WASHINGTON, D.C. — The biggest chemical battery in the United States is located near Interstate 90 in Luverne, Minn. The 80 ton device -- the size of two tractor-trailers stacked on top of each other -- stores as much energy as about 3 million rechargeable AA batteries and can power about 3,000 houses for more than an hour when discharging at its maximum rate.

The battery, purchased by utility company Xcel, draws its power from energy generated by a local wind farm. As it charges and discharges, the storage device helps to regulate the power production fluctuations of the wind turbines that feed energy onto the electrical grid.

The battery is also intended to soak up extra energy at night, when the wind blows strongest and when the power demand from the grid is the lowest. This energy can then be released in the afternoon to lessen the strain on the electrical grid when people return home from work.

"We believe that energy storage will allow more wind resources and more renewable sources of power to come on to the system," said Frank Novachek, director of corporate planning for Xcel.

The Department of Energy agrees that massive energy storage will be important, announcing on Oct. 26 the first round of stimulus funds allocated for the development of new high-risk energy technologies. A relatively new DOE agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy -- created in 2007 in the image of the Department of Defense's DARPA -- is giving out almost $20 million for the development of new battery chemistries for large-scale storage. These cutting-edge ideas for improved batteries include nanotubes capable of releasing huge amounts of energy in a short amount of time and batteries consisting entirely of liquid metals and molten salt.

Why size matters

"Most of the batteries we have in the world were made for small-scale usage," said George Crabtree director of the material science division of Argonne National Laboratory. "You don't need much energy to start your car, and your car battery is going to recharge again as soon as the car starts."

But according to a 2008 report by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, large-scale batteries need to be developed to deal with the increasing amounts of renewable energy on the grid. The AIChE report warned that no proven technologies have been developed to store large quantities of solar and wind energy.

These renewable sources of energy are not as constant as traditional sources like coal and nuclear power -- winds change speed frequently, the sun does not shine at night, and, as a result, energy must be captured and stored so it can be used when needed. Large-scale, high capacity batteries can allow power companies to constantly adjust and balance the amount of power flowing into the grid to match customer's ever-changing demands.

Coal and nuclear power companies match supply to demand by keeping about 13 percent of the total power supply in reserve. When more power is needed, they can bring more generators online or tap into the reserve.

Because renewable energy sources still make up only a small fraction of the nation's total energy supply -- about 2.4 percent as of 2006 -- their power fluctuations are still manageable. But 26 states have established standards to massively increase the amount of renewable energy. New York state hopes to produce 24 percent of its energy portfolio from renewable sources by 2013; California is shooting for 33 percent by 2020, and Hawaii hopes to achieve 40 percent by 2030.

"Without [massive energy storage], renewable power can only be piggybacked onto the U.S. grid to supply not more than 15 percent of the power at best," concluded the 2008 AIChE report.

Some of the power and storage needs can be provided by technologies other than chemical batteries.  

The Tennessee Valley Authority has been using the 1,600 foot Raccoon Mountain to store energy since the 1970s. When the demand for electricity is low, surplus power is used to pump water from a low-lying reservoir to another reservoir at the top of the mountain. When the demand for energy is high and electricity production expenses increase, the water in the upper reservoir is released, and gravity pulls it down a tunnel in the center of the mountain to spin turbines connected to the hydro-electric generator below. The technology is efficient, but additional development of new plants is hampered by environmental concerns and by the lack of suitable mountains in convenient places.

In Alabama, PowerSouth has set up a different kind of storage system that also makes use of natural topography to store energy. The Compressed Air Energy Storage facility in McIntosh forces air into a sealed underground salt cavern the size of an 80 story building. The air can be released and heated to rotate generators and produce electricity. A major limitation of this technology is that it needs to be built in an area containing specific geological formations that will not leak.

Flywheels that spin 15,000 times a minute, developed by Beacon Power in Massachusetts, provide another way of regulating the flow of power. On Nov. 23, construction will begin on a 20-megawatt facility that stores and dispenses power using the mechanical energy of spinning wheels set into motion by a extra electricity. Unlike the large batteries, the wheels cannot hold energy for a long period of time because friction slows them down, but they work well for smoothing out power fluctuations.

Sale on batteries

Chemical batteries do not rely on features of the local landscape and offer longer-term energy storage, making them an attractive option for use as energy storage repositories in the future. Efforts are underway to develop new battery chemistries that range from creating advanced version of lead batteries to improving the capabilities of the lithium-ion batteries that currently power laptops and hybrid cars.

Today's biggest batteries -- including the one in Minnesota and a device intended for emergency power in Texas by the utility company American Electric Power -- are made by the Japanese ceramics company NGK Insulators. Incentives for renewable power offered by the island nation have led to the installation of NGK's largest battery, more than five times bigger than the Minnesota battery.

The chemistry inside these sodium-sulfur batteries is similar to that of the lead acid battery inside of a car. In the car battery, a chemical reaction provides power by sending electrons from one lead plate to another through a liquid called an electrolyte. NGK batteries replace the lead plates with molten sulfur and molten salt and the liquid electrolyte with a solid piece of ceramic that allows electrons to flow between the two hot liquids.

This gives the batteries a much longer lifetime than car battery chemistry would allow. NGK guarantees them for 15 years (4,500 charge and discharge cycles), during which their efficiency at absorbing and discharging energy drops from about 92 to 75 percent.

But experts agree that sodium-sulfur batteries are still too expensive to affordably achieve the gigawatts of energy storage that will be needed to reach state goals.  

"The first thing we need to do is to lower the price of battery systems," said Imre Gyuk, manager for the DOE Energy Storage Research Program. "We also need to increase the cycle life of these systems and improve their reliability."

ARPA-E's new awards are focused on price-cutting technologies in early stages of development.

Battery manufacturer EaglePicher, working in partnership with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, received $7.2 million to modify the sodium sulfur batteries. The researchers are hoping to lower the operating temperature and slow down the corrosion that limits battery life by thinning the ceramic plate that separates the components inside.

"PNL has already made prototype separators that reduce the operating temperature by 100 degrees Celsius [180 degrees Fahrenheit]," said Robert Higgins, director of new technology at Eagle Picher. "[The battery] will have a longer lifetime and a much lower cost."

Dan Sadoway of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., received about $7 million on the strength of a prototype battery the size of an ink bottle that works in an entirely different way. His all-liquid device eschews expensive materials in favor of cheap metals like magnesium and antimony. The design operates around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, sandwiching a layer of molten salt between two layers of liquid metals.

Another ARPA-E award went to the FastCAP Systems Corporation, also located in Cambridge, Mass., which designs capacitors -- devices that store less energy than batteries but are able to release that energy much faster. FastCAP is working on increasing the surface area of capacitors to create ultracapacitors that could contain more electrical charge and store more energy. Their goal is to produce a device with the same energy density and energy storage capacities as batteries that would be capable of releasing power 20 times more effectively. An additional advantage of capacitor technology over battery technology is in their use of materials that are less toxic and available domestically.

"With ARPA-E, we are swinging from the heels and trying to hit home runs, not just base hits," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said. "This is high-risk, high reward research: if even one or two of these ideas become transformative technologies -- the next transistor or another Green Revolution -- this will be among the best investments we've ever made."

Devin Powell and Philip F. Schewe report for Inside Science News Service.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When birds migrate over long distances — sometimes thousands of miles — they usually end up in exactly the same place year after year. Such accurate feats of navigation, accomplished by millions of birds every year, have long made scientists wonder how they do it. Now a group of scientists in Germany has experimental evidence that reveals an important part of the secret of birds' navigational success.

Birds navigate in part by orienting themselves with the sun and by following physical landmarks. But these strategies alone are not enough. Birds must be able to navigate on cloudy days and find their way across huge swaths of ocean where there are no recognizable landmarks. Scientists have suspected for years that birds have an innate ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field and adjust their paths accordingly, but they still do not understand how.

Some scientists have hypothesized that the mechanism is rooted in a bird's beak, where iron-based minerals act as magnetic sensors that detect the bird's orientation, feeding this information to its brain via a special nerve. Other scientists have disputed this, proposing instead that the magnetic sensors are actually in a bird's eyes, where light receptors sensitive to magnetic fields feed data to the brain through optic nerves.

Henrik Mouritsen and his colleagues at the University of Oldenburg in Germany have now made a compelling argument for the eyes. They reported in the journal Nature that European robins with lesions that disrupt a specialized light-processing part of the brain are unable to orient themselves using the Earth's magnetic field. Birds with lesions disrupting the nerve that connects the beak to the brain do not have the same problem.

This strongly suggests that birds can "see" the Earth's magnetic field and orient themselves accordingly.

Jason Socrates Bardi reports for Inside Science News Service.

Oceans cover about 71 percent of the earth’s surface. Much of what happens in this watery world — and by extension, almost three-quarters of the planet’s surface — remains maddeningly beyond humanity’s ability to easily measure it.

Scientists have so far used their understanding of physics and fluid dynamics, combined with what direct observations are available, to infer how the ocean works. These inferences remain, in many cases, best guesses - albeit very well-informed best guesses. But scientists inevitably dream of a day when they can directly observe the goings-on of the ocean.

That day, it seems, is moving closer and closer to actuality.

Various ongoing projects are enhancing our ability to monitor, in real time, what happens in the ocean. An improved ability to peek into this previously hidden realm will aid in several important endeavors — fishery management, understanding the impacts of climate change on ocean dynamics, and forecasting tsunamis among them.

In that regard, scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California San Diego are now developing some potentially important new devices: small, low-cost, ocean-going robots that, in some respects, act like schools of fish. They swarm.

Earlier this week, the National Science Foundation awarded grants to two teams at Scripps. The goal: to develop new, ocean-monitoring robots that are deployed, and operate, in groups.

The so-called autonomous underwater explorers (AUEs) will work as follows: Many tens or even hundreds of pint-size AUEs will be dropped into the ocean along with a few “motherships” — basketball-sized AUEs.

The smaller AUEs will communicate with the larger using acoustic signals. Together, the swarm will provide detailed and fine-grained information on how the water is moving — rising, falling, swirling, and so on. (Here’s a video of Scripps scientist Jules Jaffe explaining how the marine robot swarms will work. )

The AUEs might be used to understand how currents might carry pollution, such as oil spills or sewage effluence, away from point of pollution. Likewise, they could aid in the design of marine protected areas by helping scientists understand how fish larvae disperse with currents.

When functional, these mini-robots will presumably be one of many tools in the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative. OOI, as it’s called, aims to build a network of ocean sensors to “measure the physical, chemical, geological and biological variables in the ocean and seafloor.”

In September, after more than a decade of planning, OOI received funding for construction from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and from NSF. (You can see the location of observatories here.)

And efforts to monitor the ocean don’t stop there.

OOI will integrate into a larger, multiagency, public-private effort called the Integrated Ocean Observing System, or IOOS.

And IOOS itself will plug into the greater Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), in which 80 governments are participating.

Here and there, pieces of this earth-wide ocean monitoring system are already in place. One section, formerly known as NEPTUNE and now rechristened Regional Scale Nodes (RSN), has various “nodes” up and running. Underwater stations connected to dry land by fiber optic cables currently monitor conditions on the Juan de Fuca plate off the Pacific Northwest, which straddles US and Canadian waters.

The Monterey Ocean Observing System (MOOS) and Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), meanwhile, already observe life at a depth of 2,923 feet in the Monterey Bay. (They served as testing grounds for methods, technologies and materials used in the larger NEPTUNE project.)

There’s also a NEPTUNE Canada, which is connected, like some of the other initiatives, directly to the Internet. (Here’s another called VENUS.)

And earlier this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed the seventh in a series of “smart buoys” meant to monitor water quality and weather conditions in Chesapeake Bay.

Incrementally and in fits and starts, humanity, it seems, is extending sensors into the vast unknown of the world’s marine environment. And in so doing, we’re wiring the world’s oceans.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff reports for the Christian Science Monitor.

The Internet’s amazing reach, it turns out, extends to individuals who donate sperm for assisted reproduction.

Once, the donations were largely a private matter, even shielded from couples that sought help having babies. Nurses and doctors often selected the sperm for them.

But now offspring from those transactions are taking to the Internet, seeking information about their sperm “fathers” and trying to find others born of the same donor.

Psychologist Andrea Braverman, of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, is to talk about the implications at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at the University of Minnesota’s Coffman Union, 300 Washington Ave. S.E., Minneapolis. The lecture, co-sponsored by two university programs in law, health and life sciences, is free and open to the public.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As sea-surface temperatures rise across the globe, some scientists believe that hurricane frequency and intensity may increase. A fresh technique offers promise to generate new data from long-dead storms, which could improve researchers' forecasts and make them more accurate.

Carl Ebeling, a geophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., demonstrated a method to uncover the power of historic hurricanes by looking at how oceans churned by the storms transferred energy into the ground.  His efforts could improve the understanding of historical hurricane patterns, filling in gaps in the hurricane record.

Ebeling's method is based on the realization that weather transfers energy into the ocean, where the water in turn pumps some of that energy into the ocean floor. That energy travels along the ocean floor and is eventually recorded by land-based seismographs, the same machines that detect earthquakes.

Ebeling knew about this process because he spent seven years working for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna, Austria. He was responsible for evaluating the ability of potential seismic monitoring stations to detect clandestine nuclear weapons tests, and in doing that work he noticed strange seismic patterns in Antarctica.

"It appears that this was really well correlated with a really large storm in the South Atlantic," said Ebeling. "That's what started me thinking down this particular path."

Ebeling took seismic records from stations in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico and analyzed them for evidence of Hurricane Andrew, a Category V storm that devastated Florida in 1992.

Seismic records show the motion of the ground, regardless of the cause. While earthquakes are the most common source of seismic events, bomb blasts, building demolition and a host of other events — including violent weather — can be recorded on sensitive seismographs. 

Typically, scientists monitoring seismographs for earthquake activity disregard signals caused by human activity or by weather as "noise." But it is in the noise generated by hurricanes that Ebeling is finding his data.

"I'm changing that paradigm a little bit," said Ebeling. "Earthquakes for me are noise."

Before high-altitude surveillance aircraft and satellites, meteorologists could not track hurricanes at sea. In fact, if storms didn't make landfall, they might not be recorded at all unless the storm crossed an unlucky ship's path. For these reasons, complete historical hurricane records begin only in the 1960s, which is a short timeframe in which to find meaningful patterns.

Ebeling presented his research in October at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

"We generally know which seasons during this period were active or inactive, but it's nice to know that this data might help to confirm this," said Phil Klotzbach, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. "If you look at data for 1933, which had 21 named storms, no tracks of tropical cyclones extend east of [50 degrees West Longitude, or roughly 2,000 miles east of Washington, D.C.].  I'm sure there were storms out there, but nobody was there to measure them!"

Ebeling said he needs to increase the number of hurricanes in his database. "I've really only looked at Andrew and a few other ones," he said. "Ultimately what I'd like to be able to do ... is to go back and digitize analog seismograms that existed since the 1930s at stations near Harvard, Mass., and San Juan, Puerto Rico."

That work will allow Ebeling and others to discern information about hurricanes that happened decades ago, but are not listed in current records. "One of the questions [atmospheric scientists are] grappling with right now is whether rising sea surface temperatures are contributing to hurricane frequency," said Ebeling.

Adding decades of observations to the Atlantic hurricane record should greatly improve scientists' ability to answer that timely question.

Chris Gorski reports for Inside Science News Service.

Yet another reason to cherish North America’s great boreal forest comes in a new report saying that the forest plays a critical role in curbing climate change.

I always have valued this vast forest -- which touches northern Minnesota and fans broadly through Canada -- because it is a seasonal home and breeding ground for so many of the birds we see migrating south right now.

It turns out that the boreal forests also are one of the world’s most important carbon banks, storing 22 percent of all carbon on the earth’s land surface. The report, “The Carbon the World Forgot,” says North America’s boreal forest stores the equivalent of 26 years of global emissions from burning fossil fuels, based on 2006 emissions levels.

Some of the boreal carbon has been in place for up to 8,000 years, stored in trees, permafrost and peatlands where organic matter has accumulated over millennia.

One dreaded scenario for global warming’s impact on Minnesota is that the trees defining the boreal forest - including balsam fir, spruce and paper birch - will decline as temperatures rise. This new report raises prospects for a destructive cycle in which the decline of the boreal causes considerably more carbon to be released.

Much of the international effort to protect forests in order minimize climate change has focused on the tropics. This study’s authors call for looking as well to the boreal forest as international climate negotiators meet in Copenhagen next month. The consortium releasing the study included the Canadian Boreal Initiative and the Pew Environment Group’s International Boreal Conservation Campaign.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Predicting the side-effects of a drug is not simple task. The human body has more than 1,500 molecules that are known to be involved in various diseases, and often a drug designed to hit one of these targets will also hit others that have similar structures, causing unintended consequences.

Now a group of researchers have developed a tool that can help predict the side effects of a drug by looking at all the potential interactions it might have in the human body. This tool revealed that one side effect of the AIDS drug rescriptor causes severe rashes by inadvertently targeting a hormone receptor known as histamine H4.

The scientists also found that the antidepressant drugs Prozac and Paxil were similar to beta blockers, which are used to treat hypertension -- perhaps explaining some of the shared side-effects between these different classes of drugs.

Overall, the team led by Bryan Roth at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Brian Shoichet at the University of California, San Francisco predicted some 1,800 new "off-target" associations. They tested a number of these experimentally and confirmed 23 of them, reported in the scientific journal Nature.

They uncovered these interactions by comparing 3,665 existing and experimental drugs with more than 65,000 chemicals that are known to bind to hundreds of human proteins. Strong similarities between the drugs and any of the 65,000 chemicals predicted that both might bind to the same proteins.

Besides making it easier to screen for drug toxicities, said Shoichet, the method may make it possible to look for additional targets of existing drugs.

Jason Socrates Bardi reports for Inside Science News Service.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Scientists studying how Bengalese finches use sets of syllables to communicate are a step closer to understanding how humans develop and use vocabulary. After studying the neural networks in finch brains, the researchers developed a model of the neurons in the bird's vocal center.

According to physicist Dezhe Jin, at Penn State University in Philadelphia, both humans and finches rearrange sets of learned syllables to communicate, although finches can create only a few dozen basic syllables while humans draw upon many thousands. The exact arrangement of syllables and words is referred to as syntax.

Because of the parallel between the way humans and the finches handle syllables, Jin said, the finches make the perfect research subjects to study how the brains of both species structure their vocalizations.

"It's very regimentally similar to our syntax," Jin said of the process the finch brain uses to determine what sounds it makes when singing. "Even though we look at [a] primitive species, it can offer insights in to how the human brain works."

Jin used a computer to model a section of the finch's neural passages and simulate how an electrical signal would travel through them. All of the finches' songs start out as a series of electrical signals in the vocal center of the brain and then move out through a series of complex neuron pathways to the region of the brain that controls the finch's voice box. The signal received depends on what chain of neurons the electrical signal followed. A signal flowing through one branch of neurons produces a different sound than a signal following a different chain.

Jin's colleague Alexay Kozhevnikov, also at Penn State, is preparing to test Jin's predictions. In the coming months, Kozhevnikov plans to attach tiny electrodes to the speech centers of a finch's brain. The electrodes will identify which neurons the electric signal travels through while the bird is singing.

"Every syllable will be encoded by a tiny chain of these neurons," Kozhevnikov said, "What you would see is that they would fire during one syllable, but not during another syllable."

Scientists might one day be able to identify how individual neurons control syllables in humans. Ann Graybiel, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., already has used Jin's model to help identify how a primate's brain keeps track of time. Jin also said that other scientists are looking into using the model to gain insight into why people stutter.

Mike Lucibella reports for Inside Science News Service.

In the new movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” George Clooney plays a former member of a secret sect of soldiers trained by the U.S. military to deploy a host of paranormal weapons against the enemy. One fabled weapon is the ability to kill by psychokinesis: stare at a goat and make its heart stop.

The movie takes liberties in the name of comedy, but the program it's based on is real, Greg Miller reports in ScienceInsider, an online news ticker affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

During the Cold War, the U.S. military became convinced it was losing the “mind race” against the Soviet Union. And as recently as the late 1980s it was investigating a range of paranormal phenomenon and their potential uses in espionage and combat, Jonathan Moreno told Miller. Moreno is a philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania who studies military applications of cognitive science.

Further, Miller cites a 1988 National Research Council report  on enhancing human performance. It says that some military decision-makers believed that extrasensory perception ("if real and controllable") could prove valuable for intelligence gathering, while psychokinesis could find an even wider range of uses, from jamming enemy computers or weapons, planting thoughts in individuals without their knowledge, or even killing enemies at a distance.

The report says: "One suggested application is a conception of the 'First Earth Battalion,' made up of 'warrior monks,' who will have mastered almost all the techniques under consideration by the committee, including the use of ESP, leaving their bodies at will, levitating, psychic healing, and walking through walls." This is the elite squad Clooney's character belonged to, Miller says.

Suggested? Yes. But whether actual research ever extended as far as trying to kill anything by psychokinesis is doubtful. Wired reported on Friday that one of its staffers had interviewed John B. Alexander, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served as a Special Forces commander in Vietnam and spent decades promoting the use of psychics for national security. Alexander is featured in the non-fiction book on which the new movie is based.

“There’s plenty of material in the movie which sticks quite close to the truth — though reality is a bit more complicated,” Wired reported.

But killing animals with telepathy? That’s fiction, Wired says, quoting Alexander.

The closest this may have come in reality was an experiment with “dim mak” or death touch, a martial arts skill which involves a light strike designed to kill by interrupting the flow of chi.

Fiction is what it is. But the truth still is pretty strange.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Failed dieters may be pushed to over-eat not by their stomachs, but by their brains. The brain chemistry that makes it hard for alcoholics, drug users and smokers to quit their addictions also punishes us for trading sugar for salad, according to a new study of food consumption in rats.

The research supports those who believe that overeating can, in extreme cases, be considered an addiction comparable to drug abuse or gambling.

Some eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia, are already included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which psychiatrists use to diagnose their patients.  Overeating is a controversial candidate for inclusion in the next version of the manual.

"For people who are eating way beyond their need and storing excess fat, there's a debate as to whether you want to call that a disorder of the brain," said Charles O'Brien, director of the Center for Studies in Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and member of the task force for the new DSM.

Now Pietro Cottone and Valentina Sabino, co-directors of the Laboratory of Addictive Disorders at the Boston University School of Medicine, have found that feeding unhealthy food to rats can alter the same region of the brain that changes when they are given alcohol, opiates or nicotine. The work was published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists switched a group of rats from their normal diet of boring but nutritious rodent chow to a sugary diet of calorie-dense food. After two days of decadence, the animals were returned to a healthy diet. The pampered rats no longer cared for the healthy food; they ate less of it than their comrades who had never tried sugary food.

This change in appetite also happens in people who cycle back and forth between healthy and unhealthy foods, said Cottone. They also tend lose their desire for healthy foods enjoyed by others.

But it wasn't just that the healthy food had lost its appeal. Returning to a diet of normal food affected the amygdala of each rat, the region of the brain that produces anxiety. Brain cells in this area churned out five times the normal amount of a molecule called corticotropin-releasing factor, or CRF — the same chemical that punishes addicts who are trying to give up their drug of choice. 

Relief from the anxiety-inducing chemical only came when the rats returned to a sugary diet and gorged themselves, increasing their consumption of food as compared to their first experience with it.

"This [CRF] punishment, this negative reinforcement is causing anxiety and is increasing the probability that bad behavior is performed in the future to relieve anxiety," said Cottone.

The destructive eating habits of the rats improved when Cottone treated them with a substance that blocks CRF from attaching to the brain cells. They regained some of their taste for healthy foods and reduced the amount of sugary food they ate.

Studies in the 1990s found that CRF blockers could help rats overcome exposure to drugs. For years, the pharmaceutical industry has been trying to develop drugs based on these chemicals for alcoholics, smokers and drug abusers.

Cottone suggests that they add compulsive eaters to their list of potential clientele.

Devin Powell reports for Inside Science News Service.