Science and Health News

Did you know that your gut sends neural messages to the brain to tell it when it is full?

Researchers from the University of Birmingham have found that exposure to social-based messages promoting healthy eating can increase consumption of fruit and vegetables and reduce consumption of high-calorie snacks.

A study by York University researcher Caroline Davis and her colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is the first to demonstrate that variants of the Oxytocin Receptor (OXTR) gene contribute to why some of us overeat or engage in episodes of binge eating.

Obesity may ultimately be a disease of the brain, involving a progressive deterioration of various cognitive processes that influence eating.

For more than five years, urine and cerebral-spinal fluid samples from patients with Parkinson’s disease have been locked in freezers in the NINDS National Repository, stored with the expectation they might someday help unravel the still-hidden course of this slow-acting neurodegenerative disease.

In a startling discovery that raises fundamental questions about human behavior, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the immune system directly affects — and even controls — creatures’ social behavior, such as their desire to interact with others.

Females have two X chromosomes in each of their cells. Fully unfolded, each copy is two inches long. One of these two X chromosomes is inactive — its genes are turned off.

Virtual reality isn’t just for fun and games. Researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine are harnessing the technology to create interactive, 3D models to learn more about a patient’s cancer and determine its cause.