The public reaction to OJ Simpson’s recent sentencing of nine years in prison, seemed to be one of complacent relief. From the news media to the general public, many seemed to share a distinctively dismissive feeling that, finally, justice had been served. For many, the images of OJ back in the courtroom summoned up dusty [...]
Category Archives: Neuroscience
Dec
02
2008
Body Swapping
When I was a kid, my dad and I plummeted down Niagara Falls together in a beer barrel. Well, maybe not exactly. In reality, we handed a man five dollars, walked up the steps into a trailer on hydraulic stilts, and sat down in front of a movie screen. The next thing we knew we [...]
Nov
28
2008
Aging is one SIRTainty in life: for uni- and multicelular lifeforms!
In today’s issue of Cell magazine, an evolutionarily conserved protein, SIRT, takes the spotlight in the hit research drama, “Why we Weather with Age”. Researchers from Harvard Medical school demonstrate that the part SIRT plays in DNA damage control during aging may be to blame for some of the ugly symptoms of growing old.
Mammalian protein [...]
Nov
19
2008
Medicinal Aging?
Compounds similar to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, have been shown to reduce memory impairments in the aging brain. While marijuana is widely known to impair memory in the short-term, leading scientists from Ohio State University are contradicting this age-old dogma by investigating how endocannabinoids, the brain’s naturally occurring cannabis, can improve memory function [...]
