Most dieters regain their lost weight. Scientists say the newly discovered appetite-stimulating hormone ghrelin is what makes this happen.
Jamie Cohen writes in abcnews.com that the hormone, which is secreted in the stomach, sends messages to the brain that fluctuate throughout the day, depending on how full the stomach is. Ghrelin produces hunger by rising shortly before meals and dropping soon after.
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Every 45 minutes a gigawatt pulse of x-rays courses through the solar system. “The pulses are coming from the north pole of Jupiter,” says Randy Gladstone, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and leader of the team that made the discovery using NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory.
“We weren’t surprised to find x-rays coming from Jupiter,” he says. What did surprise him is what Chandra revealed for the first time: the location of the beacon, which is surprisingly close the planet’s pole, and the regular way it pulses.
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The High Plains in southeastern Colorado were the heart of the 1930s Dust Bowl, and conditions today are as dry as they were 70 years ago. John Stulp, a wheat farmer, says, “We had to come out here with a chisel and chisel up these dirt clods, bring them up on the surface to keep the topsoil from blowing around.” Stulp says his farm hasn’t received any measurable rain in nearly a year and he’s already lost his winter wheat crop.
In the nearby Arkansas River Valley, corn farmer Bob Wilger has the same problem?no water. The Amity Canal, built in 1860, usually carries runoff from melted mountain snow, but this year it has delivered only one “run.” “I’m not sure how we’ll get through it all, ” Wilger says. “We’ll find a way, but I don’t know how it will all come about.” read more
A minimum of three million people would be killed and 1.5 million seriously injured if even a “limited” nuclear war broke out between India and Pakistan, a new study warns. The estimates are made up of the immediate casualty list from the blast, and deaths from fire and radiation if only a tenth of both countries’ nuclear weapons were exploded above 10 of their largest cities. It does not take account of the additional suffering that would result from the loss of homes, hospitals, water and energy supplies, or the cancer that would develop in the future.
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