Nathan Seppa By disabling a dementia-linked protein, a synthetic drug is showing a tantalizing capacity to interfere with the formation of waxy amyloid deposits like those that accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. In those people, the protein, serum amyloid P, seems to exacerbate the buildup by linking amyloid molecules into more durable deposits. Research hasn't revealed whether these deposits cause Alzheimer's disease or are the result of it, but many scientists argue that limiting amyloid deposits will benefit patients (SN: 11/3/01, p. 286: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/20011103/bob17.asp.). Immunologist Mark B. Pepys of the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London and his colleagues report taking a step in that direction. In the May 16 Nature, they show that a drug called CPHPC can reduce the amount of serum amyloid P in the blood and in amyloid deposits. CPHPC is merciful shorthand for R-1-[6-[R-2-carboxy-pyrrolidin-1-yl]-6-oxo-hexanoyl] pyrrolidine-2-carboxylic acid. From Science News, Vol. 161, No. 20, May 18, 2002, p. 307. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 2088 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Between ages 6 months and 9 months, a baby accomplishes a heads-up feat, of sorts. That's when he or she transforms a budding aptitude for detecting animal faces in general into a proficiency at discerning different human faces. This finding bears on the controversial issue of what types of knowledge a baby comes equipped with at birth. Infants learn to recognize faces through a process that exchanges perceptual breadth for depth, say psychologist Olivier Pascalis of the University of Sheffield in England and his colleagues. By 9 months of age, daily exposure to people has prepped babies' perceptual system to identify human-specific facial features so that they no longer detect subtle facial differences between members of other species, Pascalis' group proposes in the May 17 Science. "Perhaps we're looking at how innate knowledge about faces changes over time due to visual experience," Pascalis says. "But it's impossible to say for sure, since experience with faces begins as soon as a child is born." From Science News, Vol. 161, No. 20, May 18, 2002, p. 307. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Vision
Link ID: 2087 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A group of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) have identified and cloned the first-known gene that makes skin cells able to sense warm temperatures. In an article appearing in the journal Science, a group led by Ardem Patapoutian of TSRI and Stuart Bevan of Novartis describes the protein the gene makes, a type of transient receptor potential (TRP) channel called "TRPV3." This membrane protein opens when it senses a certain temperature and allows ions to pass through and cause an electrical potential that signals the brain. "This protein may be an important target for drugs," says Patapoutian, "because, like other TRP channels, it may be involved in inflammation and pain-mediation." Significantly, TRPV3 is the first temperature-sensing molecule identified that becomes activated at warm and hot temperatures, 33° C (91.5° F) and above. And it is the first temperature-sensing channel found in keratinocytes, which are the major type of cell in the skin.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 2086 - Posted: 05.18.2002

New method shows electrical activity to be a central component of molecular clocks governing circadian rhythms Electrical excitability is harnessed by the body for a myriad of physiological functions including communication between nerve cells and regulation of heartbeat. Diseases caused by pathological electrical over-excitability, such as epilepsy and cardiac arrhythmia, can be catastrophic. A team of biologists at New York University has discovered a new and efficient method of “silencing” neurons – effectively blocking their electrical excitability – by introducing a new twist on a standard genetic technique. The new method sheds light on the central role electrical activity in neurons plays in governing the body’s circadian rhythms, or internal clock. It may also help in the future development of more effective treatments for diseases that are caused by aberrant electrical activity in neurons and other electrically excitable cells and tissues. The findings were published in the May 17 issue of Cell. Led by Todd C. Holmes, Assistant Professor of Biology at NYU, the team developed an experimental test case to control the electrical activity of a specific neural circuit in Drosophila by directing the expression of modified potassium channel genes. Potassium channels act as the “brakes” for electrical excitability.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 2085 - Posted: 06.24.2010

McGill Professor James Henry focuses on how nerves transmit pain When you’re in pain, nothing else matters. You don’t care about the news, sports results or the vagaries of bonds and securities. All you can think about is being pain-free. McGill professor James Henry’s research is dedicated to making that happen. Dr Henry is Professor of Physiology and Psychiatry and President of the Canadian Pain Foundation. He is a winner of the Millennium Distinguished Career Award of the Canadian Pain Society and one of the leaders of the proposed new McGill Centre for Research on Pain. Currently, the only other such pain research centre in Canada is at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. With seed funding already obtained from the Canadian Institute for Health and Research (CIHR), it is hoped that the McGill Centre for Research on Pain will soon be a reality. As an electrophysiologist, Henry studies the electrical activity of nerve cells. These "neurons," as they are called, make up the pathway by which the pain message is transmitted to the brain. And it’s all automatic. Touch a hot stove, and you instantly draw back your hand. You don’t have to think about it! The neurons that make this happen don’t actually touch each other. They are separated by a tiny gap called a synapse. So how does the message get across this gap? By means of chemicals called neurotransmitters.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 2084 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers identify for the first time proteins vital to maintaining nervous system architecture New York, N.Y., --Researchers at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found, for the first time, that certain proteins maintain the nervous system architecture after the developing body lays down the wiring pattern. The finding may someday lead to a better understanding of some neurological diseases but, for now, is changing neuroscientists’ fundamental understanding of nervous system anatomy. The investigators, led by Dr. Oliver Hobert, P&S assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, have identified a family of six proteins, called ZIGs, responsible for keeping the wiring of the nervous system in its proper place in the mature organism. The results will be published in the Jan. 25 issue of Science. Although the researchers identified the proteins in C. elegans, a microscopic worm employed as a model invertebrate to study neurobiology, humans have proteins with similar structures. "Clinicians should now look at neurological diseases whose causes are unknown or even those that are known and see if analogous human ZIG proteins may be playing a role in the pathology," Dr. Hobert says.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2083 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Doctors at Grady Memorial and Emory University believe they've found something that can drastically reduce the consequences of traumatic brain injury. In a traumatic injury, the brain tries to swell, but the skull won't let it. The brain loses blood, brain cells die and victims lose memory, speech, sometimes their personality, and often their strength and flexibility. .... Emory's Dr. Arthur Kellerman says the use of the hormone progesterone, currently used in birth control pills and the treatment of prostate cancer, can help. Copyright ©2002 WXIA-TV Atlanta

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 2082 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People who do extreme sports are adventurous, adrenaline-seekers who might be inclined to take drugs Martin Bright, home affairs editor The Observer Adrenaline junkies hooked on dangerous sports such as hang-gliding or bungee jumping have the same 'risk-taking' genetic make-up as heroin addicts, according to the latest drugs research carried out for the World Health Organisation. Scientists at London University's Institute of Psychiatry believe vulnerability to addiction can be tracked to genes that influence behaviour such as novelty-seeking and openness to new experiences. There may also be genetic factors involved in the intensity of the 'hit' different people experience when they take heroin. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Emotions
Link ID: 2081 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Humans don't have a monopoly on laughter, says Silvia Cardoso. A behavioural biologist at the State University of Campinas, Brazil, she says it's a primitive reflex common to most animals: even rats laugh. She tells Sophie Petit-Zeman that too little laughter could have serious consequences for our mental, physical and social well-being Why are you interested in laughter? It's a universal phenomenon, and one of the most common things we do. We laugh many times a day, for many different reasons, but rarely think about it, and seldom consciously control it. We know so little about the different kinds and functions of laughter, and my interest really starts there. Why do we do it? What can laughter teach us about our positive emotions and social behaviour? There's so much we don't know about how the brain contributes to emotion and I think we can get at understanding this by studying laughter. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 2080 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An acne drug which has been linked to teenagers' deaths should be banned in the UK, campaigners will tell health officials on Friday. Families will tell the Medicines Control Agency (MCA) they believe the drug Roaccutane caused mental and physical harm to their children and ask for its UK licence to be withdrawn, pending further research. MCA statistics show 15 young people have committed suicide in Britain while taking the drug. But pharmaceutical company Roche which makes the drug rejects the suggestion that the drug is in any way to blame for the suicides or depression and insist the drug is safe. Liam Grant, one of the campaigners meeting the MCA, wants Roche to be forced to carry out more studies to find out what effect their product is having on teenagers. He is one of those calling for the drug's UK licence to be withdrawn, but he said if that did not happen, it should at least be made subject to stricter controls. Mr Grant said: "In the United States you have to sign a ten page form which shows that the doctors has described the side effects that you understand them and it also has a book that showing how you can identify depression and so on. (C) BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 2079 - Posted: 05.17.2002

Physicists have shown for the first time that electrical signals in the human brain are amplified by noise. This effect is called 'stochastic resonance' and is well known in a wide range of systems, including living organisms. But the discovery by Toshio Mori and Shoichi Kai of the University of Kyushu in Japan is the first observation of stochastic resonance in the information processing part of the human central nervous system (T Mori and S Kai 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 218101). In many complex systems, weak periodic signals can be strengthened by noise. This happens when random peaks in the noisy signal coincide with regular peaks in the periodic signal. This stochastic - meaning 'random' - resonance is most effective when the noisy signal has a certain amplitude relative to the periodic signal. Scientists have already found evidence for the effect in humans, in the control of blood pressure in the brain and in the sense of touch. Copyright © IOP Publishing Ltd 1996-2002. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 2078 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Are our thoughts made of electricity? Not the familiar kind of electrical signals that travel up and down wires in our computer or nerves in our brain, but the distributed kind of electromagnetic field that permeates space and carries the broadcast signal to the TV or radio. Professor Johnjoe McFadden from the School of Biomedical and Life Sciences at the University of Surrey believes our conscious mind could be an electromagnetic field. “The theory solves many previously intractable problems of consciousness and could have profound implications for our concepts of mind, free will, spirituality, the design of artificial intelligence, and even life and death,” he said. © AlphaGalileo 2002

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 2077 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Work is first to show brain's gray matter is affected by MS BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Ten years ago people with multiple sclerosis could expect little from the medical profession other than drugs to help relieve their symptoms and canes or walkers to help them get around as their physical disabilities mounted. That, however, was before researchers were able to focus the full power of biotechnology on the disease. Today, by using advanced MRI brain imaging methods and tapping into one of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world, University at Buffalo researchers in the Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center (BNAC) are providing insights into the disease that never before were possible.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Brain imaging
Link ID: 2076 - Posted: 05.17.2002

Copyright © 2002 AP Online By ERIN McCLAM, Associated Press ATLANTA - Smoking among U.S. high school students has dropped to its lowest level in a decade, the government said Thursday, a decline that was credited to cigarette taxes and school programs that discourage youngsters from taking up the habit. Just 28.5 percent of high-schoolers in a nationwide survey last year reported they had smoked a cigarette in the previous month - down from 36.4 percent five years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The rate is the lowest since 1991, when 27.5 percent of high school students said they smoked. The figure had climbed for most of the 1990s before reversing in 1999. Copyright © 2001 Nando Media

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 2075 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A study by UK scientists at the University of Sheffield and University College London also found that infants can even tell the difference between monkeys. They believe natural changes in the brain as we grow older may be the reason why adults are not as good at recognising people. In a paper published in the journal Science, they said the changes might be like those associated with language - our ability to learn new languages decreases with age. The findings are based on an analysis of brain patterns and eye movements of infants after they were shown a series of pictures of human and monkey faces. (C) BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Vision
Link ID: 2074 - Posted: 05.17.2002

Scientists are closer to understanding the mysterious "circadian" rhythm that governs sleep and wake after an experiment using fruit flies. They bred flies missing a gene vital to the daily cycle - which made sleep deprivation have fatal consequences within hours. But they managed to help the flies survive longer by kick-starting a process which protects cells from sleep deprivation. Despite years of study, relatively little is known about the mechanism by which animals shut down for the night - or even precisely what biochemical processes are taking place while the body is asleep. The effects of sleep deprivation - in both humans and flies - can be damaging. (C) BBC

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 2072 - Posted: 05.16.2002

Scientists have explained the extra-sensory powers of alligators and crocodiles. The animals can hunt without sight, sound or smell using sensors on their jaws that detect ripples in the water. The reptiles lurk half submerged at night, waiting for a potential snack. When prey enters the water, perhaps to take a drink, the alligator or crocodile is able to sense even the slightest movement and pounce. Even a single droplet falling into a tank the size of a bath can be sensed by the network of pressure detectors on the creatures' jaws. (C) BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 2071 - Posted: 05.16.2002

Learn how Pinocchio felt (without having to lie) By Eric Haseltine How do you know how long your nose is? Perhaps you just feel how far it protrudes every time you twitch it or flare your nostrils. Or, you might have palpated your proboscis enough times to take its measure. Finally it's possible that you simply know the size of your shnozz by instinct. This last explanation, although elegant, is unsatisfying because it implies that your brain is born knowing how much your various body parts will grow. Given the variability of nutrition, disease and other factors that strongly influence growth, the brain cannot know a priori how big you will be. Recent research shows we not only have to learn-as-we grow about the size of our bodies, but that these learned perceptions can be altered in an astonishingly short time. © Copyright 2002 The Walt Disney Company. Back to Homepage.

Keyword: Vision; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 2070 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Optimism for chemical that destabilizes harmful protein build-ups. HELEN PEARSON Clinical studies will start within weeks on a new drug that may erode the protein clumps behind Alzheimer's disease and type II diabetes. In these diseases, proteins that are usually soluble fold abnormally into tightly packed deposits called amyloid that wreck internal organs. In mice, the prototype drug shrank these protein accretions within weeks, scientists have revealed. Preliminary tests on patients look promising. "I can't describe how excited I was," says Mark Pepys of University College Medical School in London, who has been working on the idea for the past 25 years. "We've invented a new molecule - and it does what we want." * Pepys, M.B. et al. Targeted pharmacological depletion of serum amyloid P component for treatment of human amyloidosis. Nature, 417, 254 - 259 , (2002). © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 2069 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientific discoveries about the animal kingdom are often used, even by biologists, to elucidate human behavior, especially our behaviors that pertain to sex and gender. For example, some people argue that male marmosets helping take care of their offspring helps us understand today's stay-at-home fathers. Or that the high divorce rate in recent years can be explained by invoking the fact that many female birds have chicks fathered outside the primary breeding pair. But in her new book 'Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals' (University of California Press, 2002), Marlene Zuk, professor of biology at UC Riverside, argues that while animals do display a lot of interesting variation, not all of it can be extrapolated to explain human behavior. She thinks some researchers have been too quick to ignore vital information from the animal kingdom, and have instead hustled "evidence" they believe is supportive of their ideas. "I am not saying we should never try to draw conclusions about human behavior from animals," says Zuk. "But people who already have social or political agendas sometimes see science as automatically deterministic about our behavior, as though we are programmed to behave in only a certain way. Then again, we have scientists who sometimes completely ignore the social or political biases that can affect our work." Copyright 2002, Regents UC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 2068 - Posted: 05.16.2002