A "Spotless Mind"

A recent study by researchers at the Georgia College of Medicine found a way to "erase" memories. In a study with mice, they found that a particular protein admitted in high quantities while recalling an event will erase a memory.

I never could tell how they know that mice are or aren't remembering. Do they ask them? How do the mice respond? I will have to check into this.

Either way, would you consider erasing a memory a la Eternal Sunshine...? Apparently it is not that far off. You can find the article here.

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The Easiest Way to Burn Fat!

... is apparently to do nothing.

In a recent study, mice that were given high fat diets but kept pretty sedentary were less likely to become obese than their very active, also over fed counterparts. Here is a quote from Nerdy Science Blog explaining:

In order to maintain body temperature, warm-blooded animals, including humans, continuously burn fat. It is believed that by burning more fats, people are less likely to become obese. Leslie Kozak and colleagues at Pennington Biomedical Research Center challenged this prevailing thought showing that burning less fat actually reduces the risk of obesity.

There is a lot more to this, including certain genes involved, but this is the gist: if you stay cool (i.e. don't move around) your body works hard to keep it's temperature up, thus, burning more fat. Sounds easy to me... now whether this actually works... we'll see. You can find out more at The Journal for Biological Chemistry.


Photo is Public Domain and can be found here.

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