Brain

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

"If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters," a wise, unnamed observer of the human condition once opined. (Some credit Garfield the cat.) Failing that, we could all sleep with gadgets that monitor our sleep and wake us at the moment we're most ready to hit the ground running - or at least not stumbling around in a bleary-eyed daze. A variety of devices are claimed by their makers to do just that - by keeping tabs on your sleep cycle and rousing you at a moment when waking is most natural.

WASHINGTON - An experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis has caused death, strokes, nerve damage and abdominal bleeding and has no proven benefits for sufferers of the disease, the Food and Drug Administration warned Thursday. Known as liberation therapy, the treatment targets chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency - or CCSVI - a narrowing of the veins in the head and neck. It involves inserting balloons or stents into veins to widen them in an attempt to relieve the symptoms of MS. The FDA received reports in 2011 of a patient who died from bleeding in the brain after undergoing the treatment and another who was left permanently paralyzed by a stroke.

Like a mind-expanding twist on TED Talks served with Burning Man-informed alt-culture, L.A.'s monthly mix of science, art and socializing known as Mindshare has drawn steadily increasing numbers since its inception in 2006. Now, with 50 events since the first gathering, the minds behind Mindshare are throwing a weekend-long celebration at Lot 613 downtown. Whether viewed as a night of mindful debauchery, a cultural salon with sex appeal, or a booze-filled bacchanal that stimulates the cerebral cortex, there's no denying the Mindshare events have made their mark on the city's social scene.

When he became a psychiatrist in the 1970s, John Ratey didn't expect to evolve into an exercise buff. But today, the Harvard University professor and expert in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder calls exercise the single most important tool people have to optimize brain function. If you get your body in shape, he says, your mind will follow. Ratey describes the emerging research on exercise and the brain in a book, "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain," which was published in January by Little, Brown.

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article .) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose. “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology (postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author)

Walking is good for your head. Sure, we knew about the improvements it can provide to aerobic capacity, not to mention muscles and joints, but two recently released studies show that walking can enhance brain function too. Walking or other repetitive exercise can change the brain in a number of ways, says Dr. Gary Small, professor of psychiatry and aging at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. The heart pumps more blood, affecting not only muscles but also the brain.

Montel Williams is not your typical pot-smoking snowboarder. Best known as an Emmy-winning talk show host, the former Marine and decorated naval intelligence officer was also a champion boxer, bodybuilder and power-lifter. In 1999, Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and it hit him hard. After a downward slide to rock bottom, Williams decided to get his life back. Were you active in your younger years? I was extremely active. I was a martial artist.

Spending countless hours playing the video game Guitar Hero has fostered an illusion among many middle-age guys. It's not too late to be a guitar god. Then they discover something: There's a big difference between the colored plastic buttons on the guitar-shaped game control and the six strings of an actual guitar. But is the difference insurmountable? Gary Marcus set out to answer that question in "Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. " "I had a sabbatical coming up," says Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University.

Which is better for weight loss -- a high-protein diet or a high-carb diet? That endless debate got a new twist on Monday. In a year-long study, Australian researchers found that both diets worked equally well when it came to shedding pounds but those on the low-carb diet were in considerably worse moods. The report, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, assigned 106 overweight and obese men and women to either a low-carb diet high in fat and protein or a high-carb diet low in fat and protein.

Everyone knows that Langer's serves the best pastrami sandwich in town. Guidebooks say so. National magazines say so. The subway disgorges so many Langer's-bound fressers that it has sometimes been called the Pastrami Express. Many of us think Langer's serves the best pastrami sandwiches in the United States and consider any variance from its formula to be something close to heresy. The idea of a pastrami sandwich at Umamicatessen, Adam Fleischman's new deli on the edge of downtown's Jewelry District, may border on the heretical even without the Langer's comparisons.

Montel Williams is not your typical pot-smoking snowboarder. Best known as an Emmy-winning talk show host, the former Marine and decorated naval intelligence officer was also a champion boxer, bodybuilder and power-lifter. In 1999, Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and it hit him hard. After a downward slide to rock bottom, Williams decided to get his life back. Were you active in your younger years? I was extremely active. I was a martial artist.

The death of NFL star Junior Seau was officially ruled a suicide by the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office on Thursday. Officials are awaiting the family's decision regarding the study of Seau's brain for evidence of repetitive injuries. Seau was discovered dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest in his beachside home in Oceanside on Wednesday morning about 9:35 a.m., according to the report. Officials have not determined an exact time of death. Dr. Craig Nelson, deputy medical examiner, conducted a forensic autopsy Thursday, including a full examination of Seau's body and organs and a collection of appropriate specimens for laboratory studies, including toxicology and microscopic examination of organs and tissues.

Former NFL star Junior Seau's death by apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound follows a pattern of suicides by other high-profile football players who suffered from long-term effects of repeated brain injury. That list of players includes Andre Waters of the Philadelphia Eagles and Terry Long of the Pittsburgh Steelers. And just last year, former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest, but not before requesting that his brain be donated to science so that researchers could study the long-term effects caused by concussion and other repeated brain injuries.

WASHINGTON - Matt Pizzo has a law degree, can-do attitude, proven leadership skills, and expertise in communications and satellite technology from his four years in the Air Force. Yet the 29-year-old has been told that he's overqualified, too old, too "non-traditional," and that he's fallen behind his civilian contemporaries. "It was disheartening, to say the least," he said of his latest job rejection. "But it's typical, I'm afraid. " For unemployed veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, rejection is a special ordeal.

Mind-reading robots? It's not as scary as it sounds. Researchers in Switzerland are developing a robot that can respond to human thoughts, and may one day help immobile people better interact with the external world. On Tuesday, scientists from Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne marked a milestone in this research, when they demonstrated that a partially paralyzed man could control the movements of a 1-foot-tall robot from more than 62 miles away, the Associated Press reported.

In addition to claiming lives, marriages, homes and careers, alcoholism has a greedy way of robbing its victims of brainpower, as well. Over time, alcohol dependence literally shrinks the brain and several of its components. And in so doing, it erodes an alcoholic's ability to learn new tasks, remember things and organize for action. Even regular, heavy drinking can take a cognitive toll, researchers have found.

You can't sleep.  You've tried counting sheep, drinking warm milk, maybe even taking medications like Benadryl or sleeping pills.   Maybe next you should try cooling your brain. According to research presented Monday at Sleep 2011 , the annual meeting of the Associated Profession Sleep Societies, cooling the brain and can reduce the amount of time it takes people with insomnia to fall asleep -- and increase the length of time they stay that way. To achieve "frontal cerebral thermal transfer," as the cooling is called, researchers Dr. Eric Nofzinger and Dr. Daniel Buysse of the Sleep Neuroimaging Research Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine outfitted 24 people --  12 with insomnia, and 12 without -- with soft plastic caps.  The caps had tubes for circulating water at neutral, moderate or maximum "cooling intensity.

Scientists have developed a “proof of concept” drug for stroke patients that helped afflicted mice recover the ability to walk normally. In laboratory experiments, the researchers also found biological evidence that the drug helped grow new neurons in the brain, according to a study published online Tuesday by the journal Stroke. An estimated 795,000 Americans have a stroke each year, according to the National Stroke Assn. in Centennial, Colo.  They occur when the brain is suddenly deprived of oxygen and nutrients, either by a blockage in a vessel (which causes an ischemic stroke)

A yearlong study of boxers' and mixed martial-arts fighters' brain activity has found those who fight for more than six years begin to experience damage and those who fight longer than 12 years expose themselves to an even greater decline each time they return to the ring. "What we've found suggests changes and damage in the brain happens years before symptoms emerge," said Dr. Charles Bernick, author of the study. "It's what we see in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients. " Bernick has supervised MRIs and computerized and cognitive tests of an estimated 170 fighters at the Cleveland Clinic's Las Vegas center in the past year.