Women who love to drink beer are at higher risk of developing psoriasis, a chronic skin disease, according to a study.

Experts said women who drank five or more beers a week, were at two-fold risk of developing skin disease. They believe the starchy grains in beer may account for the problem.

Psoriasis is a chronic skin disease characterised by itchy, red scaly patches that most commonly appear on knees, elbows and scalp but can show up anywhere, including the face.

'Non-light beer was the only alcoholic beverage that increased the risk of psoriasis, suggesting that certain non-alcoholic components of beer, which are not found in wine or liquor, may play an important role in new-onset psoriasis,' dailymail.co.uk quoted the researchers as saying.

'One of these components may be the starch source used in making beer. Beer is one of the few non-distilled alcoholic beverages that use a starch source for fermentation, which is commonly barley,' the researchers added.

The scientists studied the data from almost 83,000 women aged 27 to 44, who participated in the 1991 Nurses' Health Study II, a major US investigation looking at health risk factors in women. A total of 1,150 of the women developed psoriasis in 2005, of which 1,069 were used in the analysis.

Psoriasis risk was 72 percent greater among women who consumed an average of 2.3 or more alcoholic drinks per week.

When drinks were assessed by type, the researchers found a strong association between beer and the skin disease.

The study appeared in journal Archives of Dermatology.

Scientists from Newcastle University in the UK have demonstrated that a bacterium commonly found in soil can sniff and react to ammonia in the air.

It was previously thought that this "olfaction" was limited to more complex forms of life known as eukaryotes.

The finding, published in Biotechnology Journal, means that bacteria have four of the five senses that humans enjoy.

The discovery also has implications in the understanding and control of biofilms - the chemical coatings that bacteria can form on, for example, medical implants.

Bacteria have already demonstrated the ability to react to light, in analogy to sight, and to change the genes that they express when confronted with certain materials, in analogy to touch.
Sniff test

However, there is a distinction between an organism reacting to a chemical that it encounters directly (in analogy to the sense of taste) and a reaction to a chemical that is floating around in the air, says Reindert Nijland, lead author of the study.

"The difference is both in the mechanism that does the sensing, as well as in the compounds that are sensed," Dr Nijland, now at University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands, told BBC News.

"The compounds detected by olfactory organs are generally much more volatile than things you can taste like 'sweet' or 'salt', and therefore can provide information about things that can be much further away; you can smell a barbecue from a few blocks away whereas you have to physically touch and eat the steak to be able to actually taste it."
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If very simple organisms such as bacteria are capable of this that would imply that this ability evolved much earlier than expected"

End Quote Reindert Nijland University Medical Centre Utrecht

Bacteria are known to use their "senses" to detect chemicals that indicate the presence of other bacteria or competitors for food.

In some cases, they can produce a slimy material that causes them to stick together in what is known as a biofilm. Such biofilms can cause complications in cases ranging from implants to oil pipelines, but a familiar example is the plaque that forms on teeth.

Dr Nijland and Grant Burgess put a number of separate cultures of a bacterium called B. licheniformis in cylinders containing different "growth media" to cause them to multiply. Some were in a rich broth of food that allowed the bacteria to multiply quickly, releasing ammonia gas in the process, while others were in a medium that allowed the growth of biofilms - which can be initiated if the bacteria are in contact with ammonia.

They were surprised to find that some of the isolated bacteria cultures began to form biofilms spontaneously, with those physically closest to the "well-fed" bacteria showing the highest biofilm production.

The only explanation is that the bacteria sensed the presence of ammonia directly from the air above the cultures.
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Dr Nijland explained that the biofilm provides both a barrier and a means of transportation for the bacteria that have "smelled" nearby ammonia.

"It's tempting to speculate that [ammonia] provides the bacteria with information of a nearby nutrient source, since ammonia generally is a waste product of bacteria growing on a rich nutrient source," he said.

"The bacteria sense this, organise themselves in a biofilm which will prepare them for both competition with other species already feeding on the nutrient source, and enables swarming - migration via the matrix they have secreted to form the biofilm."

The surprise find has implications in our understanding of the difference between prokaryotes like bacteria, which have no neatly packaged parts within their cells, and the more advanced eukaryotes that include everything from yeast to humans.

"If very simple organisms such as bacteria are capable of this that would imply that this ability evolved much earlier than expected," said Dr Nijland.

"Understanding this phenomenon... will help us to develop methods to potentially interfere with this process and potentially develop new ways of preventing biofilm-related bacterial infections."

Childhood anxiety is a condition supposedly noted in children who remain socially unconnected. Apparently researchers from the UW-Madison pinpoint elevated brain activity in the amygdala and anterior hippocampus to help decide new strategies for early detection and treatment of at-risk children. Scientists assume children having higher activity in these brain regions to develop anxiety and depression.

In a prior investigation, it was concluded that anxious young monkeys are similar to children who are temperamentally anxious. In the course of the present research, experts assayed the extent of genetic and environmental factors to promote activity in the anxiety-related brain regions, making children accessible. Claimed to be the largest imaging research of non-human primates, scientists scanned the brains of 238 young rhesus monkeys. It was mentioned that all the study subjects belonged to the same extended family.

"Children with anxious temperaments suffer from extreme shyness, persistent worry, and increased bodily responses to stress. It has long been known that these children are at increased risk of developing anxiety, depression and associated substance abuse disorders," affirmed Dr. Ned H. Kalin, chair of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, who led the research.

During the investigations, monkeys were subjected to a positron emission tomography (PET) scan. This scan is apparently employed in humans to evaluate the regional brain function by calculating the brain's use of glucose. Researchers found young rhesus monkeys from a large related family to have a clear pattern of inherited anxious temperament. Those monkeys who were registered with anxious temperaments revealed higher activity in the central nucleus of the amygdala and the anterior hippocampus.

While analyzing, the scientists were supposedly able to determine an individual's degree of anxious temperament by the brain activity. Activity in the amygdala and hippocampus seemed to be affected by genes and environmental factors in different ways. The scientists were seemingly provided with a brain-based understanding of the way nature and nurture can interact for ascertaining an individual's ability to acquire common psychiatric disorders.

Kalin explained, "We believe that young children who have higher activity in these brain regions are more likely to develop anxiety and depression as adolescents and adults, and are also more likely to develop drug and alcohol problems in an attempt to treat their distress."

It was uncovered that activity in the anterior hippocampus is more heritable as compared to the amygdale. The findings may lead to new ways of identifying anxiety in children. Markers of familial risk for anxiety are seemingly found by understanding modifications in specific genes promoting hippocampal function. It was concluded that alteration in the environment can probably avoid children from developing anxiety.

The research is published in the August 12 edition of the journal Nature.

THE Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Friday slammed the report that claimed a drug-resistant superbug was traced back to India, terming it as "alarmist".

Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Ghulam Nabi Azad said it was unfair to say that the so-called "superbug NDM-1" was found only in India and Pakistan.

"It's universal and is found in the intestines of humans and animals. It's wrong to say that it's found only in India and Pakistan. They say it's found in patients who visit India and Pakistan. It was nowhere mentioned if the bacteria were there even before those persons visited India," he told reporters outside Parliament.

The Health Ministry, which was ascertaining the motives behind the study, also took strong exception to the last sentence of the report. "Concluding sentence presents a frightening picture which is not supported by any scientific data," said an official.

Minister of State for Health Dinesh Trivedi strongly objected to the naming of the "superbug" after New Delhi. "It's like HIV. As far as my information is, the first patient of HIV was in America. Can we say it originated in America? So, instead of HIV, can we say 'America NMD' or something like that?" he wondered aloud.

"Karthikeyan Kumaraswamy, one of the co-authors, has denied and disassociated himself from the report. We have to find if there's some ulterior motive of some pharmaceutical industry," he told reporters.

Karthikeyan also dismissed as hypothetical this conclusion and said the alarmist interpretations were made without his knowledge. He said there was nothing to fear about the bacteria. "Without my knowledge some of the interpretations were written in the report," said the 32-year-old research scholar of AL Mudaliar Post-Graduate Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Madras.Karthikeyan co-authored with Timothy Walsh the research article published in the Lancet.

MUMBAI: The BMC on Wednesday sent samples of various brands of an oil used to kill mosquito larvae to Haffkine Research Institute. The institute will check the product's efficacy.

The test reports are expected by Thursday. BMC's chief insecticide officer Dr Arun Bamne said that the institute will check the oil's potency. "After we get the test reports, we will procure the brand that is found to be the most effective in controlling larvae,'' he said.

Dr Ramaiya Mira, head of the Zoonosis department, Haffkine Research Institute, said that larvae and adult mosquitoes are collected and studied in small boxes named `colonies'. "Mosquito colonies to study efficacy of repellents have been used for several decades. It is an established method of testing compounds in this institute,'' she added.

A source from the institute said that the Defence Research and Development Organisation has not commissioned any study recently as reported in the media. It was actually done in 2008-09, the source added.