Common substance may fight food poisoning hazard

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NEW YORK (AP) — A substance found in nuts and whole grains may someday help doctors fight the kind of food poisoning that sickened thousands of people in Europe last summer, a study in mice suggests.

While a variety of germs can cause food poisoning, the European outbreak involved a dangerous strain of the bacterium E. coli. It infects people and pumps out a poison called Shiga toxin. Some other bacteria also produce this toxin, which overall causes more than 1 million deaths a year worldwide. The European food poisoning outbreak included about 4,000 people and 50 deaths.

There's no definitive treatment for Shiga toxin. But in Friday's issue of the journal Science, scientists report that they could protect mice against a lethal dose by injecting them with the mineral manganese.

The animals were injected daily, starting five days before they were exposed to the toxin. While untreated mice died within four days, the injected mice remained healthy. The manganese made the toxin vulnerable to being destroyed by cells.

Scientists still need to do more research before they can assess the usefulness of manganese in treating people. Manganese is already approved for medical use and it's inexpensive, they note. So that might make it especially useful in developing countries, where nearly all cases of Shiga toxin poisoning occur, wrote the researchers, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

___

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Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

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Strollers recalled in U.S., Canada over choke hazard

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WASHINGTON | Wed Oct 12, 2011 12:12pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly half a million baby strollers in the United States and Canada are being recalled because of a chocking hazard, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada said.

An embroidered logo on the canopy of the B.O.B. Trailers Inc jogging strollers can detach, posing a choking hazard to babies and young children, the agencies said in a joint statement.

B.O.B., of Boise, Idaho, has received six reports of children mouthing the detached patch on the single and double strollers.

Gagging and choking were reported in two incidents and the backing was removed without injury, the statement said.

About 411,700 strollers in the United States and 27,000 in Canada are being recalled. In February, 357,000 units were recalled due to strangulation hazard posed by the canopy drawstring.

The agencies said the voluntary recall was being carried out in cooperation with B.O.B. The recall involves all B.O.B. strollers manufactured between November 1998 and November 2010.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Jerry Norton)

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The Half-Baked Teen Brain: A Hazard or a Virtue?

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Teenagers have a bad reputation. They're moody, they thrive on drama. They take risks that terrify their parents and seem blithely unaware of the potential consequences of their actions. The reason for this, as scientists have discovered through modern brain-scanning technology, is that the teen brain isn't fully cooked — it's still in the process of rewiring and remodeling itself and maturing toward adulthood.

But here's an intriguing question: Why would the human brain pass through such a seemingly senseless and dangerous — and protracted — phase on its way to maturity? Is there some utility to the vulnerable adolescent brain, or should it be seen only as a hazard?

These are the questions raised by science writer David Dobbs in a fascinating feature in National Geographic. Although most scientific research has focused on adolescents' deficits and self-destructive impulses, Dobbs highlights work that looks at the upside of the teen brain and the evolutionary needs that drive adolescence.

MORE: Fact-Check: A Survey Links Facebook to Drug Use in Teens

The teenage brain isn't just a "work in progress," Dobbs argues. Rather, it's adapted to meet specific challenges. He writes:

Over the past five years or so, even as the work-in-progress story spread into our culture, the discipline of adolescent brain studies learned to do some more-complex thinking of its own. A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain — call it the adaptive-adolescent story — casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.

This view will likely sit better with teens. More important, it sits better with biology's most fundamental principle, that of natural selection. Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them — angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling — then how did those traits survive selection? They couldn't — not if they were the period's most fundamental or consequential features.

Dobbs explores the research on changes in the brain's dopamine system, for example, which is what drives teens to novelty and thrill-seeking, and part of what makes socializing with their peers so overwhelmingly attractive. It's maddening to the parent, who focuses on the risks while his teen seeks rewards, but evolutionarily speaking, this is exactly what sexually maturing humans should be doing if they are to successfully find mates and create a social network to support child-raising.

MORE: Students Sue 'Troubled Teen' School for Systematic Sexual, Emotional Abuse

Of course, the problem is that, these days, becoming a teen parent is not the typical road to success. Like many hard-wired human imperatives — the genes that spur our bodies to seek and store fat, for example — it is more adapted to our past than to our present. But when humans first evolved, early reproduction was probably advantageous. And in small, tribal groups, the ability to fit in with one's peers was actually a life-or-death matter — much the way modern teens still tend to view it.

Dobbs' story covers a lot of other fascinating research; check it out here. And let's hope this new perspective engenders a little more compassion for teens: they face big challenges, and being treated dismissively (or worse) by adults doesn't make it easier.

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

View the original article here

Peliculas Online

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The Half-Baked Teen Brain: A Hazard or a Virtue?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Teenagers have a bad reputation. They're moody, they thrive on drama. They take risks that terrify their parents and seem blithely unaware of the potential consequences of their actions. The reason for this, as scientists have discovered through modern brain-scanning technology, is that the teen brain isn't fully cooked — it's still in the process of rewiring and remodeling itself and maturing toward adulthood.

But here's an intriguing question: Why would the human brain pass through such a seemingly senseless and dangerous — and protracted — phase on its way to maturity? Is there some utility to the vulnerable adolescent brain, or should it be seen only as a hazard?

These are the questions raised by science writer David Dobbs in a fascinating feature in National Geographic. Although most scientific research has focused on adolescents' deficits and self-destructive impulses, Dobbs highlights work that looks at the upside of the teen brain and the evolutionary needs that drive adolescence.

MORE: Fact-Check: A Survey Links Facebook to Drug Use in Teens

The teenage brain isn't just a "work in progress," Dobbs argues. Rather, it's adapted to meet specific challenges. He writes:

Over the past five years or so, even as the work-in-progress story spread into our culture, the discipline of adolescent brain studies learned to do some more-complex thinking of its own. A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain — call it the adaptive-adolescent story — casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.

This view will likely sit better with teens. More important, it sits better with biology's most fundamental principle, that of natural selection. Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them — angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling — then how did those traits survive selection? They couldn't — not if they were the period's most fundamental or consequential features.

Dobbs explores the research on changes in the brain's dopamine system, for example, which is what drives teens to novelty and thrill-seeking, and part of what makes socializing with their peers so overwhelmingly attractive. It's maddening to the parent, who focuses on the risks while his teen seeks rewards, but evolutionarily speaking, this is exactly what sexually maturing humans should be doing if they are to successfully find mates and create a social network to support child-raising.

MORE: Students Sue 'Troubled Teen' School for Systematic Sexual, Emotional Abuse

Of course, the problem is that, these days, becoming a teen parent is not the typical road to success. Like many hard-wired human imperatives — the genes that spur our bodies to seek and store fat, for example — it is more adapted to our past than to our present. But when humans first evolved, early reproduction was probably advantageous. And in small, tribal groups, the ability to fit in with one's peers was actually a life-or-death matter — much the way modern teens still tend to view it.

Dobbs' story covers a lot of other fascinating research; check it out here. And let's hope this new perspective engenders a little more compassion for teens: they face big challenges, and being treated dismissively (or worse) by adults doesn't make it easier.

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

View the original article here

Peliculas Online

Read More