Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/255746759?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Does motherhood dampen cocaine?s effects?
ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2012) ? Mother rats respond much differently to cocaine than female rats that have never given birth, according to new University of Michigan research that looks at both behavior and brain chemistry.
The findings may help lay the groundwork for more tailored human addiction treatment, based on scientific understanding of how gender, hormones and life experience impact drug use.
In an oral presentation at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, U-M researcher Jennifer Cummings, Ph.D., summarized findings from experiments with rats at the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute, part of the U-M Medical School. She worked with Jill Becker, Ph.D., of the U-M Department of Psychology.
They identified clear differences in how intensely the "pleasure centers" in the mother rats' brains reacted to the drug, compared with non-mothers. Mother rats' brains released less of a chemical called dopamine, which helps cause the "high" from cocaine.
They also found an interaction with stress: mother rats that were exposed to periods of increased stress weren't willing to work as hard to get a dose of cocaine, compared with rats that had never given birth or mother rats that weren't exposed to the stress -- even though the stressed mother rats showed an increased tendency to use cocaine when it was easy to get.
Taken together, the findings suggest that the experience of becoming a mother alters a female's overall response to cocaine -- adding complexity to the issue of how best to treat addiction.
"While we have not yet identified a mechanism to explain these differences, they do suggest that the reward system and brain circuitry affected by cocaine is changed with maternal experience," says Cummings, a research investigator at MBNI and former postdoctoral fellow in Becker's laboratory. "The next step is to determine how factors such as hormone changes in pregnancy and early motherhood, and the experience of caring for offspring, might be differentially contributing to this response."
While rats and people are admittedly very different, research on rodents allows scientists like Cummings and Becker to study brain chemistry and drug-related behavior in detail, and pave the way for translating those findings to human drug treatment. With drug use and abuse among women on the rise, gender-specific understanding and treatment is becoming more important than ever, Cummings says.
In general, researchers already know that motherhood can give animals a better memory and ability to navigate compared with non-mothers -- and that these effects last beyond the time that the mother is caring for her offspring.
The new research used a system that gave rats access to cocaine if they poked a dispenser with their noses a minimum number of times.
At first, when the number of pokes needed to get a dose was low, the mother rats took more drug than the non-mothers after exposure to a brief, stressful situation. But as the researchers ramped up the number of pokes needed to as high as 70, the stressed mothers became more likely to stop seeking doses.
The researchers also used a technique called microdialysis to measure the level of dopamine in the rats' brains, especially in an area called the nucleus accumbens which is considered the brain's "pleasure center."
In this measurement of neurological response, the mother rats' dopamine levels after receiving cocaine were much lower than those of non-mothers.
"Even though there was reduced dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens of rats that had been mothers, many of their behavioral responses to cocaine were the same or greater than non-mothers, indicating that there are downstream long term changes to the brains of the rats that had been mothers," says Becker.
The research focused on female rats that had given birth to and reared one litter of pups, compared with those that were virgins. Future experiments, Cummings says, might look at the impact of those that gave birth but didn't rear their pups, and those that reared pups born to other rats but never gave birth themselves.
Only through this careful research can the impact of hormones be teased apart from the impact of the actual motherhood experience.
The research was funded by two grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH 5R21-DA27924-2 and NIH R01-DA012677).
In addition to her main appointment as a professor in the U-M Department of Psychology in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts, Becker also holds an appointment in the U-M Medical School's Department of Psychiatry and is a member of the U-M Neuroscience Program.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Michigan Health System.
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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/F_JAHX1Rj_g/121015161918.htm
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Pit-stop at Peaches' | Around Town | Know your city
Sandhya Ramachandran decides to pause between mouthfuls and gets talking to the three young promoters of Chennai?s new and popular vegetarian world-cuisine restaurant ? Peaches?.
Raghu Viswanathan, Venkatesh Kannan and Niranjan Tata never really thought they would start a restaurant together, ten years from the first day they met in college. Hours of coding and debugging later, in both college and the IT Company they worked in, the idea of starting something together was born.
It took them a while before they figured out what exactly they wanted to do. Niranjan reveals that they zeroed in on their choices of food, travel and entertainment. Venkatesh adds, ?Then each one of us picked a topic and researched on it?. Since the three of them were foodies, the result was evident.
Raghu tells us that ?the name Peaches was our first choice, but then, we wanted a few more choices and hunted for names again.? Funnily enough, they split responsibilities based on alphabets this time. One team of precise, well divided labour, alright!
So we get to what interests us the most ? the food. We wanted to know the ideal three-course menu that we could order for the boss just in case we happened to land up at Peaches?. Niranjan took this one and has suggested we ?start with the French onion soup. It is everyone?s favourite?. Aah! So the boss will begin the lunch in good spirits. He then says we must order their mushroom tortellini for starters, get some Phuket Paneer for the main course and indulge our boss in the time-tested gajar ka halwa and ice-cream to wrap up the meal. Safe and ever-reliable options, we agree.
We asked Raghu to pick out the meal at Peaches? for our Peaches ? meaning what we could order at a date ? and he lists out, ?Comfort food or what we call the ?sarakku dish?(tavern snacks) of crispy American corn to begin with.? Good for conversations, we add. Then he urges that you order a creamy mushroom lasagna saying ?you cannot go wrong with something that has cream, cheese and mushroom.? Ideal dish for the ideal date, we quip albeit a little cheesily. For dessert, he encourages the great hot chocolate fudge fundae. Hell, we?d order that even if we weren?t on a date!
Venkatesh however declares that the Somaras should be the ideal dessert choice. He indulges us in an interesting theory of immortality behind it. ?The somaras comes straight from heaven, as its name suggests. Every drink adds a day to your life. So the sure shot way of longevity is to drop by Peaches for a daily dose of somaras,? he finishes. They had their fill, and have lived to tell the tale today. Maybe it is not all clever advertisement, maybe there is an element of truth. Why don?t we check it out for ourselves?
Source: http://know.burrp.com/my-city/pit-stop-at-peaches%E2%80%99/45251
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Monday, October 15, 2012
Shuttle X-ing: Endeavour spacecraft slowly winds through L.A.
In retirement, it's crawling along the streets of Los Angeles at a sluggish 2 mph, a pace that rush-hour commuters can sympathize with.
The space shuttle Endeavour sits in a strip mall as a Hawaiian Airlines jet approaches a runway at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, Friday, Oct. 12. Endeavour's 12-mile road trip kicked off shortly before midnight Thursday as it moved from its hangar at the airport en route to the California Science Center, its ultimate destination.
Jae C. Hong/AP
EnlargeAt its prime, the space?shuttle?Endeavour circled the globe at 17,500 mph, faster than a speeding bullet.
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In retirement, it's crawling along the streets of Los Angeles at a sluggish 2 mph, a pace that rush-hour commuters can sympathize with.
Endeavour's two-day, 12-mile road trip to the California Science Center where it will be put on display kicked off early Friday. Rolled on a 160-wheeled carrier, it left from a hangar at the Los Angeles International Airport, passing diamond-shaped "Shuttle?Xing" signs, and reached city streets about two hours later.
Hundreds of spectators, some with pajama-clad children in tow, waited in the predawn darkness. In unison, they held up their cameras and cellphones and gaped as the 170,000-pound Endeavour inched by with its tail towering over streetlights and its wings spanning the roadway.
It made stop-and-go progress, with some halts to check its balance and to prune trees in its path as it crept past strip malls and storefronts.
In a massive feat of parallel parking, the?shuttle?was backed into a shopping center parking lot in the Westchester neighborhood around 5:30 a.m. ? later than expected.
Janet Dion, a family therapist from nearby Manhattan Beach, was in awe as she marveled at Endeavour, its sides weathered by millions of miles in space and two dozen re-entries.
"You can sense the magnitude of where it's been," Dion said, focusing on the heat tiles that protected theshuttle?during the return to Earth.
"It's exciting to see the tiles up close, especially the texture of the tiles," she said. "It's amazing. You can almost feel the fabric of it, like a skin. Like our skin."
Everyone it seemed wanted to pose with Endeavour. Firefighters, police officers and construction workers on duty took turns standing in front of it.
Others saw an opportunity to make a buck. Jason Duran and his friend printed up Endeavour T-shirts and hawked them for $30.
"We're entrepreneurs," he said.
Endeavour will remain at the parking lot for a nine-hour layover as crews worked to widen the carrier so that it could straddle the median during the next part of the trip. It was expected to move again in early afternoon then stop for several more hours to transfer to a special dolly for the cross over the busy Interstate 405 at night.
Ushering a?shuttle?through an urban core is a logistical challenge that took almost a year to plan. Guarded by a security detail reminiscent of a presidential visit, police enforced rolling street and sidewalk closures as early as Thursday night in some locations and discouraged spectators from swarming side streets.
The behemoth transport has caused headaches for shopkeepers along the route who counted on cheering crowds jamming the curbs to boost business.
In the days leading up to Endeavour's move, the owners of Randy's Donuts sold shuttle-shaped pastries emblazoned with the NASA logo and even hung a miniature?shuttle?replica inside the giant doughnut sign visible from the freeway.
Co-owner Larry Weintraub planned to watch the?shuttle?creep by the roadside sign, which has been featured in several movies. But the store, which serves up sweets 24-7, will be closed.
"I'm still excited, but I'm disappointed that people aren't going to be able to stand in the streets and shout 'Yay,'" he said.
Saturday is typically the busiest day for James Fugate, who co-owns Eso Won Books in South Los Angeles. But with Endeavour expected to shuffle through, Fugate braced for a ho-hum day in sales.
"We don't close because we're slow. That's when you pull out a book to read," he said.
The baby of the?shuttle?fleet, Endeavour replaced Challenger, which exploded during liftoff in 1986, killing seven astronauts. It thundered off the launch pad 25 times, orbited Earth nearly 4,700 times and racked up 123 million miles.
Last month, it wowed throngs with a dizzying aerial loop, soaring over the state Capitol, Golden Gate Bridge, Hollywood Sign and other California landmarks while strapped to the back of a modified 747 before finally landing at LAX.
The last leg of Endeavour's retirement journey skips the tourist attractions and instead, winds through blue-collar communities in southern Los Angeles County. While viewing will be severely curtailed due to sidewalk shutdowns, crowds are still expected.
Moving the Endeavour required a specialized carrier typically used to haul oil rigs, bridges and heavy equipment. The wheels can spin in any direction, allowing the?shuttle?to zigzag past obstacles. An operator walks alongside, controlling the movements via joystick. Several spotters along the wings are on the lookout for hazards.
To make room for the five-story-tall?shuttle?and its 78-foot wingspan, some 400 trees were chopped down, cable and telephone lines were raised, and steel plates were laid down to protect the streets and underground utilities.
Endeavour will mostly travel on wide boulevards with some boasting as many lanes as a freeway. While there have been advance preparations, there is remaining work to be done during the move, including de-energizing power lines. Southern California Edison warned of outages in the suburb of Inglewood.
One of the trickiest parts involves trundling through a narrow residential street with apartment buildings on both sides. With Endeavour's wings expected to intrude into driveways, residents have been told to stay indoors until the?shuttle?passes.
The route was selected after ruling out other options. Dismantling the?shuttle?would have ruined the delicate heat tiles. Helicoptering it to its destination was not feasible. Neither was crossing on freeways since theshuttle?is too big to fit through the underpasses. The cost of transporting it cross-town was estimated at over $10 million.
As complex as the latest endeavor is, Southern California is no stranger to moving heavy things.
In 1946, Howard Hughes' "Spruce Goose" aircraft was built in sections and hauled from Culver City to Long Beach, 30 miles away. In 1984, an old United Airlines DC-8, with its wings and tail disassembled, was towed from Long Beach to the science center.
Earlier this year, a two-story-tall chunk of granite was hauled 105 miles from a rock quarry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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Travel in grand tax style with your spouse ? Business Management ...
Usually, you can?t deduct the cost of taking your spouse along on a business trip unless he or she is employed by the company. But that doesn?t mean you must pay the full cost out of your own pocket.
Strategy: Invite your spouse on business trips to popular destinations. The extra cost is technically nondeductible, but you still qualify for tax breaks. Reason: The tax law permits you to deduct what it would have cost you to travel alone, even if that?s more than half of what it would cost the two of you to travel together. So you can combine a business trip with a mini-vacation and still write off a good portion of it.
Example: Suppose you?re finalizing a business deal with a client located in a resort area. You and your spouse drive 500 miles to the business destination and spend a total of 10 days away from home. During the trip, you spend eight days in business meetings and two days sightseeing and relaxing with your spouse. Here?s the tax breakdown in three steps.
1. Despite your spouse?s presence, there is no difference in your auto expenses. If you use the standard mileage rate for business travel (55.5 cents per mile for 2012), you may deduct $555 for the round trip (1,000 miles x 55.5 cents) even though the gas costs only $150.
2. You can deduct 50% of your meals on business-related days plus 50% of the meals for both of you when you dine with the client. Assume your meals cost $100 a day and the tab for your spouse?s meals at seven business dinners is $560.? Thus, you can deduct $680 for meals (50% of $800 + 50% of $560 for your spouse).
3. Finally, you can deduct eight nights at the hotel at $200 a night for a total of $1,600?the cost of a single room?even though the double costs you $225 a night. ?
This brings your total deduction to $2,835 ($555 gas + $680 meals + $1,600 lodging). The cost of the trip, discounting incidentals, comes to $4,400 ($150 gas + $2,000 meals + $2,250 lodging). So you?re able to write off more than half of the trip?s total cost.
Tip: The IRS says that the two weekend days between business meetings also count as business days (as do any business travel days). Therefore, if you take time off during the intervening weekend, your total deduction jumps to $3,335 ($555 gas + $780 meals + $2,000 lodging), or more than 75% of the entire cost.
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Longtime GOP Senate moderate Arlen Specter dies
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) ? For most of his 30 years as Pennsylvania's longest-serving U.S. senator and prominent moderate in Congress, Arlen Specter was a Republican, though often at odds with the GOP leadership.
He helped end the Supreme Court hopes of former federal appeals Judge Robert H. Bork, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan. Decades later, he was one of only three Republicans in Congress to vote for President Barack Obama's economic stimulus.
His breaks with his party were hardly a surprise: He had begun his political career as a Democrat and ended it as one, too.
In between, he was at the heart of several major American political events. He rose to prominence in the 1960s as an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, developing the single-bullet theory in President John F. Kennedy's assassination. He came to the Senate in the Reagan landslide of 1980 and was a key voice in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of both Bork and Clarence Thomas.
Specter died Sunday died at his home in Philadelphia from complications of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, said his son Shanin. He was 82. Over the years, Specter had fought two previous bouts with Hodgkin lymphoma, overcome a brain tumor and survived cardiac arrest following bypass surgery.
Intellectual and stubborn, Specter took the lead on a wide spectrum of issues and was no stranger to controversy.
In one of his last major political acts, Specter startled fellow senators in April 2009 when he announced he was joining the Democrats. He said he was "increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy," though he said the Democrats could not count on him to be "an automatic 60th vote" that would give them a filibuster-proof majority.
He had also concluded that he was unlikely to win a sixth term as a Republican, and his frankness about why he returned to the Democratic Party was packaged in a powerful TV ad by his primary opponent, then-U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, who hammered away at the incumbent as a political opportunist.
"My change in party will enable me to be re-elected," Specter says in TV news footage used in the ad.
The announcer ends the ad saying, "Arlen Specter changed parties to save one job ? his, not yours."
Democrats picked Sestak, a retired Navy vice admiral, over Specter in the 2010 primary, ending his decades of service. Sestak lost Specter's seat to conservative Republican Rep. Pat Toomey in the general election by 2 percentage points.
Specter rose to prominence in the 1960s as an aggressive Philadelphia prosecutor and during his time on the Warren Commission.
In 1987, Specter helped thwart Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, earning him conservative enemies who still bitterly refer to such denials as being "borked." But four years later, Specter was criticized by liberals for his tough questioning of Anita Hill at Thomas' Supreme Court nomination hearings and for accusing her of committing "flat-out perjury." The interrogation, televised nationally, incensed women's groups and nearly cost him his seat in 1992.
Specter took credit for helping to defeat President Bill Clinton's national health care plan ? the complexities of which he highlighted in a gigantic chart that hung on his office wall for years afterward ? and helped lead the investigation into Gulf War syndrome, the name given to a collection of symptoms experienced by veterans of the war that include fatigue, memory loss, pain and difficulty sleeping. And following the Iran-Contra scandal, Specter pushed legislation that created the inspectors general of the CIA, which later exposed Aldrich Ames as a Soviet spy.
But he was not afraid to buck his fellow Republicans.
As a senior member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Specter pushed for increased funding for stem-cell research, breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease, and supported several labor-backed initiatives in a GOP-led Congress. He also doggedly sought federal funds for local projects in his home state.
In 1995, he launched a presidential bid, denouncing religious conservatives as the "fringe" that plays too large a role in setting the party's agenda. Specter, who was Jewish, bowed out before the first primary because of lackluster fundraising.
Specter's irascible independence caught up with him in 2004. He barely survived a GOP primary challenge from Toomey by 17,000 votes of more than 1.4 million cast. He went on to easily win the general election with the help of organized labor, a traditionally Democratic constituency.
Specter was diagnosed in 2005 with stage IV Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. Announcing the diagnosis with his trademark doggedness, Specter said: "I have beaten a brain tumor, bypass heart surgery and many tough political opponents and I'm going to beat this, too."
"Arlen Specter was always a fighter," Obama said in a statement Sunday. "From his days stamping out corruption as a prosecutor in Philadelphia to his three decades of service in the Senate, Arlen was fiercely independent ? never putting party or ideology ahead of the people he was chosen to serve. He brought that same toughness and determination to his personal struggles."
Specter wrote of his illness in a 2008 book, "Never Give In: Battling Cancer in the Senate," saying he wanted to let others facing similar crises "ought to know they are not alone."
Cancer handed him "a stark look at mortality" and an "added sense of humility," Specter told The Associated Press.
Born in Wichita, Kan., on Feb. 12, 1930, Specter spent summers toiling in his father's junkyard in Russell, Kan., where he knew another future senator ? Bob Dole. The junkyard thrived during World War II, allowing Specter's father to send his four children to college.
Specter left Kansas for college in 1947 because the University of Kansas, where his best friends were headed, did not have Jewish fraternities. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951 and Yale law school in 1956. He served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1953.
Friends say his childhood circumstances made him determined, tough and independent-minded. Specter considered his father's triumphs the embodiment of the American dream, a fulfillment that friends say drove him to a career in public life.
He entered politics as a Democrat in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, when he was an assistant district attorney who sent six Teamsters officials to jail for union corruption.
Working on the Warren Commission in 1964, Specter was the chief author of the theory that a single bullet had hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally, an assumption critical to the conclusion that presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The theory remains controversial and was the subject of ridicule in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie "JFK."
After working on the Warren Commission, he returned to Philadelphia and challenged his boss, James Crumlish, for district attorney in 1965. Specter ran as a Republican and was derided by Crumlish as "Benedict Arlen." But Crumlish lost to his protege by 36,000 votes.
Specter lost re-election as district attorney in 1973 and went into private practice. Among his most notorious clients as a private attorney was Ira Einhorn, a Philadelphia counterculture celebrity who killed his girlfriend in 1977.
Finally, in 1980, Specter won the Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Richard Schweiker, defeating former Pittsburgh Mayor Pete Flaherty.
After leaving the Senate in January 2011, the University of Pennsylvania Law School said Specter would teach a course about Congress' relationship with the Supreme Court, and Maryland Public Television launched a political-affairs show hosted by the former senator.
He also occasionally performed standup comedy at clubs in Philadelphia and New York. He played squash nearly every day into his mid-70s and liked to unwind with a martini or two at night.
A funeral was scheduled for Tuesday in Penn Valley, Pa., and will be open to the public, followed by burial in Huntingdon Valley, Pa.
Specter is survived by his wife, Joan, and two sons, Shanin and Steve, and four granddaughters.
___
Associated Press writers Ron Todt in Philadelphia and Lara Jakes contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/longtime-gop-senate-moderate-arlen-specter-dies-165919376--politics.html
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