B. Recognizing Binge Eating as a Psychiatric Disorder

Narrator: This is Science Today. About thirty percent of obese adults in this country have patterns of binge eating. Dr. Kim Peter Norman, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Francisco, says although binge eating is not yet considered an official diagnosis, it's starting to get lots of attention by primary care doctors and psychiatrists as an eating disorder.

Norman: The emotional issues that go along with the eating disorder are very much like what we see in bulimia nervosa. They'll describe themselves as filled with self-loathing. They hate their bodies, they hate their lives, they're depressed, they're anxious, they believe everybody looks at them with contempt. And they certainly see themselves that way.

Narrator: Binge eating, which is sometimes called compulsive eating, is marked by frequent and repeated eating, usually in private, in which a person often feels out of control, ashamed or depressed.

Norman: And for those individuals, emotional factors - their depression, their anxiety, their self-esteem - contributes to their obesity. And then we do give a diagnosis of emotional factors affecting physical condition obesity. And those individuals do very well when they're given psychotherapeutic kinds of interventions.

Narrator:For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.

C. Physicists Aim to Create a Primordial State of Matter

Narrator: This is Science Today. Physicists are using huge ion colliders to reproduce the state of matter following the Big Bang, the explosion that gave rise to the universe. Daniel Cebra, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, took part in an earlier experiment that recreated hints of this primordial, plasma-like state. Now, a facility at the Brookhaven National Laboratory aims to create large enough chunks of this plasma, so physicists can better study its properties.

Cebra: Not just to know where the transition was, but to also know what the compressibility of the plasma is, the way the plasma behaves in its hot, dense stage. This will give us an idea of how the universe behaved at those brief moments - just following the Big Bang.

Narrator: Cebra says physicists hope to create definitive evidence of this plasma.

Cebra: By understanding this transition, it allows us to really understand a lot of where some of the initial, non-uniformities might have come from. What was the very early nature of the universe and those first couple of microseconds?

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.

D. Technological Advances In the Sea

Narrator: This is Science Today. Thanks to new technology, researchers have been able to get detailed images of the Earth's surface below the seafloor. John Orcutt of the University of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography says only recently has it been possible to actually build instruments that could last long at the bottom of the ocean.

Orcutt: Instrumentation when I first started doing this stuff now about twenty-five years ago - we could leave things on the bottom no more than a few weeks. We didn't have enough recording capabilities to record more than a few hours of data on the bottom. But all that changed, really with the advance in computer technology available to the consumer.

Narrator: Orcutt was recently in charge of several instruments placed on the sea floor under the South Pacific which recorded seismic events for over a year, giving researchers the first highly detailed image of the Earth's mantle beneath the oceans.

Orcutt: Oceanography today is at a threshold where we're going to have the tools to bring lots of new information and a lot of new discoveries about the oceans to the table, to research and to what it's impact on public policy an so on during the coming decades.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin....

E. A New Frontier in Orthopedics

Narrator: This is Science Today. Cartilage transplantation is offering young, active patients with damaged knee and ankle joints an alternative to total joint replacement. William Bugbee, a professor of orthopedics at the University of California, San Diego, says they've been using this technique, known as fresh osteochondral allografting, since 1983.

Bugbee: The reason there's been so much interest in this program that we've had for so long is that this is sort of a new frontier in orthopedics - treatment of cartilage lesions. Now, there are different treatments that can be used for smaller lesions in the knee, but the allografting, the actual transplantation is really the best option for people with bigger problems in their knee.

Narrator: Because cartilage has no blood supply, the match is for size only. Once in place, the donor cartilage knits to the patient's own to form a stable bond.

Bugbee: We're operating on people in their teens and twenties. What's going to happen to them when they're forty or fifty? Is this going to prevent them from the inevitable arthritis? That's an unanswered question. But this is the best way to return them to essentially normal functioning during their active years and that's what's so important to them.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.