Word: rheostats
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Moments after sitting down to read your cover story on headaches [HEALTH, Oct. 7], I felt a familiar twinge in my head. I put down the magazine, had a shot of nasal spray and sat back to wait. Within minutes, an unseen hand twisted the dial on the rheostat in my head. Forty-five minutes later, the pain retreated as quickly as it had arrived, leaving me limp and exhausted. For cluster-headache sufferers like me, such episodes have a huge impact on our daily lives. No one seems to know where cluster headaches come from, why we get them...
...rare strain of hugely obese mice, the investigators found that all of them shared a defect in a gene that coded for a previously unknown hormone released by body fat. When a normal animal gains too much weight, the hormone signals the brain to turn down the appetite rheostat. When fat stores drop, the hormone is shut off, causing appetite to rebound. In the gene-damaged mice, there was no leptin at all, causing them to eat and eat without satiation. "We called the hormone leptin," Friedman says, "after the Greek word leptos, for thin...
...town. (Carl and I have known each other since we were kid reporters together for the Washington Star, a paper now deceased). Nora Ephron, the bright, funny writer from New York, has just moved in with Carl, and is going nervously nuts, for some reason, trying to install a rheostat for the lights. The galley proofs of a book called "All the President's Men" have just arrived from the publisher. Carl, Nora and I stay up all night reading them, Carl passing sheets to Nora and she passing them along to me. I go to sleep...
This means gene therapy cannot now be used to treat, for example, diabetics. If they were provided with a normal insulin gene that was always turned on, their insulin level would soon be dangerously high. "But the mechanism we have in mind," Wilson says, "will be like a genetic rheostat. The gene will not work until you take a pill, and the more pills you take, the more the gene will be expressed--and if you want to cut off the supply, you simply stop taking the pill...
...masseuse will encourage you to buy certain herbs. Before you know it, you've suspended disbelief and are having your foot rubbed by a reflexologist -- a practitioner of a therapy, popular among the Amish, that maintains that your body's control panels are your feet. (The liver's special rheostat is in the middle of the right foot; the gallbladder's is nearby...