by Ewen Callaway People's visceral reaction to incest or betrayal by others could stem from a natural aversion to potentially toxic foods, researchers argue. Subjects who swig nasty tasting liquids grimace in a similar way to people who view photos of open wounds or toilets covered in faeces, as well as people whose trust is violated. This overlap points to a common neural foundation for distaste and moral disgust, say Hanah Chapman and Adam Anderson - both psychologists at the University of Toronto. Common usage of the word disgust and its synonyms might reflect a deep connection between moral disgust and distaste, she says. "People will say that behaviour disgusts me, or so-and-so is repulsive, or that interaction left a bad taste in my mouth." Because people frequently employ the word disgust as a stand-in for anger, Chapman's team wanted a more objective measure of the emotion. They relied on electrical measurements of a facial muscle group called the levator labii, which runs along our cheeks. It wrinkles the nose and purses the lip. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 12592 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden Why waste time holding an election when children can look at pictures and pick the winners? Scientists showed a few years ago that such an approach worked for adults looking at mug shots of candidates for the U.S. Congress. Now two economists at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have extended the findings to children, using candidates in the 2002 French parliamentary election. John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas hypothesized that because "naïve" ratings based solely on facial appearance correlate with actual voter behavior, voters and children might have a lot in common. In one experiment, they showed 684 university students 57 pairs of faces--election winners and runners-up--and asked them to judge who looked more "competent." They found that the students chose the winner 60% of the time, a statistically significant deviation from random choices. Using the same pictures, the researchers got a 64% hit rate when they asked 681 children aged 5 through 13 to pick the "captain of their boat" in a computer game. The authors conclude, in a paper published tomorrow in Science, that the children used the same cues as adults when assessing a face. Princeton University psychologist Alexander Todorov, author of the earlier congressional elections paper, calls the findings "really striking." He agrees they suggest that the ways people infer traits from appearance "are surprisingly stable across the life span." Furthermore, he says, given that small Swiss children are no worse than adults in passing judgment on French politicians, it's unlikely that voters are basing their judgments on subconscious knowledge about candidates or learned associations between facial features and competence. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12591 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jonah Lehrer I am a sucker for financial bubbles. The first stock I bought was Cisco Systems, in early 2000. It was the height of the dot-com bubble and Cisco was about to become the most valuable company in the world. Naturally my investment crashed too. I'd like to say that I learnt from my dot-com disaster, but I didn't. In late 2006 I began investing in blue-chip financial stocks, such as Citibank and Bank of America. At the time these companies were reporting record profits as they expanded into the sub-prime mortgage business. We all know how that turned out. If there's any consolation from my losses it's that I wasn't the only one. The current economic crisis is a by-product of collective failure, an example of terrible decision-making on a huge scale. Banks gave out loans to people who shouldn't have taken them, consumers got used to spending money they didn't have, regulators failed to regulate, and investors, appeased by ephemeral profits, failed to ask hard questions. In retrospect we can see the profound foolishness of this behaviour. Yet it's worth remembering that this is not the first time that the markets have gone haywire. The history of finance is largely a history of financial bubbles, from the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland to the South Sea Bubble of 18th-century England. Do we never learn? And, if not, why not? The answer to these questions returns us to the human brain, in particular a single neurotransmitter in the brain - dopamine - that seems to play a crucial role in shaping the behaviour of investors. While dopamine is an essential ingredient of cognition - it helps us to process and predict rewards, from a bite of chocolate cake to stock market profits - this neurotransmitter system can also be led astray, with often devastating consequences. Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Parkinsons
Link ID: 12590 - Posted: 02.28.2009

By Tina Hesman Saey Yukon Cornelius isn’t the only one with a taste for metals. While most people probably can’t find silver and gold by nibbling snow, as Cornelius seems to do in the Rudolph movie*, new research shows that taste buds can detect iron, zinc, copper, magnesium and other metals. The source of metallic taste has long been elusive, but a study in the Feb. 25 Journal of Neuroscience traces the sensation to a combination of proteins used in detecting sweetness and the pain of red-hot chili peppers, and other as-of-yet unidentified proteins. Scientists used to believe that there were only a handful of tastes the tongue could register — sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami, a delicious, meaty taste found in monosodium glutamate, Parmesan cheese and portobello mushrooms. Scientists define a taste as something that is detected by a specific combination of proteins in taste buds, as distinct from a flavor that results from a combination of tastes and odors. But it would be impossible to describe all the differences between chicken soup and lobster bisque using only the known tastes, says Johannes le Coutre of the Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. So researchers think there are many other taste sensations. Le Coutre, Céline Riera and colleagues conducted the new study to find out if they could explain just one of them — metallic taste. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 12589 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Scientists measured blood levels of the vitamin in a representative sample of 1,766 people over 65 and assessed their mental functioning with a widely used questionnaire. About 12 percent were cognitively impaired, and the lower their vitamin D level, the more likely they were to be in that group. Compared with those in the highest one-quarter for serum vitamin D, those in the lowest were 2.3 times as likely to be impaired, even after statistically adjusting for age, sex, education and ethnicity. Men showed the effect more strongly than women. “The cause of dementia is not vitamin D deficiency,” said David Llewellyn, a research associate at Cambridge University and the study’s lead author. “It’s a very complicated disease. But while further research is needed, vitamin D supplementation is cheap, safe and convenient, and may therefore play an important role in prevention.” According to background information in the study, which appears online in The Journal of Geriatric Psychology and Neurology, vitamin D receptors are present in a variety of cells, including neurons and the glial cells associated with them. That suggests that the vitamin may play a role in brain development and the protection of neurons. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12588 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Taking a combination of folic acid and B vitamins may help to prevent a common form of vision loss in older women, according to a new study. Age-related macular degeneration is a degenerative disease of the macula, a small area at the centre of the retina. The overgrowth of blood vessels into the retina can lead to central vision loss, preventing sufferers from seeing fine details, recognizing faces, or reading and driving. It is a leading cause of vision loss in older Americans, and more than a third of Canadians between the ages of 55 and 74 develop AMD, according to the AMD Canada website. In Monday's issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, William Christen, of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and his colleagues reported the results of their randomized double-blind clinical trial involving more than 5,000 women aged 40 and older. "Other than avoiding cigarette smoking, this is the first suggestion from a randomized trial of a possible way to reduce early stage AMD," said Christen, who led the research. The findings should also apply to men, he said. In the study, participants who took a combination of vitamin B6, vitamin B12 and folic acid reduced their risk of macular degeneration by more than a third after seven years, compared with women who took placebos. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12587 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carrie Arnold The Griecos had learned of Christina's illness just months earlier, although she had been struggling with the eating disorder for three years. They found outpatient therapy for her right away, but it didn't stop her from slashing her calories to starvation levels. Feeling helpless and guilty, as if they were somehow to blame, the Griecos, who live in Chantilly, arranged for Christina to spend two months in an eating disorders clinic in Arizona, at a cost of more than $100,000. ad_icon In their haste, they forgot about a note that one therapist had scribbled on a scrap of paper: "Maudsley approach," it read. "Very effective for adolescents." Looking back, the Griecos wish they had focused on it sooner. Unlike traditional eating disorder treatment programs, which tend to equate parental involvement with parental interference, the Maudsley approach treats the family as an integral part of the healing process. Named for the London hospital where it was developed in the 1980s, the Maudsley approach views food as medicine and parents as the optimal people to help their child return to health. Unlike traditional psychotherapy, this family-based treatment views the ill teenager as unable to start eating, rather than as choosing not to eat. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 12586 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Joyce Gramza Besides well-known complications like nerve damage, people with type 2 diabetes also have twice the normal risk of Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, some researchers even describe Alzheimer’s as a "type 3" diabetes. So Alzheimer’s researchers at San Diego’s Burnham Institute for Medical Research tested the effects of diabetes treatments on brain cells. They found that metformin, a drug commonly-prescribed to diabetics and prediabetics (those at risk of becoming diabetic), can more than double the production of amyloid-beta, or a-beta, the protein that forms toxic brain plaques in Alzheimer’s. Francesca Fang-Liao, Huaxi Xu and their team saw this increase in a-beta after treating brain cells in the lab with metformin. However, the effect was reversed when they added insulin. As they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they also confirmed both findings in the brains of mice given metformin, or metformin plus insulin. "Based on the chemical structure of metformin, it doesn’t look to be able to cross the blood brain barrier," says Liao, who is now at the University of Tennessee School of Medicine. "However… when we gave metformin in the drinking water [of mice] we found that after one or two days it reached to the brain, accumulating there in significant concentrations. ©2009 ScienCentral

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12585 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jesse Bering Although I've always wanted this particular superhuman power, I've never been very good at detecting other men's sexual orientation. Findings from a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, however, suggest I may be underestimating my gaydar abilities. The January 2008 study investigated people's ability to identify homosexual men from pictures of their faces alone. In an initial experiment, researchers Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady from Tufts University perused online dating sites and carefully selected 45 straight male faces and 45 gay male faces. All of these photos were matched for orientation (only faces shown looking forward were used) and facial alterations (none of the images contained jewelry, glasses or facial hair). To control for context, the faces were also cut and pasted onto a white background for the study. These 90 faces were then shown to 90 participants in random order, who were asked simply to judge the target's "probable sexual orientation" (gay or straight) by pressing a button. Surprisingly, all participants (both men and women) scored above chance on this gaydar task, correctly identifying the gay faces. Even more surprisingly, accuracy rate was just as good when the images were exposed at a rapid rate of only 50 milliseconds, which offered participants no opportunity to consciously process the photo. A parsimonious explanation for these findings would be that the countenance of these photos—an online dating site—means that they're likely stereotypical in some way. In other words, perhaps it's not the target's face per se that signals his sexual orientation, but the way he expresses himself facially when trying to attract a member of the same or the opposite gender. Or maybe hairstyles are suggestive of sexual orientation. Wary of these possible criticisms, Rule and Ambady conducted a second experiment that controlled for such extraneous variables as self-presentation and hairstyle. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12584 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Beil The patient, known as only “MBM,” was just 7 years old the first time doctors saw her. She had always been prone to night sweats, but now excessive perspiration was forcing her to change clothes several times a day. She was endlessly thirsty, fatigued and losing weight despite a voracious appetite. A dozen years later, at age 19, doctors checked her into a hospital, thinking she had some kind of unusual metabolic condition. After aggressive treatment with drugs, her symptoms improved, but only for a short time, and the next year surgeons removed most of her thyroid. When she was 35 — gaunt, weak and losing hair — doctors began searching every tissue of her body for a diagnosis. They finally located the problem. It was MBM’s mitochondria, the organelles that supply the energy for cells to function. Thanks to mitochondria, the sandwich you had for lunch is now powering your heart and brain. Somehow the mitochondria inside MBM’s cells had gone haywire, becoming too large and too numerous. Such damage was “the first instance of a spontaneous functional defect of the mitochondrial enzyme organization.” The mysterious case of patient MBM was considered so remarkable that the Journal of Clinical Investigation published a description of it. That was in 1962. Today, scientists suspect that millions of people may be suffering from mitochondria gone awry, in more subtle but nonetheless insidious forms. Evidence suggests that malfunctioning mitochondria could explain Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer and other consequences of aging. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Parkinsons; Alzheimers
Link ID: 12583 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Heart-felt perils await people who hold disapproving attitudes about the elderly, a new study suggests. Young and middle-aged adults who endorse negative stereotypes about older people display high rates of strokes, heart attacks and other serious heart problems later in life, compared with aging peers who view the elderly in generally positive ways, say Yale University psychologist Becca Levy and her colleagues. “We found that age stereotypes, which tend to be acquired in childhood or young adulthood and carried over into old age, seem to have far-reaching effects on cardiovascular health,” Levy says. Her team describes evidence for a connection between attitudes toward aging and eventual heart health in a paper published online February 13 and set to appear in Psychological Science. Reasons for this association remain unclear. In earlier studies, Levy found that elderly volunteers who reported negative stereotypes about old people were more likely to display heightened physiological responses to stress and to report unhealthy habits, such as cigarette smoking. Levy’s new report “is the latest in a series of well-conducted studies by various scientists that demonstrate that individual psychological differences assessed early in life predict various health and longevity outcomes many years later,” remarks psychologist Howard Friedman of the University of California, Riverside. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 12582 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The future health of thousands of UK children could be affected because their ear infections are not being treated properly, a charity says. Deafness Research UK says that antibiotics are given routinely in many cases, but often do not work. Children whose hearing is regularly affected may suffer developmental problems, but many parents are unaware of what to do, it said. The RNID said it was vital to seek GP advice about recurrent infections. A report by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, published last year, suggested that as many as 200,000 children each year suffer repeated middle ear infections, a condition called otitis media, or sometimes "glue ear". Dr Ian Williamson, a senior lecturer in general practice at Southampton University, said that too many GPs turned to antibiotics to treat the condition. He said: "Ear conditions and their root causes are not necessarily best tackled by antibiotics. We are concerned that time pressure on the NHS - combined with a deeply held cultural myth by the public that antibiotics are a cure-all - means that many children and parents aren't receiving the best advice possible on how to treat and prevent ear infections." Instead, Dr Williamson is urging the NHS to take a more "holistic" approach, with children suffering recurrent infections identified quickly so that other treatments can be provided. These can include the insertion of tubes called "grommets", which allow the fluid trapped in the middle ear to drain away. Dr Williamson said that if other treatments were not considered, children could suffer problems with speech in language development as their impaired hearing held them back. The charity also warned that overuse of antibiotics could help breed resistant bacteria and kill "good bacteria" in the nose and throat which actually helped prevent infection taking hold. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12581 - Posted: 02.23.2009

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the limited use of a device that sends electrical signals to the brain to ease the symptoms of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The Reclaim system, made by Medtronic Inc., can be used to treat up to 4,000 people in the United States each year under a humanitarian exemption from the Food and Drug Administration rules, the agency said Thursday. "Deep-brain stimulation using the Reclaim system may provide some relief to certain patients with severe obsessive compulsive disorder who have not responded to conventional therapy," FDA official Dr. Daniel Schultz said in a news release. "However, Reclaim is not a cure for OCD. Individual results will vary and patients implanted with the device are likely to continue to have some mild to moderate impairment in functioning and continue to require medications." The device, which Medtronic compares to a pacemaker, uses a small electrical pulse generator that blocks abnormal nerve signals in the brain. A battery-powered unit implanted near the abdomen or the collar bone is connected to electrodes implanted in the brain. © CBC 2009

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 12580 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford Suicide victims with a history of abuse during childhood are more likely to carry chemical changes to their DNA that could affect how they respond to stress as adults, a study has found. Those with no history of childhood abuse did not show the same pattern of DNA modification, and had normal expression of NR3C1, a gene linked to stress responses. But the findings do not mean that the effect of childhood abuse is indelible, cautions Joan Kaufman, a psychologist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in the new study. "The long-term effects of early abuse are not inevitable," she says, "and the more you understand about the mechanisms of risk, the more you can devise treatments." The results, reported today in Nature Neuroscience1, follow on from work showing that rat pups that are stressed because they were raised by negligent mothers have extra methyl groups in their DNA in a region of the genome that controls expression of Nr3c1, the equivalent gene in rats. Such 'methylation' can reduce gene expression. NR3C1 encodes a protein expressed in neurons that responds to hormones called glucocorticoids. Lower expression of NR3C1 could be harmful because reduced responses to these glucocorticoids have been linked to increased stress. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12579 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Michael Shermer "There’s an old English proverb that says, ‘It is an equal failing to trust everyone and to trust no one.’ ” So begins Paul Zak, a professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University, who is taking the study of economic behavior down to the molecular level. His search for the neurochemistry of trust and trade has brought him to oxytocin, a hormone synthesized in the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood by the pituitary. In women, oxytocin stimulates birth contractions, lactation, and maternal bonding with a nursing infant. In both women and men, it increases during sex and surges at orgasm, playing a role in pair bonding, an evolutionary adaptation for long-term care of helpless infants. “We know that trust is a very strong predictor of national prosperity, but I want to know what makes two people trust one another,” Zak explains as we sit down in his Center for Neuroeconomics Studies nestled in the bedroom community of Claremont, California. Zak is the oxytocin man. It says so right on his license plate. Tall and handsome with square shoulders and the physique of someone who works out regularly, Zak’s firm grip and warm smile exude, well, trust. Trained in traditional economics, in the mid-1990s his research led him to connect trust to economic growth. ©2009 Heldref Publications ·

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12578 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Unhealthy lifestyles are associated with more than double the risk of a stroke, a UK study has reported. Smoking, drinking too much alcohol, not taking enough exercise and eating few vegetables and little fruit contribute to the chances of a stroke, it found. Just a small proportion of the 20,000 adults studied had healthy enough lifestyles to protect against the condition, researchers said. Strokes cost the UK £7bn a year, the British Medical Journal article added. Previous studies have shown that lifestyle behaviour, such as smoking and diet, are associated with the risk of heart attacks and stroke, but the impact of a combination of risk factors in apparently healthy people has been less clear. In the latest study, led by the University of East Anglia, researchers gave one point for each "healthy behaviour" reported by the participants, aged between 40 and 79. One point was given to those who did not smoke, one point awarded for drinking just one to 14 units of alcohol a week, one point for consuming five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and one point for being physically active. A significantly higher percentage of women than men scored a maximum of four. The study found those who scored zero points were 2.3 times more likely to have a stroke in the 11-year follow-up than those with four points. For every point decrease in the scores, there was an increase in likelihood of stroke, the researchers said. Some 259 people did not score any points, of whom 15 had a stroke - at a rate of 5.8%. But the most common score was three - achieved by 7,822 individuals, of whom 186, or 2.4%, had a stroke. Around 5,000 achieved the healthiest score of four, which was associated with an absolute stroke risk of 1.7%. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 12577 - Posted: 02.21.2009

LONDON - AstraZeneca's cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor cut the risk of stroke by nearly half in seemingly healthy patients, according to a new study. The medical trial involving 17,802 patients found even those with low levels of cholesterol benefited from daily treatment with Crestor. The results were presented at the American Stroke Association meeting in San Diego yesterday. The study resembles earlier findings from the company-funded study, which showed Crestor slashed the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death by 47 percent. All of the patients had high levels of protein called hsCRP, an indicator of inflammation. The data "clearly demonstrate that statin therapy reduces stroke risk among individuals with elevated levels of hsCRP," Robert Glynn, of the division of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in a statement. Crestor is from the medicine class known as statins. AstraZeneca plans to file for expanded approval of the drug in the first half of this year. Over five years, 33 patients who took Crestor in the study suffered a stroke, compared with 64 of those getting a placebo. The drug prevented strokes caused by clots that block blood flow the brain, the researchers said. © Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 12576 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kay Lazar Children of parents with Alzheimer's disease can develop memory problems in their 50s or even younger - much earlier than previously thought - according to a large study released yesterday by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine. The study subjects, who carried a gene strongly linked to Alzheimer's, performed worse in memory tests, on average, than other middle-aged people who had the same gene but did not have a parent diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The difference in memory between the two groups was equivalent to approximately 15 years of brain aging, researchers found.. "How big an effect we saw was surprising," said Dr. Sudha Seshadri, a BU associate professor of neurology and senior author of the study. "It was like you were comparing two groups, 55-year-olds to 70-year-olds." Researchers not involved with the study say the findings have broad implications because they are the first to demonstrate changes in cognitive abilities years before the age at which the degenerative brain disease is diagnosed. By the time the most common form of Alzheimer's is confirmed, usually around age 75, it has irreparably damaged large sections of the brain's memory center. The BU findings do not suggest that everyone with the gene, known as APOE-e4, will develop Alzheimer's, said Seshadri. The gene is believed to play a role in about 50 percent of Alzheimer's cases. The study also did not address whether the people showing early memory impairment were destined to develop Alzheimer's. © 2009 NY Times Co

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12575 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa Mutations in two genes, IDH1 and IDH2, might provide markers that enable doctors to discern malignant from benign brain tumors and catch some cancers early, scientists report in the Feb. 19 New England Journal of Medicine. The study adds to a growing list of molecular clues that doctors may ultimately use to diagnosis and treat cancers, says study coauthor D. Williams Parsons, a pediatric oncologist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Doctors diagnose nearly 200,000 brain cancers each year in the United States. Most get their start elsewhere in the body and spread to the brain. But in about 22,000 of these patients, the cancer originates in the brain or central nervous system. These primary brain tumors are most often gliomas — clusters of tumor cells that derive from the brain’s glial cells. Gliomas vary in virulence from benign (grade 1) to fast-growing and rapidly lethal (grade 4). The IDH genes are so-named because they encode an enzyme called isocitrate dehydrogenase. While the role of the enzyme is poorly understood, the mutations in IDH genes attracted interest after turning up last year in brain tumors but not in other cancer tissues. In the new study, the researchers tested samples of benign and cancerous primary brain tumors removed from 445 people and from tumors obtained from 494 others who had cancers of the colon, prostate, pancreas, breast, stomach, ovary or blood (leukemia). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 12574 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Solmaz Barazesh A lot of stress can turn your hair gray, but a little stress can actually delay aging. A protein tied to protecting cells from stress also helps slow aging, a new study finds. The research, published February 20 in Science, identifies a key regulator of a mechanism cells use to prevent protein damage from stress. Exposure to heat, cold or heavy metals can damage proteins and unravel them from their usual conformations — trauma that can cause cell death. But cells have a damage-limiting mechanism called the heat shock response to combat these and other stresses. As part of the heat shock response, special protein repair molecules patch up the damaged proteins and refold them correctly, preventing death and extending the life of the cell. Molecular biologist Sandy Westerheide of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and her colleagues found that the heat shock response in human cell lines is regulated by Sirtuin 1, or SIRT1, an aging-related protein. It’s the first evidence linking SIRT1 to the protein-protecting heat shock response. “This is a very interesting and insightful study,” comments Raul Mostoslavsky, a cell biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston. “We knew that Sirtuin 1 had many roles in longevity. It’s remarkable that it also affects heat shock response.” The study focused on individual cells, but for whole organisms the finding could shed light on a link between stress and life span. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 12573 - Posted: 06.24.2010