Stroke Drug - Stem Nobel - Straying Autism - Free Will

[Marc Breedlove]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19812066

Drug 'may prevent stroke damage'

It may be possible to use a drug to prevent some
of the lasting and crippling damage caused by a
stroke, according to doctors in the US and Canada.

A safety trial, published in the Lancet Neurology
medical journal, suggested the chemical NA-1 was safe to use.

The study on 185 people also hinted that patients
given the drug developed fewer regions of damaged brain tissue.

The Stroke Association said that it was promising, but needed more research.

Tests in primates had suggested NA-1 prevented
brain cells dying when a stroke starved them of oxygen.

A small trial was set up at 14 hospitals in the US and Canada.

Patients who took part were having an operation
to repair a brain aneurysm, a weakened blood
vessel which could rupture, are at increased risk of a stroke.

Ninety-two people had the drug injected into a
vein, while another 93 were injected with salty water.

The doctors concluded that NA-1 was safe, with
only two patients having mild side effects.

However, brain scans also showed that fewer brain
lesions, damaged areas of tissue, formed in patients given the drug.

BBC © 2012
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/us/california-fight-to-ensure-marijuana-goes-only-to-sick.html?ref=health

Marijuana Only for the Sick? A Farce, Some Angelenos Say

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

LOS ANGELES ­ One year after federal law
enforcement officials began cracking down on
California’s medical marijuana industry with a
series of high-profile arrests around the state,
they finally moved into Los Angeles last month,
giving 71 dispensaries until Tuesday to shut
down. At the same time, because of a
well-organized push by a new coalition of medical
marijuana supporters, the City Council last week
repealed a ban on the dispensaries that it had
passed only a couple of months earlier.

Despite years of trying fruitlessly to regulate
medical marijuana, California again finds itself
in a marijuana-laced chaos over a booming and divisive industry.

Nobody even knows how many medical marijuana
dispensaries are in Los Angeles. Estimates range
from 500 to more than 1,000. The only certainty,
supporters and opponents agree, is that they far outnumber Starbucks.

“That’s the ongoing, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ circus
of L.A.,” said Michael Larsen, president of the
Neighborhood Council in Eagle Rock, a
middle-class community that has 15 dispensaries
within a one-and-a-half-mile radius of the main
commercial area, many of them near houses.
“People here are desperate, and there’s nothing they can do.”

Though the neighborhood’s dispensaries were among
those ordered to close by Tuesday, many are still
operating. As he looked at a young man who
bounded out of the Together for Change dispensary
on Thursday morning, Mr. Larsen said, “I’m going
to go out on a limb, but that’s not a cancer patient.”

In the biggest push against medical marijuana
since California legalized it in 1996, the
federal authorities have shut at least 600
dispensaries statewide since last October.
California’s four United States attorneys said
the dispensaries violated not only federal law,
which considers all possession and distribution
of marijuana to be illegal, but state law, which
requires operators to be nonprofit primary
caregivers to their patients and to distribute
marijuana strictly for medical purposes.

© 2012 The New York Times Company
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19869673

Stem cell experts win Nobel prize

Two pioneers of stem cell research have shared
the Nobel prize for medicine or physiology.

John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from
Japan were awarded to prize for transforming specialised cells into stem cells.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/science/study-shows-autistic-children-are-likely-to-wander.html?ref=science

Study Shows Children With Autism Tend to Stray

By RONI CARYN RABIN

When Patrick Murphy was 6, he became obsessed
with vacuum cleaners. The boy, who has autism,
used to slip out of his house near Buffalo
without telling his parents, running to a nearby
appliance store or into strangers’ homes to marvel at vacuum cleaners.

Patrick is now 14, and his parents have double
bolts on the doors in their home and brackets on
their windows. Still, Patrick ­ who is now
focused on dogs ­ manages to sneak out. Two weeks
ago, he crept from the house after his mother
went to bed. When his father came home, he
alerted the police. They found Patrick running
barefoot in his pajamas at 2 a.m., three miles from his home.

“That was very scary,” said Patrick’s father,
Brian Murphy, who has now added an alarm system
to the house to keep his son safe. “He has broken
through brackets, windows, picked locks, you name
it. It’s absolutely the most stressful part of parenting a child with autism.”

The behavior, called wandering or elopement, has
led to numerous deaths in autistic children by
drowning and in traffic accidents. Now a new
study of more than 1,200 families with autistic
children suggests wandering is alarmingly common.
Nearly half of parents with an autistic child age
4 or older said their children had tried to leave
a safe place at least once, the study reported.
One in four said their children had disappeared
long enough to cause concern. Many parents said
their wandering children had narrowly escaped
traffic accidents or had been in danger of drowning.

© 2012 The New York Times Company
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/whos-in-charge-inside-your-head.html?ref=science

Who’s in Charge Inside Your Head?

By DAVID P. BARASH

ZOMBIE bees? That’s right: zombie bees. First
reported in California in 2008, these
stranger-than-fiction creatures have spread to
North Dakota and, just recently, to my home in Washington State.

Of course, they’re not really zombies, although
they act disquietingly like them, showing
abnormal behavior like flying at night (almost
unheard-of in healthy bees), moving erratically
and then dying. These “zombees” are victims of a
parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis. The fly lays
eggs within honeybees, inducing their hosts to
make a nocturnal “flight of the living dead,”
after which the larval flies emerge, having
consumed the bee from the inside out.

These events, although bizarre, aren’t all that
unusual in the animal world. Many fly and wasp
species lay their eggs inside hosts. What is
especially interesting, and a bit more unusual,
is the way an internal parasite not only feeds on
its host, but also frequently alters its
behavior, in a way that favors the continued
survival and reproduction of the parasite.

Not all internal parasites kill their hosts, of
course: pretty much every multicellular animal is
home to numerous fellow travelers, each of which
has its own agenda, which in some cases involves
influencing, or taking control of, part or all of
the body in which they temporarily reside.

And this, in turn, leads to the question: who’s
in charge of your own mind? Think of the morgue
scene in the movie “Men in Black,” when a human
corpse is revealed to be a robot, its skull
inhabited by a little green man from outer space.
Science fiction, but less bizarre than you might expect, or want to believe.

© 2012 The New York Times Company
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