The Safety of Genetically Modified Plants

Shingles is caused by the same virus which causes chicken pox, the Herpes Zoster virus. Once you have had chicken pox, HZV lives in your nerve cells forever and can sometimes reactivate itself. It is usually kept at bay by the immune system by zoster virus specific immunity factor. If you are unwell or as you age, the HZV can flare-up causing chicken pox like spots along one nerve known as shingles. T'ai Chi seems to boost the level the zoster virus specific immunity factor by up to 50%. (this study looked at people doing T'ai Chi 3 times a week for 4 months.) It seems T'ai Chi reduces the levels of stress hormones, which boosts the immune system.

Don't you just hate it when you get an annoying song stuck in your head and you can't stop humming it all day? Researchers in America think this happens because these repetitive, catchy songs give us a brain itch, which can only be cured by a cognitive scratch… otherwise known as listening to the offending tune over and over again. Prof James Kellaris from the University of Cincinnati has been studying these songs that he calls earworms, and has discovered that nearly everyone suffers from them at some time and that in general women are more susceptible to them than men, as are musicians. He's also shown that there is no guaranteed way of ever getting the song out of your head, especially if you try a replacement strategy by thinking of a different tune, because more likely than not if you'll replace one earworm for another! So, will this research lead to the pop industry releasing songs to deliberately plague us with hard-to-shift purpose-built earworms? (…some of you might say they already do that very well!) Well, maybe not. Prof Kellaris hasn't found a winning formula for an effective earworm since people react differently to different tunes. We do know that one of the key elements of an earworm is repetition, since a tune with a lot of variation isn't easily taken in.

A new vaccine to treat cocaine addiction is about to be put to the test in America by its UK designers Xenova Pharmaceuticals. Called TA-CD the vaccine works by encouraging an addict's immune system to produce antibodies to cocaine, in much the same way as it would against bacteria or viruses. These antibodies circulate in the bloodstream mopping up any cocaine taken into the body before it can get to the brain to produce the hit that the addict craves. The company also has a related product called TA-NIC which works in an identical way against nicotine and could potentially help smokers to kick the habit. So why don't people naturally develop antibodies like this, just by giving taking the drug ? The reason is that the nicotine and cocaine molecules are too small to be seen by the immune system. The breakthrough made by Xenova was to link nicotine and cocaine to a much bigger molecule which the immune system can see. As a result the antibodies produced can lock on to nicotine or cocaine on its own in the blood stream, and neutralise it. Both vaccines have passed safety trials. Now it just remains to be seen how effectively they work.