by Helen Thomson A drug for perfect pitch is just the start: mastering new skills could become easy if we can restore the brain's youthful ability to create new circuits WANNABE maestros, listen up. A mood-stabilising drug can help you achieve perfect pitch – the ability to identify any note you hear without inferring it from a reference note. Since this is a skill that is usually acquired only early in life, the discovery is the first evidence that it may be possible to revert the human brain to a childlike state, enabling us to treat disorders and unlock skills that are difficult, if not impossible, to acquire beyond a certain age. From bilingualism to sporting prowess, many abilities rely on neural circuits that are laid down by our early experiences. Until the age of 7 or so, the brain goes through several "critical periods" during which it can be radically changed by the environment. During these times, the brain is said to have increased plasticity. In order to take advantage of these critical periods, the brain needs to be stimulated appropriately so it lays down the neuronal circuitry needed for a particular ability. For example, young children with poor sight in one eye may develop lazy eye, or amblyopia. It can be treated by covering the better eye, forcing the child to use the lazy eye – but this strategy only works during the critical period. These windows of opportunity are fleeting, but now researchers are beginning to understand what closes them and how they might be reopened. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hearing
Link ID: 19115 - Posted: 01.09.2014

By Stephen L. Macknik Hypoglycemia occurs when your blood sugar gets dangerously low, resulting in sweating, the feeling of weakness and dysphoria (the “don’t touch me” feeling you have when you’re sick and nauseous, possibly unconscious, as with the flu), and a variety of other symptoms. You basically go into a state similar to shock. The principal problem, however, arises from low blood sugar supply to the brain, resulting in impairment of function. It’s a common problem in diabetic non-compliance (not eating low-carbohydrate foods while diabetic), which is especially prevalent in the poor. SABRINA TAVERNISE, of The New York Times reported on a new study in the journal Health Affairs, by Seligman and colleagues of the University of California, San Francisco, in which they analyzed the prevalence of hypoglycemia in low income populations at risk for hypoglycemia, as a function of time since the patients’ households’ last pay day. They found that hypoglycemia increases at the end of a pay cycle in low-income diabetics. They thus concluded that low-income diabetic patients have low access to food at the end of the month, resulting in frank starvation and thus low blood sugar. I find this to be an unlikely scenario. It’s not that I don’t believe that low-income is tied to diabetes and hypoglycemia at the end of the pay cycle. I do believe it, and the Centers for Disease Control have determined that 8% of the population has diabetes, and that the burden is carried by low-income families. So I think the main effect, increased hypoglycemia in the poor at the end of their pay cycle, is correct (and Ms. Tavernise reports that experts in the field are happy with the methods, so I’m happy with them too as a non-expert in this field). © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19114 - Posted: 01.09.2014

by Anil Ananthaswamy Next time you happen to be snorkelling near a coral reef, keep an eye out for mantis shrimp. In all likelihood, these crustaceans, which resemble small lobsters, will have spotted you: they scan their surroundings with rapid eye movements just like those of primates. Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and colleagues have been studying mantis shrimp for years, and it is how they use their eyes that interests Marshall. Their eyes are on stalks and can dart around. Humans use similar rapid eye movements, called saccades, to "acquire" or lock on to new objects, and to track them as they move. "It was not clear whether the shrimp eye movements were anything to do with acquiring objects, or just repositioning the eyes," Marshall says. To find out, the team placed mantis shrimp in a perspex tube inside an aquarium, and suddenly introduced a small coloured disc into their line of sight. A camera outside the aquarium filmed their eyes. The team found that the mantis shrimp's fovea – the part of the eye with the highest resolution – was using saccades to home in on the coloured disc. This sort of behaviour is normally found in animals like primates, says Marshall. The saccadic eye movements are extremely rapid. Human saccades can sweep through a field of view at a rate of 200-300 degrees per second. "[Mantis shrimp] are actually going up to twice that amount," says Marshall. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 19113 - Posted: 01.09.2014

By Partha Mitra Leonardo Da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura), advises painters to pay particular attention to the motions of the mind, moti mentali. “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure,” he advises; otherwise the figure will be considered twice dead: “dead because it is a depiction, and dead yet again in not exhibiting motion either of the mind or of the body.” Francesco Melzi, student and friend to Da Vinci, compiled the Treatise posthumously from fragmented notes left to him. The vivid portrayal of emotions in the paintings from Leonardo’s school shows that his students learned to read the moti mentali of their subjects in exquisite detail. Associating an emotional expression of the face with a “motion of the mind” was an astonishing insight by Da Vinci and a surprisingly modern metaphor. Today we correlate specific patterns of electrochemical dynamics (i.e. “motions”) of the central nervous system, with emotional feelings. Consciousness, the substrate for any emotional feeling, is itself a “motion of the mind,” an ephemeral state characterized by certain dynamical patterns of electrical activity. Even if all the neurons, their constituent parts and neuronal circuitry remained structurally the same, a change in the dynamics can mean the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness. But what kind of motion is it? What are the patterns of electrical activity that correspond to our subjective state of being conscious, and why? Can they be measured and quantified? This is not only a theoretical or philosophical question but also one that is of vital interest to the anesthesiologist trying to regulate the level of consciousness during surgery, or for the neurologist trying to differentiate between different states of consciousness following brain trauma. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19112 - Posted: 01.08.2014

by Laura Sanders Baby V sailed through her first Christmas with the heart of a little explorer. She travelled to frigid upstate New York where she mashed snow in her cold little hands, tasted her great grandma’s twice baked potato and was licked clean by at least four dogs. And she opened lots of presents. It’s totally true what people say about little kids and gifts: The wrapping paper proved to be the biggest hit. But in the Christmas aftermath, one of Baby V’s new toys really caught her attention. She cannot resist her singing, talking book. The book has only three pages, but Baby V is smitten. Any time the book pipes up, which it seems to do randomly, she snaps to attention, staring at it, grabbing it and trying to figure it out. With a cutesy high-pitched voice, the book tells Baby V to “Turn the pa-AYE-ge!” and “This is fun!” Sometimes, the book bursts into little songs, all the while maintaining the cheeriest, squeakiest, sugarplum-drenched tone, even when it’s saying something kind of sad: “Three little kittens have lost their mittens and they began to cry!” The book maker (uh, author?) clearly knows how to tap into infants’ deep love for happy, squeaky noises, as does the creator of Elmo. Scientists are also noticing this trend, and are starting to figure out exactly why these sounds are so alluring to little ones. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014.

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19111 - Posted: 01.08.2014

Just in time for all those New Year’s resolutions to exercise more, scientists have a better idea of how the body turns pain into gain. Exertion stimulates muscles to release a molecule that modifies fat cells, turning them into calorie-burning machines, a research team has found. Exercise works the muscles but affects cells throughout the body, even in the brain. An important player in this process is a protein called PGC-1α. In exercising muscles, it activates genes that ramp up energy use. But its impact extends beyond these tissues. The protein somehow indirectly prompts, for example, white fat—the energy-storing variety that pads our hips and stomachs—to switch on genes that are characteristic of brown fat, a form that burns calories. PGC-1α doesn’t travel outside muscle cells, so researchers aren’t sure how its influence spreads, however. By sifting through the secretions of PGC-1α-making muscle cells, Robert Gerszten of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues have nabbed one molecule that might be doing the protein’s bidding: β-aminoisobutyric acid (BAIBA). They found that BAIBA induces white fat cells to become more like brown fat cells, altering their gene activity patterns. And it stimulates other cell types, stoking fat metabolism in the liver, the team also reveals today in Cell Metabolism. These effects may translate into a healthier metabolism. When mice lapped up water laced with the molecule, the rodents lost weight and were better at absorbing glucose. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity; Muscles
Link ID: 19110 - Posted: 01.08.2014

By Susan Berger, The chiropractor had just worked on Lynne Beliveau’s neck when she became dizzy, unable to see or move. Rushed to the hospital, Beliveau had a shunt inserted to relieve pressure caused by swelling in her brain. The Ashburn woman suffered a series of strokes and today, eight years later, the 41-year-old mother of three suffers from constant vertigo. Elizabeth Haran Caplan knew she was in trouble seconds after a chiropractor in Oklahoma City manipulated her neck. The room got dark and she felt dizzy. Because of her years of service as a combat medic in Kosovo and Somalia, she knew what was happening and yelled, “Stop. I’m having a stroke.” More than a decade later, she is blind in her left eye and has problems swallowing without choking due to paralysis of one side of her throat. Approximately 20 million Americans visit chiropractors each year, according to the American Chiropractic Association, seeking relief from back pain, neck pain, headaches, sinus problems, ringing in the ears and more. For many, the manipulations provide relief. But one of the techniques chiropractors use, called cervical neck manipulation or “cracking the neck,” has raised concerns that it can cause serious harm. “I have jumped out of airplanes, escaped bullets in Somalia,” said Haran Caplan, 47, who retired from the Army nine years ago as a lieutenant colonel. “Who knew the most dangerous place I would put myself would be on a chiropractor’s table?” © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 19109 - Posted: 01.08.2014

By Felicity Muth Whether there exist differences between boys and girls is passionately debated (for example, see this debate about gender disparity between Stephen Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke). Some studies have found that girls are more sociable than boys, but prefer to play with just one other person, while boys prefer a larger group to play with. However, it is very difficult to say whether differences that we see in boys’ and girls’ behaviour has a biological basis, as boys and girls are also treated differently. Even before a baby is born, parents have often painted its room pink or blue, and bought gender-differentiated toys. A mother is more likely to under-estimate her female baby’s crawling abilities, and over-estimate her male baby’s (he’s a boy, of course he’s going to be stronger and better at crawling?!). Perceptions on the personality and abilities of a baby also differ depending on whether the adult is told that the child is male or female. Given these differences in how people treat male and female children, it can be difficult to say whether the behaviours we see are have a biological basis or not. However, we can look for certain clues to biological differences in child behaviour from our ‘cousins’ the chimpanzees. Chimpanzees live in communities of 20 to 180 individuals, with sub-groups within this. One recent study looked at the behaviour of eight female and twelve male chimpanzee infants to see if their behaviour differed from each other. They found that the young males were more sociable than the young females. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 19108 - Posted: 01.08.2014

Ed Yong A marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) at the Galapagos Islands National Park rests calmly as tourists walk by — a behaviour that may have evolved because of a lack of predators. Expand When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, he noted that many of its animal inhabitants were so unafraid of people that “a gun is here almost superfluous”. He swatted birds with his hat, pulled the tails of iguanas and sat on giant tortoises. These antics fuelled his famous idea that animals become tame when they live on remote, predator-free islands. Now, William Cooper Jr of Indiana University–Purdue University in Fort Wayne has tested Darwin's hypothesis on 66 species of lizards from around the world and found that island dwellers tended to be more docile than their continental relatives — the strongest evidence yet for this classic idea. The results are published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1. Several studies and unpublished reports have shown that particular species are more approachable on islands where there are fewer predators, or quicker to flee on islands that contain introduced hunters such as feral cats. But despite this largely anecdotal evidence for island tameness, “no one has ever established that it’s a general phenomenon in any group”, says Cooper. “We showed that for a large prey group — lizards — there really is a significant decline in wariness on islands.” © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution; Aggression
Link ID: 19107 - Posted: 01.08.2014

By JAMES GORMAN ST. LOUIS — Deanna Barch talks fast, as if she doesn’t want to waste any time getting to the task at hand, which is substantial. She is one of the researchers here at Washington University working on the first interactive wiring diagram of the living, working human brain. To build this diagram she and her colleagues are doing brain scans and cognitive, psychological, physical and genetic assessments of 1,200 volunteers. They are more than a third of the way through collecting information. Then comes the processing of data, incorporating it into a three-dimensional, interactive map of the healthy human brain showing structure and function, with detail to one and a half cubic millimeters, or less than 0.0001 cubic inches. Dr. Barch is explaining the dimensions of the task, and the reasons for undertaking it, as she stands in a small room, where multiple monitors are set in front of a window that looks onto an adjoining room with an M.R.I. machine, in the psychology building. She asks a research assistant to bring up an image. “It’s all there,” she says, reassuring a reporter who has just emerged from the machine, and whose brain is on display. And so it is, as far as the parts are concerned: cortex, amygdala, hippocampus and all the other regions and subregions, where memories, fear, speech and calculation occur. But this is just a first go-round. It is a static image, in black and white. There are hours of scans and tests yet to do, though the reporter is doing only a demonstration and not completing the full routine. Each of the 1,200 subjects whose brain data will form the final database will spend a good 10 hours over two days being scanned and doing other tests. The scientists and technicians will then spend at least another 10 hours analyzing and storing each person’s data to build something that neuroscience does not yet have: a baseline database for structure and activity in a healthy brain that can be cross-referenced with personality traits, cognitive skills and genetics. And it will be online, in an interactive map available to all. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 19106 - Posted: 01.07.2014

By Ashutosh Jogalekar Often you will hear people talking about why drugs are expensive: it’s the greedy pharmaceutical companies, the patent system, the government, capitalism itself. All these factors contribute to increasing the price of a drug, but one very important factor often gets entirely overlooked: Drugs are expensive because the science of drug discovery is hard. And it’s just getting harder. In fact purely on a scientific level, taking a drug all the way from initial discovery to market is considered harder than putting a man on the moon, and there’s more than a shred of truth to this contention. In this series of posts I will try to highlight some of the purely scientific challenges inherent in the discovery of new medicines. I am hoping that this will make laymen appreciate a little better why the cost of drugs doesn’t have everything to do with profit and power and much to do with scientific ignorance and difficulty; as one leading scientist I know quips, “Drugs are not expensive because we are evil, they are expensive because we are stupid.” I could actually end this post right here by stating one simple, predominant reason why the science of drug discovery is so tortuous: it’s because biology is complex. The second reason is because we are dealing with a classic multiple variable optimization problem, except that the variables to be optimized again pertain to a very poorly understood, complex and unpredictable system. The longer answer will be more interesting. The simple fact is that we still haven’t figured out the workings of biological systems – the human body in this case – to an extent that allows us to rationally and predictably modify, mitigate or cure their ills using small organic molecules. That we have been able to do so to an unusually successful degree is a tribute to both human ingenuity and plain good luck. But there’s still a very long way to go. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 19105 - Posted: 01.07.2014

By JAMES GORMAN St. Louis — I knew I wouldn’t find my “self” in a brain scan. I also knew as I headed into the noisy torpedo tube of a souped-up M.R.I. machine at Washington University in St. Louis that unless there was something terribly wrong (“Igor, look! His head is filled with Bitcoins!”), I would receive no news of the particulars of how my brain was arranged. Even if I had been one of the 1,200 volunteers in the part of the Human Connectome Project being conducted there, I wouldn’t have gotten a report of my own personal connectome and what it meant. Once the 10 hours of scans and tests are finished, and 10 hours more of processing and analysis done, the data for each of the volunteers — all anonymous — becomes part of a database to help scientists develop tools so that one day such an individual report might be possible. Besides, I was just going through a portion of the process, to see what it was like. Even so, I do have this sense of myself as an individual, different from others in ways good, bad and inconsequential, and the pretty reasonable feeling that whatever a “self” is, it lies behind my eyes and between my ears. That’s where I feel that “I” live. So I couldn’t shake the sense that there would be something special in seeing my brain, even if I couldn’t actually spot where all the song lyrics I’ve memorized are stored, or locate my fondness for cooking and singing and my deep disappointment that I can’t carry a tune (though I can follow a recipe). So I climbed into the M.R.I. machine. I tried to hold my head perfectly still as I stared at a spot marked by a cross, tried to corral my fading memory to perform well on tests, curled my toes and moved my fingers so that muscle motion could be mapped, and wondered at the extraordinary noises M.R.I. machines make. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Brain imaging
Link ID: 19104 - Posted: 01.07.2014

By SABRINA TAVERNISE Poor people with diabetes are significantly more likely to go to the hospital for dangerously low blood sugar at the end of the month when food budgets are tight than at the beginning of the month, a new study has found. Researchers found no increase in such hospitalizations among higher-income people for the condition known as hypoglycemia, suggesting that poverty and exhausted food budgets may be a reason for the increased health risk. Hypoglycemia occurs when people with diabetes have not had enough to eat, but continue taking medications for the disease. To control diabetes, patients need to keep their blood sugar within a narrow band. Levels that are too low or too high (known as hyperglycemia) can be dangerous. Researchers found a clear pattern among low-income people: Hospital admissions for hypoglycemia were 27 percent higher at the end of the month than at the beginning. Researchers said they could not prove that the patients’ economic circumstances were the reason for the admission, but the two things were highly correlated. The study, published online Monday in the journal Health Affairs, comes as Congress continues to debate legislation that includes the food stamp program for poor Americans. House Republicans are advocating $40 billion in cuts to the program, a step that Democrats oppose. About 25 million Americans, or 8 percent of the population, have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The poor are disproportionately affected. The United States spends more than $100 billion a year treating people with the disease, the agency estimates. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19103 - Posted: 01.07.2014

by Alyssa Botelho Women with breast cancer often enjoy several years in remission, only to then be given the devastating news that they have developed brain tumours. Now we are finally starting to understand how breast cancer cells are able to spread undetected in the brain: they masquerade as neurons and hijack their energy supply. For every tumour that originates in the brain, 10 arrive there from other organ systems. Understanding how tumours spread, or metastasise, and survive in the brain is important because the survival rate of people with brain metastases is poor – only a fifth are still alive a year after being diagnosed. Rahul Jandial, a neurosurgeon at the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, California, wanted to explore how breast cancer cells are able to cross the blood-brain barrier and escape destruction by the immune system. "If, by chance, a malignant breast cancer cell swimming in the bloodstream crossed into the brain, how would it survive in a completely new, foreign habitat?" Jandial says. He and his team wondered if breast cancer cells that could use the resources around them – neurotransmitters and other chemicals in the brain – would be the ones that survived and flourished. To test the idea, they took samples of metastatic breast cancer cells from the brains of several women and grew them in the lab. They compared the expression of proteins involved in detecting and absorbing GABA – a common neurotransmitter that neurons convert into energy – in these cells with what happens in non-metastatic breast cancer cells. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 19102 - Posted: 01.07.2014

After a concussion, adolescents with the highest level of mental activities — such as reading, doing homework and playing video games — take the longest to recover, a new study suggests. Adolescents engaged in the highest level of mental activities take about 100 days on average to recover from symptoms of concussion, compared to about 20 to 50 days for those with lower mental activities, according to researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston. A concussion is an injury to the brain resulting from a blow to the head. Classic symptoms of concussion are confusion and amnesia. Others include headache, dizziness, nausea or vomiting, and fatigue. The study was published on Monday in Pediatrics, a peer-reviewed, scientific journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. One of the authors is a co-developer of the post-concussion assessment software used in the study and is a co-owner of the company that distributes the software. Researchers tracked 335 people aged eight to 23 who visited a sports concussion clinic in Boston over 21 months. The results support the benefits of mental rest to recover from a concussion, researchers say. The researchers also back up academic accommodation for student athletes recovering from sports-related concussions, which allows them relative mental rest during the school year. © CBC 2014

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19101 - Posted: 01.06.2014

Brittany Fallon In today’s focal party, the main characters are Nambi, the Alpha female who engages in regular sexual relations with young males; Nick, the former Alpha male, replaced by Nambi’s son Musa; and Zefa, Nick’s former Beta male, who is forming new alliances to overthrow Musa. It’s hard not to pretend I’m witnessing the real world version of Game of Thrones – except it’s not humans I’m observing, but chimpanzees. There’s no Iron Throne involved in this power struggle – just the race for reproductive success. Dominant individuals enjoy a number of benefits that improve their chance of passing on genes, including richer access to sexual partners. But how does this influence their tactics for attracting mates? Perhaps no effort is needed, the chimpanzee equivalent to the philandering Robert, with potential sex partners who line up in hopes of birthing the next possible heir. Or is it that, like promiscuous Cersei, they’ve learned a number of coy and successful pick up lines (“Tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon.”)? Elaborate metaphors aside, this is exactly the sort of question that I attempt to answer for my PhD on sexual displays in the Sonso chimpanzee community of the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda. Chimpanzees, like a variety of animals, produce ‘courtship displays’ to attract mates. Displays are largely comprised of gestures, which can be broadly defined as distinct bodily movements that do not physically manipulate the receiver toward the goal of the signaller. Both males and females, ranging in age from 2 to 52 years old in my community, can produce these solicitations. Displays can be elaborate, many signals strung together, or they can be simple, a single shaking of a branch followed immediately by copulation. What’s particularly amazing about chimpanzee solicitations is that they seem to be intentionally communicative: following a display, signallers will visibly wait for a response from their target by gaze-checking, and, if met with failure, will persist in gesturing. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 19100 - Posted: 01.06.2014

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Are there good scientific studies that show that drinking sugar-sweetened soda increases the risk for obesity? The answer may vary depending on who is paying for the study. Researchers examined 17 large reviews of the subject (one review assessed results for adults and children separately, so there were 18 sets of study conclusions). Six of the studies reported receiving funds from industry groups, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, the American Beverage Association and others. The other 12 reviews claimed no conflicts of interest. The analysis appears in the December issue of PLOS Medicine. Among the reviews with no conflicts of interest, 10 of 12, or 83.3 percent, reported that sugary drinks were directly associated with weight gain or obesity. The conclusions of studies supported by industry were a mirror image: five of six — the same 83.3 percent — reported that there was insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion. “I wouldn’t say that industry participation alone is enough to dismiss the study’s results in the whole of nutrition research,” said the lead author, Maira Bes-Rastrollo, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Navarra in Spain. “But I think that the general public and the scientific community should be aware that the food industry has vested interests that may influence their conclusions.” Copyright 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19099 - Posted: 01.06.2014

By Tia Ghose and LiveScience Neurons derived from schizophrenic patients. Image: Dr. Kristen Brennand, Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Some so-called jumping genes that copy and paste themselves throughout the genome may be linked to schizophrenia, new research suggests. The new study, published Jan. 2 in Neuron, suggests these jumping genes may alter how neurons (or nerve cells in the brain) form during development, thereby increasing the risk of schizophrenia, study co-author Dr. Tadafumi Kato, a neurobiologist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, wrote in an email. Jumping genes, or retrotransposons, are mobile genetic elements that copy and paste themselves at different places throughout the genome. About half of the human genome is made of these mysterious elements, compared with the 1 percent of genes that actually code for making proteins, Kato said. Earlier studies had found that a certain type of jumping gene, known as long interspersed nuclear element-1 (LINE-1), was active in human brain cells. Kato and his colleagues wondered whether they might play a role in mental illness. To find out, the team conducted a post-mortem analysis of 120 human brains, 13 from patients who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The team found a higher number of LINE-1 copies in the brains of schizophrenics compared with other groups. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19098 - Posted: 01.04.2014

by Bethany Brookshire When most people think of the quintessential lab mouse, they think of a little white mouse with red eyes. Soft fur. A timid nature. But scientists think of something very different. This mouse is black, small and fast, with pink ears and a pinkish tail. It’s got black eyes to match. The fur may be soft, but the temper sure isn’t. This is the C57 Black 6 mouse. Each Black 6 mouse should be almost identical to every other Black 6 mouse. They have been bred to their own siblings for hundreds of generations, so there should be very few genetic differences left. But even supposedly identical mouse strains have their differences. These take the form of mutations in single DNA base pairs that accumulate in different populations. Recently, researchers showed that one of these tiny changes in a single gene was enough to produce a huge difference in how two groups of Black 6 mice respond to drugs. And the authors identified a surprising number of other small DNA differences still waiting to be explored. On one level, the new work offers scientists a novel tool for identifying genes that could relate to behaviors. But it also serves as a warning. “Identical” mouse populations aren’t as alike as many scientists had assumed. The Black 6, the most common lab mouse in the United States, is used for everything from drug abuse studies to cancer research. The Black 6 is also the reference strain for the Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium. Whenever scientists discover a new genetic change in a mouse strain, they compare it first against the Black 6. And it’s the mouse used by the International Knockout Mouse Consortium (now the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium), which keep a library of mouse embryos with different deleted genes. The Allen Brain Atlas, a database of neuroanatomy and gene activity throughout the mouse brain, relies on the Black 6 as well. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19097 - Posted: 01.04.2014

By NORIMITSU ONISHI SAN FRANCISCO — It started out as an operation to treat an increasingly common medical problem in America, childhood sleep apnea. It has become an anguished fight over the fate of a 13-year-old girl who, though pronounced legally dead by doctors, remains alive in the opinion of her religious parents. Sam Singer, a spokesman for Children’s Hospital, called the deal a victory for the hospital, which will release the girl to the Alameda County coroner. The girl, Jahi McMath, was declared brain-dead after complications from surgery on Dec. 9 at Children’s Hospital Oakland, which wanted to remove her from a ventilator. But her heart continues to beat, and her family protested the removal in court, so she has remained connected to the machine. On Friday, amid acrimonious battles in three courts, an Alameda County Superior Court judge mediated an agreement that could allow the child to be moved to another facility willing to take her, even though the hospital has declared her dead. As arguments in the courts continue, the girl will remain connected to the ventilator at least until Tuesday, under the judge’s order. In the meantime, family members are scrambling to identify a facility that will accept the girl and doctors willing to carry out procedures that will keep her heart beating during the transfer. Nailah Winkfield, the girl’s mother, said she was hopeful that Friday’s agreement would facilitate her daughter’s move. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19096 - Posted: 01.04.2014