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

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 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

Nearly half of those with Parkinson's face regular discrimination, such as having their symptoms mistaken for drunkenness, a survey suggests. The survey of more than 2,000 people was commissioned by charity Parkinson's UK. One person in 500 people is affected by the condition in Britain. Parkinson's sufferer Mark Worsfold was arrested during last year's Olympics because police thought he looked suspicious. He was detained during the cycling road race in Leatherhead, Surrey, reportedly because he was not smiling - the condition means his face can appear expressionless. Parkinson's is a progressive neurological condition that attacks the part of the brain that controls movement. The main symptoms of Parkinson's are tremors or shaking that cannot be controlled, and rigidity of the muscles, which can make movement difficult and painful. Speech, language and facial expressions can also be affected. Most people who get it are aged 50 or over but younger people can have it too. The survey found that one in five people living with Parkinson's had been mistaken for being drunk, while one in 10 had been verbally abused or experienced hostility in public because of their condition. Around 62% said they thought the public had a poor understanding of how the condition affects people. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18035 - Posted: 04.15.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Two new experiments, one involving people and the other animals, suggest that regular exercise can substantially improve memory, although different types of exercise seem to affect the brain quite differently. The news may offer consolation for the growing numbers of us who are entering age groups most at risk for cognitive decline. It was back in the 1990s that scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., first discovered that exercise bulks up the brain. In groundbreaking experiments, they showed that mice given access to running wheels produced far more cells in an area of the brain controlling memory creation than animals that didn’t run. The exercised animals then performed better on memory tests than their sedentary labmates. Since then, scientists have been working to understand precisely how, at a molecular level, exercise improves memory, as well as whether all types of exercise, including weight training, are beneficial. The new studies provide some additional and inspiring clarity on those issues, as well as, incidentally, on how you can get lab rats to weight train. For the human study, published in The Journal of Aging Research, scientists at the University of British Columbia recruited dozens of women ages 70 to 80 who had been found to have mild cognitive impairment, a condition that makes a person’s memory and thinking more muddled than would be expected at a given age. Mild cognitive impairment is also a recognized risk factor for increasing dementia. Seniors with the condition develop Alzheimer’s disease at much higher rates than those of the same age with sharper memories. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18015 - Posted: 04.10.2013

By KATIE HAFNER While undressing for bed one night in 2009, Susan Spencer-Wendel noticed that the muscles in her left palm had disappeared, leaving a scrawny pile of tendons and bones. Her right hand was fine. She let out a yelp and showed the hand to her husband, who told her to go to the doctor. She was 42. Ms. Spencer-Wendel then entered a protracted period of denial. Adopted as an infant in Florida, she traveled from her home in West Palm Beach to find blood relatives living in Cyprus, who confirmed that there was no family history of her worst fear: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., the relentless disease that lays waste to muscles while leaving the mind intact. In June 2011, a doctor in Miami gave her a definitive diagnosis of A.L.S., smiling “like he was inviting me to a birthday party,” she writes in “Until I Say Goodbye: My Year of Living With Joy.” Patients with A.L.S., which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, typically live no more than four years after the onset of symptoms. There is no cure. Ms. Spencer-Wendel thought she had prepared herself fully — that she would burst off the starting block like a sprinter to greet her fate. Instead, when she heard the news, “I dropped my head for the start ... and began to cry.” Her heart-ripping book chronicles what she did immediately after her diagnosis: she decided to embrace life while death chased her down. Instead of letting the world close in on her, she resolved to travel as far and as wide for as long as she could. She went to the Yukon with her best friend, Budapest with her husband, and the Bahamas with her sister. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 18007 - Posted: 04.09.2013

By John McCarthy Maybe this discovery is interesting because it sheds therapeutic light on the dreaded neurodegenerative diseases that killed Woody Guthrie and Lou Gehrig. Or maybe it’s fascination with healthy cells, and yet another unsuspected complexity in how they work. What’s discovered: a previously unknown energy source in nerve cells. It propels the molecular “motors” that drag neurotransmitters from the nucleus where they’re made. The “motors” are assemblies of molecules. They walk like clumsy robots, with a staggering gait, dragging a capsule of neurotransmitter “bullets” along microtubule “highways” between nucleus and synapses. They move by flinging their boot-like feet (lavender blobs, in the image) forward, a billionth of a meter at each step. (A superb animation of “motors” in action is XVIVO’s “Life of a Cell” (at ~1:15 of playing time)). When the cargo finally arrives at the synapses, neurotransmitters are loaded into compartments at the synapse’s interior face, like bullets into a magazine. They are ready to be “fired” across a synapse to signal an adjoining neuron. It’s this transport of neurotransmitter “bullets” that failed in Guthrie’s and Gehrig’s nerve cells. Their synapses had nothing to fire. What powers the flinging that moves those boots? Previously, the answer has been specialized molecules (acronym: ATP) spewed into the cell’s fluid interior by mitochondria. The boots, it was thought, powered each step by grabbing a floating ATP and blowing it up like a firecracker. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 17978 - Posted: 04.02.2013

By Emily Burns Lots of people set themselves goals – like things to do by the time you’re 30. Maybe it’s to find your dream job, meet the love of your life, or travel the world! For sufferers of Cystic Fibrosis, it’s living to see your 30th birthday. Even with all of the advances in medicine and technology, the average life expectancy of someone with Cystic Fibrosis is 33 years. Cystic Fibrosis is an inherited disease that mostly affects the lungs, but also the pancreas, liver and intestines. The body fluids we need – like the mucus in our lungs and intestines – are much thicker than normal, making it extremely difficult to breathe and digest food. Constant physiotherapy, breathing exercises, diet supplements and antibiotics are needed just to get on with daily life. And all of this suffering is caused by one tiny change in our DNA, which then messes up how one single protein folds into the right shape. It’s otherwise known as a protein misfolding disease. There are over 2 million proteins in the human body, carrying out their individual tasks to keep us breathing, thinking – enabling us to live. But their production isn’t easy. It’s an incredibly intricate and specialised process that is constantly going on inside us. If it goes wrong, there are serious consequences to our health, with Cystic Fibrosis being a prime example.... While the primary causes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is still not known, one of the theories suggests that cellular and ER stress results in the cell death that we see. They are known as amyloid diseases, as they’re caused by the accumulation of amyloids in cells. We usually think of amyloids as being associated with Alzheimer’s, so you might think that they were a particular type of protein, but that’s not quite it. Instead, amyloids are protein delinquents: any protein that can form a beta sheet can become an amyloid. When a mutated protein misfolds, the side chains of amino acids (that dictate the specific fold) are no longer so important: the main chain of the polypeptide now causes these amyloid fibres to stick together. These amyloid fibres are formed regardless of the original folded protein structure (meaning that they form the same fibrous shape for every protein) and can penetrate the cells, causing cell stress and death. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers; Aggression
Link ID: 17964 - Posted: 03.28.2013

By MARY ROACH WAGENINGEN, THE NETHERLANDS — When I told people I was traveling to Food Valley, I described it as the Silicon Valley of eating. At this cluster of universities and research facilities, nearly 15,000 scientists are dedicated to improving — or, depending on your sentiments about processed food, compromising — the quality of our meals. At the time I made the Silicon Valley comparison, I did not expect to be served actual silicone. But here I am, in the Restaurant of the Future, a cafeteria at Wageningen University where hidden cameras record diners as they make decisions about what to eat. And here it is, a bowl of rubbery white cubes the size of salad croutons. Andries van der Bilt has brought them from his lab in the brusquely named Department of Head and Neck, at the nearby University Medical Center Utrecht. “You chew them,” he said. The cubes are made of a trademarked product called Comfort Putty, more typically used in its unhardened form for taking dental impressions. Dr. Van der Bilt isn’t a dentist, however. He is an oral physiologist, and he likely knows more about chewing than anyone else in the world. He uses the cubes to quantify “masticatory performance” — how effectively a person chews. I take a cube from the bowl. If you ever, as a child, chewed on a whimsical pencil eraser in the shape of, say, an animal or a piece of fruit, then you have tasted this dish. “I’m sorry.” Dr. Van der Bilt winces. “It’s quite old.” As though fresh silicone might be better. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17949 - Posted: 03.26.2013

A compact, self-contained sensor recorded and transmitted brain activity data wirelessly for more than a year in early stage animal tests, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. In addition to allowing for more natural studies of brain activity in moving subjects, this implantable device represents a potential major step toward cord-free control of advanced prosthetics that move with the power of thought. The report is in the April 2013 issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering. “For people who have sustained paralysis or limb amputation, rehabilitation can be slow and frustrating because they have to learn a new way of doing things that the rest of us do without actively thinking about it,” said Grace Peng, Ph.D., who oversees the Rehabilitation Engineering Program of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of NIH. “Brain-computer interfaces harness existing brain circuitry, which may offer a more intuitive rehab experience, and ultimately, a better quality of life for people who have already faced serious challenges.” Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) have shown that it is possible for a person to control a robotic arm through implanted brain sensors linked to powerful external computers. However, such devices have relied on wired connections, which pose infection risks and restrict movement, or were wireless but had very limited computing power. Building on this line of research, David Borton, Ph.D., and Ming Yin, Ph.D., of Brown University, Providence, R.I., and colleagues surmounted several major barriers in developing their sensor. To be fully implantable within the brain, the device needed to be very small and completely sealed off to protect the delicate machinery inside the device and the even more delicate tissue surrounding it. At the same time, it had to be powerful enough to convert the brain’s subtle electrical activity into digital signals that could be used by a computer, and then boost those signals to a level that could be detected by a wireless receiver located some distance outside the body. Like all cordless machines, the device had to be rechargeable, but in the case of an implanted brain sensor, recharging must also be done wirelessly.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17923 - Posted: 03.20.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS For most people, exercise elevates mood. Repeated studies with humans and animals have shown that regular workouts can increase stress resistance, decrease anxiety, lessen symptoms of depression and generally leave people cheerful. But what if someone sincerely dislikes exercise and works out only under a kind of emotional duress, deeming that he or she must do so, perhaps because a doctor or worried spouse has ordered it? In that case, which is hardly uncommon, does the stress of being, in effect, forced to exercise reduce or cancel out the otherwise sturdy emotional benefits of physical activity? That issue has been of considerable interest to exercise scientists for some time, particularly those who work with animals, since in some experiments, animals are required to exercise at intensities or for durations that they don’t control. Such intense exercise greatly increases their stress, as measured by certain behaviors and by physiological markers like increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol. But no study had directly compared the emotional effects of forced and voluntary exercise on anxiety and emotional resilience. So scientists at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder recently decided to conduct one. They began by gathering a group of healthy adult male rats of a type that generally enjoys running. Then they gave some of the animals access to unlocked running wheels and let them exercise whenever and for as long as they liked. The exercise was fully under the animals’ control. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17899 - Posted: 03.13.2013

By JAN HOFFMAN Physically active children generally report happier moods and fewer symptoms of depression than children who are less active. Now researchers may have found a reason: by one measure, exercise seems to help children cope with stress. Finnish researchers had 258 children wear accelerometers on their wrists for at least four days that registered the quality and quantity of their physical activity. Their parents used cotton swabs to take saliva samples at various times throughout a single day, which the researchers used to assess levels of cortisol, a hormone typically induced by physical or mental stress. There was no difference in the cortisol levels at home between children who were active and those who were less active. But when the researchers gave the children a standard psychosocial stress test at a clinic involving arithmetic and storytelling challenges, they found that those who had not engaged in physical activity had raised cortisol levels. The children who had moderate or vigorous physical activity showed relatively no rise in cortisol levels. Those results indicate a more positive physiological response to stress by children who were more active, the researchers said in a study that was published this week in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. The children who were least active had the highest levels. “This study shows that children who are more active throughout their day have a better hormonal response to an acute stressful situation,” said Disa Hatfield, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17882 - Posted: 03.09.2013

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff No doubt, the biggest appeal of exercise is to build biceps, heart muscle, and perhaps some definition in those abdominal muscles, but how about using exercise to build your brain? It’s been known for some time that exercise can lift your mood, ward off depression, and help the brain age more gracefully -- free of memory loss and dementia. But now researchers have found that even just one bout of exercise can -- even better than a cup of coffee -- improve your mental focus and cognitive performance for any challenging task you face that day. A new analysis of 19 studies involving 586 kids, teens, and young adults that was published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal found that short 10 to 40 minutes bursts of exercise led to an immediate boost in concentration and mental focus, likely by improving blood flow to the brain. “These results provide further evidence that doing about 20 minutes of exercise just before taking a test or giving a speech can improve performance,” said Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Ratey, who wrote the best-selling book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Another piece of proof can be seen in the brain scan above -- from a 2009 University of Illinois study also included in the new analysis -- which compares the brain activity of 9-year-olds who took a brisk walk and those who didn’t take a walk. The walkers had far more activity in brain regions involved with focused attention and filtering out noisy distractions while they were taking a challenging test compared to the non-walkers. © 2013 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17881 - Posted: 03.09.2013

By Scicurious I heard the rumblings on Twitter, and then on the blogs. It was telepathy. No, it wasn’t telepathy, but it was close. It was like the Borg. No it wasn’t. It was a mind meld! Ok, maybe. So what was it? It was one rat learning to do something, while electrodes recorded his every move. In the meantime, on another continent, another rat received the signals into his own brain…and changed his behavior. Telepathy? No. A good solid proof of concept? I’m not sure. An interesting idea? Absolutely. So I wanted to look at this paper in depth. We know already that some other experts weren’t really thrilled with the results. But I’m going to look at WHY, and what a more convincing experiment might look like. So what actually happened here? Each experiment involved two sets of rats. First, you have your “encoder rats”. These rats were water-deprived (not terribly, just thirsty), and trained to press a lever for a water reward (water deprivation is one training technique for lever pressing, and is one of the fastest. But you can also food-deprive and train for food or just train the animal to something tasty, like Crisco or sweetened milk). The rats were trained until they were 95% accurate at the task. They were then implanted with electrodes in the motor cortex, that recorded the firing of the neurons as the rats pressed the left or right lever. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17874 - Posted: 03.07.2013

But critics are sceptical about predicted organic computer. Ed Yong The brains of two rats on different continents have been made to act in tandem. When the first, in Brazil, uses its whiskers to choose between two stimuli, an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United States. The US rat then usually makes the same choice on the same task. Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that this system allows one rat to use the senses of another, incorporating information from its far-away partner into its own representation of the world. “It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg,” he says. “But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.” Nicolelis says that the work, published today in Scientific Reports1, is the first step towards constructing an organic computer that uses networks of linked animal brains to solve tasks. But other scientists who work on neural implants are sceptical. Lee Miller, a physiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that Nicolelis’s team has made many important contributions to neural interfaces, but the current paper could be mistaken for a “poor Hollywood science-fiction script”. He adds, “It is not clear to what end the effort is really being made.” In earlier work2, Nicolelis’s team developed implants that can send and receive signals from the brain, allowing monkeys to control robotic or virtual arms and get a sense of touch in return. This time, Nicolelis wanted to see whether he could use these implants to couple the brains of two separate animals. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17862 - Posted: 03.02.2013

By Laura Sanders Before you can run, you have to walk, and before you can walk well, you have to walk like a brand-new baby. A new study uncovers the logistics of newborns’ herky-jerky, Frankensteinian stepping action and how this early reflex morphs into refined adult locomotion. In the study, electrodes on infants’ chubby legs picked up signals from neurons that tell muscles to fire, revealing that three-day old babies tense up many of their leg muscles all at once. Toddlers, preschoolers and adults, by contrast, showed a progressively more sophisticated, selective pattern of neuron activity. From birth to adulthood, motor neurons in the spine get an overhaul as neurons in different locations along the spine become specialized for various aspects of walking, such as foot position, balance and direction, Yuri Ivanenko of the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome and colleagues conclude in the Feb. 13 Journal of Neuroscience. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17802 - Posted: 02.14.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Being physically fit in midlife is associated with a lower risk of dementia in old age, a new study reports. Between 1971 and 2009, 19,458 healthy adults younger than age 65 took a treadmill fitness test as part of a broader health examination. Researchers followed the subjects through their Medicare records for an average of 24 years. After adjusting for age, smoking, diabetes, cholesterol and other health factors, the researchers found that compared with those in the lowest 20 percent for fitness in midlife, those in the highest 20 percent had a 36 percent reduced risk of dementia. The reason for the association is unclear, but it was independent of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular risk factors for dementia, suggesting that both vascular and nonvascular mechanisms may be involved. “Dementia is a disease with no cure and no good therapies,” said the lead author, Dr. Laura F. DeFina, the interim chief scientific officer at the Cooper Institute in Dallas. Physical activity may be “a preventive way to address dementia instead of addressing the costs of a disabled elder.” The study population was largely white and highly educated, and the researchers acknowledge that their findings, published last week in The Annals of Internal Medicine, cannot be generalized to other populations. They emphasize that the study is observational and does not prove causation. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17790 - Posted: 02.12.2013