Also known as Todd’s syndrome, Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS) is a neurological condition that distorts perception, causing disorientation and a warping of the senses [source:PubMed]. AIWS can be triggered by an abnormal amount of electricity in the body, causing a change in blood flow in the brain. Signals sent from the brain to the eyes are disturbed resulting in a variety of symptoms including: hallucinations, lost sense of time and an altered self-image where certain body parts appear disproportionate to the rest of the body. Often diagnosed in childhood, this condition can often leave sufferers feeling like Lewis Carroll’s character Alice lost in her dreams. 

Some 15 years ago, scientists realized that the rice plant was unusually effective at absorbing toxic forms of arsenic from soil and water — but no one had directly connected eating rice with actual harm to health.

That changed in July when U.K. and Indian scientists reported that daily consumption of arsenic-tainted rice is linked to genetic damage in humans. Experts say the result will be increased pressure on public health agencies to set safety limits for rice consumption.

Depression runs deep. So deep, in fact, that researchers now say the individual cells of a person with severe depression age faster than usual.

A team of researchers in the Netherlands wanted to know why people with depression are at greater risk for diseases related to aging: diabetes, obesity, cancer and heart disease. So they looked at three groups of people: 1,100 currently experiencing major depressive disorder (MDD), 800 who had MDD in the past, and 500 people who reported no signs of depression.

Lifestyle changes may, in fact, be able to turn back the clock on aging. A small pilot study has provided the first evidence that lifestyle changes can lengthen protective regions of our DNA called telomeres.

The study followed 35 men over the course of 5 years, all of whom had been diagnosed with low-risk prostate cancer. Ten of the men were assigned to undertake healthy lifestyle changes: a vegetarian whole-food diet, regular exercise and sessions of stress-reducing meditation or yoga. The others served as controls.

In 1900 the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner first discovered blood types, winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research in 1930. Since then scientists have developed ever more powerful tools for probing the biology of blood types. They've found some intriguing clues about them – tracing their deep ancestry, for example, and detecting influences of blood types on our health. And yet I found that in many ways blood types remain strangely mysterious. Scientists have yet to come up with a good explanation for their very existence.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with colleagues at three other institutions, report the discovery of two genetic programs responsible for turning stem cells into both the red and white cells that make up human blood. The scientists say their finding is important because it identifies how nature itself makes blood products at the earliest stages of development and provides researchers with the tools to make the cells themselves, investigate how blood cells develop, and produce clinically relevant blood products.

The study (“Direct induction of hemato endothelial programs in human pluripotent stem cells by transcriptional regulators”) was reported in Nature Communications.

Studies suggest that browsing Facebook can make you unhappy, says Justin Mullins. Why might that be?
Not so long ago a new form of communication swept the world, transforming life in ways unimagined just a few years before. One commentator heralded it as “the greatest means of communication ever developed by the mind of man” while others pointed to its potential to revolutionise news, entertainment and education. But the poet and playwright TS Eliot had a different take. “It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome,” he wrote.