Your bones may know when you’re getting fat

I often harp about the fact that your body wants to stay the same weight. You lose weight; you gain it back. Just look around you. People look about the same year after year. It’s called homeostasis—physiological stability. Lots of mechanisms are at play here. For example, our fat cells release the hormone leptin into our bloodstreams. It tells our brains we've had enough to eat. Conversely, when leptin levels drop, our appetites return--it's a system to keep us from starving. Now, some scientists think they may have discovered another source of weight stability: our bones.

To see if added weight triggered weight loss, scientists implanted tiny capsules into mice abdomens. Some of the capsules contained weights and some were empty. Within two days, the animals that harbored the weighted capsules were eating less, and, after two weeks, had lost almost as much weight as the capsules contained. After removing the weighted capsules, the mice started eating more and regained the lost weight. The scientists repeated the experiments with mice that had been bred to produce very little leptin, yet the results were the same.

In trying to determine what caused this phenomenon, the scientists started looking at bones, which can sense the stress of added weight (including weight-bearing exercise). To handle that extra pressure, bones start adding new bone cells, a process that's triggered by cells called osteocytes. Now it looks like those osteocytes may also be sensing changes in body mass and, in response, sending biochemical messages that affect changes to appetite. To test this, the scientists bred mice with unnaturally low levels of osteocytes and implanted the weight capsules into this group. This time, the animals did not drop the added weight. Apparently, without osteocytes, their bodies did not realize they’d become heavier.

Okay. So what this says to me is that we could strap on some weights to trick our bones into thinking we’d become heavier. Our osteocytes would leap into action and curb our appetites. You first.

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Paranormal people

I am sensible person and was a science major in college as well as grad school. But I do believe that some people, such as CharlieGoldsmith the healer (and cats, apparently), have special abilities. The U.S. government agrees. Beginning in the 70s and continuing for a couple of decades, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies studied and documented the paranormal abilities a bunch of people. Reports of these studies have only recently been declassified. In one 1975 report by the CIA, the authors conclude: “A large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon.” The history of the government’s programs in this realm is documented in an excellent book called Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, by Annie Jacobsen.

One of the phenomena of interest to the government was the ability by some people to “see” things far away—what they called traveling clairvoyance or remote viewing. To test this ability, the agency scientists would give map coordinates to the test subject who would describe what he or she visualized at that location. Some people were remarkably accurate, but their visualizations weren’t particularly helpful. For example, in one famous case, the remote viewer person could visualize all the elements of the location where a fugitive was hiding but could not say precisely where that location was. By the time the authorities figured it out, the fugitive had left.

Among the people the government tested was Uri Geller, he of the spoon bending. In one test at the Stanford Research Institute a scientist put a die (as in dice) in a sealed metal box. The scientist would shake the box, then put it in front of Geller. Without touching it, Geller would declare which number was uppermost. They repeated the test eight times and Geller was correct every time. The probability that this could have occurred by chance is about one in a million. The scientists performed many more tests on Geller, all of which he handled perfectly.

The author of the book mentioned above spent several days in Tel Aviv with Geller (now in his 70s). Everywhere they went, people would ask him to bend spoons and he’d always comply. (In case you didn’t know, he does this with his mind.) On one day, they visit Benjamin Netanyahu at his home. As they sit in the courtyard, the old family dog, who has a terrible limp, sits down at Uri’s feet. The dog gets up to chase a bird and displays no limp. Netanyahu’s wife says, ‘Uri, you healed Kaya.” Geller replies, “I’m not a healer, but she does look better.”

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The cat who predicts death

You may have heard about Oscar, a cat who could predict when a terminally ill patient was about to die. The cat’s abilities were trustworthy enough to merit notice in The New England Journal of Medicine (2007). 

Oscar had been adopted by the medical staff at a nursing home in Rhode Island. Most of time he wasn’t particularly friendly. He would spend his days hiding in someone’s office. But when someone was on the brink of death, out he would come. He would sniff the air, crane his neck, and curl up next to the unlucky patient. Over several years, the cat had done this next to more than 50 patients, every one of whom died soon thereafter.

Nobody knows how Oscar does this, but the author of the journal article wrote, “No one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays a while.” The staff is confident enough about Oscar’s abilities that they notify the families of the selected patient to come for a last visit.

Here’s how one doctor describes one instance of Oscar’s behavior: “Ralph Reynolds was dying, and we were trying to do everything that we could to make him as comfortable as possible. We believed that he was close to death and one of the aides put Oscar on the bed and announced to us that if the patient were dying, Oscar should be present. Oscar looked at all of us as if we were mad and ran out of the room. Ralph hung on for another 36 hours. But, sure enough, just four hours before he finally passed away, we found Oscar, pacing up and down outside his closed door. When we opened the door, he dashed straight for the bed and leapt up next to Ralph. He curled up there and refused to budge. A few hours later, Ralph was gone. Oscar didn't leave his side until the funeral director came.” 

And a family member reported: “During the last week, when my mother had fallen into unconsciousness, Oscar would come into the room, look around or jump on to the bed for a moment and then leave. However, on the night my mother died, I went to her room and saw Oscar lying on her bed. Two hours later, my mother took her last breath. Oscar never moved until she died. Then, he got up casually, as if nothing had happened, and left the room.”

As far as I know, Oscar is still on duty. I don't know if our cat can do this. It would be hard to tell because she sleeps on me anyway. I guess I'll just have to be surprised.

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Pain: It’s complicated

Pharmaceutical companies are knocking themselves out trying to find new pain relievers. So far, they aren’t having much luck. Pain is complicated and not fully understood. Bear in mind that pain is a crucial survival mechanism. It keeps us from harming ourselves. Case in point: word got out to pain researchers that a boy from Pakistan was entertaining tourists by sticking knives through his arms and walking across burning coals. He could do this because of a genetic abnormality called congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). That is, his pain-sensing neurons were ineffective. Before the researchers could study him, he’d jumped off a building and died. He might have felt no pain, but he was not immune to death.

At the opposite end of the pain spectrum is the “man on fire” syndrome: searing, excruciating, pain in response to mild warmth—as mild as walking into a 68-degree room. In this case, the pain-sensing neurons are hyperactive. In both these extreme cases—hyperactivity and insensitivity—the same gene is implicated. Both cases also are variations of the ordinary pain we all experience when we’re injured or sick: the pain is caused by the activation of peripheral neurons that send their pain signals up our spinal cords and into our brains. This type of pain falls into the acute category.

The other category is persistent pain, characterized by chronic burning, deep aching, and electric shock-like sensations. Its mechanism is completely different from acute pain and is caused by cells in the brain called glia, which function as a kind of glue to hold neurons in place, but which also, as scientists have recently learned, supply them with nutrients and oxygen, insulate one neuron from another, and destroy pathogens. Unfortunately, they also promote an exaggerated pain response by enhancing neuronal firing when stimulated by a variety of triggers, such as a protein sent from sensory neurons following an injury. They’re also triggered by immune cells sent to the brain by the central nervous system’s lymphatic system.

Researchers are now recognizing that glial cells are probably implicated in inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. They’ve also discovered that women are more prone to persistent pain than men, but they haven’t figured out why. What’s more, opioid drugs are not useful—and can be harmful—in persistent pain.

As my source, The Scientist online magazine says, “…persistent pain is a very complex, multicellular disease state.” So far, there’s not much on the horizon in the way of help.

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