science/tech news
Sep. 11th, 2003 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
watertankFlickering images reduce nicotine craving
Looking at simple flickering images, or conjuring up mental pictures, can help stop cigarette cravings, researchers have discovered.
The team, at the University of Sheffield, UK, hope the trick could assist people in stopping smoking. If so, they plan to develop a palm-top computer application for would-be quitters to look at whenever they are struck by a craving.
"Cravings start when we create a little picture in our mind of what we want," says addiction specialist Jon May, who led the team. "The images are what makes the cravings tantalising. You can see in your head what you want, but you can't have it. We tried to interfere with that process."
At this point, researchers have only measured how the approach affects cravings, not if people actually reduce their smoking. But if it does, a program to display the flashing pattern on palm-top computers would give people a portable way of using the technique while trying to stop smoking.
Case reopens on Black Death cause
Fresh controversy has broken out over the cause of the Black Death that killed up to half the people in Europe in 1348 and circulated for centuries after that.
For a century the blame has rested with the bubonic plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is carried by rats and fleas. But the most ambitious effort yet to find traces of Yersinia in the remains of Black Death victims has failed, and the researchers involved argue that a previous study that did report finding Yersinia was flawed.
In 2000, Didier Raoult and colleagues at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France, claimed to have settled the matter by using PCR to amplify fragments of DNA extracted from the teeth of three 14th-century skeletons from nearby Montpellier. These sequences included some unique to Yersinia, they reported.
Scott and others argued that it was not even clear if the skeletons were from people who died from the Black Death. But in June 2003, Raoult dismissed such criticism as "unsubstantiated speculation".
Now Cooper and his colleagues have analysed 121 teeth from 66 skeletons found in five mass graves, including one in East Smithfield in London, UK, dug for Black Death victims in 1349. They also looked at suspected plague pits at Spitalfields in London, Vodroffsgaard in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Angers and Verdun in France.
'Living condom' could block HIV
Genetically-modified vaginal bacteria may be able to serve as a "living condom", secreting proteins that protect women against HIV, suggests a new report.
The bacteria have already been used to cripple the virus in test tube experiments. Now the researchers are verifying whether the unmodified parental strain - a natural component of the vaginal microbial flora - can successfully colonise the vaginal tissues of rhesus macaque monkeys. And the researchers have launched a company to study the potential of the approach.
"We are working on production, delivery and efficacy simultaneously to try and bring this to the clinic as soon as possible," says research leader Peter Lee of Stanford University in California.
Meat eating is an old human habit
Humans evolved beyond their vegetarian roots and became meat-eaters at the dawn of the genus Homo, around 2.5 million years ago, according to a study of our ancestors' teeth.
In 1999, researchers found cut marks on animal bones dated at around 2.5 million years old. But no one could be sure that they were made by meat-eating hominids, because none appeared to have suitable teeth.
Now an analysis by Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas has revealed that the first members of Homo had much sharper teeth than their most likely immediate ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, the species that produced the famous fossil Lucy.
Generalist genes 'cause all learning disabilities'
Learning disabilities result from general problems in the brain rather than specific genetic or neurological defects, the British Association Festival of Science in Salford was told on Tuesday.
A large but unidentified group of genes, each with very small effects on overall brain function, work together to determine most of mental ability, says Robert Plomin, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.
Plomin studied 15,000 sets of twins as they grew up. At seven years old, researchers compared rates of learning disabilities in pairs of identical and fraternal twins.
They found that identical twins were more likely to be afflicted with the same disorder than were fraternal twins, confirming a genetic root for learning disabilities. But researchers also checked if a child with a problem in maths was likely to have a twin with a reading disability, and vice versa. They found the link was more common in identical than fraternal twins
Looking at simple flickering images, or conjuring up mental pictures, can help stop cigarette cravings, researchers have discovered.
The team, at the University of Sheffield, UK, hope the trick could assist people in stopping smoking. If so, they plan to develop a palm-top computer application for would-be quitters to look at whenever they are struck by a craving.
"Cravings start when we create a little picture in our mind of what we want," says addiction specialist Jon May, who led the team. "The images are what makes the cravings tantalising. You can see in your head what you want, but you can't have it. We tried to interfere with that process."
At this point, researchers have only measured how the approach affects cravings, not if people actually reduce their smoking. But if it does, a program to display the flashing pattern on palm-top computers would give people a portable way of using the technique while trying to stop smoking.
Case reopens on Black Death cause
Fresh controversy has broken out over the cause of the Black Death that killed up to half the people in Europe in 1348 and circulated for centuries after that.
For a century the blame has rested with the bubonic plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is carried by rats and fleas. But the most ambitious effort yet to find traces of Yersinia in the remains of Black Death victims has failed, and the researchers involved argue that a previous study that did report finding Yersinia was flawed.
In 2000, Didier Raoult and colleagues at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France, claimed to have settled the matter by using PCR to amplify fragments of DNA extracted from the teeth of three 14th-century skeletons from nearby Montpellier. These sequences included some unique to Yersinia, they reported.
Scott and others argued that it was not even clear if the skeletons were from people who died from the Black Death. But in June 2003, Raoult dismissed such criticism as "unsubstantiated speculation".
Now Cooper and his colleagues have analysed 121 teeth from 66 skeletons found in five mass graves, including one in East Smithfield in London, UK, dug for Black Death victims in 1349. They also looked at suspected plague pits at Spitalfields in London, Vodroffsgaard in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Angers and Verdun in France.
'Living condom' could block HIV
Genetically-modified vaginal bacteria may be able to serve as a "living condom", secreting proteins that protect women against HIV, suggests a new report.
The bacteria have already been used to cripple the virus in test tube experiments. Now the researchers are verifying whether the unmodified parental strain - a natural component of the vaginal microbial flora - can successfully colonise the vaginal tissues of rhesus macaque monkeys. And the researchers have launched a company to study the potential of the approach.
"We are working on production, delivery and efficacy simultaneously to try and bring this to the clinic as soon as possible," says research leader Peter Lee of Stanford University in California.
Meat eating is an old human habit
Humans evolved beyond their vegetarian roots and became meat-eaters at the dawn of the genus Homo, around 2.5 million years ago, according to a study of our ancestors' teeth.
In 1999, researchers found cut marks on animal bones dated at around 2.5 million years old. But no one could be sure that they were made by meat-eating hominids, because none appeared to have suitable teeth.
Now an analysis by Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas has revealed that the first members of Homo had much sharper teeth than their most likely immediate ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, the species that produced the famous fossil Lucy.
Generalist genes 'cause all learning disabilities'
Learning disabilities result from general problems in the brain rather than specific genetic or neurological defects, the British Association Festival of Science in Salford was told on Tuesday.
A large but unidentified group of genes, each with very small effects on overall brain function, work together to determine most of mental ability, says Robert Plomin, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.
Plomin studied 15,000 sets of twins as they grew up. At seven years old, researchers compared rates of learning disabilities in pairs of identical and fraternal twins.
They found that identical twins were more likely to be afflicted with the same disorder than were fraternal twins, confirming a genetic root for learning disabilities. But researchers also checked if a child with a problem in maths was likely to have a twin with a reading disability, and vice versa. They found the link was more common in identical than fraternal twins
