The Associated Press is running a story covering the positive effects of positive patient expectations. Among the findings at various universities:

University of Michigan scientists injected the jaws of healthy young men with salt water to cause painful pressure, while PET scans measured the impact in their brains. During one scan, the men were told they were getting a pain reliever, actually a placebo.
Their brains immediately released more endorphins – chemicals that act as natural painkillers by blocking the transmission of pain signals between nerve cells – and the men felt better. To return to pre-placebo pain levels, scientists had to increase the salt-water pressure.
Italy’s [Dr. Fabrizio] Benedetti gave Parkinson’s patients a placebo and measured the electrical activity of individual nerve cells in a movement-controlling part of the brain. Those neurons quieted down, a decrease in firing of about 40 percent that correlated with a reduction in patients’ muscle rigidity – they moved more easily.
Likewise, Parkinson’s patients moved much better when they were told that doctors had turned on a pacemaker-like implant in their brains, which blocks tremors, than when it was turned on covertly.

The article repeatedly tries to specify that the placebo effects observed weren’t just psychological, but also physical. However, there is a physical electro-chemical embodiment of all psychological activity. The distinction disregards links between neural activity and it’s body-wide effects. However, all-in-all, it highlights the importance of patient perception on mediating the known effects of a drug or technology.

The surprising discovery of different oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 isotope ratios inside versus outside of cells can lead to new frontiers against cancer:

A scientific method that has been used to track the source of illegal drugs, explosives, counterfeit bills and biological warfare agents may have some new uses: detecting rapidly growing cancers and studying obesity and eating disorders…
The researchers found that up to 70 percent of the water inside rapidly growing bacterial cells was generated by metabolism, the process of converting food into energy and other necessities of life. That conclusion was based on their surprising discovery that water inside the bacterial cells (intracellular water) has a different oxygen-18-to-oxygen-16 ratio than water outside the cells (extracellular water).
If future research proves the same thing is true in mammalian cells, then the difference in isotopic makeup of water inside and outside of rapidly growing cells might be used to detect fast-growing cancer cells in the brain or other hard-to-biopsy areas of the body, or study the metabolism of obese people or people suffering anorexia or bulimia, says Hegg, an assistant professor chemistry…
The researchers grew E. coli bacteria at body temperature in flasks containing a nutrient-rich liquid culture medium. There were four sets of flasks, each holding a growth medium containing water with a different ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16.
After the bacteria grew for three hours, the contents of each flask were sucked through a filter, leaving a pasty “cake” of bacterial cells with the consistency of wet flour.
Water was extracted from the bacterial cakes by placing each cake in a test tube, freezing the cakes by putting the tubes in liquid nitrogen, using a vacuum to remove the air from each tube, then putting the tubes in boiling water. The water from each cell cake was boiled into steam, which was routed to another tube where the water condensed.
Before undergoing this process, half of the bacterial cakes were washed with water with four different ratios of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16. The washing process allowed researchers to calculate how much of the water extracted from the bacterial cakes came from outside and from inside the bacteria. Water samples were analyzed in a mass spectrometer, which detects the atomic weights of isotopes of oxygen within the water.
The result: The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 was different in water from inside and outside the bacteria. The extent of that difference allowed the scientists to determine that 30 percent of the water inside rapidly growing E. coli came from outside the bacteria and 70 percent of the water was produced by metabolism inside the bacteria.

The research from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington was published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
More at the University of Utah…