People should eat more fruits and vegetables to prevent stroke and other health problems.

Having higher levels of vitamin C in your blood may reduce your risk of stroke, new research suggests. People with the highest concentrations of vitamin C in their blood had a 42 percent lower risk of stroke than people with the lowest levels, according to the study, which is in the January issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, HealthDay reported.
But, that doesn’t mean that popping mega-doses of vitamin C supplement can ward off a brain attack, health experts cautioned.
“In the study itself, the authors made a strong point that they couldn’t conclude that vitamin C directly lowers stroke risk,“ said Dr. Keith Siller, medical director of New York University Medical Center’s Comprehensive Stroke Care Center.
“It’s not necessarily the vitamin C itself. Vitamin C may be a marker of a general healthy lifestyle, and high levels of plasma vitamin C probably mean that you’re more health conscious.“
Dr. Mark Levine, chief of the molecular and clinical nutrition section at the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, agreed that vitamin C alone probably isn’t responsible for the stroke risk reduction.
“It’s just an association. It could be vitamin C, it could be vitamin C plus other nutrients, and it could be other things independent of vitamin C. People who eat lots of fruits and vegetables may be eating less fast food,“ said Levine, who also co-authored an editorial in the same issue of the journal.
The real message, said Levine, is that people should be eating more fruits and vegetables to prevent stroke and other health problems. “Get five or more fruits and vegetables daily in a rainbow of colors,“ he advised.
The new study included information from more than 20,000 people between the ages of 40 and 79 from the United Kingdom. All of the participants completed a health questionnaire, and one blood sample was analyzed for vitamin C levels for each study volunteer.
The average follow-up time was 9.5 years, and the final study included almost 200,000 person-years. During that time, 448 of the study participants had a stroke.
After compensating for other risk factors, such as gender, smoking history, body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diabetes, physical activity and a history of heart disease, the researchers found that those with the highest levels of vitamin C in their blood had a 42 percent reduced risk of stroke compared to those with the lowest levels.
The difference between the vitamin C levels between the lowest and highest group roughly translates to about one extra fruit or vegetable daily, according to the study.
“The strong inverse association between plasma vitamin C and stroke suggests that plasma vitamin C is likely to be a good biomarker of whatever causal factors affect stroke risk, most plausibly the dietary intake of plant foods,“ the study’s authors wrote.

For patients on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, severe and morbid obesity are associated with a lower chance of receiving an organ, reports a study in the February Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Led by Dr. Dorry L. Segev of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the researchers used data from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to examine how obesity affects waiting times for kidney transplantation, Physorg.com said.
“The results identify a potential bias in organ allocation that is not consistent with the goals of our allocation system,“ Dr. Segev comments. “Obese patients are waiting longer for kidney transplants when compared with their non-obese counterparts, even after adjusting for all medical factors tracked through UNOS.“
Dr. Segev and colleagues analyzed data on more than 132,000 patients wait-listed for kidney transplants from 1995 to 2004. As obesity increased, the likelihood of receiving a transplant decreased.
Adjusted for other factors, the chances of receiving a kidney transplant were 27 percent lower for patients classified as severely obese and 44 percent lower for morbidly obese patients, compared to normal-weight patients. (The chances of receiving a transplant were not significantly reduced for patients classified as overweight or mildly obese.)
In addition, when a kidney became available, patients in the highest categories of obesity were more likely to be bypassed--that is, their physician was more likely to decline the offer of a kidney.
The chances of being bypassed were 11 percent higher for severely obese patients and 22 percent higher for morbidly obese patients.
The findings raise concerns that obesity may be a previously unappreciated source of bias in organ allocation. “It is possible that providers are bypassing obese patients and instead transplanting non-obese patients because they feel that kidneys are a scarce resource and they want the kidneys to go to the patients who will benefit most from them,“ says Dr. Segev.
“However, there is strong evidence that even obese patients will benefit significantly from a kidney transplant. And more importantly, the US organ allocation system is not based on such medical decisions, but instead is based on the notion that everyone who gets listed deserves a fair chance at getting transplanted.“

When hypnosis is used to make people forget, it produces measurable changes in the brain that suggest the effects are real and not simply people “letting themselves go“.
About two thirds of the population can be hypnotized and common uses include the treatment of pain, anxiety and phobias, Telegraph.co.uk said.
However, sceptics have argued that hypnosis does not result in an altered state of consciousness--a ’trance’--but is an exaggerated form of social compliance, where subjects suspend their critical faculties to do whatever a hypnotist asks of them.
Now brain scans of people that are taken following a hypnotic suggestion to forget have revealed parts of the brain really are affected.
The researchers team that did the study say their insights into memory suppression and recall may help understand the mechanisms underlying some forms of amnesia, along with how people suppress distressing memories or things they would rather not dwell upon.
Prof Yadin Dudai and colleagues at The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, describe in the journal Neuron a study on two groups of volunteers--those who were susceptible to hypnotic suggestions and those who were not--after they had shown a documentary depicting a day in the life of a young woman.
A week later, they placed them in a brain scanner and induced them into a hypnotic state. In this state, the scientists gave the subjects a posthypnotic suggestion to forget the movie, also giving them a reversibility cue that would restore the memory.
Once the subjects had been brought out of the hypnotic state, the researchers tested their recall, then gave them the reversibility cue and tested their recall again. As expected, the hypnosis-susceptible group showed reduced recall of the movie, compared with the hypnosis-non-susceptible group.
Analysis of the brain scans revealed distinctive differences between the hypnosis-susceptible group and-non-susceptible group in specific brain areas--occipital, temporal, and prefrontal areas.
“The surprise for us was that activity was raised during memory suppression in one specific region in the frontal cortex.“ In effect, it probably tells the other brain regions “don’t even think about retrieving that memory“, he says.
“The one thing we can say for sure is that hypnotism worked under the conditions we used,“ says Prof Dudai, adding that the findings are different from those seen in people who attempt to deceive. “We are therefore highly confident that this is not an artifact,“ he noted.

A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits--in less than 40 million years--it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.
“The leading edge of this cloud is already interacting with gas from our Galaxy,“ said Felix J. Lockman, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), leader of a team of astronomers who used the National Science Foundation’s Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to study the object. The scientists presented their findings to the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Austin, Texas, according to Physorg.com.
The cloud, called Smith’s Cloud, after the astronomer who discovered it in 1963, contains enough hydrogen to make a million stars like the Sun. Eleven thousand light-years long and 2,500 light-years wide, it is only 8,000 light-years from our Galaxy’s disk.
It is careening toward our Galaxy at more than 150 miles per second, aimed to strike the Milky Way’s disk at an angle of about 45 degrees.
“This is most likely a gas cloud left over from the formation of the Milky Way or gas stripped from a neighbor galaxy. When it hits, it could set off a tremendous burst of star formation. Many of those stars will be very massive, rushing through their lives quickly and exploding as supernovae. Over a few million years, it’ll look like a celestial New Year’s celebration, with huge firecrackers going off in that region of the Galaxy,“ Lockman said.
When Smith’s Cloud was first discovered, and for decades after, the available images did not have enough detail to show whether the cloud was part of the Milky Way, something being blown out of the Milky Way, or something falling in.
Lockman and his colleagues used the GBT to make an extremely detailed study of hydrogen in Smith’s Cloud. Their observations included nearly 40,000 individual pointings of the giant telescope to cover the cloud with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. Smith’s Cloud is about 15 degrees long in the sky, 30 times the width of the full moon.
“If you could see this cloud with your eyes, it would be a very impressive sight in the night sky,“ Lockman said. “From tip to tail it would cover almost as much sky as the Orion constellation. But as far as we know it is made entirely of gas--no one has found a single star in it,“ he stated.

Mobile phones, notebook computers, iPods--the boom in portable computing and communications devices is dependent on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to deliver power.
These batteries offer the highest energy density, allow laptops to function for useful amounts of time, and do not display a memory effect when compared to other types of rechargeable batteries. However, modern rechargeable batteries are still not truly satisfactory, ScienceDaily wrote.
Modern, efficient, rechargeable batteries and fuel cells require materials with an enhanced ability to conduct lithium ions. German researchers have now developed a new class of inorganic ionic conductor with a structure analogous to that of the mineral argyrodite.
A team led by Hans-Jorg Deiseroth in Siegen, Germany reports, in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the characterization of the most conductive representative of the man-made argyrodite minerals made of lithium, phosphorus, sulfur, and bromine atoms.
In ionic conductors, charge is not transported in the form of electrons as it is in metals; instead, the charge is transported in the form of charged particles--typically, lithium ions.
This transport requires materials in which the lithium ions can move as freely as possible. The team from the University of Siegen, in cooperation with scientists at the University of MŸnster, started from a long-known mineral: argyrodite is a silver-, germanium-, and sulfur-containing mineral discovered near Freiberg, Germany in 1885 and the silver ions in this material are very mobile.
The individual components of argyrodite can be replaced by a number of other atoms without altering the typical structure of the mineral.
The term argyrodite now refers to an entire class of compounds that have a specific arrangement of atoms and type of structure.
The team led by Deiseroth produced a version of the mineral in which silver is replaced by lithium, germanium by phosphorus, and some of the sulfur atoms by halides (chloride, bromide, or iodide), resulting in argyrodite-like structures.
In the crystal lattice the phosphorus, sulfur, and halide atoms adopt a dense tetrahedral packing arrangment in which the gaps are filled somewhat regularly with lithium ions. The lithium ions can “jump“ from gap to gap.
The freely moving ions indicate that the solid has a high ionic conductivity and the reported bromine-containing structure has the highest ionic conductivity of lithium ions known for any argyrodite to date.
The scientists have thoroughly examined the lithium argyrodites by single-crystal X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
This analysis allowed precise characterization of the crystal structures of these compounds and provided fascinating insights into the dynamics of the mobile lithium ions.

Appetitive stimulus affects behavior in a specific domain.

Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a mouthwatering dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.
For example, the researchers reveal in one experiment that the aroma of chocolate chip cookies can prompt women on a tight budget to splurge on a new item of clothing, according to ScienceDaily.
“We found that an appetitive stimulus not only affects behavior in a specific behavior domain, but also induces a shared state that propels a consumer to choose smaller--sooner options in unrelated domains,“ explains researcher Xiuping Li (National University of Singapore).
In the first experiment, Li asked participants to act as “photo editors of a magazine“ and choose among either appetite stimulating pictures of food or non-appetite stimulating pictures of nature. A control group was shown no pictures at all.
All were then asked to participate in a lottery that would either pay them less money sooner or more money later.
Those who had been exposed to the photos of food were almost twenty percentage points more likely to choose the lottery with the chance of a smaller, more immediate payoff than those who were exposed to the photos of nature (61 percent vs. 41.5 percent) and eleven percentage points more likely to choose the short-term gain than those who had not been exposed to any stimulus (61 percent vs. 50 percent).
Similarly, another experiment used a cookie-scented candle to further gauge whether appetitive stimulus affects consumer behavior.
Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an unplanned purchase of a new sweater--even when told they were on a tight budget--than those randomly assigned to a room with a hidden unscented candle (67 percent vs. 17 percent).
“The scent of the appetitive stimulus led to reduced happiness with remote gains, which implied that participants in a present-oriented state were less sensitive to future values,“ Li explains.
“In addition, [this] experiment showed that participants were more likely to satisfy their current and spontaneous desire if they were exposed to the unrelated appetitive stimulus before they made the decision.“