A Cocaine Vaccine?

I am at SciAm Blogs today, talking about a recent paper on the cocaine vaccine. Does it work? And how? What does it do? Head over and check it out.

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Alcoholism and Social Exclusion

Sci DID post yesterday, hurricane or no hurricane (The Sci-household is intact and unscathed). I was at SciAm, talking about an fMRI study looking at alcoholism and social exclusion. While alcoholics and controls behaviorally report similar social exclusion, their brains do very different things. A study like this might be helpful to evaluate whether therapeutic […]

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Overeating and Obesity: Should we really call it food addiction?

Nature Reviews Neuroscience came out with a perspectives article today on overeating and obesity, and the evidence behind the food addiction model that is gaining popularity. It’s an issue that I myself have given a lot of thought to: is there REALLY such a thing as food addiction that’s just like heroin addiction or cocaine […]

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Movies and The Smoking Brain

Sci saw this paper come out last week, it made it big in the mainstream media, and a couple of blogs covered it. Whenever something like this comes up in the news, I just have to get the paper myself and make sure whether it’s all really true. And now I have it, so here […]

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Critiquing LaPlant et al, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience, Part 1. Let’s get this going.

So Sci was sitting in a seminar the other day. We were mentioning this paper, some problems we had with it, some of the things we LIKED about it, and various approaches, etc, in our usual sciencey fashion. As the discussion got intense (in a good way), one of the PIs there leaned over and […]

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