clocks 2.clo.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Try this: For an entire day, forget about the clock. Eat when you’re hungry and sleep when you’re tired. What do you think will happen?

You may be surprised to find that your day is much like most other days. You’ll probably get hungry when you normally eat and tired when you normally sleep. Even though you don’t know what time it is, your body does. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.sampa.com/louis-j-sheehan-esquire/blog

These patterns of daily life are called circadian rhythms, and they are more than just habits. Inside our bodies are several clocklike systems that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle. Throughout the day and night, our internal clocks direct changes in temperature, body chemicals, hunger, sleepiness and more.

Everyone’s rhythms are unique, which is why you might like to stay up late while your sister always wants to go to bed early. But overall, everyone is programmed to feel tired at night and alert during the day. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.sampa.com/louis-j-sheehan-esquire/blog

Scientists have known for a long time that the light of day and the dark of night play important roles in setting our internal clocks. Now, new discoveries are giving scientists insights into how these clocks work.

Learning about our body clocks may help scientists understand why problems arise when we act out of step with our circadian rhythms. For example, traveling across time zones can make people wake up in the middle of the night. Regularly staying up late can make kids do worse on tests and quizzes. And working shifts at night leads to higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity.

“There is a growing sense that when we eat and when we sleep are important parts of how healthy we are,” says Steven Shea, Director of the Sleep Disorders Research Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Scientists still aren’t sure why the timing of sleep matters so much, Shea says. But research findings suggest that our circadian rhythms are more important than we give them credit for.

“During the night, we are prepared to sleep,” Shea says. “During the day, we are prepared to eat and move around. If you reverse what you are doing, everything is out of phase. That can have adverse consequences.”

Time warp

One way to learn about how our body clocks tick is to mess them up and see what happens. That’s what neuroscientist Frank Scheer and his colleagues did in a recent study.

The researchers brought 10 people to their lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The lab was sort of like a timeless chamber. Rooms were dimly lit. There were no windows and no clocks. It was impossible to know what time it was.

“If you knew it was 4 a.m., you’d think, ‘I must be really tired,’ ” says Scheer, who also works with Shea at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Removing time cues eliminated these powers of suggestion.

Participants were allowed to sleep only when the scientists said it was OK. The study subjects ate only at designated mealtimes. They were given a precisely calculated number of calories, designed to meet their needs. And they had to finish everything on their plates.

The experiment lasted for 10 days. Participants didn’t know the design of the experiment. In particular, they didn’t know that they were living a 28-hour day instead of the usual 24. With that unusual schedule, they ended up eating and sleeping at all different times of day — and different times of the body clock — over the course of the study.

The most interesting result of the study, Scheer says, involved a hormone called leptin. Hormones are the body’s messenger molecules. Leptin, in particular, sends a fullness message to the brain. As you eat, leptin levels rise until you feel like you’ve eaten enough.

When people in the study slept during the day and ate at night, however, leptin levels dropped. That suggests that people who follow unusual schedules are less likely to feel full after eating.

If given unlimited amounts of food, these people would probably eat more and crave more junk food, the researchers predict. As a result, they could gain weight and develop weight-related health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease. Other studies support that prediction.

Kids don’t often work night shifts. “But some may experience staying up late at night,” Scheer says. That’s OK on special occasions.

But staying up night after night, these studies suggest, could make kids extra hungry and more likely to gain weight. And regularly sleeping too little, Scheer says, may be one cause of the recent surge in childhood obesity.

Eat to sleep

Scheer’s work suggests that our sleeping schedules affect our eating habits. But do our eating schedules influence our sleeping habits?

New research suggests that it works both ways, says Clifford Saper. He’s a neurologist, or a scientist who studies the brain, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

In one recent study, Saper and colleagues investigated a different type of body clock in mice. Like people, mice have more than one internal clock. In the brain, there is the master clock that responds to light and helps determine when we get tired. There are a bunch of minor clocks, too, which reside in the gut, blood vessels and other parts of the body.

The master clock works like “the conductor of a symphony,” Saper says. It’s like the clock at school that determines when classes end and when lunch begins. Everyone sets their watches to this clock. In the body, the secondary clocks follow the lead of the master pacemaker.

Sometimes, however, the master clock gives up control. One example is when mice don’t eat for a long time. If a food source appears when a hungry mouse is normally sleeping, and the mouse happens to wake up in time to find it, this minor food clock wakes the mouse up a couple of hours before that time, night after night.

This ability to change their schedules instantly helps mice survive. If the animals are starving, the food clock ensures that they are awake when food is available, even if it’s an odd time to be up and an odd time to eat. It doesn’t matter whether it’s dark or light outside.

“The amazing thing is that the [food] clock … adjusts to whatever time it finds the food immediately,” Saper says. “It could make a 12-hour time shift overnight.”

The master clock, on the other hand, can only adjust slowly to changes in light.

Saper wanted to know more about this food clock. In his study, he turned off all the internal clocks in a group of mice. Then, he turned the clocks back on, one by one.

His results pinpointed the food clock to a certain part of the mouse’s brain. That’s interesting because the master clock resides in a different part of the brain. Figuring out where the food clock is will help scientists better understand how it works.

Similar studies haven’t been done in people, but human brains are wired much like mouse brains, Saper says. He suspects that people have a food clock, too. If so, his work might eventually help night shift workers learn to reset their circadian rhythms without health problems.

The mouse study might also offer help for people who suffer from jet lag when traveling. Jet lag is the exhaustion and disorientation that comes with crossing many time zones.

The master clock requires a day for every time zone crossed to adjust to the new time. But Saper’s work suggests that people could speed up this process by jump-starting their food clocks. To do this, travelers would need to fast for at least 16 hours before eating breakfast at the normal time they would in their new destinations.

“You could potentially turn on the food clock and adjust to a new time zone very rapidly,” Saper says. For now, he adds, “It’s all speculation.”



Power words:

Circadian rhythm: A daily cycle of biological activity of approximately 24 hours. It is driven by an internal clock and influenced by regular variations in the environment, such as the alternation of night and day.

Hormone: A chemical compound that is produced in a gland and then carried to another part of the body by the blood. Hormones control many important body activities, such as growth. Hormones act by causing and adjusting chemical reactions in the body.

Sleep: A natural state of rest that occurs at regular times. During sleep, growth is thought to take place, and energy is conserved and stored away. Dreams take place during a stage of sleep called REM. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

muted 4.mut.99876 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . The past decade has witnessed a wave of new medications to treat schizophrenia, a debilitating mental disorder that afflicts 1 in 100 people. Armed with results from their own studies, various pharmaceutical companies tout the new drugs, the so-called atypical antipsychotics, as superior to traditional antipsychotic drugs in the battle against schizophrenia.http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/

However, it may be time to lower expectations for atypical antipsychotics. A new investigation, funded largely by the federal government, finds that treatment with any of three of these medications diminishes chronic schizophrenia symptoms only slightly more than a traditional antipsychotic drug does.

�Atypical antipsychotics work better than standard medications, but their advantage is relatively modest, at least for chronic schizophrenia,� says study coauthor Jeffrey A. Lieberman, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although atypical antipsychotics often induce a weight gain of 5 to 12 pounds, Lieberman adds, they�re much less likely than traditional antipsychotics to cause severe movement disorders.http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/

The new investigation, led by psychiatrist Jan Volavka of the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, N.Y., sharpens an ongoing debate among physicians about whether to prescribe atypical antipsychotics as a primary schizophrenia treatment. These drugs cost at least 10 times as much as traditional antipsychotic medications, such as haloperidol.

Volavka and his coworkers describe their findings in the February American Journal of Psychiatry.

The scientists recruited 157 patients, most around age 40, from state psychiatric hospitals in North Carolina and New York. Participants had suffered from schizophrenia for up to several decades and had previously taken only traditional antipsychotics, which had not yielded any improvement. Over a 14-week trial, patients were randomly assigned to receive one of three atypical antipsychotics�clozapine, olanzapine, or risperidone�or haloperidol.

The three atypical drugs, but not haloperidol, yielded �statistically significant but clinically modest� improvements in schizophrenia symptoms, the researchers say. These symptoms included delusions, hallucinations, apathy, and a lack of verbal and emotional expression. Clozapine and olanzapine worked slightly better than risperidone did.

The new study was funded mainly by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md., with about 18 percent of the project�s cost assumed by olanzapine�s manufacturer. Previous trials subsidized by pharmaceutical firms have focused on the particular atypical antipsychotic drug made by the funder.

The modest treatment advantage reported by Volavka�s group for atypical antipsychotics �clearly underscores the need for identification of more effective [antipsychotic] treatments,� remarks psychiatrist David A. Lewis of the University of Pittsburgh in an editorial published with the new study.

Researchers need trials longer than the new study to clarify the relative merits of different atypical antipsychotic drugs, especially as frontline treatments for schizophrenia, holds psychiatrist John M. Kane of Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y.

Such a project is now under way. Researchers in 38 states, led by Lieberman, plan to study 1,600 people with schizophrenia treated for up to 1 year with one of five atypical antipsychotics or a traditional medication. Participants in this NIMH-funded study will also receive standard forms of supportive psychotherapy and education (SN: 4/28/01, p. 268: http://www.sciencenews.org/20010428/bob12.asp). Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .

nest grass 003.gra.2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Out-of-control grasses may lure song sparrows near San Francisco into bad real estate deals.

Dense stands of an invasive kind of cordgrass spreading through marshes may look like great new territory for Alameda song sparrows to nest. But the lush neighborhoods bring an extra risk of nest-drowning floods, says Cully Nordby of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The birds’ already slim chance of successfully raising chicks drop from 15 percent to about 10 for nests in alien cordgrass, Nordby says.

California has listed this subspecies of song sparrow, Melospiza melodia pusillula, as a species of special concern. Specialized for life along the edges of tidal marshes, the Alameda song sparrow lives only around San Francisco’s South Bay.

GRASSY INVASIONThickets of Spartina cordgrass are taking over tidal marshes around San Francisco as an Atlantic cordgrass invades the West Coast and hybridizes to form a super-tough species. Dense stands trick birds into unwise nesting.C. Nordby

Song sparrows choosing the new cordgrass suburbs lying lower in the marshes than their traditional homes do lose fewer nests to predators. But any advantage on that front disappears as floods in cordgrass wipe out about three times as many nests as in shrubbery elsewhere, Nordby and her colleagues report in an upcoming Biological Invasions.

Flood-prone cordgrass could be a new kind of what biologists call ecological traps, Nordby says. These traps come from environmental changes that turn a species’ normal, healthful urges into really bad ideas.

The cordgrass Spartina alterniflora arrived from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts during the 1970s. Before it could overrun the Pacific species, the two hybridized, and the offspring turned out to be a super cordgrass that overgrows both parent species.

Alameda song sparrows need dense tangles of plants to support cup-shaped nests and hide them from crows, raccoons and other predators. And the novel form of cordgrass could satisfy an animal looking for cover, Nordby says. The hybrid Spartina can grow 2 meters tall, creating a solid thicket that scientists and predators alike must wriggle or thrash through.

Nordby and her colleagues monitored nests in the tidal marshes to compare the fates of birds in the usual habitats with those in the exotic cordgrass.

“One of the tricky parts of doing this research was trying not to just blaze trails right to the nests,” Nordby says. Yet the invasive cordgrass grows closer to the fringe of the marshes than Alameda song sparrows normally nest, and it floods easily. (The Pacific cordgrass species grew near the marsh margins too, but it straggled along in such a loose formation that the birds hardly ever moved in.)

Building a nest and starting a family takes at least a month, Nordby says, so a new home can look great at first. As a full moon approaches and the tides peak higher and breeding season progresses, a once-dry nest turns into a death trap. In 2003, for example, the highest tide of the month rose from 1.89 meters in March to 2.13 meters in July. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

“I’ve seen eggs floating,” Nordby says. If they manage to settle back down into the nest, parents can take up incubating them again. If the eggs wash overboard, though, they’re doomed. “Even a matter of half an inch can make a difference,” Nordby says.

The grass looks like a problem, says Martin Schlaepfer of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. He says, though, that he’d like to learn more about the preferences of the birds for the new cordgrass versus the familiar nesting sites. In the strictest definition, a trap lures animals away from the old grounds instead of just providing an imperfect habitat.http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

yale

It may be time for mental-health workers to pick up a new depression-fighting tool—the telephone. People taking antidepressant drugs for a bout of depression do particularly well, at least over a 6-month period, if they also take part in a program that includes telephone psychotherapy, a new study finds.

Evidence of telephone therapy's mood-enhancing effect raises the prospect of expanding the reach of depression treatment, says the investigation's director, psychiatrist Gregory E. Simon of Group Health Cooperative in Seattle. Many people suffering from depression don't take antidepressants—even if the drugs have been prescribed for them—and never receive psychotherapy of any kind. Feelings of discouragement when a medication doesn't work right away and the stigma associated with psychological treatment contribute to this problem, Simon holds.

"With this telephone program, we can help many depressed people who aren't reached by traditional in-person treatments," he says. Simon and his coworkers describe their results in the Aug. 25 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Between November 2000 and May 2002, the researchers recruited 600 adults who were beginning antidepressant treatment at medical clinics run by Group Health Cooperative, a prepaid health plan. Generally, primary care physicians had prescribed fluoxetine (Prozac) or related medications. The study excluded people who were already receiving in-person psychotherapy or planned to do so.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: typical primary care follow-ups; typical care plus at least three "care-management" telephone calls over 3 months from mental-health clinicians, who checked on medication use and provided feedback from a patient to his or her primary care physician; and typical care plus care management and eight sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy delivered by phone.

During the cognitive-behavioral therapy, the clinician and patient discussed ways to increase pleasant activities, reverse negative thoughts, and manage daily affairs. Each session lasted 30 to 40 minutes.

Six months after a person's treatment began, 80 percent of those who received telephone psychotherapy reported a marked decline in depression symptoms, compared with 66 percent of the care-management group and 55 percent of those who got only typical primary care follow-ups. Participants who received telephone psychotherapy reported the most satisfaction with their treatment.

Psychiatric interviews conducted by phone at that time also found that interviewer-detected signs of depression had diminished most sharply in the telephone-psychotherapy group. These results fit with evidence that cognitive-behavioral therapy delivered in person boosts the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs (SN: 8/21/04, p. 116: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040821/fob4.asp).http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com

Psychologist Alan E. Kazdin, director of Yale University's Child Conduct Clinic, regards Simon's project as part of a broad movement to make psychological treatments more easily available through sources such as the Internet and self-help manuals, as well as the telephone.http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com

"Telephone psychotherapy won't replace typical psychotherapy, but it will add to what clinicians can do," he says. "We can help more people if we have a diversified portfolio of treatments for mental disorders."http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com

Lorenzo http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

Lorenzo de' Medici (January 1, 1449 – 9 April 1492) was an Italian statesman and de facto[1] ruler of the Florentine Republic during the Italian Renaissance. Known as Lorenzo the Magnificent (Lorenzo il Magnifico) by contemporary Florentines, he was a diplomat, politician, and patron of scholars, artists, and poets. His life coincided with the high point of the early Italian Renaissance; his death marked the end of the Golden Age of Florence. The fragile peace he helped maintain between the various Italian states collapsed with his death; and two years later the French invasion of 1494 began and led to nearly 400 years of foreign occupation of the Italian peninsula.
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Technorati Profile

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Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Eckert 200003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 888333

Ernst Eckert
Born September 8, 1904(1904-09-08)[citation needed]
Prague, Austria-Hungary
Died July 8, 2004 (aged 99)
Saint Paul, Minnesota[1]
Residence West St. Paul
Nationality
United States (1950)[2]
Fields Heat transfer, Mass transfer[3]
Institutions 1938 Aeronautical Research Institute (Braunschweig)
1945 Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
1951 University of Minnesota (Regents Professor & professor emeritus)
Alma mater German Institute of Technology (1927)
(Ph.D. - 1931)
Doctoral students Regents Professor R. J. Goldstein
Known for Eckert number
Notable awards ASME Max Jakob medal (1961)
Fulbright Award (1962)[2]
Notes
married Josefine Binder (1931)
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Dr Ernst R. G. Eckert was a scientist who advanced the film cooling technique for aeronautical engines.[4] Eckert worked as a rocket and jet engine scientist at the Aeronautical Research Institute in Braunschweig, Germany, then via Operation Paperclip, began jet propulsion research in 1945 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In 1951, Eckert joined the University of Minnesota in the department of mechanical engineering. Eckert published more than 550 scientific papers and books.

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