EUREKA!

EUREKA!

[NEW FINDINGS AND RESEARCH]

Craving Catalyst?

New neuromarker identified.

Using magnetic resonance imaging of brain activation patterns in human study subjects, neuroscience prof Tor Wager and colleagues at Yale and the French National Centre for Scientific Research identified a neuromarker that predicts the intensity of drug and food cravings. Their discovery, published in Nature Neuroscience, could be an important step toward understanding addiction as a brain disorder and improving methods for diagnosis and treatment. Craving helps drive overeating and substance abuse, which in turn contribute to the leading preventable causes of disease and death. Craving also is linked to compulsive gambling and other problematic behaviors.

Seeds of Invention

Rice grains provide clues.

Anthropology prof Jiajing Wang’s research on sharp-edged stone tools discovered in southern China provides the earliest evidence of humans harvesting rice—an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. Her analysis notes that wild rice naturally sheds its seeds, which shatter on the ground and grow on their own. The use of tools to harvest rice indicates that people in the Lower Yangtze region also valued varieties of rice that did not shed their seeds as they matured. Harvesting seeds with tools led to the domestication of those rice plants, as they became dependent on humans for propagation and cultivation.

Nancy Schoeffler