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Humans can accurately perceive a moving object's direction. We can also, however, be fooled into miss-perceiving this direction.
If one views upward motion for some 30 seconds and then subsequently looks at motion in a different direction, the latter may be grossly miss-calculated. This illusion is known as the direction after-effect.
We can also be fooled into miss-calculating the directions of two superimposed motions - direction repulsion. These two illusions react similarly to various experimental manipulations, consistent with the same neural structures driving both illusions. We devised a series of experiments demonstrating that the two illusions are driven by different neural structures. Medical News Today
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Vitamin C supplements and chemotherapy aren't a good combination, says a team of New York researchers. Vitamin C reduced the effectiveness of many cancer drugs, they found in laboratory and animal studies.
"What we found is that vitamin C blunted the effectiveness of all the chemotherapy drugs we studied," says Mark Heaney, MD, PhD, associate attending physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the study's lead author. "What vitamin C does is protect the cancer cells from the chemotherapy mainly by protecting their mitochondria [the cell's power sources]," he tells WebMD.
In the laboratory studies, he says, the vitamin C blunted the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drugs from 30% to 70%, depending on the dose of vitamin C and the chemo drug. WebMD
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 Japan's sumo wrestlers are vulnerable to a more virulent strain of a herpes skin virus, contracted through grappling their opponents, scientists revealed today.
The herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is notorious among the general public for causing unsightly cold sores and sore throats.
The symptoms recur because the pathogen can hide in nerve cells for a long time and then leap out.
But a more extreme form of the disease occurs among athletes who take part in close-contact sports, such as sumo, rugby and judo.
Known as Herpes gladiatorum, or scrumpox, it causes painful, virus-filled blisters to form on the face and the neck that can damage the skin. Fever, headaches and an infection of the lymph nodes can also result. Life & Style
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 Baby girls who are of larger than average length and weight at birth grow up being at increased risk of breast cancer, analysis suggests.
The analysis of 32 studies involving more than 600,000 women provides the strongest evidence yet of such a link.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine team says birth size might explain 5% of all breast cancers.
It could point to some link between cancer and the environment of the baby before birth, PLoS Medicine reports. BBC News
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Study suggests disruption of chemotherapy's ability to target tumor cells
Large doses of vitamin C could reduce the effectiveness of anticancer drugs, according to a new study that focused on laboratory cancer cells and mice.
The finding raises questions about whether human patients might suffer the same effects, the study authors said. USA Today
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 University of Illinois microbiology professor William Metcalf and his collaborators have developed a way to mass-produce an antimalarial compound, potentially making the treatment of malaria less expensive.
Metcalf set out to understand how this compound, one of a group known as phosphonates, is made in nature by bacteria. He was interested in that process partly because some phosphonates have antibiotic properties. Recently, Metcalf and his lab successfully identified and sequenced the genes and identified the processes by which bacteria make this particular phosphonate compound (FR900098). Science Daily
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California came closer than any other state to instituting routine H.I.V. screening as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday signed into law a bill requiring private health insurance providers to cover the cost of the testing regardless of a primary diagnosis.
As soon as next year, health care providers in California will no longer have to manipulate the codes on insurance forms to goad private insurers into paying for the tests that screen for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
Removing the cost barrier is a major step toward making H.I.V. screening more prevalent and, in the process, removing the fear and stigma long attached to the test.
“This kind of test should be as routine as a cholesterol or blood pressure test,” said Assemblyman Paul Krekorian, the author of the bill. “It should be a part of basic preventative health care.”
The law, said Mr. Krekorian, a Democrat, brings California closer to the routine H.I.V. testing recommended in a 2006 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The New York Times
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A large skull is disadvantageous to animals that move quickly in three-dimensional space, like fish and birds in water or air.
A cerebral neocortex with a six-layered sheet has not evolved, most likely due to the limited cranial space. Instead of the laminar cortex, telencephalic nuclear masses seem to have evolved as the pallium in teleost fishes.
We consider that the nuclear masses contain rather simple neural circuits sharing a skeleton of simple circuits in the mammalian cortex. Such basic similarities at the connectional level shared by nuclear and cortical pallium might underlie similar or equivalent functions. Medical News Today
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A fat hormone gene is linked to colon cancer, researchers find.
The finding provides part of the answer to a big question: What triggers colon cancer?
To get at this question, Boris Pasche, MD, PhD, and colleagues followed a trail of clues that implicates adiponectin, a hormone made only by fat cells.
Colon cancer cells have more adiponectin receptors than do normal gut cells.
People with the highest adiponectin levels have a 47% lower risk of colon cancer than do people with the lowest adiponectin levels.
Obese people have decreased adiponectin levels.
Obese people have an increased risk of colon cancer.
The researchers looked at five common variants of the adiponectin gene and five common variants of the gene for the adiponectin receptor.
They first analyzed adiponectin genes from about 1,100 people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, including 441 colon cancer patients. This population is at particularly high risk of colon cancer. Three adiponectin gene variants, and one adiponectin receptor gene variant, affected colon cancer risk. WebMD
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 Stopping very young children from eating foods such as eggs, shellfish and peanuts may not prevent them developing allergies and might even be responsible for a dramatic increase in severe food reactions, say leading specialist doctors, who are calling for a rethink of the food exclusion philosophy.
As well, they will challenge government advice that infants should be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months, saying this could also raise the allergy risk and that four months is a better age for babies to begin building up immune tolerance to some basic foods. Life & Style
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 In September, medical teams at 25 hospitals across the world revealed they were undertaking the largest study of its kind into near death experiences (NDE).
Researchers want to know if there is any truth in so called "out-of-body" incidents reported by gravely ill people.
One of the hospitals taking part in the research is Morriston Hospital in Swansea, where Dr Penny Sartori has become a leading expert on the phenomenon.
She gives her own personal insight into why the research is so important - and the impact it has had on her own life. BBC News
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Finding could lead to new treatments, experts say
Three genes may raise risks for painful gout by up to 40 times, researchers report.
The finding could help identify people at risk for the arthritic illness, long before symptoms start. One of the genes studied had already been associated with gout, but identifying all three genes could help develop new treatments. USAToday
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