Half of the world's human population is infected with Toxoplasma, parasites in the body—and the brain. Remember that.
Toxoplasma gondii is a common parasite found in the guts of cats; it sheds eggs that are picked up by rats and other animals that are eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts in the bodies of the intermediate rat hosts, including in the brain...
Oxford scientists discovered that the minds of the infected rats have been subtly altered. In a series of experiments, they demonstrated that healthy rats will prudently avoid areas that have been doused with cat urine. In fact, when scientists test anti-anxiety drugs on rats, they use a whiff of cat urine to induce neurochemical panic.
However, it turns out that Toxoplasma-ridden rats show no such reaction. In fact, some of the infected rats actually seek out the cat urine-marked areas again and again. The parasite alters the mind (and thus the behavior) of the rat for its own benefit.
If the parasite can alter rat behavior, does it have any effect on humans?
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey (Associate Director for Laboratory Research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute) noticed links between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia in human beings, approximately three billion of whom are infected with T. gondii:
* Toxoplasma infection is associated with damage to astrocytes, glial cells which surround and support neurons. Schizophrenia is also associated with damage to astrocytes.
* Pregnant women with high levels of antibodies to Toxoplasma are more likely to give birth to children who will develop schizophrenia.
* Human cells raised in petri dishes, and infected with Toxoplasma, will respond to drugs like haloperidol; the growth of the parasite stops. Haloperidol is an antipsychotic, used to treat schizophrenia.
Dr. Torrey got together with the Oxford scientists, to see if anything could be done about those parasite-controlled rats that were driven to hang around cat urine-soaked corners (waiting for cats). According to a recent press release, haloperidol restores the rat's healthy fear of cat urine. In fact, antipsychotic drugs were as effective as pyrimethamine, a drug that specifically eliminates Toxoplasma.
In other news, Spyware Barely Touches Firefox -
Internet Explorer users can be as much as 21 times more likely to end up with a spyware-infected PC than people who go online with Mozilla's Firefox browser, academic researchers from Microsoft's backyard said in a recently published paper.
"We can't say whether Firefox is a safer browser or not," said Henry Levy, one of the two University of Washington professors who, along with a pair of graduate students, created Web crawlers to scour the Internet for spyware in several 2005 forays. "But we can say that users will have a safer experience [surfing] with Firefox."
and Microsoft Anti-Spyware Deleting Norton Anti-Virus -
Microsoft's Anti-Spyware program is causing troubles for people who also use Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus software; apparently, a recent update to Microsoft's anti-spyware application flags Norton as a password-stealing program and prompts users to remove it.
According to several different support threads over at Microsoft's user groups forum, the latest definitions file from Microsoft "(version 5805, 5807) detects Symantec Antivirus files as PWS.Bancos.A (Password Stealer)."
When Microsoft Anti-Spyware users remove the flagged Norton file as prompted, Symantec's product gets corrupted and no longer protects the user's machine. The Norton user then has to go through the Windows registry and delete multiple entries (registry editing is always a dicey affair that can quickly hose a system if the user doesn't know what he or she is doing) so that the program can be completely removed and re-installed.
Mozilla 2 Microsoft 0...
And more Wikipedia editing -
In the wacky, sometimes wickedly funny, world of Wikipedia, the internet's free encyclopedia, Tony Blair has been given the new middle names of Whoop-de Doo.
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, makes surprise visits to Ilford instead of Iraq and Robbie Williams earns his millions eating pet hamsters. Oh, and David Beckham was a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18th century...
Last week the 19-page entry for the prime minister was being changed as many as 25 times a day. He was briefly accused of having posters of Adolf Hitler on his bedroom wall as a teenager and of starting a “false” war against Saddam Hussein...
One saboteur, codenamed Thruston, changes the same sentence in Blair's entry on an almost daily basis to accuse him of setting out to “destroy” civil service neutrality.
John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, has his own antagonist who regularly insults him with such epithets as “fat bonehead”. The caption under a photograph of Prescott was changed to read Rhubarb Pie...
Another hacker regularly removes whole sections of Gordon Brown’s biography and replaces it with one word: “tax”...
Enemies of Sienna Miller, the actress whose on-off affair with Jude Law has captured tabloid headlines, dispute her height and claim that she has modelled nude. An entry for Robbie Williams, the singer, last week read “. . . makes his money by eating domestic pets in pubs in and around Stoke”.
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