Word: basal
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...skin cancer discovered on President Clinton is the most common and easily curable form of the disease. Most cases of this cancer, known as basal cell carcinoma, are caused by exposure to UV radiation, primarily from the sun, and can be cleanly removed with surgery. The lesions, which were found during the President's annual physical on Friday, enlarge over a period of months and even years, and are distinguished by their shiny, firm appearance and ivory-colored borders. Some growths bleed and heal repeatedly, making it easy to mistake them for sores instead of tumors...
...Nobel Prize committee reminded the world last week, that view radically changed in the late 1950s when Swedish pharmacologist Arvid Carlsson brought dopamine out of the shadows. First Carlsson established that the areas of the brain known as the basal ganglia contained very high levels of dopamine. Then he administered a drug that lowered those concentrations in laboratory mice. Soon the mice began to stagger and reel, losing control of their voluntary movements...
...Sonic hedgehog--they have been able to awaken hair follicles from a resting state and force them into an active one. Alas, that's just in mice. Whether the therapy works on human pates remains to be seen. One potential problem: the Sonic hedgehog gene is linked to basal-cell carcinoma, a common, treatable skin cancer...
...patients with Huntington's disease, it's the part of the brain called the basal ganglia that's destroyed. While these victims have perfectly intact explicit memory systems, they can't learn new motor skills. An Alzheimer's patient can learn to draw in a mirror but can't remember doing it; a Huntington's patient can't do it but can remember trying to learn. Yet another region of the brain, an almond-size knot of neural tissue known as the amygdala, seems to be crucial in forming and triggering the recall of a special subclass of memories that...
...thyroid gland controls the body's basal metabolic rate--the rate at which it consumes energy while at rest. When the thyroid hormone is produced in excess, the body consumes energy faster than it can be supplied. The result is a haywire combination of anxiety, tension and fatigue. The body wants to go, go, go--and it does, even when it isn't going anywhere. This type of things can wear you out, even if you haven't been exerting yourself...