A drug to treat a particular form of Duchenne muscular dystrophy has been given the green light by the European Medicines Agency and could be available in the UK in six months. Translarna is only relevant to patients with a 'nonsense mutation', who make up 10-15% of those affected by Duchenne. The EMA decided not to pass the drug in January, but they have since re-examined the evidence. A campaign group said the drug must reach the right children without delay. There are currently no approved therapies available for this life-threatening condition. The patients who will benefit the most are those aged five years and over who are still able to walk, the EMA said. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a genetic disease that gradually causes weakness and loss of muscle function. Patients with the condition lack normal dystrophin, a protein found in muscles, which helps to protect muscles from injury. In patients with the disease, the muscles become damaged and eventually stop working. There are 2,400 children in the UK living with muscular dystrophy, but only those whose condition is caused by a particular 'nonsense mutation' - namely 200 children - are suitable to use Translarna. The drug, ataluren, will be known by the brand name of Translarna in the EU. It was developed by PTC Therapeutics. The next step will see the European Commission rubberstamp the EMA's scientific 'green light' within the next three months and authorise the drug to be marketed in the European Union. At that point, individual member states, including the UK, must decide how it will be funded. The Muscular Dystrophy Campaign is calling for urgent meetings with National Institute of Health of Clinical Excellence (NICE) and NHS England to discuss how Translarna can be cleared for approval and use in the UK. It said families in the UK could have access to the drug by spring 2015. Robert Meadowcroft, chief executive of the campaign, said: "This decision by the EMA is fantastic news. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Muscles; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 19648 - Posted: 05.24.2014

By JENEEN INTERLANDI Bessel van der Kolk sat cross-legged on an oversize pillow in the center of a smallish room overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur. He wore khaki pants, a blue fleece zip-up and square wire-rimmed glasses. His feet were bare. It was the third day of his workshop, “Trauma Memory and Recovery of the Self,” and 30 or so workshop participants — all of them trauma victims or trauma therapists — lined the room’s perimeter. They, too, sat barefoot on cushy pillows, eyeing van der Kolk, notebooks in hand. For two days, they had listened to his lectures on the social history, neurobiology and clinical realities of post-traumatic stress disorder and its lesser-known sibling, complex trauma. Now, finally, he was about to demonstrate an actual therapeutic technique, and his gaze was fixed on the subject of his experiment: a 36-year-old Iraq war veteran named Eugene, who sat directly across from van der Kolk, looking mournful and expectant. Van der Kolk began as he often does, with a personal anecdote. “My mother was very unnurturing and unloving,” he said. “But I have a full memory and a complete sense of what it is like to be loved and nurtured by her.” That’s because, he explained, he had done the very exercise that we were about to try on Eugene. Here’s how it would work: Eugene would recreate the trauma that haunted him most by calling on people in the room to play certain roles. He would confront those people — with his anger, sorrow, remorse and confusion — and they would respond in character, apologizing, forgiving or validating his feelings as needed. By projecting his “inner world” into three-dimensional space, Eugene would be able to rewrite his troubled history more thoroughly than other forms of role-play therapy might allow. If the experiment succeeded, the bad memories would be supplemented with an alternative narrative — one that provided feelings of acceptance or forgiveness or love. The exercise, which van der Kolk calls a “structure” but which is also known as psychomotor therapy, was developed by Albert Pesso, a dancer who studied with Martha Graham. He taught it to van der Kolk about two decades ago. Though it has never been tested in a controlled study, van der Kolk says he has had some success with it in workshops like this one. He likes to try it whenever he has a small group and a willing volunteer. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 19647 - Posted: 05.24.2014

|By Ann Graybiel and Kyle Smith For children and adults who have conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette syndrome or autism, repetitive thoughts and actions can occur even if the individuals do not want them to. In OCD a thought that repeats again and again—“my hands are dirty, my hands are dirty”—can recur in a habitual way. Such conditions occur in people from different countries and cultures, suggesting that they represent a core dysfunction related to an imbalance between behaviors. These problems appear to reflect disturbances in brain circuits that are different from, but allied with, the normal habit circuits. Researchers in our group and that of Susanne Ahmari at the University of Pittsburgh have tested whether these OCD circuits can be controlled. Our lab group stimulated the neocortex and striatum in mice that were genetically engineered to have OCD-like traits. These mice groom themselves excessively, especially around the face. In the lab we mimicked a problem that people with OCD often have because they react excessively and repetitively to some trigger stimulus in the environment. We conditioned the mice to learn that after a tone sounded a drop of water would fall on their noses about a second later. We also performed the same routine with normal (“control”) mice. The OCD-like mice started by just grooming when the water drop came, but then began to start grooming in response to the tone alone, and kept grooming all the way through when the drop fell. The control mice learned to suppress this early grooming, which after all was a wasted effort because the water drop came later. The OCD-like mice groomed compulsively every time the external cue sounded. Using optogenetics—a technique that controls the activity of brain cells by shining light on them—we then excited a pathway that connects a small region in the cortex with the striatum. The pathway has been implicated in suppressing behaviors. This treatment immediately blocked the compulsive early grooming in the mutant mice! Yet when the water drop came, they could groom normally. And the optogenetic stimulation did not affect other normal behaviors such as eating; it selectively blocked the compulsive aspect of behavior. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19646 - Posted: 05.24.2014

Kevin Loria Music was among the least of Mr. B's concerns. As a 59-year-old Dutch man living with extremely severe obsessive compulsive disorder for 46 years, he had other things on his mind. His OCD was so severe it led to moderate anxiety and mild depression. Not only was his condition extreme, but it was also resistant to traditional treatment. It got so bad that he opted to receive an implant to stimulate his brain constantly with electricity — a treatment, called deep brain stimulation (DBS), that has been shown to successfully treat OCD in the past. It worked, but had a very peculiar side effect. As researchers write in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, it turned Mr. B. into a Johnny Cash fanatic, though he'd never really listened to The Man in Black before. Mr. B. had listened to the same music for decades, but was never a devout music lover. He was a Rolling Stones and Beatles fan (with a preference for the Stones), and listened to Dutch music as well. But just months after flying to Minneapolis and having two sets of electrodes tunneled into his brain for the shock therapy, he had a mind-blowing run-in with the song "Ring of Fire" playing on the radio. Something about Cash's deep bass-baritone voice resonated with him at that moment. His life had already changed. After the surgical implants and therapy, his OCD had gone from extremely severe to mild, and his depression and anxiety were at a level lower than mild. But when he heard Cash croon, another change began. Mr. B. bought all the Johnny Cash music he could find and stopped listening to anything else — no more Beatles, no more Stones, no more Nederpop. Instead, he played Cash all the time, and especially loved the songs from the '70s and '80s. "Folsom Prison Blues," "Ring Of Fire," and "Sunday Morning Come-Down" are his favorites. They make him feel like a hero, he told doctors. © 2014 Business Insider, Inc.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Attention
Link ID: 19645 - Posted: 05.24.2014

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS A new study found subtle differences in the brains of college football players when compared to other students.Tim Larsen for The New York TimesA new study found subtle differences in the brains of college football players when compared to other students. The brains of college football players are subtly different from the brains of other students, especially if the players have experienced a concussion in the past, according to an important new brain-scan study that, while restrained in its conclusions, adds to concerns that sports-related hits to the head could have lingering effects on the brain, even among the young and healthy. Almost all of us have heard by now that concussions are more injurious than was once believed. It’s been widely reported that the autopsied brains of some professional football and hockey players who experienced repeated hits to the head showed signs of severe and progressive brain damage. Meanwhile, recent studies with living animals suggest that the brain may respond to even mild concussive blows with inflammatory and other reactions that, while designed to spur healing, could also contribute to tissue damage. But many fundamental questions about the long-term impacts of blows to the head during sports remain unanswered, including which portions of the brain are most affected, whether any brain changes also affect the ability to think, and if playing a contact sport might alter the structure and function of the brains of athletes, even ones who have never experienced a confirmed concussion. So, for a study published last week in JAMA, researchers at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research and the University of Tulsa, both in Tulsa, Okla., and other institutions, started delving into those issues by turning to the university’s Division I football team. Tulsa is, of course, in the heart of football country. But the researchers say they met no resistance from the school, team or players. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19644 - Posted: 05.22.2014

Four common chronic pain conditions share a genetic element, suggesting they could - at least in part - be inherited diseases, say UK researchers. The four include irritable bowel syndrome, musculoskeletal pain, pelvic pain and dry eye disease. The study of more than 8,000 sets of twins found the ailments were common in identical pairs sharing the same DNA. The King's College London team say the discovery could ultimately help with managing these debilitating diseases. While environmental factors probably still play a role in the four conditions, genes could account for as much as two-thirds of someone's chances of developing the disease, they believe. They told the journal Pain that more research is needed to pinpoint the precise genes involved. Chronic pain - pain which persists or recurs for months on end - is common and has many different causes, which can make it difficult to diagnose and treat. While the pain can be related to other medical conditions, it is thought to be caused by problems with the nervous system, sending pain signals to the brain despite no obvious tissue damage. Experts are keen to understand more about chronic pain to improve the quality of life of the millions of people who have to endure it. Some have suspected that some people may have a genetic predisposition to chronic pain since many sufferers share similar symptoms and often have more than one of the different types of chronic pain conditions. The team at King's College London decided to study identical and non-identical twins because these two groups provide an ideal comparison for investigating inherited genes - identical twins share the same DNA while non-identical twins do not. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19643 - Posted: 05.22.2014

André Aleman & Damiaan Denys According to the World Health Organization, almost 1 million people kill themselves every year. That is more than the number that die in homicides and war combined. A further 10 million to 20 million people attempt it. Suicide is one of the three leading causes of death in the economically most productive age group — those aged 15–44 years — and rates have risen since the economic crisis triggered by the banking crash in 2008 (see 'Suicide rates in Europe'). For example, the number of suicides per year in the Netherlands rose by 30% between 2008 and 2012, from 1,353 to 1,753. In the United States, the average suicide costs society US$1.06 million according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite its enormous societal impact, little progress has been made in the scientific understanding or treatment of suicidal behaviour. We do know that up to 90% of suicides occur in people with a clinically diagnosable psychiatric disorder1. Large epidemiological studies have shown mental disorders, particularly depression and alcohol addiction, to be major risk factors2. And there is compelling evidence that adequate prevention and treatment of such disorders can reduce suicide rates2. But psychiatry has long neglected the topic. Other than as symptoms of borderline personality disorder and mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts were not listed in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). The DSM-5 (published last year) does not code suicidal behaviour — the most prominent emergency in psychiatry in primary care. Suicidality is perceived as a medical complication rather than as a disorder in its own right. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 19642 - Posted: 05.22.2014

By JAMES GORMAN If an exercise wheel sits in a forest, will mice run on it? Every once in a while, science asks a simple question and gets a straightforward answer. In this case, yes, they will. And not only mice, but also rats, shrews, frogs and slugs. True, the frogs did not exactly run, and the slugs probably ended up on the wheel by accident, but the mice clearly enjoyed it. That, scientists said, means that wheel-running is not a neurotic behavior found only in caged mice. They like the wheel. Two researchers in the Netherlands did an experiment that it seems nobody had tried before. They placed exercise wheels outdoors in a yard garden and in an area of dunes, and monitored the wheels with motion detectors and automatic cameras. They were inspired by questions from animal welfare committees at universities about whether mice were really enjoying wheel-running, an activity used in all sorts of studies, or were instead like bears pacing in a cage, stressed and neurotic. Would they run on a wheel if they were free? Now there is no doubt. Mice came to the wheels like human beings to a health club holding a spring membership sale. They made the wheels spin. They hopped on, hopped off and hopped back on. “When I saw the first mice, I was extremely happy,” said Johanna H. Meijer at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “I had to laugh about the results, but at the same time, I take it very seriously. It’s funny, and it’s important at the same time.” Dr. Meijer’s day job is as a “brain electrophysiologist” studying biological rhythms in mice. She relished the chance to get out of the laboratory and study wild animals, and in a way that no one else had. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 19641 - Posted: 05.21.2014

Puffing on a battery-powered, electronic cigarette to satisfy nicotine cravings could help longtime smokers quit their tobacco addiction. The evidence supporting that claim has been thin in the past, but researchers have now reported that adults in England who used the devices were 60% more likely to remain smoke-free than those who turned to nicotine patches or went cold turkey. Some public health researchers, though, still worry that’s not enough to cancel out the negative effects of e-cigarettes, which might keep other smokers hooked on nicotine or prevent them from seeking out more effective ways to quit. “This is an important study because, until now, the data on quitting smoking with e-cigarettes has been mostly anecdotal,” says Neal Benowitz, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who studies tobacco addiction and was not involved in the work. E-cigarettes produce a nicotine-rich vapor that’s free of many of the toxins and carcinogens that make tobacco cigarettes so unhealthy. Their popularity has skyrocketed since they hit the market in the early 2000s; a 2012 survey found that 30% of adult smokers in the United States had tried e-cigarettes. But studies attempting to establish both the risks and benefits of the devices have had varied conclusions. One recent review of the scientific literature, which included Benowitz as an author, reported that smokers who used e-cigarettes were less likely to quit smoking than those who didn’t use the devices. The results were based on broad surveys of all smokers, however, not just those attempting to quit. Another paper concluded that e-cigarettes are about as effective as nicotine patches at helping people stop smoking. Since 2006, researchers in England have run an ongoing surveillance program, in conjunction with the government’s research bureau, called the Smoking Toolkit Study. Every month, they survey a new sample of 1800 random adults about their smoking behavior. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19640 - Posted: 05.21.2014

Dr Lucy Maddox There has been much heated debate in recent weeks about whether cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis has been totally over-egged. One stance is that Nice (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) has recommended a treatment with little or no evidence base. Another is that CBT is a helpful intervention for many people experiencing psychotic-like phenomena. But what is CBT for psychosis? What does it look like? And how can knowing this help us to understand the issues being argued about? Psychosis is an umbrella term for a collection of symptoms. These symptoms get classed as "positive" or "negative", which is not to infer that some are good and some are bad, but rather to capture the fact that some of the symptoms add something new and others take something away. Positive symptoms are those that add an unusual experience of some kind, eg seeing things that others can't (hallucinations) or strongly believing things that don't make sense to others (delusions). Negative symptoms involve something being taken away from the person, eg a lack of enjoyment (anhedonia), motivation (avolition), or a lack of emotion. Whilst a recent meta-analysis has shown only limited evidence for the effectiveness of CBT for psychosis and suggested that previous results are inflated, we should be cautious about using this one meta-analysis to chuck out CBT for psychosis. Among other potential holes that could be poked in its conclusions is the fact that the analysis uses psychotic symptoms as the only outcome measure for effectiveness, which might not be the best or only thing we should be looking at. Many other reviews and individual studies do report reductions in psychotic symptoms from CBT for psychosis, including delusions and hallucinations and some of the brain processing correlates of these positive symptoms (eg Kumari et al 2011). Perhaps more interestingly though, they also report benefits from CBT in domains other than the psychotic symptoms themselves. (eg Wykes et al, 2009). © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 19639 - Posted: 05.21.2014

by Laura Sanders An injectable form of a newer, more expensive schizophrenia drug works no better than an older drug, scientists report May 21 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In a randomized clinical trial of 311 people with schizophrenia, injections of paliperidone palmitate failed to alleviate schizophrenia symptoms just as often as did injections of haloperidol decanoate, a drug that’s been around for decades. A single injection of paliperidone palmitate, a second-generation antipsychotic, costs about $1000 in the United States. An injection of haloperidol costs only about $35. The two drugs caused different side effects: In some patients, haloperidol led to muscle tremors and restlessness and paliperidone palmitate caused weight gain. Knowledge of these different side effects — and not differences in effectiveness — might be useful in deciding which drug a person ought to take. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 19638 - Posted: 05.21.2014

Dr. Mark Saleh Bell's palsy is a neurological condition frequently seen in emergency rooms and medical offices. Symptoms consist of weakness involving all muscles on one side of the face. About 40,000 cases occur annually in the United States. Men and women are equally affected, and though it can occur at any age, people in their 40s are especially vulnerable. The facial weakness that occurs in Bell's palsy prevents the eye of the affected side from blinking properly and causes the mouth to droop. Because the eyelid doesn't close sufficiently, the eye can dry and become irritated. Bell's palsy symptoms progress fairly rapidly, with weakness usually occurring within three days. If the progression of weakness is more gradual and extends beyond a week, Bell's palsy may not be the problem, and other potential causes should be investigated. Those with certain medical conditions, such as diabetes or pregnancy, are at greater risk of developing Bell's palsy, and those who have had one episode have an 8 percent chance of recurrence. Bell's palsy is thought to occur when the seventh cranial (facial) nerve becomes inflamed. The nerve controls the muscles involved in facial expression and is responsible for other functions, including taste perception, eye tearing and salivation. The cause of the inflammation is unknown, although the herpes simplex virus and autoimmune inflammation are possible causes. © 2014 Hearst Communications, Inc.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 19637 - Posted: 05.21.2014

After a string of scandals involving accusations of misconduct and retracted papers, social psychology is engaged in intense self-examination—and the process is turning out to be painful. This week, a global network of nearly 100 researchers unveiled the results of an effort to replicate 27 well-known studies in the field. In more than half of the cases, the result was a partial or complete failure. As the replicators see it, the failed do-overs are a healthy corrective. “Replication helps us make sure what we think is true really is true,” says Brent Donnellan, a psychologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing who has undertaken three recent replications of studies from other groups—all of which came out negative. “We are moving forward as a science,” he says. But rather than a renaissance, some researchers on the receiving end of this organized replication effort see an inquisition. “I feel like a criminal suspect who has no right to a defense and there is no way to win,” says psychologist Simone Schnall of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who studies embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is unconsciously shaped by bodily movement and the surrounding environment. Schnall’s 2008 study finding that hand-washing reduced the severity of moral judgment was one of those Donnellan could not replicate. About half of the replications are the work of Many Labs, a network of about 50 psychologists around the world. The results of their first 13 replications, released online in November, were greeted with a collective sigh of relief: Only two failed. Meanwhile, Many Labs participant Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, put out a call for proposals for more replication studies. After 40 rolled in, he and Daniël Lakens, a psychologist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, chose another 14 to repeat. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 19636 - Posted: 05.20.2014

|By Isaac Bédard Very few animals have revealed an ability to consciously think about the future—behaviors such as storing food for the winter are often viewed as a function of instinct. Now a team of anthropologists at the University of Zurich has evidence that wild orangutans have the capacity to perceive the future, prepare for it and communicate those future plans to other orangutans. The researchers observed 15 dominant male orangutans in Sumatra for several years. These males roam through immense swaths of dense jungle, emitting loud yells every couple of hours so that the females they mate with and protect can locate and follow them. The shouts also warn away any lesser males that might be in the vicinity. These vocalizations had been observed by primatologists before, but the new data reveal that the apes' last daily call, an especially long howl, is aimed in the direction they will travel in the morning—and the other apes take note. The females stop moving when they hear this special 80-second call, bed down for the night, and in the morning begin traveling in the direction indicated the evening before. The scientists believe that the dominant apes are planning their route in advance and communicating it to other orangutans in the area. They acknowledge, however, that the dominant males might not intend their long calls to have such an effect on their followers. Karin Isler, a Zurich anthropologist who co-authored the study in PLOS ONE last fall, explains, “We don't know whether the apes are conscious. This planning does not have to be conscious. But it is also more and more difficult to argue that they [do not have] some sort of mind of their own.” © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution; Attention
Link ID: 19635 - Posted: 05.20.2014

By BENEDICT CAREY SAN DIEGO – The last match of the tournament had all the elements of a classic showdown, pitting style versus stealth, quickness versus deliberation, and the world’s foremost card virtuoso against its premier numbers wizard. If not quite Ali-Frazier or Williams-Sharapova, the duel was all the audience of about 100 could ask for. They had come to the first Extreme Memory Tournament, or XMT, to see a fast-paced, digitally enhanced memory contest, and that’s what they got. The contest, an unusual collaboration between industry and academic scientists, featured one-minute matches between 16 world-class “memory athletes” from all over the world as they met in a World Cup-like elimination format. The grand prize was $20,000; the potential scientific payoff was large, too. One of the tournament’s sponsors, the company Dart NeuroScience, is working to develop drugs for improved cognition. The other, Washington University in St. Louis, sent a research team with a battery of cognitive tests to determine what, if anything, sets memory athletes apart. Previous research was sparse and inconclusive. Yet as the two finalists, both Germans, prepared to face off — Simon Reinhard, 35, a lawyer who holds the world record in card memorization (a deck in 21.19 seconds), and Johannes Mallow, 32, a teacher with the record for memorizing digits (501 in five minutes) — the Washington group had one preliminary finding that wasn’t obvious. “We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us,” said Henry L. Roediger III, the psychologist who led the research team, “is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention.” People have been performing feats of memory for ages, scrolling out pi to hundreds of digits, or phenomenally long verses, or word pairs. Most store the studied material in a so-called memory palace, associating the numbers, words or cards with specific images they have already memorized; then they mentally place the associated pairs in a familiar location, like the rooms of a childhood home or the stops on a subway line. The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos is credited with first describing the method, in the fifth century B.C., and it has been vividly described in popular books, most recently “Moonwalking With Einstein,” by Joshua Foer. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 19634 - Posted: 05.20.2014

By David Grimm, A shaggy brown terrier approaches a large chocolate Labrador in a city park. When the terrier gets close, he adopts a yogalike pose, crouching on his forepaws and hiking his butt into the air. The Lab gives an excited bark, and soon the two dogs are somersaulting and tugging on each other’s ears. Then the terrier takes off and the Lab gives chase, his tail wagging wildly. When the two meet once more, the whole thing begins again. Watch a couple of dogs play, and you’ll probably see seemingly random gestures, lots of frenetic activity and a whole lot of energy being expended. But decades of research suggest that beneath this apparently frivolous fun lies a hidden language of honesty and deceit, empathy and perhaps even a humanlike morality. Take those two dogs. That yogalike pose is known as a “play bow,” and in the language of play it’s one of the most commonly used words. It’s an instigation and a clarification, a warning and an apology. Dogs often adopt this stance as an invitation to play right before they lunge at another dog; they also bow before they nip (“I’m going to bite you, but I’m just fooling around”) or after some particularly aggressive roughhousing (“Sorry I knocked you over; I didn’t mean it.”). All of this suggests that dogs have a kind of moral code — one long hidden to humans until a cognitive ethologist named Marc Bekoff began to crack it. A wiry 68-year-old with reddish-gray hair tied back in a long ponytail, Bekoff is a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he taught for 32 years. He began studying animal behavior in the early 1970s, spending four years videotaping groups of dogs, wolves and coyotes in large enclosures and slowly playing back the tapes, jotting down every nip, yip and lick. “Twenty minutes of film could take a week to analyze,” he says. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 19633 - Posted: 05.20.2014

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Sweet revenge comes in many delectable forms, among them the receipt of accolades for work long scorned. And then to get to tell the whole story at length and without a single interruption — small wonder that the Nobel laureate Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner, a renowned neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, writes with a cheerful bounce. Once disparaged, his scientific work is now hailed as visionary, and his memoir takes the reader on a leisurely and immensely readable victory lap from then to now. In the process, two stories unfold. The first is the progress of Dr. Prusiner’s thinking on the transmissible proteins he named prions (PREE-ons) in 1982, starting with his first experiments on an obscure disease of sheep and ending with the most recent work linking prions to an array of human neurological catastrophes, including Alzheimer’s disease. The science is convoluted, like the proteins, and for the uninitiated the best way to achieve a rudimentary grasp of the subject is to hear it the way Dr. Prusiner tells it, from the very beginning. But a parallel narrative turns out to be equally fascinating: perhaps not since James D. Watson’s 1968 memoir “The Double Helix“ has the down and dirty business of world-class science been given such an airing. Dr. Watson raised eyebrows with his gossipy account of the serious task of unraveling the genetic code — and he was working in genteel postwar Britain at the time, with experimental science still at least in theory a gentleman’s game. That illusion is long gone: The stakes are considerably higher now, the competition fierce, the pace frantic, and Dr. Prusiner, 71, revisits quite a few of the battles that punctuated his long research career. He was an underachiever in high school and then an achiever in college and medical school, captivated by the laboratory early on. He finished his medical training on the neurology wards in San Francisco, where he met the patient who would set the course of his career: a slim, tanned 60-year-old woman from Marin County who was having trouble unzipping her golf bag. Months later she was dead of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, one of several related and invariably fatal neurological diseases (mad cow among them) that leave the brain of the affected human or animal riddled with holes, a useless sponge. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 19632 - Posted: 05.20.2014

Sara Reardon The researchers' technique shows neurons throughout the body twinkling with activity. Researchers have for the first time imaged all of the neurons firing in a living organism, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. The achievement, reported today in Nature Methods1 shows how signals travel through the body in real time. Scientists mapped the connections among all 302 of the nematode's neurons in 19862 — a first that has not been repeated with any other organism. But this wiring diagram, or 'connectome', does not allow researchers to determine the neuronal pathways that lead to a particular action. Nor does it allow researchers to predict what the nematode will do at any point in time, says neuroscientist Alipasha Vaziri of the University of Vienna. By providing a means of displaying signaling activity between neurons in three dimensions and in real-time, the new technique should allow scientists to do both. Vaziri and his colleagues engineered C. elegans so that when a neuron fires and calcium ions pass through its cell membranes, the neuron lights up. To capture those signals, they imaged the whole worm using a technique called light-field deconvolution microscopy, which combines images from a set of tiny lenses and analyses them using an algorithm to give a high-resolution three-dimensional image. The researchers took as many as 50 images per second of the entire worm, enabling them to watch the neurons firing in the brain, ventral cord, and tail (see video). Next, the group applied the technique to the transparent larvae of the zebrafish (Danio rerio), imaging the entire brain as the fish responded to the odours of chemicals pumped into their water. They were able to capture the activity of about 5,000 neurons simultaneously (the zebrafish has about 100,000 total neurons). © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 19631 - Posted: 05.19.2014

By NATASHA SINGER Joseph J. Atick cased the floor of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington as if he owned the place. In a way, he did. He was one of the organizers of the event, a conference and trade show for the biometrics security industry. Perhaps more to the point, a number of the wares on display, like an airport face-scanning checkpoint, could trace their lineage to his work. A physicist, Dr. Atick is one of the pioneer entrepreneurs of modern face recognition. Having helped advance the fundamental face-matching technology in the 1990s, he went into business and promoted the systems to government agencies looking to identify criminals or prevent identity fraud. “We saved lives,” he said during the conference in mid-March. “We have solved crimes.” Thanks in part to his boosterism, the global business of biometrics — using people’s unique physiological characteristics, like their fingerprint ridges and facial features, to learn or confirm their identity — is booming. It generated an estimated $7.2 billion in 2012, according to reports by Frost & Sullivan. Making his rounds at the trade show, Dr. Atick, a short, trim man with an indeterminate Mediterranean accent, warmly greeted industry representatives at their exhibition booths. Once he was safely out of earshot, however, he worried aloud about what he was seeing. What were those companies’ policies for retaining and reusing consumers’ facial data? Could they identify individuals without their explicit consent? Were they running face-matching queries for government agencies on the side? Now an industry consultant, Dr. Atick finds himself in a delicate position. While promoting and profiting from an industry that he helped foster, he also feels compelled to caution against its unfettered proliferation. He isn’t so much concerned about government agencies that use face recognition openly for specific purposes — for example, the many state motor vehicle departments that scan drivers’ faces as a way to prevent license duplications and fraud. Rather, what troubles him is the potential exploitation of face recognition to identify ordinary and unwitting citizens as they go about their lives in public. Online, we are all tracked. But to Dr. Atick, the street remains a haven, and he frets that he may have abetted a technology that could upend the social order. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 19630 - Posted: 05.19.2014

|By Beth Skwarecki The protein family notorious for causing neurogenerative diseases such as Parkinson's—not to mention mad cow—appears to play an important role in healthy cells. “Do you think God created prions just to kill?” muses Eric R. Kandel of Columbia University. “These things have evolved initially to have a physiological function.” Kandel's work on memory helped to reveal that animals make and use prions in their nervous systems as part of an essential function: stabilizing the synapses involved with forming long-term memories. These natural prions are not infectious, but on a molecular level they chain up exactly the same way as their disease-causing brethren. (Some researchers call them “prionlike” to avoid confusion.) Now neuroscientist Kausik Si of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Mo., one of Kandel's former students, has shown that the prion's action is tightly controlled by the cell and can be turned on when a new long-term memory needs to be formed. Once the prion's chain reaction gets started, it is self-perpetuating, and thus the synapse—where neurons connect—can be maintained after the initial trigger is gone, perhaps for a lifetime. But that still does not explain how the first prion is triggered or why it happens at only certain of the synapses, which play a crucial role in forming memories. Si's work, published February 11 in PLOS Biology, traces the biochemistry of this protein-preservation process in fruit flies, showing how the cell turns on the machinery responsible for the persistence of memory—and how the memory can be stabilized at just the right time and in the right place. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Prions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19629 - Posted: 05.19.2014