may help erase lingering differences between the superbly flexible embryonic stem cells and their lab-made substitutes. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can become any type of cell. But isolating stem cells destroys the embryo from which they come, raising ethical concerns and funding barriers. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 14495 - Posted: 09.27.2010

There may be a very good reason why people clutch a painful area of their body after receiving an injury, according to a study. Touching the affected area allows a picture of the body to form in the brain, says a study in Current Biology. Researchers at University College London (UCL) found that the way the body is represented in the brain is key to reducing perceptions of acute pain. But it does not work if someone else touches the injury, they say. Scientists from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL studied the effects of self-touch in people who were made to feel pain using an experimental model called the Thermal Grill Illusion (TGI). Healthy volunteers were asked to put their index and ring fingers in warm water and their middle finger in cold water. This generates a feeling that the middle finger is painfully hot, explains the study. Pain relief Lead researcher Dr Marjolein Kammers said: "The brain doesn't know this is an illusion of pain but it does allow scientists to investigate the experience of pain without causing injury to anyone." BBC © MMX

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14494 - Posted: 09.25.2010

By NOAH SNYDER-MACKLER We arrived in the Simien Mountains National Park today. Back in the States, I have an office in the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania. It is located in the Solomon Laboratories building, which was probably built shortly after Ben Franklin founded the university in the late 18th century. I share my office with another graduate student. I have a six-inch-wide office window with a view of one side of the School of Social Work. Here I have an office on the edge of an escarpment in northern Ethiopia. I share my office with thousands of the most gregarious primates, the gelada. I have no windows in my Ethiopian office. Wildlife photographers rate my office as one of the most beautiful locations in the world. I can’t argue with that. I spent most of the drive from Gondar to the mountains taking in the passing landscapes. The wet season is ending, and my colleagues have told me that the rains have been less frequent. I have never been in the mountains after the rainy season. It is breathtaking. When the sun peeks through the clouds and the fog lifts, you see endless fields of lush grass speckled with wildflowers of all colors. As we enter the park I am giddy with excitement. I can’t wait to see the monkeys. It’s been too long and I feel like I’ve missed so much of the soap opera that is gelada life. Who has had a baby? Who died? What groups have new males? What groups split into multiple groups? I have a million questions. I think my colleagues are happy when we pull up to our hut and they are released from my pestering curiosity. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14493 - Posted: 09.25.2010

WHEN the French legislative assembly met for the first time, in October 1791, it organised itself in such a way that conservative members sat to the right and liberals sat to the left. Over the years, this arrangement became a metaphor for political views, with liberals being considered on the left of the political spectrum and conservatives being on the right. It seems, though, that these terms may be more than mere metaphor, for a study by Daniel Oppenheimer and Thomas Trail of Princeton University suggests that leaning left physically may cause an individual to lean that way mentally, too. That metaphors can reflect real behaviour is well known. Social interactions that are friendly are often described as “warm” and past experiments have shown that if people are given a warm drink they are more likely to behave towards others in a warm manner than if they are given a cold drink. Similarly, experiments exploring the concepts of “up=good” and “down=bad”, in which people are asked to move objects either upwards or downwards on a shelf, reveal that “up” primes people to be positive and “down” primes them to be negative. With these sorts of studies in mind, Dr Oppenheimer and Dr Trail set out to determine if orienting people towards their left or right sides shifts their political opinions. In their first experiment they asked 112 people to squeeze a hand-grip for five seconds and then asked them “To what extent do you agree with Democrats on political issues?” and “To what extent do you agree with Republicans on political issues?” Both questions were answered on an eight-point scale, with one indicating strong disagreement and eight indicating strong agreement. Follow-up questions collected information on handedness, age and political affiliation. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010.

Keyword: Emotions; Laterality
Link ID: 14492 - Posted: 09.25.2010

Many mentally handicapped Danes, including children, were lobotomized between 1947 and 1983, and many died from the operation, a historian behind a soon-to-be-published book on the topic told Danish media Thursday. "Doctors did not count on curing them completely, but wanted to pacify them, perhaps to better their condition," Jesper Vaczy Kragh told the Christian daily Kristelig Dagbladet. "The results of such operations generally were not good, and some 7.6 percent did not survive," said the medical historian, behind a book on lobotomies set to be published in October. "What happened with people with mental handicaps is worse than what happened with psychiatric patients," he said, referring to many operations performed on children as young as six years of age, even though their brains were not yet completely developed. Official figures show that between 1947 and 1983, when conducting lobotomies was outlawed in Denmark, around 4,500 Danes had the operation. But it was previously unknown that many mentally handicapped people were subjected to the procedure. Kragh estimates more than 300 mentally handicapped people were operated on during that period at Copenhagen's University Hospital and at a municipal hospital in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14491 - Posted: 09.25.2010

by Jessica Griggs LETTERS, words, numbers, sounds, touch, pain and smell all trigger flashes of colour in Carol Steen's mind. The New York-based artist first discovered she could paint her synaesthetic visions after a visit to her acupuncturist. "Each time a needle went in a colour flashed in front of my eyes," she recalls. "When all the needles were in it was like watching a movie. I rushed home and realised I could recall enough to paint a part of what I had seen." Other synaesthetic artists include David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky, who painted the piece below, entitled Blue. There is still some speculation over whether Kandinsky actually had synaesthesia or was simply influenced by reports of the phenomenon in other people. But to Christopher Tyler of the Smith-Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center in San Francisco, who has analysed Kandinsky's work, it is obvious (Journal of the History of Neuroscience, vol 12, p 223). "It's very explicit in his work and his writings. He went to a performance of Wagner's music and then wrote about how vivid the visual impressions of the horns were and the colour that the music evoked in his mind. That's synaesthesia," he says. Steen agrees: "I saw a sphere like the one in Kandinsky's Blue in one of my acupuncture sessions. Since it is really hard to explain your visions to someone, I assume Kandinsky was a synaesthete." The striking colour contrast with the red dot is also familiar to her. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14490 - Posted: 09.25.2010

Andrew Dermont So you're at a cocktail party, and, like at most cocktail parties, there are a handful of conversations happening around the room. Yet, despite the dull roar of laughter and discussion, you have no trouble focusing on the voice of the person with whom you're speaking. You see her eyes and lips moving and you understand every word she is saying. But as often happens, you begin to lose interest in the conversation. And though you continue to nod your head and say things like, "Uh-huh, Oh really?" you consciously turn your attention to the uproarious banter of a more enticing conversation happening elsewhere in the room. How is it that in a blink of an eye, we're able to selectively refocus our auditory attention to a distant conversation, while ignoring the conversation that's happening right in front of us? The answer, it turns out, is a mystery According to Tony Zador, a Professor of Biology and the Chairman of Neuroscience at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the brain mechanisms responsible for any kind of attention, whether visual or auditory, are probably not fundamentally different. However, the challenge of understanding how the brain goes about selectively listening to one cocktail party conversation over another is twofold. The first issue is one of computation: "We have a whole bunch of different sounds and from a bunch of different sources and they are superimposed at the level of the ears and somehow they’re added together and to us it’s typically pretty effortless to separate out those different threads of the conversation, but actually that’s a surprisingly difficult task," says Zador. Scientists were able to program computers to recognize speech in controlled situations and quiet rooms as far back as ten years ago, says Zador, but when deployed in real world settings with background noise their algorithms fail completely. Humans on the other hand have evolved to effortlessly break down the components of an auditory scene. Original content is for Non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 14489 - Posted: 09.25.2010

"Brain imaging is not a very good way to test subtle distinctions [in the brain]...it's like trying to find out something about New York City by studying New York State," says NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, one of the pioneers of neuroscientific animal research back in the 1970s. "Animal research is so important because we can go in and study individual cells and individual synapses on those cells," he says. But can we take the information we learn about the brains of rats and apply that knowledge to the endlessly complex human brain? In his second Big Think interview, LeDoux told us that, yes, we can learn much from studying rats' brains, even about things like emotion, which we often attribute solely to humans. "Through the history of psychology, there's been a struggle between what can we learn about psychological states in humans and animals, what can we learn about psychological states by studying conscious states in people and unconscious states," LeDoux explains. In the 1930s and '40s, the behaviorists threw out the idea of consciousness because it is a subjective pehnomenon that cannot be measured. Then the cognitive revolution of the '50s and '60s brought the mind back to psychology, "but it didn't bring back the mind that the behaviorists got rid of," says LeDoux. "When I got interested in emotion in the '70s, emotion was still being thought of in terms of subjective conscious experiences, whereas other aspects of psychology, like perception and memory were thought of as information processing functions." LeDoux revolutionized the study of emotion, especially of fear, by thinking about it in terms of observable behavior. "All animals have to be able to detect danger and respond to danger in order to stay alive, including humans." And because this is such a basic evolutionary adaptation, it functions quite similarly between animals and humans. Original content is for Non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14488 - Posted: 09.25.2010

Antipsychotic drugs taken by thousands in the UK raise the risk of dangerous blood clots, scientists believe. The latest research, published in the British Medical Journal, provides the strongest evidence yet of a link. People given antipsychotics in the past two years had a third greater risk of clots like deep vein thrombosis (DVT). The Nottingham University study looking at 25,000 cases found the risk was even higher for the newer "atypical" antipsychotics. Antipsychotic drugs are usually given to patients with conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but are sometimes used to ease persistent nausea and vertigo or to calm agitated dementia patients. Higher stroke risk Some scientists had already spotted a higher risk of clots in people taking antipsychotics, but the new study, which looked at more than 25,500 cases, appears to confirm this. Almost 16,000 of the people in the study suffered a DVT and just over 9,000 suffered a clot on the lung, called a pulmonary embolism. BBC © MMX

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14487 - Posted: 09.23.2010

Australian researchers studying Huntington's disease in human embryonic stem cells say that signs of the disease can be seen in cells just a few days old. The researchers, from Macquarie University's Australian Proteome Analysis Facility (APAF) and IVF Sydney, say they are the first in the world to study Huntington's disease in human embryonic stem cells. Dr. Leon McQuade, the senior scientific officer at APAF, presented the research Wednesday at the Human Proteomics Organization congress in Sydney. Huntington's disease is a fatal genetic brain disorder affecting about one in every 10,000 Canadians, according to the Huntington Society of Canada. Symptoms are usually first seen in middle age and become progressively worse. Until now, studies into how the disease develops could only be done in mouse models, which do not always accurately reflect the disease in humans, or in brain cells of patients after they have died. Recently, researchers have examined human embryonic stem cells taken from five- to seven-day-old embryos that were known to have Huntington's and had been donated by couples undergoing genetic testing before IVF. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 14486 - Posted: 09.23.2010

By Jeremy Hsu Michael Jackson's classic transformation from a panther to a human during the music video "Black and White" may cause confusion upon first viewing for good reason. Now neuroscientists have used a similarly disruptive trick to show how the brain recognizes objects under changing conditions. Their new experiments succeeded in retraining monkey brains to blur the distinction between two objects — a Dalmatian dog image and a rhinoceros image. Such results provide the strongest proof yet of how the brain relies upon time-dependent image sequences to learn how to recognize objects. "Don't think of the visual system as explicitly learning about object differences," said James DiCarlo, a neuroscientist at MIT. "Instead, think of the visual system as explicitly learning to group images that likely arise from the same source." The mind can usually get away with the assumption that images appearing rapidly one after the other — like a flipbook — belong to the same source. Researchers suspect that the learning process, called "temporal contiguity," trains the brain to recognize objects, such as humans, from different distances, different angles and in both well-lit and shadowy situations. DiCarlo and Nuo Li, a brain researcher at MIT and lead author on the study, decided to test the theory by intentionally confusing the learning process. Their work is detailed in the Sept. 23 issue of the journal Neuron. © 2010 LiveScience.com

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14485 - Posted: 09.23.2010

by Helen Fields Fans of the Animal Planet show Meerkat Manor, which follows the lives of a group of African meerkats, are familiar with the drama: The dominant female that rules the group keeps subordinate females from reproducing by kicking them out. Sometimes they come back, and sometimes they start a new group. A new study of the animals, including the stars of the show, finds that dominant females may decide when to suppress their subordinates' reproduction based on the costs and benefits to themselves. Meerkats live in tight family groups in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa and Botswana. The meerkats on Meerkat Manor are part of a study that started in 1993 and has followed roughly 3000 animals through their lives. The animals live in groups that range around the desert. Every morning when they wake up, and twice later in the day, they've been trained to step onto a set of scales to be weighed. The animals have generated reams of data in the past 17 years. In meerkat groups, one female is generally in charge, giving birth to most of the pups and thereby passing the most genes on to the next generation. She may keep the other females from reproducing by evicting them, either temporarily or permanently, or by killing their pups. But sometimes, other females in the group manage to have offspring. Researchers have debated the question of why dominants sometimes let subordinates breed—in meerkats and in other species—for years, says Tim Clutton-Brock, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. One theory says that dominants are trading with subordinates, letting them have some of their own babies in exchange for sticking around to help. Another theory holds that subordinates manage to reproduce when dominants aren't strong enough to stop them. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14484 - Posted: 09.23.2010

By Nathan Seppa The dismal range of options for treating a stroke might be improving. Scientists report that neutralizing an enzyme called NOX4 that shows up in stroke-damaged tissues can limit brain injury in mice. The study appears in the September PLoS Biology. Stroke treatment is often hampered because the primary available drug, a clot-buster called tPA, is effective only within three hours of a stroke’s onset; many strokes are not detected until after that window has closed. Knowing the molecular culprits involved in brain tissue damage caused by a stroke might give scientists another angle to exploit as they seek treatments, says Harald Schmidt, a physician and pharmacologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. To that end, Schmidt teamed with an international group of scientists to study the role of NOX4, a member of an enzyme family that makes free radicals — highly reactive molecules that can kill cells and contribute to tissue damage. The researchers induced strokes in mice by threading a filament up an artery into the brain to a point at which it obstructed the vessel. In a series of experiments, the scientists found that mice genetically engineered to lack the NOX4 enzyme showed substantially less damage from these strokes than mice making NOX4. In other tests, normal mice with the ability make the NOX enzymes fared better against strokes when given an experimental drug that neutralized NOX4 than did mice not receiving the drug. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 14483 - Posted: 09.23.2010

by Jessica Griggs PLINY the Elder recounts the story of two legendary painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, who were trying to decide which of them was the more accomplished artist. They brought two covered canvases to show each other. First Zeuxis revealed his - a bunch of grapes so lusciously lifelike that birds swooped down to peck at the canvas. Confident of victory, Zeuxis leaned over to pull the cover off Parrhasius's offering, only to find that the covering itself was the painting. Having been fooled by his rival's handiwork, Zeuxis admitted defeat. Examples of this "trick of the eye" art, or trompe l'oeil as it commonly known, date back to Graeco-Roman times, but it wasn't until the Renaissance, when painters mastered the art of perspective drawing, that the genre flourished. Examples include the image of a little boy climbing out of a painting's frame, called Escaping Criticism, and the work above, known as the Cabinet of Curiosities, thought to have been painted by the Flemish artist Domenico Remps in the 1690s. Trompe l'oeil didn't flourish until the Renaissance, when painters mastered the art of perspective This painting works because the objects are life-size and depicted in hyper-realistic detail, and also because Remps laid a set of decoys that hoodwink our visual system into perceiving depth, says Priscilla Heard, a neuropsychologist at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. Misleading cues include the way the wood grain shrinks the further into the cabinet you look, and the way shadows fall on the sill and the paper drawing. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14482 - Posted: 09.23.2010

David Hirschman Memory is one of the cornerstones of what it means to be human. Recording aspects of the world around us and storing them in our brains for future recall is vital to nearly all advanced human functions. It makes us who we are, and helps us to make sense of reality. But what is really happening in our brains when we are experiencing events and then saving them for later? Dr. Antonio Damasio, a behavioral neurobiologist at the University of Southern California who has studied the neural systems behind memory for years, says that memory is actually a complex process where the brain scatters information across its neurons and then reconnects it using sequential cues. Our brains are not at all like video cameras, he says; they don't have the capacity to keep exact film-like representations of everything that happens in our lives. Instead, the brain records conjunctions of details and events in what Damasio calls "convergence/divergence zones." When we experience something, our neurons create a code to represent a series of disparate facts about the scene or idea that live in different areas of our brains. Recalling specific events or "memories" is actually a process of pulling together these details to essentially reconstruct a version of reality. "When you are asked to remember a certain experience that you had today in which you’re talking with person A, listening to the person’s voice, but you also are in a certain context, B, which is the context of a certain room in a certain building," says Damasio, as an example. "You are going to have the separate recordings of the voice of the person, the sight of the person, the place—but those recordings are going to be reactivated only if another recording of the simultaneity of the event has been made in a convergence/divergence zone." Original content is for Non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14481 - Posted: 09.23.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou A FEW years ago, 17-year-old Christopher Simmons was convicted of breaking into Shirley Crook's house in St Louis, Missouri, tying her up and throwing her off a bridge. The evidence was overwhelming and Simmons confessed to the murder. When the jury recommended a death sentence, Simmons's defence referred to scientific papers that suggested a the brain of a typical 17-year-old was not yet fully mature. Not only did Simmons escape the death penalty, the US Supreme Court changed the law so that only those over 18 can face death row. Now neuroscientists claim we are closer to being able to estimate brain maturity using brain scans, which might prompt lawyers to offer a defence of immaturity based on an accused individual's own brain scan. Nico Dosenbach's team at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis reckon they can predict how old a person is using a 5-minute brain scan. The idea is based on the fact that brain structure changes as we age. For example, the brain's grey matter peaks in childhood and is then pruned throughout adolescence. White matter, which forms the connections between brain regions, steadily increases, eventually levelling off (see diagram). As we age, parts of the brain that are further apart are better connected and better able to communicate. "The short connections get weaker and the longer ones get stronger," says Dosenbach. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14480 - Posted: 09.23.2010

by Carl Zimmer The great philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that nothing matters more to our existence than space. Every experience we have—from the thoughts in our heads to the stars we see wheeling through the sky—makes sense only if we can assign it a location. “We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non­-existence of space,” he wrote in 1781. The nonexistence of space may certainly be hard to imagine. But for some people it is part of everyday life. Strokes can rob us of space. So can brain injuries and tumors. In 1941, neurologists Andrew Paterson and O. L. Zangwill, working in Edinburgh, Scotland, published an account of a 34-year-old patient who had been hit in the head by a mortar fragment. The injury wiped out his sense of the left half of his world. Paterson and Zangwill described how the man “consistently failed to appreciate doors and turnings on his left-hand side even when he was aware of their presence.” He also “neglected the left-hand side of a picture or the left-hand page of a book despite the fact that his attention was constantly being drawn to the oversight.” The patient could play checkers but ignored the pieces on the left side of the board. “And when his attention was drawn to the pieces on this side,” the doctors wrote, “he recognized them but immediately thereafter forgot them.” This condition, called spatial neglect, challenges our intuitive notions of how we understand the world. But by mapping how people lose some of their sense of space, neuroscientists are gaining new insights into how we build that sense in the first place. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14479 - Posted: 09.23.2010

By Ferris Jabr Where are you right now? Maybe you are at home, the office or a coffee shop—but such responses provide only a partial answer to the question at hand. Asked another way, what is the location of your "self" as you read this sentence? Like most people, you probably have a strong sense that your conscious self is housed within your physical body, regardless of your surroundings. But sometimes this spatial self-location goes awry. During a so-called out-of-body experience, for example, one's self seems to be transported outside the physical body into a surreal perspective—some people even believe they are viewing their bodies from above, as though their true selves were floating. In a related experience, people with a delusion known as somatoparaphrenia disown one of their limbs or confuse another person's limb for their own. Such warped perceptions help researchers understand the neuroscience of selfhood. A new paper offers examples of rare bodily illusions that are not confined to a single limb, nor are they complete out-of-body experiences—they are somewhere in between. These illusory body perceptions, described in the September issue of Consciousness and Cognition, could offer novel clues about how the brain maintains a link between the physical and conscious selves, or what the researchers call "bodily self-consciousness." "These reports could be interesting for us to better understand how the brain produces ownership of the entire body—a sense that we have a body in the first place," says Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who was not involved in the new study. © 2010 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14478 - Posted: 09.23.2010

Got a few pounds to lose? Cancel the gym membership. An increasing body of research reveals that exercise does next to nothing for you when it comes to losing weight. A result for couch potatoes, yes, but also one that could have serious implications for the government's long-term health strategy My mum used to complain that she couldn't lose weight. A size 18 and a couple of stone heavier than ideal, she tried in vain for years to shed the extra. Every week she headed to the gym, where she pounded the treadmill like a paratrooper, often three times a week. Most days she took the dog for a brisk, hour-long walk. She didn't eat unhealthily – the rest of the family ate exactly the same meals, and did a fraction of the exercise she did. She ought to have been the slimmest of the bunch: that she remained overweight was a frustration to her, and a mystery to all of us. From StairMasters to kettlebells, Rosemary Conley to Natalie Cassidy, we understand and expect that getting in shape is going to require serious effort on our part – and the reverse is true, too, that we expect exercise to pay back the hours of boring, sweaty graft with a leaner, lighter body. Since the days of the Green Goddess, we've known that the healthiest way to lose weight is through exercise. It's science, isn't it? Well, science has some bad news for you. More and more research in both the UK and the US is emerging to show that exercise has a negligible impact on weight loss. That tri-weekly commitment to aerobics class? Almost worthless, as far as fitting into your bikini is concerned. The Mayo Clinic, a not-for-profit medical research establishment in the US, reports that, in general, studies "have demonstrated no or modest weight loss with exercise alone" and that "an exercise regimen… is unlikely to result in short-term weight loss beyond what is achieved with dietary change." © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14477 - Posted: 09.21.2010