In South America, both in urban settings and in the Amazon, I have encountered a fragrant wood used as incense and known as palo santo, which means “wood of the saints.” Appropriately named, the aroma of palo santo (Bursera graveolens) is heavenly. If you grew up attending Catholic church or any of the institutions in which incense is burned, palo santo may smell familiar to you.

Fragrant woods are not uncommon. In New Mexico, I have enjoyed many fires made of pinion pine, whose fragrance can be detected all through the streets of Santa Fe or Taos on a cold winter night. In northern India, I have smelled fires made of the incense wood deodar, whose aroma similarly wafts over the hills at night.

The tall tropical palo santo tree is related to both frankincense and myrrh, and it is widely distributed throughout much of Central and South America, as well as the Galapagos Islands. Because palo santo has become increasingly popular due to the booming Amazon tourism trade, it will eventually need to be cultivated. Otherwise, we will experience dwindling populations of these delightfully fragrant rainforest trees.

Use of palo santo reportedly dates back to the time of the Inca Empire. The heartwood of the tree is used, and you can find bundles of palo santo for sale in markets throughout South America. Burning the wood is done to clean bad energy from a place and to promote good fortune. It is typical and common for palo santo to be burned in a ceremonial setting such as a shamanic ceremony, and often people who attend ceremonies will smoke themselves and each other with this wood. Being smoked with palo santo feels fresh and invigorating.

The essential oil of palo santo is responsible for the unique fragrance of this wood, and contains resins that are rich in the sesquiterpene class of compounds, most notably limonene. It also contains the fragrant compounds non-amine and germacrene. In one published Cuban medical study, components in the essential oil inhibited the growth of a specific type of breast cancer, MCF-7. Palo santo essential oil is significantly anti-bacterial, which probably explains its traditional use as an incense wood for dispelling bad energy.

Like cedar, which is burned in the ceremonies of the Native American Church, palo santo may be chipped into fine pieces and set alight to generate fragrant smoke. Alternately, a small piece of the wood will be lit and allowed to burn – and then blown out and waved around to smoke a place. Some people perform steam distillation on the wood to yield an essential oil, which has an especially captivating aroma. The oil is worn as a fragrance, and is also added to topical liniments and balms to relieve joint pain.

Online you will see that sticks of palo santo are widely available. You can also obtain the essential oil of this tree. I burn a little bit of palo santo regularly at home and find that it leaves a room smelling clean and free of any musty odors. Once you have smelled palo santo, you will likely find it a welcome addition to the atmosphere of any space.

Source:

Scientists writing in yesterday’s issue of the journal Science detail the discovery of a brain circuit that appears to control a mouse’s eating behavior.

Specifically, the researchers say that, whenever this circuit is artificially stimulated, the rodents start gulping down impressive amounts of food, regardless of whether or not they feel hungry.

“Normally, there’s a population of neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that’s putting the brakes on eating.”

“But when you shut those cells down by stimulating this pathway, that releases the brake, and the animal starts to eat,” explains researcher Garret Stuber with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as cited by Live Science.

Furthermore, it appears that, by toying with this circuit, it is also possible to keep mice from eating even if they are pretty much starving and should therefore jump at the opportunity to chew on some food.

The brain circuit that the researchers have experimented with as part of this study sits in a part of the brain known to the scientific community as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis.

By the looks of it, it influences eating behavior by altering activity patterns in the lateral hypothalamus.

The researchers now wish to carry on further investigations and determine whether or not this circuit also influences eating patterns in humans.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Brain-Circuit-that-Controls-Overeating-Pinned-Down-in-Mice-386841.shtml

Researchers have said that becoming obese or remaining lean can depend on the dynamics of the mitochondria, the body’s energy-producing “battery.”

Mitochondria are vital cellular organelles that generate and maintain proper energy levels in complex organisms. Using animal models, the Yale research team studied mitochondria in different populations of brain cells known to be involved in the regulation of appetite.

The team found that during the transition from a fasting to an over-fed state, mitochondria in neurons that promote hunger show dynamic changes that are the opposite of those found in neurons that control feelings of fullness.

Lead author Tamas Horvath, the Jean and David W. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Research and chair of comparative medicine at Yale School of Medicine, said that they have found that mitochondrion need to have ongoing dynamic plasticity in order to support neurons, which are necessary for appetite and for the maintenance of life.

Horvath asserted that if these dynamic events – during which the mitochondria fuse to become more effective in generating energy – are disrupted, mitochondria become static, appetite-stimulating neurons become less active, and animals do not develop obesity when exposed to high-fat, high-calorie diets.

Yale co-lead author Marcelo O. Dietrich, M.D., said these same cellular events have different consequences in neurons that promote feelings of fullness. These consequences were described in a separate paper in the same issue of Cell, co-authored by Dietrich, Horvath, and a research team in Spain.

The study showed that similar molecular drivers control mitochondria-endoplasmic reticulum interactions and related stress. If the cellular events are disrupted in these mitochondria, animals become morbidly obese.

The study has been published in the journal Cell.

Source: ANI

 

A new treatment may make it possible for people to overcome phobias in their sleep, Medical Daily reported.

In a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers from Northwestern Medicine tested the effects of gradual exposure therapy during sleep. The therapy, which involves exposing people to things they fear in small doses, has been previously shown to be effective at reducing fear responses.  However, it had never before been tested during sleep.

For the study, 15 healthy people were conditioned to develop a fear response to an image of a face. Every time researchers showed participants the image, they also administered a small electrical shock and exposed participants to a specific scent. Researchers then assessed participants’ fear responses by studying their perspiration levels and utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

After these assessments, the researchers examined the participants as they slept, while re-exposing them to the same scent they had been conditioned to associate with fear. Researchers introduced the scent during slow wave sleep, the period of time during sleep when memory consolidation is thought to occur, according to Medical Daily.

“While this particular odorant was being presented during sleep, it was reactivating the memory of that face over and over again, which is similar to the process of fear extinction during exposure therapy,” study author Katherina Hauner, a postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told Medical Daily.

When the study participants woke up, they were exposed again to the image of the face that they had been conditioned to fear. However, their fear response was measurably lower compared to before they slept, according to researchers.

“If it can be extended to pre-existing fear, the bigger picture is that, perhaps, the treatment of phobias can be enhanced during sleep,” Hauner said.

Source: http://www.projectnola.com/the-news/news/42-fox-8/299040-new-treatment-helps-people-fight-phobias-during-sleep

In the woods outside Huntsville, Texas, scientists are trying to determine whether they can use the microbes that live on the human body as microscopic witnesses that could help catch criminals.

It’s a strange scene at the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility. At first, it’s easy to miss the human bodies scattered among the tall pines, wild grass and weeds.

“We hope microbes can tell crime scene investigators how long a person has been dead,” Sibyl Bucheli of Sam Houston State University explains, as she leads a group of researchers and visitors from NPR through a tall, chain-link fence surrounding the facility and down a dusty path to her research plot.

The facility is one of the few places where, in the interest of developing new tools for forensic science, researchers can leave human bodies out in the open to study what happens as the remains decompose.

Bucheli is an entomologist who has spent years studying the ways insects on a body can help pinpoint how long a murder victim has been dead. Knowing how long it takes a particular species of fly to complete its life cycle from egg to larva to pupa to winged insect, for example, can help an investigator figure out how long a corpse has been exposed to the insects, establishing a minimum time since death.

That got Bucheli thinking. “If insects change through time, then so do bacteria,” she says. “And if insects can be used, so can the bacteria.”

It’s possible, she says, that information from bacteria could improve the accuracy of these time-of-death estimates. The microbes might also be useful when insects aren’t present, she says, helping to determine how long a person has been dead, when insects aren’t available to do that.

Such research is just in the beginning stages, but already, a scientific team at the University of Colorado has been able to use bacteria alone to narrow down how long a mouse has been dead to within three days.

“We’re really pushing the envelope of microbial forensic science,” says microbial ecologist Jessica Metcalf, a member of that Colorado team. She and her boss, microbiome researcher Rob Knight, have come to the forensics facility in southeastern Texas to collaborate with Bucheli, hoping to do with human bodies what they did in the mice.

One of the first tasks the day we visit is placing three fresh bodies in the woods. A small tractor pulls up, carrying the first body inside a blue plastic body bag. Three men lift the body off the tractor and place it on the ground. They unzip the bag and carefully unwrap the white sheet that swaddles the cadaver.

“We want to do this as respectfully as possible,” Bucheli says.

It’s a difficult moment. Corpses that have been in the field a little longer look like mummies, barely recognizable as human. The new remains are from people who have only recently died and donated their bodies for scientific research. Bucheli is clearly moved. She pauses briefly for what she calls her “thank-you moment.”

“I’m deeply appreciative of the people who make my research possible … all of them,” she says.

The scientists mark each body’s position with a metal post and then begin several hours of intense work, meticulously gathering dozens of samples of bacteria.

They carefully scrape the skin in the same spots on each body and methodically scoop up dirt from precise locations near the remains. Their plan is to come back day after day, month after month, to sample these exact spots, to figure out if, over time, the communities of bacteria in these various spots change in predictable ways as time passes and the remains decompose.

“We’re looking for a microbial clock,” Metcalf says. A clock like that could be used as a reference tool in forensic investigations.

Microbes might one day help police in other ways, too, the scientists say. The population of bacteria on a person who died of natural causes, for example, might look different than the bacteria on someone who was beaten to death.

And because different varieties of microbes are found in different places, the bacterial census of a corpse might show whether a body has been killed in one place and then dumped in another. Microbes might also help police who are searching for unmarked graves.

“If you suspected that there’s a body buried in a certain field, can you just swab little bits of soil and say, ‘Oh this particular area has microbial organisms that we usually find associated with a decomposing corpse?’ ” Metcalf asks. That’s the sort of question she and Bucheli hope their work will help answer.

And that’s not all. Knight says he thinks microbes could one day provide for each of us a kind of microbial fingerprint that could help police solve all sorts of crimes while we’re alive, as well as after we’re dead.

Back on campus, Knight demonstrates how it works. He pops open a small plastic vial, grabs a cotton swab and pulls out his laptop to test the keyboard.

“You dip the Q-tip in the saline solution and you rub it thoroughly on the individual key,” he explains. The swab quickly turns a greasy brown.

“So what’s on there is a combination of finger grease, dust and bacteria … maybe as many as a billion,” Knight says. “Definitely enough to track it back to an individual.”

Knight has been able to use an analysis of these communities of bacteria to match people to objects they’ve touched. So microbes might be able to do things like link a suspect to a murder weapon or the scene of the crime, he says.

“There are a lot of cases where it’s clear that the suspect touched something but you don’t have a print you can use off it,” Knight says.

He even thinks that analyzing the different communities of microbes on peoples’ bodies might eventually prove to be a useful tool for tracking an individual’s movements — to see if the person had recently returned from Afghanistan or been in Boston, for example.

All of this, Bucheli hopes, will one day help answer the most important question for the families of victims: Who is responsible?

“I’m somebody’s mom,” Bucheli says. “I’m somebody’s sister. You always think about: Who? Who did this?”

Now, no one yet knows how much of this research will prove useful in forensics. Most practical applications are likely years away. But it’s already clear that some of these techniques will likely raise lots of questions — about privacy, civil liberties and how much we want our microbes to reveal about ourselves.

Source: http://wuot.org/post/could-detectives-use-microbes-solve-murders

In a new study of more than 700,000 people with diagnoses of the most deadly cancers in the United States, patients who were married were more likely to detect their disease early, receive potentially curable treatments and live longer. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The researchers observed a 20% reduction in deaths among the patients who were married compared to unmarried patients – a benefit bigger than several kinds of chemotherapy used for treating cancer.

“It is pretty astonishing,” Dr. Paul Nguyen, the study’s senior author, said. “There’s something about the social support that you get within a marriage that leads to better survival.”

While the study found a strong link, researchers did not show that marriage directly causes better survival among cancer patients. The study examined associations between marital status and cancer outcomes.

The protective benefits of marriage may be due, in part, to spouses who stay on top of their partner’s health, especially their recommended cancer screenings, study authors said.

“You’re going to nag your wife to go get her mammograms. You’re going to nag your husband to go get his colonoscopy,” Nguyen said. “If you’re on your own, nobody’s going to nag you.”

In the study, people who were on their own were 17% more likely to have cancer that had spread beyond its original site.

Unmarried patients in the study were also 53% less likely to receive appropriate therapies. Nguyen, who is a radiation oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said spouses can help patients get the treatments they need.

“When I meet somebody by themselves sometimes they can be really overwhelmed by the information,” he said. “All the facts that you need to make your decisions, you don’t even hear those facts when you’re the person. You really need somebody else that’s listening and making those kinds of judgments for you.”

The perks of being married seem to continue as patients undergo their cancer treatments, which can often be painful and difficult to endure, Nguyen said.

“If you’ve got a spouse with you who is kind of helping you at the end of the day, helping you get your other stuff in order and really encouraging you to go to your treatments, I think you’re probably much more likely to complete those treatments and get the benefit of the treatment,” he said. “I’ve definitely taken a lot of patients through treatment where there’s no way they could have made it through without their spouse.”

The results also support findings from a 2005 study showing that older married women with breast cancer had a lower risk of mortality after diagnosis than their unmarried counterparts.

All this might sound like a downer for people who aren’t married, but Nguyen doesn’t see it that way.

“Whatever it is about a marriage that helps people live longer and make it through their cancer, it might very well be that any friend, any loved one can do that for a patient with cancer,” he said.

That may be especially true for men, who seemed to benefit more from marriage in the study than women.

“An unmarried guy might be much more of loner about his healthcare,” Nguyen said.

“Don’t be afraid to bring a buddy. Reach out to people because it could make a big difference.”

Source: http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com