Gout happens when excess uric acid builds up in the blood, causing uric acid crystals to form around the joints, inflicting extreme pain and swelling.

Surge in the painful joint condition called gout among American men is linked to a rise in drinking sodas and other sugary soft drinks, a new study suggests.
In an unusually long-term study, more than 51,000 male dentists, pharmacists and veterinarians aged 40 years or more in the United States and Canada filled in questionnaires on their health, weight, medications and diet, and updated the information every two years thereafter, AFP said.
Those who were already diagnosed with gout and those who could not be contacted for the follow-up were taken out of the analysis, leaving more than 46,000 volunteers.
A total of 755 new cases of gout were diagnosed during the 12-year span of the study, which was launched in 1986.
The risk of the disease increased in line with the intake of sugar-sweetened soft drinks.
Those least likely to develop gout were men who drank less than one serving per month.
Compared with that group, men who drank five to six servings a week were 29 percent likelier to develop gout. This probability rose to 45 percent among those who had one servings per day, and to 85 percent among those who drank two servings or more.
The risk was proportionately higher among drinks containing fructose as a sweetener rather than sugar.
Diet soft drinks, though, did not boost the probability of gout.
The paper also found an increased risk of gout among those who consumed large quantities of fruit or fruit juice containing naturally occurring fructose, such as apples and oranges. But that risk, the authors say, has to be balanced by the known health benefits of fruit.
The study, published online by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), is authored by Hyon Choi, a rheumatologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Gout happens when excess uric acid builds up in the blood, causing uric acid crystals to form around the joints, inflicting extreme pain and swelling.
Cases of gout have doubled in the United States in the past few decades, coinciding with a rise in soft-drink consumption.

Scientists in New Zealand and Japan have created a “tear-free“ onion using biotechnology to switch off the gene behind the enzyme that makes us cry, one of the leading researchers said.
According to AFP, the discovery could signal an end to one of cooking’s eternal puzzles: why does cutting up a simple onion sting the eyes and trigger teardrops?
The research institute in New Zealand, Crop and Food, used gene-silencing technology to make the breakthrough which it hopes could lead to a prototype onion hitting the market in a decade’s time.
Colin Eady, the institute’s senior scientist, said the project started in 2002 after Japanese scientists located the gene responsible for producing the agent behind the tears.
“We previously thought the tearing agent was produced spontaneously by cutting onions, but they proved it was controlled by an enzyme,“ he told AFP from his home outside Christchurch.
“Here in New Zealand we had the ability to insert DNA into onions, using gene-silencing technology developed by Australian scientists.
“The technology creates a sequence that switches off the tear-inducing gene in the onion so it doesn’t produce the enzyme. So when you slice the vegetable, it doesn’t produce tears.“
Eady said that by stopping sulfur compounds from being converted to the tearing agent and redirecting them into compounds responsible for flavor and health, the process could even improve the taste of the onion.
“We anticipate that the health and flavor profiles will actually be enhanced by what we’ve done,“ he said. “What we’re hoping is that we’ll essentially have a lot of the nice, sweet aromas associated with onions without that associated bitter, pungent, tear-producing factor.“
The breakthrough has caused ripples overseas, following an international symposium in the Netherlands and after the trade journal Onion World featured Eady’s work on the front cover of its December issue.

A 45-minute midday nap can help boost your memory and remember facts, but only if you learned them well in the first place, a new study suggests.
This type of memory is called “declarative memory“ and applies to standard textbook learning and knowledge, in contrast to “procedural memory,“ which applies to skills, HealthDay reported.
Sleep appears to help ’set’ these declarative memories and make them easier to recall, the researchers said.
“Sleep appears to have an impact on what is learned well, but not so much when one is not motivated to learn,“ said lead researcher Matthew A. Tucker, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Sleep and Cognition.
For the study, 33 people were trained with certain declarative memory tasks. After the training, 16 took a non-REM nap, while 17 stayed awake and watched a movie. Later the same day, all the participants were tested. The tests included memorizing words, memorizing a maze and memorizing a complex line drawing.
Tucker’s team found that over three very different declarative memory tasks, taking a nap improved performance compared with staying awake. However, napping only worked for people who had really learned the task well in the first place.
“The nap group performed better overall than the awake group, but the difference wasn’t significant,“ Tucker said. “However, when we looked at individual performance during training, we found those who did better during training benefited from napping,“ he said.
In addition, people appeared to perform well on one task only, but not all three, Tucker said. “There is likely a basic level of learning that has to be attained before sleep can have an impact on performance,“ he said.
The findings were published in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal Sleep.
Tucker thinks that taking a nap may actually improve one’s memory of facts if one is motivated to learn. “There is a lot of data starting to come in that there are benefits from naps on memory,“ he said.
Sara Mednick, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego’s Laboratory of Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience, said the new study is further proof of the role of sleep on memory and learning.
“This paper is further evidence of how sleep, specifically naps, can be a tool for memory consolidation,“ she said. “Interestingly, the data shows that not all subjects utilize sleep for consolidation to a similar extent.“

Gatherings of roosting starlings--containing up to seven million birds--have become one of the most popular wildlife spectacles in Britain.
On winter evenings, just before dusk, large groups of watchers regularly gather to enjoy this free aerial display, The Guardian wrote.
But just how the birds manage to create such complex patterns without bumping into each other has long been a puzzle for scientists and birders alike.
Now, thanks to new research by Starlings in Flight, a pan-European group of physicists, biologists and economists, we know exactly how they do it.
Each individual starling focuses its attention on seven of its neighbors; and as the flock turns and wheels around the sky, it responds to the movements of these particular individuals. So no matter how far these birds are driven apart, they will gradually move back towards each other.
This contradicts the widely held belief that each starling simply watches out for the movements of the bird immediately in front.
The scientists discovered this by studying the starlings swarming over Rome’s main railway station, then creating complex 3D computer models to analyze the behavior of each individual bird in the flock.