Get 'em while they're young. That's the plan behind Jessica Blom-Hoffman's efforts to keep kids from becoming overweight. Working under a new five-year $616,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, the assistant professor of counseling and applied educational psychology is establishing a program aimed at fostering healthy eating habits at five Boston elementary schools.

The idea is to steer kids toward healthy foods, then track how their eating habits develop, says Blom-Hoffman, who is working with a colleague, associate professor Debra Franko.

Eating habits that are developed early tend to be very stable through life, explains Blom-Hoffman. If we can get to children when they're still developing their dietary preferences, we stand a greater chance of successfully combating obesity than do other school-based programs that start in older grades.

The program will use many approaches to get kids to replace their candy and chips with apples and carrots. In class, students will use an interactive CD-ROM to learn about nutrition. At lunchtime and after school, kids will serve as fruit and vegetable helpers, handing out stickers to classmates who eat healthy foods. At home, students and parents will have access to books and activities on healthy eating.

Teachers and aides will supervise the program, cheering on healthy eating, as will mentors from the Center for the Study of Sport in Society's Athletes in Service to America program.

Children participating in the study will be tracked over the next five years, to see if the program helps create long-term healthy eaters. All in the study will be involved in a physical-activity promotion program, already in place through Athletes in Service to America. At the end of the study, Blom-Hoffman will compare the kids who were offered both the nutritional and exercise portions of the program with those who participated only in the physical activity part.

Exposing kids to new foods, and giving them as many positive experiences as they can have, without pressure, is really important, says Blom-Hoffman. You'd be surprised, but some young children have a hard time even identifying a fruit or a vegetable.

Electric avenue

A deregulated market is making it especially difficult for the electricity industry to avoid catastrophic power outages, like the one that stilled a large part of the East Coast in summer 2003.

Now, Northeastern electrical engineersworking with academic, business, and environmental experts under a three-year $270,000 National Science Foundation grantare developing a mathematical model aimed at sidestepping such outages.

Engineering professor Alex Stankovic, associate professor Bradley Lehman, and dean Allen Soysteralong with Andrew Saric of the Cacak College of Engineering, in Serbia and Montenegro, and colleagues from Temple and Syracuse Universitieshave teamed up with ISO New England, the nonprofit organization that runs the region's transmission grid, to create a robust model for operating power systems.

The ideal model, says Stankovic, would keep the whole grid running, even when individual pieces of equipment fail.

The ISO is in charge of balancing generation and loads, so they can instruct individual generators to raise or lower generation to exactly match the actual load, he says. The system has to be able to withstand unplanned removals of some pieces of equipment.

Stankovic and his colleagues must consider a vast array of mathematical variables related to the operation of all parts of the electrical system. It's not easy to let the operation of the system hang on a set of numbers, Stankovic says. You want to make sure your model is very good, even, he says, to the point that it's resilient to unavoidable small inaccuracies in the model itself.

The model makers, says Stankovic, are pushing the envelope of what's known on the research end, under the umbrella of applied mathematics, operations research, and energy engineering.

Cocaine on the brain

Because its users don’t get withdrawal symptoms like sweats and cramps, some experts believe an addiction to cocaine is purely psychological. James Stellar believes otherwise.

The psychology professor and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences thinks a cocaine highwhich he describes as a euphoric state that makes your boyfriend gorgeous and your life perfectsomehow alters brain activity, thereby creating physical addiction.

With a team of undergraduate researchers, Stellar, a neuroscientist, is studying a portion of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which plays an important role in reward, pleasure, and addiction, as well as the neurotransmitter dopamine. The researchers examine the brains of rats before, during, and after exposure to cocaine, looking for alterations in brain-activity patterns.

The team also measures a rat's pleasure responses. One experiment allows rats to inject themselves with cocaine by pushing a lever. Electrodes attached to the animal's brains monitor activity fluctuations as the rats get high.

Stellar has heard anecdotal stories about former addicts whose cravings are triggered by random occurrences, like the mother who rushes to buy cocaine after spilling baby powder. Anything associated with cocaine memoriesa scent, a pattern on a necktiecan trigger a craving, he says.

Our interest is the brain circuitry that mediates reward and motivation, into which cocaine taps to create human addiction, explains Stellar. Our big goal is to pinpoint what exactly happens, biologically, in the brain of a cocaine-addicted rat.