Some 200,000 people live with partial or nearly total permanent paralysis in the United States, with spinal cord injuries adding 11,000 new cases each year. Most research aimed at recovering motor function has focused on repairing damaged nerve fibers, which has succeeded in restoring limited movement in animal experiments. But regenerating nerves and restoring complex motor behavior in humans are far more difficult, prompting researchers to explore alternatives to spinal cord rehabilitation. One promising approach involves circumventing neuronal damage by establishing connections between healthy areas of the brain and virtual devices, called brain–machine interfaces (BMIs), programmed to transform neural impulses into signals that can control a robotic device. While experiments have shown that animals using these artificial actuators can learn to adjust their brain activity to move robot arms, many issues remain unresolved, including what type of brain signal would provide the most appropriate inputs to program these machines. Link: http://www.plos.org/downloads/plbi-01-02-carmena.pdf

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 4375 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Findings shed light on the evolution of human cognition, the capacity for long lifespan and the potential for neurodegenerative disease ATLANTA -- A research team from the Salk Institute, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), has identified genes in the cerebral cortex that differ in levels of activity between humans and nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys. These findings, which appear in the online journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may provide essential clues to the unusual cognitive abilities of humans. They also may help researchers understand why humans have a longer lifespan than other primate species and yet are so vulnerable to age-related, neurodegenerative diseases. Because the DNA sequences of humans are so similar to those of chimpanzees, scientists have long speculated that differences in the activity levels of particular genes, otherwise known as gene expression, and, as a result, the amounts of particular proteins cells produce, are what distinguish humans from chimpanzees. The recent sequencing of the human genome has led to the development of "gene chips" that enable researches to examine the expression levels of thousands of genes at a time as well as compare expression levels in different species. Using gene chips to compare samples of the cerebral cortex of humans, chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, the research team at the Salk, the Yerkes Center and UCLA identified 91 genes that are expressed in different amounts in humans compared to the other primate species. Upon further study, the team observed 83 of these genes showed higher levels of activity in humans, and as a result, regulated neural activity.

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4374 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor MOST patients given “lobotomies” at a Scottish hospital made a remarkable recovery, according to the first report into the outcome of their treatment. The patients suffered from severe depression and many had been in hospital for years. But after the controversial operation, called neurosurgery for mental disorder (NMD), eight of the 14 patients treated could leave hospital and live on their own. Details of the patients’ dramatic improvement come as British psychiatrists have called for a moratorium on the treatment. Professor Keith Matthews, a consultant psychiatrist and director of the Dundee Neurosurgery for Mental Disorder Programme at Ninewells, said: “Some of these people had not left hospital for between three and seven years. Often they were in intensive care and needed nurses with them all the time. They are now living independently. Even better, they are out and about and some of them are picking up their careers. Some people do extremely well.” Matthews added that while it is important to recognise that neurosurgery for mental disorder does not help everyone, it has transformed the lives of some severely depressed patients. ©2003 Newsquest (Sunday Herald) Limited.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 4373 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer NEW YORK -- A whistleblowing veterinarian has entangled Columbia University's prestigious medical center in a protracted dispute after alleging that baboons and other lab animals suffered from cruel or negligent treatment. A year after veterinarian Catherine Dell'Orto complained to senior medical center officials, the case remains very much alive. It is the subject of investigations by two federal agencies, and animal-rights activists are seeking punitive action against the medical center. Dell'Orto has left the university, contending she was shunned after speaking up, but she continues to press her cause. Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 4372 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Monkeys that can move a robot arm with thoughts alone have brought the merger of mind and machine one step closer. In experiments at Duke University, implants in the monkeys' brains picked up brain signals and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys' thoughts. The achievement is a significant advance in the continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be a great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 4371 - Posted: 10.14.2003

— In a study that calls into question the plasticity of adult stem cells, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, have demonstrated that adult bone marrow cells can fuse with brain, heart and liver cells in the body. The phenomenon of fusion would give the appearance that bone marrow stem cells are altering themselves to become mature cells in other tissues, when in fact they are not, according to one of the study's senior authors, HHMI investigator Sean J. Morrison at the University of Michigan. The researchers published their findings October 12, 2003, in the online version of the journal Nature. The studies were carried out by collaborating scientists, Manuel Alvarez-Dolado and Ricardo Pardal, in the laboratories of Arturo Alvarez-Buylla of the University of California, San Francisco and Morrison at the University of Michigan. Other co-authors are from the University of Valencia in Spain, the University of Dusseldorf in Germany and MIT. ©2003 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 4370 - Posted: 06.24.2010

— Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers have developed a method for manipulating the molecular “ticks” of the regulatory clock that governs the development of neurons in fruit flies. Understanding how to reset the developmental clock could prove useful in stem cell research where restoring the full potential of older cells could lead to new treatments for a variety of diseases. HHMI investigator Chris Doe and colleague Bret Pearson at the University of Oregon reported their findings in the October 9, 2003, issue of the journal Nature. ©2003 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stem Cells
Link ID: 4369 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A combination of two common antibiotics may help delay symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, research shows. A team from McMaster University in Canada treated patients either with doxycycline and rifampin, or dummy pills for three months. Those given antibiotics showed significantly less mental decline. Experts warn that a 101-patient study is too small to draw firm conclusions. Canadian researchers say more work is needed to replicate their findings. But they say their results indicate that antibiotic treatment produces results comparable with currently available treatments - which only work for around half of all patients. (C) BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4368 - Posted: 10.11.2003

Bruce Bower Registering a memory for the long haul doesn't happen all at once, according to new studies of how people learn perceptual and motor skills. Instead, building memory is a three-pronged process that rests on sleep. First, knowledge accrues during training and dips immediately afterward. A good night's sleep then revives much of what was forgotten, the researchers find. Finally, recalling the learned skill the next day destabilizes the memory of it, setting the stage for an individual either to reinforce prior knowledge or lose it. These findings, published in the Oct. 9 Nature , contrast with the long-standing psychological theory that lasting memories essentially form all at once and don't require sleep. Copyright ©2003 Science Service.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4367 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PORTLAND, Ore. -- A researcher at Oregon Health & Science University's Oregon Hearing Research Center and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute have discovered a new gene that has profound effects on the formation of inorganic crystals in the inner ears of zebrafish. The study is featured on the cover of this week's issue of Science magazine. The newly discovered gene starmaker encodes a protein that controls the size and formation of calcium carbonate crystals in otoliths, or "ear stones," present in the inner ears of zebrafish, the researchers report. Otoliths act as inert weights involved in the perception of gravity, and in fish are involved in the perception of sound. In human ears, biominerals are present in the form of "otoconia," or "ear dust," which also are made of calcium carbonate, but the structures are much smaller. Otoconia are important for balance in humans.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 4366 - Posted: 10.11.2003

(Philadelphia, PA) - Smokers with a specific combination of two genetic variants may be more likely to remain abstinent and less prone to relapse when trying to quit smoking, a study by researchers from the Tobacco Use Research Center of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine indicates. This research – which will appear in the October issue of Health Psychology- has important implications for the development of more effective treatment strategies that are tailored to individual smokers' needs. "While previous research has examined the effects of genes related to dopamine, a chemical in the brain associated with reinforcing the effects of nicotine, this study provides the first evidence that genes that alter dopamine function may influence smoking cessation and relapse during treatment," said lead author Caryn Lerman, Ph.D., Associate Director for Cancer Control and Population Science at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor in Penn's School of Medicine and the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Dr. Lerman led a research team that examined 418 smokers enrolled in a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial of bupropion for smoking cessation. Participants provided blood samples and received bupropion or placebo plus seven sessions of behavioral group counseling. Smoking status, abstinence symptoms and side effects were recorded weekly, and smoking status was verified at the end of treatment and again at a six-month follow-up appointment.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4365 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Protein molecules are the basic components of life. They have so many functions that many nanotechnologists are interested in harnessing them to make tiny machines. Inside the human body, proteins look like ribbons folded in certain ways. "In order for proteins to function, they have to fold into just the right shape," explains Susan Lindquist, biologist and director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. "And unfortunately, sometimes they can get that wrong. Misfolded proteins can be very toxic in cells. They can actually set up a chain reaction that gradually converts all the other proteins of that type in the cell to that same altered form, and poisons their functioning." Proteins that are folded the wrong way are called prions, short for proteinaceous infectious particles. Inside mammals' brain cells, some types of prions can alter cell structure and lead to fatal illnesses such mad cow disease in animals or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people. © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 4364 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It seems the old adage about sticks, stones and hurtful words may need some revision. According to a report published today in the journal Science, social rejection elicits a similar brain response as physical pain does. Naomi L. Eisenberger of the University of California at Los Angeles and her colleagues recruited 13 college students to play a virtual game of catch while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). At first, the students were told they could only observe the game. Their computer-generated playmates, which the subjects believed were controlled by unseen people, then began throwing to them. But after about 40 throws, the other players began ignoring the subject with no explanation. The researchers found that this exclusion caused activity in a region of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. In addition, students who reported feeling the most distress from being snubbed showed the greatest activity in this brain region, which is also involved in pain processing.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4363 - Posted: 10.10.2003

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Scientists have long suspected a link between mass whale strandings and the Navy's use of powerful sonar systems, but the evidence — dying whales washing ashore when sonar exercises occur — has been mostly anecdotal. Now, international researchers have identified a disorder similar to decompression sickness, or the bends, as the cause of at least some whale beachings, and they say military sonar is most likely to blame. The new findings, being reported today in Nature, are based primarily on necropsies of 10 whales that stranded themselves in the Canary Islands during a 2002 international naval exercise there that included one American ship. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 4362 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DNA switches turn workers to nursemaids. JOHN WHITFIELD A honeybee's genes can tell you its job. Bees tending the nest have a different set of active genes in their brains to their nestmates out gathering food, researchers have found1. There are many biological steps between DNA and deeds, says Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. To find the two so closely linked is a surprise. "The genome is more heavily involved in orchestrating behaviour than one might have thought," he says. Bees could help us map similar links in humans. "We share many components in our nervous systems with the honeybee," says bee researcher Greg Hunt of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. In fruitflies, equivalents to the honeybee job genes are involved in learning, through their control of cell communication. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4361 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Genes and behavior go together in honey bees so strongly that an individual bee's occupation can be predicted by knowing a profile of its gene expression in the brain, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This strong relationship surfaced in a complex molecular study of 6,878 different genes replicated with 72 cDNA microarrays that captured the essence of brain gene activity within the natural world of the honey bee (Apis mellifera). Even though most of the differences in gene expression were small, the changes were observable in 40 percent of the genes studied, the scientists report in the Oct. 10 issue of the journal Science. "We have discovered a clear molecular signature in the bee brain that is robustly associated with behavior," said principal researcher Gene E. Robinson, a professor of entomology and director of the Neuroscience Program at Illinois. "This provides a striking picture of the genome as a dynamic entity, more actively involved in modulating behavior in the adult brain than we previously thought."

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4360 - Posted: 10.10.2003

Fly genetics may increase understanding of human hearing disorders MADISON -- Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Medical School have found genetic evidence linking humans and fruit flies in a new way: through their hearing. The link offers the future possibility that the insect's auditory system may serve as a model for understanding human deafness and other hearing disorders. The scientists found that a mutated fruit fly gene controlling hearing and the mutated human counterpart gene both produced similar consequences: hearing loss as well as limb deformities and genital abnormalities. The mutated human gene is responsible for a disorder called Townes-Brocks' syndrome. The unexpected finding was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online (Sept. 2, 2003). "We were very surprised to learn about this specific genetic similarity," said Grace Boekhoff-Falk, PhD, associate professor of anatomy, who led the study. "Developmental biologists have known that there are remarkable parallels between fruit fly and human genetics, but the parallels have been restricted to tissues and organs that existed before the evolutionary divergence of vertebrates and invertebrates, which occurred more than 600 million years ago."

Keyword: Hearing; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4359 - Posted: 10.10.2003

Walking down a dark alley late at night is enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies. Your heart starts racing, your palms get clammy and you get ready to run. Now researchers from Boston University have unravelled the neural pathways that transmit information about your surroundings to your organs, enabling them to respond appropriately. The research, to be published on Friday in BMC Neuroscience, has shown that neurons originating in high-order brain structures transmit signals about the environment relatively directly to low-order structures in the spinal cord. There is just one structure in the middle – the hypothalamus. The pathway then connects to autonomic nerves, which originate in the spinal cord, to regulate organ function. Helen Barbas, the research team leader, says: "The existence of these pathways has implications for several psychological conditions. For example, these pathways may be excessively active in anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and obsessive-compulsive disorder - conditions in which the emotional experience is extreme relative to the situation. Similarly, these pathways may be abnormally inactive in psychopathic individuals, who lack appropriate emotional responses."

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4358 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Two key areas of the brain appear to respond to the pain of rejection in the same way as physical pain, a UCLA-led team of psychologists reports in the Oct. 10 issue of Science. "While everyone accepts that physical pain is real, people are tempted to think that social pain is just in their heads," said Matthew D. Lieberman, one of the paper's three authors and an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA. "But physical and social pain may be more similar than we realized." "In the English language we use physical metaphors to describe social pain like 'a broken heart' and 'hurt feelings,'" said Naomi I. Eisenberger, a UCLA Ph.D. candidate in social psychology and the study's lead author. "Now we see that there is good reason for this."

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4357 - Posted: 10.10.2003

Maryann Mott for National Geographic News Dogs are being used to sniff out the scat of endangered species like wolves, kit foxes, grizzly bears—even right whales. The feces of these animals are a treasure trove for researchers, yielding valuable information about the animals, including population size, fertility, gender, stress, and extent of home range. Before scat-sniffing dogs were trained, researchers visually searched areas for droppings. It was a time-consuming job that wasn't always easy. Some animals defecate conspicuously but others try to hide their dung. Even when found, some scat, such as black bear and grizzly bear, look so similar that they are easily confused. Dogs make the process easier. They cover larger areas, faster and more accurately, using their powerful sense of smell. Canines can detect poop from hundreds of yards away, and find four times more samples than using other methods, such as visual observation or hair snags, said Samuel Wasser, director of The Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. © 2003 National Geographic Society.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 4356 - Posted: 06.24.2010