By E. Paul Zehr As an infant, the Man Of Steel escaped Krypton’s red sun in a rocket lovingly prepared for him by his parents. Kal-L (but more commonly known as Kal-El) arrived under our yellow sun in Smallville to eventually become Clark Kent. Since his debut in Action Comics #1 in June of 1938, Superman has accumulated a pretty long list of “super abilities”. For me, though, I really like the list of his abilities that come from the 1940s radio serials. This was back when Superman was described as “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound”. These descriptions all have to do with super-strength when you get right down to it. And with this summer’s “Man of Steel” Superman re-boot, super-strength is the focus of this post. I have to admit I’ve always found the explanation for Superman’s powers to be, well, a bit dubious. He has his powers because of our yellow sun. That is, because he was from a red sun planet (Krypton) somehow the yellow sun of Earth unleashes some inner super power mechanism that gives Superman all his…super-ness. Of course it’s a bit pure escapist fun. But what if there actually was something to that, though? I don’t mean something to the “yellow sun / red sun” stuff. You can just check in with our “friendly neighborhood physics” professor Jim Kakalios and his bok “Physics of Superheroes” for the real deal on that one. I mean rather the unleashing of some inner mechanism bit. What if something inside the human body could be unleashed—like removing the shackles from Hercules—and allow for dramatically increased strength? © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Muscles; Aggression
Link ID: 18273 - Posted: 06.15.2013

by Trisha Gura A rare genetic disease may be going to the dogs. About six in 100,000 babies are born with centronuclear myopathy, which weakens skeletal muscles so severely that children have trouble eating and breathing and often die before age 18. Now, by discovering a very similar condition in canines, researchers have a means to diagnose the disease, unravel its molecular intricacies, and target new therapies. The story began when Jocelyn Laporte, a geneticist at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Strasbourg, France, uncovered the genetic roots of an odd form of centronuclear myopathy that showed up in a Turkish family. Three children, two of them fraternal twins, were born normal. Then, at the age of 3-and-a-half, they grew progressively and rapidly ill. (Most forms of the illness do not come on so suddenly.) The twins died by the age of 9. Their younger brother recently reached the same age but is very ill. Investigators traced the problem to a mutation in a gene called BIN1, which makes a protein that helps shape the muscle so that it can respond to nerve signals that initiate muscle contraction. To find out how mutations in this gene could lead to such dire consequences, other researchers tried to genetically engineer mice models. But deleting the BIN1 gene failed to recreate the disease in mice, so the researchers had to look elsewhere. Laporte's team joined with geneticist and veterinarian Laurent Tiret, at the Alfort School of Veterinary Medicine in Paris, to tap a network of vets in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and France. The idea was to track down and analyze dogs that had spontaneously acquired a similar condition. Because of their longer lifespans and larger size, the canines could model how the disease progresses and might respond to new therapies. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Muscles; Aggression
Link ID: 18272 - Posted: 06.15.2013

by Alyssa Danigelis Next time you happen across an enormous cockroach, check to see whether it’s got a backpack on. Then look for the person controlling its movements with a phone. The RoboRoach has arrived. The RoboRoach is a system created by University of Michigan grads who have backgrounds in neuroscience, Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo. They came up with the cyborg roach idea as part of an effort to show students what real brain spiking activity looks like using off-the-shelf electronics. Essentially the RoboRoach involves taking a real live cockroach, putting it under anesthesia and placing wires in its antenna. Then the cockroach is outfitted with a special lightweight little backpack Gage and Marzullo developed that sends pulses to the antenna, causing the neurons to fire and the roach to think there’s a wall on one side. So it turns. The backpack connects to a phone via Bluetooth, enabling a human user to steer the cockroach through an app. Why? Why would anyone do this? ”We want to create neural interfaces that the general public can use,” the scientists say in a video. “Typically, to understand how these hardware devices and biological interfaces work, you’d have to go to graduate school in a neuro-engineering lab.” They added that the product is a learning tool, not a toy, and through it they hope to start a neuro-revolution. Currently the duo’s Backyard Brains startup is raising money through a Kickstarter campaign to develop more fine-tuned prototypes, make them more affordable, and extend battery life. The startup says it will make the RoboRoach hardware by hand in an Ann Arbor hacker space. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 18264 - Posted: 06.12.2013

By Sandra G. Boodman, Through repeated painful experience, Shannon Bream had learned to keep her eyedrops close at hand wherever she went — even in the shower. Although they did little to quell the near-constant thrum of pain, the lubricating drops were better than nothing. She clutched the bottle while working out at the gym and kept extras in her purse, car and desk. At night, she set her alarm clock to ring every few hours so she could use them; failing to do so, she had discovered, meant waking up in pain that felt “like someone was stabbing me in the eye,” she said. “Daytime was okay, I could function, but nights had become an absolute nightmare,” said Bream, who covers the Supreme Court for Fox News. But a doctor’s suggestion that she was exaggerating her worsening misery, coupled with the bleak future presented on the Internet message boards she trolled night after night searching for help, plunged her into despair. “I didn’t think I could live like this for another 40 years,” she recalled thinking during her 18-month ordeal. Ironically, it was those same message boards that helped steer Bream to the doctor who provided a correct diagnosis and a satisfactory resolution. In the middle of one night in February 2010, Bream, then 39, awoke suddenly with pain in her left eye “so searing it sat me straight up in bed.” She stumbled to the bathroom, where she frantically rummaged through the medicine cabinet and grabbed various eyedrops, hoping to dull the pain. Her eye was tearing profusely; after about three hours, both the pain and tearing subsided. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Aggression
Link ID: 18256 - Posted: 06.11.2013

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News Activity observed in the brain when using a "mind machine" is similar to how the brain learns new motor skills, scientists have found. Participants' neural activity was recorded by using sensors implanted in their brain, which were linked to a computer that translated electrical impulses into actions. The researchers believe people will be able to perform increasingly complex tasks just by thinking them. The study is published in PNAS journal. The subjects in the study moved from thinking about a task to automatically processing a task, in a similar way to how other motor movements are learnt - like playing the piano or learning to ride a bicycle. This was shown by the areas of neurons that were active in the brain, which changed as subjects became more adept at a mental task. Scientists analysed the results of a mind control task on a brain-computer interface (BCI) of seven participants with epilepsy. They were asked to play a computer game where they had to manipulate a ball to move across a screen - using only their mind. Recent studies using BCIs have shown that our minds can control various objects, like a robotic arm, "but there is still a lot of mystery in the way we learn to control them", said Jeremiah Wander from the University of Washington in Seattle, US, who led the study. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 18255 - Posted: 06.11.2013

By Susana Martinez-Conde This week’s illusion was discovered by Dartmouth College neuroscientist Peter Tse, author of “The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation“, and presented as a Top 10 finalist at the recent Best Illusion of the Year Contest. The Knobby Sphere Illusion tricks your sense of touch. To experience it, you will need a regular pencil (for instance, with a hexagonal cross-section, and a small hard sphere (such a marble or ball bearing). Squeeze the pencil lengthwise very hard between your thumb and first finger for a full minute, until you can see deep indentations in your skin. Now feel the sphere by rolling it around against the parts of your fingers where the indentations are. The sphere no longer feels round, but bumpy. Your brain assumes that the touch receptors in your skin lie on a flat sheet, and misattributes the skin deformations to the sphere. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18243 - Posted: 06.08.2013

Devin Powell A model helicopter can now be steered through an obstacle course by thought alone, researchers report today in the Journal of Neural Engineering. The aircraft's pilot operates it remotely using a cap of electrodes to detect brainwaves that are translated into commands.1 Ultimately, the developers of the mind-controlled copter hope to adapt their technology for directing artificial robotic limbs and other medical devices. Today's best neural prosthetics require electrodes to be implanted in the body and are thus reserved for quadriplegics and others with disabilities severe enough justify invasive surgery. "We want to develop something non-invasive that can benefit lots of people, not just a limited number of patients," says Bin He, a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, whose new results build on his previous work with a virtual thought-controlled helicopter.2 But He's mechanical whirlybird isn't the first vehicle to be flown by the brain. In 2010 a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported an unmanned aircraft that flies a fixed altitude but adjusts its heading to the left or right in response to a user's thoughts.3 The new chopper goes a step further. It can be guided up and down, as well as left or right, and it offers more precise control. To move it in a particular direction, a user imagines clenching his or her hands — the left one to go left, for instance, or both to go up. That mental image alters brain activity in the motor cortex. Changes in the strength and frequency of signals recorded by electrodes on the scalp using electroencephalography (EEG), and deciphered by a computer program, reveal the pilot's intent. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 18231 - Posted: 06.05.2013

by Helen Thomson TWO years ago, Antonio Melillo was in a car crash that completely severed his spinal cord. He has not been able to move or feel his legs since. And yet here I am, in a lab at the Santa Lucia Foundation hospital in Rome, Italy, watching him walk. Melillo is one of the first people with lower limb paralysis to try out MindWalker – the world's first exoskeleton that aims to enable paralysed and locked-in people to walk using only their mind. Five people have been involved in the clinical trial of MindWalker over the past eight weeks. The trial culminates this week with a review by the European Commission, which funded the work. It's the end of a three-year development period for the project, which has three main elements. There is the exoskeleton itself, a contraption that holds a person's body weight and moves their legs when instructed. People learn how to use it in the second element: a virtual-reality environment. And then there's the mind-reading component. Over in the corner of the lab, Thomas Hoellinger of the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in Belgium is wearing an EEG cap, which measures electrical activity at various points across his scalp. There are several ways he can use it to control the exoskeleton through thought alone – at the moment, the most promising involves wearing a pair of glasses with flickering diodes attached to each lens. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 18227 - Posted: 06.04.2013

Linda Carroll TODAY contributor Each day brings Jenn McNary another dose of hope and heartache as she watches one son get healthier while the other becomes sicker. Both of McNary's sons were born with Duchene muscular dystrophy. Max, 11, is receiving an experimental therapy that appears to be making him better, while 14-year-old Austin is slowly dying. Austin was too sick to be included in the clinical trials for a promising new drug called Eteplirsen. “He can’t get into a chair, out of his wheelchair, into his bed and onto the toilet,” McNary told NBC’s Janet Shamlian. Max, however, was exactly what researchers were looking for. He was put on Eteplirsen, and now he's back to running around, climbing stairs and even playing soccer. “It’s a miracle,” McNary said. “It really is a miracle drug. This is something that nobody ever expected and he looks like an almost normal 11-year-old.” Eteplirsen is designed to partially repair one of the common genetic mutations that causes DMD. Even a partial repair may enough to improve life for boys struck by the condition, which results from a defect in the dystrophin gene. That gene resides on the X chromosome, which is why only boys end up with DMD. Boys get one X and one Y chromosome. Girls get two copies of the X chromosome — one from their mother and one from their father — so even if they inherit a defective copy from their mom, they get a healthy one from their dad. Although they won’t suffer symptoms, girls wind up with a 50 percent chance of being carriers for DMD.

Keyword: Muscles; Aggression
Link ID: 18196 - Posted: 05.28.2013

Chris Palmer Once thought to be a low-level form of pain, itch is instead a distinct sensation with a dedicated neural circuit linking cells in the periphery of the body to the brain, a study in mice suggests. Neuroscientists Mark Hoon and Santosh Mishra of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland, searched for the molecule that encodes the sensation of itch by screening genes in sensory neurons that are activated by touch, heat, pain and itch. They found that one particular protein, called natriuretic polypeptide b, or Nppb, was expressed in only a subset of these neurons. Mutant mice lacking Nppb did not respond to itch-inducing compounds, but did respond normally to heat and pain. The researchers also found that when they injected Nppb in the mice's necks, it put them into a self-scratching frenzy. This occurred both in the mutants and in control mice. “Our research reveals the primary transmitter used by itch sensory neurons and confirms that itch is detected by specialized sensory neurons,” says Hoon. Hoon and Mishra went on to find neurons bearing receptors for Nppb in the spinal cord. Injection of a toxin made from soapwort seeds that targeted these spinal-cord neurons blocked itch responses, but not other sensory responses, suggesting that information about the itch sensation is transmitted along a distinct pathway. The researchers' results are published today in Science1. The result “explains problems in the literature and provides a very testable hypothesis for how itch works”, says Glenn Giesler, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18194 - Posted: 05.25.2013

By ALLISON HERSH LONDON I’M in line at the supermarket holding three items close to my chest. But I might as well be juggling my Kleenex box, toothpaste tube and an orange. Because — as you’d surely notice if you were behind me in line — I‘m bent forward at a sharp angle, which makes holding things difficult. I know you don’t want to stare, but you do. Maybe you think you’re being considerate when you say, apropos of nothing, “You look like you’re in pain.” Well, thanks, I am — but I’ll resist replying the way I want (“You look like you’re having a bad hair day”). I’m sorry. I know you mean well. Anyway it’s my turn at the register which means I’m closer to being at home where I can lie down and wait for the spasms to subside. Besides, if I told you what my issue was, you would probably shrug and reply that you’d never heard of it. There aren’t any public service announcements about it or telethons. No Angelina Jolies to bravely inform the world. Just people like me, in supermarket checkout lines. And this, I realize, is at the core of a problem that extends beyond me and my condition and that affects the way all of us respond to illnesses, some of which are the subject of public attention — and resources — and some of which are not. I have dystonia, a neurological disorder. Some years ago, for reasons no one knows, the muscles in my back and neck began to spasm involuntarily; the spasms multiply quickly, fatigue the muscles and force the body into repetitive movements and awkward postures like mine. There is no cure, only treatment options like deep brain stimulation, which requires a surgery I underwent last year as a last resort. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Aggression
Link ID: 18171 - Posted: 05.20.2013

By David Brown, A team of researchers said Wednesday that it had produced embryonic stem cells — a possible source of disease-fighting spare parts — from a cloned human embryo. Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University accomplished in humans what has been done over the past 15 years in sheep, mice, cattle and several other species. The achievement is likely to, at least temporarily, reawaken worries about “reproductive cloning” — the production of one-parent duplicate humans. But few experts think that production of stem cells through cloning is likely to be medically useful soon, or possibly ever. “An outstanding issue of whether it would work in humans has been resolved,” said Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist at MIT’s Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., who added that he thinks the feat “has no clinical relevance.” “I think part of the significance is technical and part of the significance is historical,” said John Gearhart, head of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “Many labs attempted it, and no one had ever been able to achieve it.” A far less controversial way to get stem cells is now available. It involves reprogramming mature cells (often ones taken from the skin) so that they return to what amounts to a second childhood from which they can grow into a new and different adulthood. Learning how to make and manipulate those “induced pluripotent stem” (IPS) cells is one of biology’s hottest fields. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Stem Cells; Aggression
Link ID: 18162 - Posted: 05.16.2013

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. I hadn’t seen Larry in a dozen years when he reappeared in my office a few months ago, grinning. We were both grinning. I always liked Larry, even though he was a bit of a hustler, a little erratic in his appointments, a persistent dabbler in a variety of illegal substances. But he was always careful to avoid the hard stuff; he said he had a bad problem as a teenager and was going to stay out of trouble. It was to stay out of trouble that he left town all those years ago, and now he was back, grayer and thinner but still smiling. Then he pulled out a list of the medications he needed, and we both stopped smiling. According to Larry’s list, he was now taking giant quantities of one of the most addictive painkillers around, an immensely popular black-market drug most doctors automatically avoid prescribing except under the most exceptional circumstances. “I got a bad back now, Doc,” Larry said. Doctors hate pain. Let me count the ways. We hate it because we are (mostly) kindhearted and hate to see people suffer. We hate it because it is invisible, cannot be measured or monitored, and varies wildly and unpredictably from person to person. We hate it because it can drag us closer to the perilous zones of illegal practice than any other complaint. And we hate it most of all because unless we specifically seek out training in how to manage pain, we get virtually none at all, and wind up flying over all kinds of scary territory absolutely solo, without a map or a net. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Aggression
Link ID: 18153 - Posted: 05.14.2013

Roberta Kwok Sitting motionless in her wheelchair, paralysed from the neck down by a stroke, Cathy Hutchinson seems to take no notice of the cable rising from the top of her head through her curly dark hair. Instead, she stares intently at a bottle sitting on the table in front of her, a straw protruding from the top. Her gaze never wavers as she mentally guides a robot arm beside her to reach across the table, close its grippers around the bottle, then slowly lift the vessel towards her mouth. Only when she finally manages to take a sip does her face relax into a luminous smile. This video of 58-year-old Hutchinson illustrates the strides being taken in brain-controlled prosthetics1. Over the past 15 years, researchers have shown that a rat can make a robotic arm push a lever2, a monkey can play a video game3 and a person with quadriplegia — Hutchinson — can sip from a bottle of coffee1, all by simply thinking about the action. Improvements in prosthetic limbs have been equally dramatic, with devices now able to move individual fingers and bend at more than two dozen joints. But Hutchinson's focused stare in that video also illustrates the one crucial feature still missing from prosthetics. Her eyes could tell her where the arm was, but she could not feel what it was doing. Nor could she sense when the grippers touched the bottle, or whether it was slipping out of their grasp. Without this type of sensory feedback, even the simplest actions can be slow and clumsy, as Igor Spetic of Madison, Ohio, knows well. Fitted with a prosthetic after his right hand was crushed in an industrial accident in 2010, Spetic describes breaking dishes, grabbing fruit too hard and bruising it and dropping a can when trying to pick it up at the local shop. Having a sense of touch would be “tremendous”, he says. “It'd be one step closer to having the hand back.” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Aggression
Link ID: 18138 - Posted: 05.09.2013

National Institutes of Health researchers used the popular anti-wrinkle agent Botox to discover a new and important role for a group of molecules that nerve cells use to quickly send messages. This novel role for the molecules, called SNARES, may be a missing piece that scientists have been searching for to fully understand how brain cells communicate under normal and disease conditions. "The results were very surprising,” said Ling-Gang Wu, Ph.D., a scientist at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “Like many scientists we thought SNAREs were only involved in fusion." Every day almost 100 billion nerve cells throughout the body send thousands of messages through nearly 100 trillion communication points called synapses. Cell-to-cell communication at synapses controls thoughts, movements, and senses and could provide therapeutic targets for a number of neurological disorders, including epilepsy. Nerve cells use chemicals, called neurotransmitters, to rapidly send messages at synapses. Like pellets inside shotgun shells, neurotransmitters are stored inside spherical membranes, called synaptic vesicles. Messages are sent when a carrier shell fuses with the nerve cell’s own shell, called the plasma membrane, and releases the neurotransmitter “pellets” into the synapse. SNAREs (soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor attachment protein receptor) are three proteins known to be critical for fusion between carrier shells and nerve cell membranes during neurotransmitter release.

Keyword: Muscles; Aggression
Link ID: 18115 - Posted: 05.04.2013

By Stephani Sutherland Itching is not the only sensation to arise from unique neurons. A team at the California Institute of Technology has identified neurons that transmit the pleasurable sensations of massage, at least in mice. The cells responded to gentle rubbing but not to pinching or poking. Activation of the cells requires “a pressure component,” says lead investigator David Anderson, a neuroscientist at Caltech, “much like you would apply if you were stroking your cat.” The team first identified the mysterious cells several years ago by an unusual protein on their surface called MrgprB4—closely related to the receptor expressed by the newly identified itch cells. The rare sensory cells make up only about 2 percent of the body's peripheral neurons that respond to external stimuli, but they seem to cover about half the skin's surface with large, branching nerve endings. Whereas sensory neurons that transmit pain have been intensely studied, this is the first demonstration in live animals of a sensory cell that gives pleasure. After the scientists activated those neurons with a designer drug, the mice came to favor the place where they received the drug, according to the paper published January 31 in Nature. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18092 - Posted: 04.30.2013

By R. Douglas Fields Scientists have speculated that it is a mild manifestation of pain or perhaps a malfunction of overly sensitive nerve endings stuck in a feedback loop. They have even wondered whether itching is mostly psychological (just think about bed bugs for a minute). Now a study rules out these possibilities by succeeding where past attempts have failed: a group of neuroscientists have finally isolated a unique type of nerve cell that makes us itch and only itch. In previous research, neuroscientists Liang Han and Xinzhong Dong of Johns Hopkins University and their colleagues determined that some sensory neurons with nerve endings in the skin have a unique protein receptor on them called MrgprA3. They observed under a microscope that chemicals known to create itching caused these neurons to generate electrical signals but that painful stimuli such as hot water or capsaicin, the potent substance in hot peppers, did not. In the new study published in Nature Neuroscience, the researchers used genetic engineering to selectively kill the entire population of MrgprA3 neurons in mice while leaving all the other sensory neurons intact. These mice no longer scratched themselves when exposed to itchy substances or allergens, but they showed no changes at all in responding to touch or pain-producing stimulation. The mice's behavior confirms that MrgprA3-containing neurons are essential for itch, but it does not rule out the possibility that these cells might respond to other sensations as well. To find out, the neuroscientists engineered a receptor that responds to capsaicin injected into the MrgprA3 neurons, in a type of mouse that lacks the capsaicin receptor in all its other cells. Now the only neurons that would be stimulated by capsaicin were the MrgprA3 neurons. If these cells are indeed itch-specific, injecting capsaicin into a tiny spot on the mouse's skin should make the rodent scratch instead of wincing in pain—which is exactly what happened. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18066 - Posted: 04.24.2013

By PAULA SPAN It was supposed to be a short stay. In 2006, Roger Anderson was to undergo surgery to relieve a painfully compressed spinal disk. His wife, Karen, figured the staff at the hospital, in Portland, Ore., would understand how to care for someone with Parkinson’s disease. It can be difficult. Parkinson’s patients like Mr. Anderson, for example, must take medications at precise intervals to replace the brain chemical dopamine, which is diminished by the disease. “You don’t have much of a window,” Mrs. Anderson said. “If you have to wait an hour, you have tremendous problems.” Without these medications, people may “freeze” and be unable to move, or develop uncontrolled movements called dyskinesia, and are prone to falls. But the nurses at the Portland hospital didn’t seem to grasp those imperatives. “You’d have to wait half an hour or an hour, and that’s not how it works for Parkinson’s patients,” Mrs. Anderson said. Nor did hospital rules, at the time, permit her to simply give her husband the Sinemet pills on her own. Surgery and anesthesia, the disrupted medications, an incision that subsequently became infected — all contributed to a tailspin that lasted nearly three months. Mr. Anderson developed delirium, rotated between rehab centers and hospitals, took a fall, lost 60 pounds. “People were telling me, ‘He’s never going to come home,’” Mrs. Anderson said. He did recover, and at 69 is doing well, his wife said, though his disease has progressed. But his wasn’t an unusual story, neurologists say. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18054 - Posted: 04.22.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS If you give a rat a running wheel and it decides not to use it, are genes to blame? And if so, what does that tell us about why many people skip exercise? To examine those questions, scientists at the University of Missouri in Columbia recently interbred rats to create two very distinct groups of animals, one of which loves to run. Those in the other group turn up their collective little noses at exercise, slouching idly in their cages instead. Then the scientists closely scrutinized and compared the animals’ bodies, brains and DNA. For some time, exercise scientists have suspected that the motivation to exercise — or not — must have a genetic component. When researchers have compared physical activity patterns among family members, and particularly among twins, they have found that close relations tend to work out similarly, exercising about as much or as little as their parents or siblings do, even if they grew up in different environments. These findings suggest that the desire to be active or indolent is, to some extent, inherited. But to what extent someone’s motivation to exercise is affected by genes — and what specific genes may be involved — has been hard to determine. There are only so many human twins around for study purposes, after all. And even more daunting, it’s difficult to separate the role of upbringing from that of genetics in determining whether and why some people want to exercise and others don’t. So the University of Missouri researchers decided to create their own innately avid runners or couch potatoes, provide them with similar upbringings, and see what happened next. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 18044 - Posted: 04.18.2013

By Sandra G. Boodman, For someone who had been such a healthy child, Nancy Kennedy couldn’t figure out how she had become the kind of sickly adult whose life revolved around visits to a seemingly endless series of doctors. Beginning in 2005, shortly after a job transfer took her from Northern Virginia to St. Louis, Kennedy, then 47, developed a string of vexing medical problems. Her white blood cell count was inexplicably elevated. Her sinuses were chronically infected, although her respiratory tract seemed unusually dry. She often felt fatigued, and her joints hurt. “It felt as though an alien had invaded my body,” said Kennedy, formerly a manager at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. “I felt like I was in doctors’ offices all the time.” Tests for possible ailments — including blood disorders, cancer, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis — were negative. For seven years. Kennedy and her primary-care physician, who said she felt as though she sent Kennedy to “every specialist that walked,” had no clear idea what might be wrong. But during a physical in January 2012, her doctor, Melissa Johnson, struck by Kennedy’s trouble walking and her accelerating deterioration, decided to check for a condition not previously considered. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Aggression
Link ID: 18040 - Posted: 04.16.2013