New Hampshire Health News Digest

The two Obamas - International Herald Tribune But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there's Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who'd throw you under the truck for votes. This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He's the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he's too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside. But he's been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in "Entourage" and it all falls ...

Healthy lifestyle triggers genetic changes: study - Yahoo! News WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Comprehensive lifestyle changes including a better diet and more exercise can lead not only to a better physique, but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, U.S. researchers said on Monday. ADVERTISEMENT In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy. The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation. As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes. After th...

Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned Michael Arrington 165 comments » The stories over the weekend were bad enough - the Associated Press, with a long history of suing over quotations from their articles, went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submissions. Drudge Retort is doing nothing different than what Digg, TechMeme, Mixx and dozens of other sites do, and frankly the fact that they are being linked to should be considered a favor. After heavy criticism over the last few days, the A.P. is in damage control mode, says the NYTimes, and retreating from their earlier position. But from what I read, they’re just pushing their case further. They do not want people quoting their stories, despite the fact that such activity very clearly falls within the fair use exception to copyright law. They claim that the activity is an infringement. A.P. vice...

Memory Loss - Aging - Alzheimer's Disease - Aging Brains Take In More Information, Studies Show - Health - NYTimes.com “For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.” Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact. “A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more a...

Religion a figment of human imagination - being-human - 28 April 2008 - New Scientist Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination. That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists. Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died. Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the i...

Study identifies new regulator of fat metabolism Study identifies new regulator of fat metabolism Over the past several years, animal studies have shown that high-fat, low-carbohydrate “ketogenic” diets cause demonstrable changes in metabolism and subsequent weight loss. Now, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have identified a key mechanism behind this turn of events. Their findings, which appear in the June 2007 issue of Cell Metabolism, demonstrate that a liver hormone known as FGF21 is required to oxidize fatty acids – and thereby burn calories. [...] "When the diet is extremely low in starches and sugars, blood sugar levels drop substantially so that muscle and brain have to turn to alternative fuels,” explains senior author Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, MD, an investigator in the Department of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Consequently, fatty acids are broken down in the l...

Diabetes Drug May Hold Potential As Treatment For Epilepsy, Using Same Mechanism As Ketogenic Diet Two years ago, University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists reported they had suppressed epileptic seizures in rats by giving them a glycolytic-inhibitor, inhibiting the brain's ability to turn sugar into excess energy and blocking the expression of seizure-related genes. The discovery was greeted with excitement and hope for a new class of drugs for epilepsy, which afflicts more than 50 million people worldwide. Now, in a presentation at Experimental Biology 2008 in San Diego,* Dr. Avtar Roopra describes a next step in this research that may mean a drug already widely used by people with diabetes could also be an effective and safe therapy for epilepsy, especially for that one third of patients who have recurrent seizures despite therapy with the best available antiepileptic drugs. Although the earlier work by Dr. Roopra and his colleagues marked the first time a compound had been used...

The Bypass Effect On Diabetes, Cancer, Surgery Can Send Diabetes Into Remission, And May Reduce Risk Of Certain Cancers - CBS News Dr. Neil Hutcher from Richmond, Va. has performed more than 3,000 bypass surgeries. Asked how many people gain the weight back, Dr. Hutcher tells Stahl, "You know I think when you’re dealing with an incurable disease that kills many people, if you have an 85 to 90 percent success rate, that’s pretty darn good." [...] It used to be that roughly one in 100 people died from this operation. Hutcher says it's now about one in 1,000, which makes it less deadly than most major surgeries. "It's less than gall bladder surgery. It's about one-tenth of cardiac surgery," he explains. [...] A big reason the operation works is because it seems to suppress appetite. "If you listen to your patients, they come back and they say, 'Doctor, you put the fire out,'" Hutcher says. "When you see a sign for fast food or…she...

New home sales plunge to lowest level in 16 1/2 years: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance Sales of new homes plunged in March to the lowest level in 16 1/2 years as housing slumped further at the start of the spring sales season. The median price of a new home in March compared to a year ago fell by the largest amount in nearly four decades. The Commerce Department reported Thursday that sales of new homes dropped by 8.5 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000 units, the slowest sales pace since October 1991. The median price of a home sold in March dropped by 13.3 percent compared to March 2007, the biggest year-over-year price decline since a 14.6 percent plunge in July 1970. The dismal news on new home sales followed earlier reports showing that sales of existing homes fell by 2 percent in March. Housing, which boomed for five years, has been in a prolonged slump for the past two years with sales and home prices falling at especially sharp rates in formerly b...

96% of women are liars, honest - The Scotsman, Scotland's National Newspaper - 09DEC04 96% of women are liars, honest The Scotsman ( Scotland's National Newspaper), EDWARD BLACK, December 9th, 2004 NINETEEN out of 20 women admit lying to their partners or husbands, a survey on attitudes to truth and relationships has found. Eighty-three per cent owned up to telling "big, life-changing lies", with 13 per cent saying they did so frequently. Half said that if they became pregnant by another man but wanted to stay with their partner, they would lie about the baby’s real father. Forty-two per cent would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, no matter the wishes of their partner. And an alarming 31 per cent said they would not tell a future partner if they had a sexual disease: this rises to 65 per cent among single women. In the poll of 5,000 women for That’s Life! magazine, 45 per cent said they told "little white lies" most days. The favourite untr...

Research May Provide New Link Between Soft Drinks And Weight Gain Total caloric intake was lower in the mice that consumed the fructose-sweetened water than in the other groups, except for the control animals provided with water only. “We were surprised to see that mice actually ate less when exposed to fructose-sweetened beverages, and therefore didn’t consume more overall calories,” said Dr. Tschöp. “Nevertheless, they gained significantly more body fat within a few weeks.” Results from an earlier study in humans led by Peter Havel, DVM, PhD, an endocrinology researcher at the University of California, Davis, and coauthored by Dr. Tschöp, found that several hormones involved in the regulation of body weight, including leptin, insulin and ghrelin, do not respond to fructose as they do to other types of carbohydrates, such as glucose. Based on that study and their new data, the researchers now also believe that another factor contributing to the increased fat storage is that the liver ...

Ananova - Man hired stripper for dad's funeral Man hired stripper for dad's funeral A Taiwanese man hired an erotic dancer to perform at his 103-year-old father's funeral. An erotic dancer at a funeral in Taiwan /Lu Feng The stripper danced in front of Cai Jinlai's coffin for more than ten minutes at the funeral in Taizhong town. Son, Cai Ruigong, paid her more than £80 to dance in memory of his late father, reports United Daily News. Cai Ruigong says he promised his father a stripper for his funeral if he lived beyond the age of 100. Cai Jinlai passed away at the age of 103 after a three mile walk into town to vote. He was the oldest person in his village and had more than 100 descendants. His son said his father was famous locally for his interest in strip clubs: "He would travel around the island with his friends to see these shows," he added.

Why doing nothing may sometimes be the best action of all - Lifehack.org Mr. Azar is interested in a topic much in vogue with contemporary economists: how investors make high-stakes decisions. In classical economics, people are assumed to make rational, independent choices based on self-interest. It’s an assumption that makes for neatness, but it appears to be wide of the mark. Rather than construct some artificial experiment, Azar decided to study professional soccer goalkeepers and how they deal with the toughest, highest-stakes decision they are forced to make on a regular basis: how to act to stop a penalty kick at goal. Faced with a player sending the ball towards them at 80 m.p.h. or more, the goalkeeper has only a fraction of a second to decide how to block the shot. It’s a fearful challenge: 4 out of 5 penalty kicks score a goal. By analyzing data on more than 300 kicks, the researchers calculated the action most likely to prevent a goal being scored. Surprisingly, it is standi...

Cuba Lifts Ban On Computer, DVD Sales -- Cuba -- InformationWeek HAVANA - Communist Cuba has authorized the sale of computers, DVD and video players, and other electrical appliances in the first sign President Raul Castro is moving to lift some restrictions on daily life. "Based on the improved availability of electricity the government at the highest level has approved the sale of some equipment which was prohibited," said an internal government memo seen by Reuters. It listed computers, video and DVD players, 19-inch and 24-inch television sets, electric pressure cookers and rice cookers, electric bicycles, car alarms and microwaves that can now be freely bought by Cubans.

Boys' And Girls' Brains Are Different: Gender Differences In Language Appear Biological For the first time -- and in unambiguous findings -- researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. "Our findings -- which suggest that language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in girls -- could have major implications for teaching children and even provide support for advocates of single sex classrooms," said Douglas D. Burman, research associate in Northwestern's Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers measured brain activity in 31 boys and in 31 girls aged 9 to 15 as they performed spelling and writing language tasks. The tas...