Scientists from the most respected and admired medical research laboratories in the world have confirmed that a chemical naturally found in many foods and especially in the skin of grapes and therefore in red wine, acts to alter the properties of a protein associated with infirmities of aging. In the last line of their article in the prestigious journal Science, published on page 1216 of the March 8, 2013 issue, they put it this way: “Thus allotsteric activation (a small molecule affecting the activity of a protein) of SIRT1(the protein) by STACs (which includes the small molecule found in red wine) remains a viable therapeutic intervention strategy for many diseases associated with aging.”
Researchers from the United Kingdom, working with collections ofcoffeeplants in Costa Rica and with citrus orchards in Crete, discovered that these flowering plants incorporated caffeine in their floral nectar at far lower concentrations than doses used in other parts of the plant, which would repel the beesand act torepel herbivores, animals that eat the plants. Experiments with observations of the bee’s behavior and their brain’s neural circuits demonstrate that the caffeine’s job is to enhance the bee’s memory of the nectar, encouraging return of the bee and therefore giving the plant an advantage in the competitive world of pollination. The caffeine works on the bees in ways that find parallels to how we are affected by caffeine. The details can be found beginning on pages 1202 and 1157 of the same March 8, 2013 issue of Science referred to above.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia and in Copenhagen, Denmark, biologists havebeen investigating what appear to be infected organisms acting in a manner to help spread the infection. Male crickets infected with a virus initiate courtship twice as fast as uninfected crickets with the uninfected partner becoming infected. To quote Shelley Adamo of Dalhousie University: “They are reproductively dead. Yet both sexes are sexually active….” Here’s another example. Killifish, commonly found in home fish tanks because of their vivid colors, when infected in the wild with a virus-infected flatworm, expose themselves to predation by birds the fish normally hide from. The virus needs to infect a bird to continue its biological lifecycle. Finally, one more: A single celled organism, the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, can only reproduce sexually in the gut of a cat. Rats infected with the protozoan can lose their fear of cats and be sexually attracted to the felines. Research shows that many of us are infected with this protozoan (which resides in the mammalian brain) with uncertainty about its effect on our behavior, but with dire suspicions.
Psychologists went to a soup kitchen and half the people were asked to remember and describe an event that made them feel successful or proud, a self-affirming memory. Others at the soup kitchen were asked to describe their daily diet, a confirmation of their status in life. Both groups were asked to take a standard “cognitive function test” (designed to test one’s attitude toward life). The self-affirming group did significantly better on the test and three times as many of this group compared to those asked the diet question, on leaving, collected flyers containing information on helping the working poor.
As reported on page 28 of the March 11 issue of the magazine Chemicaland Engineering News, and published in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland discovered that mice communicate fear among each other by wafting a pheromone (a chemical emitted external to the body, which causes changes in an animal’s actions) with a chemical structure that is very similar to the chemical in the scent of animals that pray on mice. The chemical is found in fox feces. The scientists propose that mice may have evolved the alarm pheromone to make use of a preexisting ability to detect predator scents. The same sensory organ in mouse nostrils detects both the predator scent and the alarm pheromone.
