Category Health/Medical

“Alcohol abuse costs almost $220 billion to the U.S. economy every year. That’s a shocking number. We need a better treatment right now.” Tiruveedhula is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. The exact causes of alcoholism are not well understood, but the researchers explain that the urge to drink is related to the brain’s pleasure centers. Scientists have found that alcohol triggers the brain to release dopamine, the same neurochemical whose levels increase in response to pleasurable behavior like eating, sex or listening to music.

Some drugs currently available to treat alcoholism are aimed at dopamine. “They dampen out the dopamine system a little bit, so you don’t get so happy when you have an alcoholic beverage,” says James Cook, Ph.D...

Gout is a painful and debilitating form of arthritis that affects approximately 3X more men than women. 4 to 5% of European men in NZ suffer from gout. Amongst Māori and Pacific Island men this figure rises to 10-15% due to a greater genetic risk in these people.

The researchers surveyed 2051 New Zealanders with clinically verified gout. Of these people 71% reported having one or more food triggers. Tomatoes were listed as a trigger in 20% of these cases. Genetics PhD student Tanya Flynn, says that tomatoes were found to be the 4th most commonly mentioned trigger, after seafood, alcohol and red meat.

“We thought it important to find a biological reason for this to add weight to what gout patients are already saying,” Miss Flynn says...

A high-fat diet may impair important receptors located in the stomach that signal fullness, researchers have discovered. They investigated the association between hot chilli pepper receptors (TRPV1) in the stomach and the feeling of fullness, in lab studies, suggesting that their work will inform further studies and the development of new therapies.

“The stomach stretches when it is full, which activates nerves in the stomach to tell the body that it has had enough food. We found that this activation is regulated through hot chilli pepper or TRPV1 receptors,” says Associate Professor Amanda Page. “It is known from previous studies that capsaicin, found in hot chillies, reduces food intake in humans...

i-Motif DNA structures have previously been utilised for many different nanotechnological applications, but all have used changes in pH to fold the DNA. Herein we describe how copper(II) cations can alter the conformation of i-motif DNA into an alternative hairpin structure which is reversible by chelation with EDTA

Scientists can now ‘switch’ the structure of DNA using copper salts and EDTA. Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid is an agent commonly found in shampoo and other household products. The applications for this discovery include nanotechnology – where DNA is used to make tiny machines, and in DNA-based computing – where computers are built from DNA rather than silicon...