By John McCarthy Humans can focus on one thing amidst many. “Searchlight of attention” is the metaphor. You recall a childhood friend’s face one moment, then perhaps the dog you loved back then, and then…what you will. Your son’s face on stage rivets your attention; the rest of the cast is unseen. No “ghost” in the brain aims that searchlight. What does? Neurons do, somehow, but how is a mystery that new research actually deepened. The experiment used monkeys. They can focus attention like people do. They can zero in on a red square on a screen full of distractions, for instance. When the square moves, a trained monkey will press a button. Electrodes inserted in a monkey neuron will reveal “firing” (minuscule electrical ripples) simultaneous with attention. This may locate brain areas by which the monkey watched that red square. It’s not only the explosive firing in neurons that instruments detect. They also spot the milder priming to fire, when the monkey expects (from training) that neurons are about to be stimulated. Neurons in a one area of the cortex fire when an object moves (but not, for instance, if it gets brighter but stays still.) If a monkey learns that an onscreen cue (a blip of light) signals that the red square is about to move, the cue alone primes the motion-sensing neurons. They also synchronize more tightly (i.e. reduce random noise among them.) Cues cock neurons, like a gun. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the bell that preceded feeding. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 17361 - Posted: 10.11.2012

Virginia Hughes On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car and tossed the bag onto the empty passenger seat. But as she tried to close the door, she found it blocked by a slight, unkempt man with a big knife. He forced her to slide over and took her place behind the wheel. The man drove aimlessly along country roads, ranting about his girlfriend's infidelity and the time he had spent in jail. Ebaugh, a psychotherapist who was 30 years old at the time, used her training to try to calm the man and negotiate her freedom. But after several hours and a few stops, he took her to a motel, watched a pornographic film and raped her. Then he forced her back into the car. She pleaded with him to let her go, and he said that he would. So when he stopped on a bridge at around 2 a.m. and told her to get out, she thought she was free. Then he motioned for her to jump. “That's the time where my system, I think, just lost it,” Ebaugh recalls. Succumbing to the terror and exhaustion of the night, she fainted. Ebaugh awoke in freefall. The man had thrown her, limp and handcuffed, off the bridge four storeys above a river reservoir. When she hit the frigid water, she turned onto her back and started kicking. “At that point, there was no part of me that thought I wasn't going to make it,” she says. Few people will experience psychological and physical abuse as terrible as the abuse Ebaugh endured that night. But extreme stress is not unusual. In the United States, an estimated 50–60% of people will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives, whether through military combat, assault, a serious car accident or a natural disaster. Acute stress triggers an intense physiological response and cements an association in the brain's circuits between the event and fear. If this association lingers for more than a month, as it does for about 8% of trauma victims, it is considered to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The three main criteria for diagnosis are recurring and frightening memories, avoidance of any potential triggers for such memories and a heightened state of arousal. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Stress; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17360 - Posted: 10.11.2012

Alison Abbott In 1965, health authorities in Camberwell, a bustling quarter of London's southward sprawl, began an unusual tally. They started to keep case records for every person in the area who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder or any other psychiatric condition. Decades later, when psychiatrists looked back across the data, they saw a surprising trend: the incidence of schizophrenia had more or less doubled, from around 11 per 100,000 inhabitants per year in 1965 to 23 per 100,000 in 1997 — a period when there was no such rise in the general population (J. Boydell et al. Br. J. Psychiatry 182, 45–49; 2003). The result raised a question in many researchers' minds: could the stress of city life be increasing the risk of schizophrenia and other mental-health disorders? The question is an urgent one. Back in 1950, less than one-third of the world's population lived in cities. Now, lured by the prospect of work and opportunity, more than half do. Mental illnesses already comprise the world's biggest disease burden after infectious diseases and, although global statistics do not yet show any major increase in incidence, the cost is rising. In Germany, the number of sick days taken for psychiatric ailments doubled between 2000 and 2010; in North America, up to 40% of disability claims for work absence are related to depression, according to some estimates. “It seems that cities may be making us sick,” says Jane Boydell at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, who led the Camberwell study. Anecdotally, the link between cities, stress and mental health makes sense. Psychiatrists know that stress can trigger mental disorders — and modern city life is widely perceived as stressful. City dwellers typically face more noise, more crime, more slums and more people jostling on the streets than do those outside urban areas. Those who have jobs complain of growing demands on them in the workplace, where they are expected to do much more in less time. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 17359 - Posted: 10.11.2012

Strokes are occurring at a younger age, say researchers who call the trend concerning. Researchers looked at strokes occurring in people aged 20 to 54 in the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky regions. "We found trends toward increasing stroke incidence at younger ages," study author Dr. Brett Kissela of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio and his co-authors concluded in Wednesday's online issue of the journal Neurology. A rise in risk factors such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol are potential reasons for the trend, Kissela said. Better diagnosis from MRI could also be contributing. "Regardless, the rising trend found in our study is of great concern for public health because strokes in younger people translate to greater lifetime disability," he said in a release. In the study, researchers looked at first strokes that occurred during three, separate year-long periods between 1993 and 2005. What's behind stroke trend? The average age of people who experienced stroke fell from 71 years in 1993 and 1994 to 69 years in 2005, the researchers found. Among the young stroke patients, more coronary heart disease was found in 1999 and 2005 compared with the first year. The prevalence of heart disease among the general population didn't change. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Stroke; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17358 - Posted: 10.11.2012

By Erin Wayman Rusty red stains on the head of a fossilized segmented creature found in southwestern China are a paleontological record-breaker: They are the remains of the oldest arthropod brain ever found. The imprint of the 520-million-year-old critter’s three-part brain indicates that complex nervous systems evolved fairly early in animal evolution, among the ancestors of insects, centipedes and crustaceans. The roughly 7-centimeter-long specimen includes the entire body of Fuxianhuia protensa. The species lived during the Cambrian period, before modern arthropod lineages evolved. The fossil shows F. protensa had a brain composed of three sections that sat in front of the animal’s gut. That’s the same setup seen today in insects, crabs, lobsters and many other arthropods, researchers report in the Oct. 11 Nature. “It was very fascinating and very exciting,” says study coauthor Nicholas Strausfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona. “It suggests that the organization we see in the modern [arthropod] brains is very ancient.” Scientists had thought early arthropods had simpler brains like those of modern water fleas, fairy shrimp and other tiny freshwater crustaceans called branchiopods. The branchiopod brain consists of two connected parts with a third mass of nervous tissue sitting behind the stomach. Sometime after the branchiopod lineage split from the other arthropods, scientists had assumed, the nervous tissue behind the gut migrated up and connected with the other parts of the brain, Strausfeld says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17357 - Posted: 10.11.2012

by Emily Underwood Four young boys with a rare, fatal brain condition have made it through a dangerous ordeal. Scientists have safely transplanted human neural stem cells into their brains. Twelve months after the surgeries, the boys have more myelin—a fatty insulating protein that coats nerve fibers and speeds up electric signals between neurons—and show improved brain function, a new study in Science Translational Medicine reports. The preliminary trial paves the way for future research into potential stem cell treatments for the disorder, which overlaps with more common diseases such as Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis. "This is very exciting," says Douglas Fields, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the work. "From these early studies one sees the promise of cell transplant therapy in overcoming disease and relieving suffering." Without myelin, electrical impulses traveling along nerve fibers in the brain can't travel from neuron to neuron says Nalin Gupta, lead author of the study and a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Signals in the brain become scattered and disorganized, he says, comparing them to a pile of lumber. "You wouldn't expect lumber to assemble itself into a house," he notes, yet neurons in a newborn baby's brain perform a similar feat with the help of myelin-producing cells called oligodendrocytes. Most infants are born with very little myelin and develop it over time. In children with early-onset Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, he says, a genetic mutation prevents oligodendrocytes from producing myelin, causing electrical signals to die out before they reach their destinations. This results in serious developmental setbacks, such as the inability to talk, walk, or breathe independently, and ultimately causes premature death. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stem Cells; Glia
Link ID: 17356 - Posted: 10.11.2012

By GINA KOLATA Scientists have selected three different types of Alzheimer’s drugs to be tested in the first large-scale international attempt to prevent the disease in people who are otherwise doomed to get it. It is one of three studies with the same goal that will start early next year. This one involves 160 people from the United States, Britain and Australia with a variety of gene mutations that cause Alzheimer’s with absolute certainty. Most of the test subjects will have no symptoms yet of the degenerative disease that ravages the brain, destroying memory and thought. But they would be expected to start showing signs of problems with memory and thinking within five years unless the drugs work. The hope is that by intervening early, the disease might be headed off. Another study starting next year involves an extended family in Colombia that shares the same mutation. Anyone who inherits that mutated gene get Alzheimer’s disease. A third study will involve people in the United States age 70 and older who seem perfectly healthy and who do not have any known Alzheimer’s mutations but in whom, brain scans show, the disease is starting to manifest itself. In recent years, as studies involving people who already have Alzheimer’s have failed, researchers increasingly have called for studies in those who do not yet have the disease, arguing that the time to intervene is before the brain is irreversibly damaged. So the new study with people who are destined to get Alzheimer’s unless a drug can stop it is a way to test that idea. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17355 - Posted: 10.11.2012

by Robert F. Service According to George Bernard Shaw: "The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure." Not to be picky George, but actually both sensations result from the activity of a diverse family of proteins on the surface of cells. This year's Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to two Americans—Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Brian Kobilka of Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California—who revealed the inner workings of these proteins, which also orchestrate a variety of things such as the way we see, smell, taste, feel, and fight infections. The notion that a single family of proteins was responsible for so many different physiological processes was far from evident early on. One hint came at the end of the 19th century, when scientists studying the effects of the hormone adrenaline discovered that it had different effects in various parts of the body. It made heart rate and blood pressure increase, but it decreased digestive activity and caused pupils to relax. One idea was that proteins called receptors on different cells somehow captured adrenaline molecules and either ferried the hormone into cells or transferred a message inside to trigger a response. In the 1940s, an American biologist named Raymond Ahlquist made enough progress to conclude that there must be two types of adrenaline receptors, one that caused smooth muscle cells to contract, and the other that stimulated the heart. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 17354 - Posted: 10.11.2012

By Susan Milius A dollop of living yellow ooze has aced a test of navigation, showing that you don’t really need a mind to make spatial memories. The egg-yolk-colored slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell without any nervous system. But this blob of a creature uses its slime trails as a form of external spatial memory, says complex systems biologist Chris R. Reid of the University of Sydney. Smears of goo left behind as a slime mold crawls act as records of past paths. Given a choice, slime molds won’t crawl over their old slime, Reid and his colleagues found. These simple external “memories” work quite well. When lured into a U-shaped dead-end in front of a sugar treat, slime molds were able to escape. Instead of just throbbing futilely against the closed end of the U or crawling around in circles, 39 out of 40 managed to ooze their way back out of the blind alley and creep to the treat by an outside route, Reid and his colleagues report October 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s the first time any spatial memory system has been found in an organism without a brain,” Reid says. Ants, which Reid also studies, lay trails of scents as they scurry to food sources, and these scents can function as external memories of the whole colony. Ants do have brains though. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17353 - Posted: 10.11.2012

By Jason G. Goldman My high school biology teacher once told me that nothing was binary in biology except for alive and dead, and pregnant and not pregnant. Any other variation, he said, existed along a continuum. Whether or not the claim is technically accurate, it serves to illustrate an important feature of biological life. That is, very little in the biological world falls neatly into categories. A new finding, published today in PLoS ONE by Gustavo Arriaga, Eric P. Zhou, and Erich D. Jarvis from Duke University adds to the list of phenomena that scientists once thought were categorical but may, in fact, not be. The consensus among researchers was that, in general, animals divide neatly into two categories: singers and non-singers. The singers include songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds, humans, dolphins, whales, bats, elephants, sea lions and seals. What these species all have in common – and what distinguishes them from the non-singers of the animal world – is that they are vocal learners. That is, these species can change the composition of their sounds that emanate from the larynx (for mammals) or syrinx (for birds), both in terms of the acoustic qualities such as pitch, and in terms of syntax (the particular ordering of the parts of the song). It is perhaps not surprising that songbirds and parrots have been extremely useful as models for understanding human speech and language acquisition. When other animals, such as monkeys or non-human apes, produce vocalizations, they are always innate, usually reflexive, and never learned. But is the vocal learner/non-learner dichotomy truly reflective of biological reality? Maybe not. It turns out that mice make things more complicated. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17352 - Posted: 10.11.2012

By Janet Raloff For pregnant women, diets rich in fish can offer their babies protection against developing behaviors associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, a new study finds. Yet for most Americans, fish consumption is the leading source of exposure to mercury — a potent neurotoxic pollutant that has been linked to a host of health problems, including delays in neural development. Data from the new study, published online October 8 in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, demonstrate that low-mercury diets and regular fish consumption are not mutually exclusive, says epidemiologist and study leader Susan Korrick of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “It really depends on the type of fish that you’re eating,” she says. In fact, some study participants had been eating more than two servings of fish weekly yet accumulated relatively little mercury. As part of a long-running study of children born during the 1990s in New Bedford, Mass., 515 women who had just given birth completed a dietary survey. About 420 also provided samples of their hair for mercury testing. About eight years later, Korrick’s team administered a battery of IQ and other tests to assess behaviors associated with ADHD in the children. The children spanned a continuum running from almost no ADHD-related behaviors to those with outright clinical disease. A mom’s hair-mercury level tended to be associated with where her child fell along this spectrum. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: ADHD; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 17351 - Posted: 10.09.2012

Mo Costandi The growth pattern of long-range connections in the brain predicts how a child’s reading skills will develop, according to research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Literacy requires the integration of activity in brain areas involved in vision, hearing and language. These areas are distributed throughout the brain, so efficient communication between them is essential for proficient reading. Jason Yeatman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues studied how the development of reading ability relates to growth in the brain’s white-matter tracts, the bundles of nerve fibres that connect distant regions of the brain. They tested how the reading skills of 55 children aged between 7 and 12 years old developed over a three-year period. There were big differences in reading ability between the children, and these differences persisted — the children who were weak readers relative to their peers at the beginning of the study were still weak three years later. The researchers also scanned the brains of 39 of the children at least three times during the same period, to visualize the growth of two major white-matter tracts: the arcuate fasciculus, which conects the brain's language centres, and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, which links the language centres with the parts of the brain that process visual information. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Language; Dyslexia
Link ID: 17350 - Posted: 10.09.2012

By Courtney Humphries A. Fainting, also called syncope, is a sudden and brief loss of consciousness followed by a spontaneous return to wakefulness — people who “black out” and then “come to” on their own without outside intervention. During the faint, they’re in danger of falls and injuries if they lose muscle control. There are several possible causes of fainting, but they all stem from a temporary decrease in blood flow to the brain. The typical Victorian-era swoon is one of the most common forms, called vasovagal syncope. Lewis Lipsitz, a geriatrician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Hebrew SeniorLife, explains that it’s caused by a reflexive response to a stimulus, such as stress, a sudden shock, or the sight of blood. Fainting without an obvious trigger can be a sign of an underlying health problem, such as an irregular heart rhythm, heart disease, or severe dehydration. “The elderly have syncope more commonly than any other group,” Lipsitz says, which can put them at risk of falls and fractures. Often the spells are caused by actions as simple as changing position or eating a meal. When we stand up, Lipsitz says, “about half a liter of blood immediately goes to the legs and the lower abdomen,” and eating also pulls blood from the brain to the gut. Our bodies compensate by raising the heart rate to get blood to the brain. But elderly people can’t always restore their blood flow, and dehydration or certain medications can exacerbate the problem. © Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 17349 - Posted: 10.09.2012

There was nothing sweet about Kaitlyn Terrana's 16th birthday. And she has virtually no recollection of her last birthday, her 17th, either. She slept through both of them. At a time when the teenager should be living each day to the fullest, she is trapped in a roughly six-week cycle in which she has no choice but to take to her bed, slumbering for about 10 days at a time. Kaitlyn has developed an extremely rare condition called Kleine-Levin syndrome, or KLS, and it is stealing her life away. "Kind of like the day before, I start feeling really tired and it's really hard for me to focus in class," she says from her home in Winona, Ont., near Hamilton. "And then after that, I'm just gone for 10 days. I have to sleep, I can't stay awake." Her mom, Kathy Terrana, has to closely monitor Kaitlyn when she experiences one of these sleeping periods, saying her daughter can't be left alone. "In the beginning of her episodes, she starts off being very, very tired," she says. "By late evening I can usually tell that, yes, she is starting an episode, because she doesn't talk, she doesn't converse with anybody. "It's not very nice to say, but it's almost like she's a walking zombie, because when they're in their episodes they can be walking around but they don't know what's going on around them. So there's no empathy, there's no feeling whatsoever. She's in a complete fog." © CBC 2012

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17348 - Posted: 10.09.2012

By Scicurious Ok, I know it’s not Friday Weird Science time, but this paper is both interesting science AND somewhat odd. And who can’t use extra weird in their day, right? I know that Ed has already been here before me, but I can’t let this one go. I like studies on sleep, and I like studies on sex, and this has both! This paper is not actually about gettin’ laid. Though it IS about getting laid…but what it’s really about is the purpose of sleep. What is the purpose of sleep? After all, 8 hours a night (ish, for humans) is an awfully long time to spend unconscious and relatively defenseless. But almost all animals (all mammals and birds, definitely) that have more than a rudimentary brain do it. This leads us to think that it must really be an important thing to do. But why? There are several hypotheses as to why we need to sleep. The one I see most often is that our brains need that relatively inactive time (though there is still a lot of activity) to perform restorative processes and promote the best brain performance. But we don’t know, exactly, what the restorative processes are. We just know that animals and humans perform very badly on tasks when sleep deprived. But there is another hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that sleep is not really all that necessary for optimal performance. Instead, sleep is a way to preserve energy when it’s a better idea to be inactive. So, for example, humans might sleep at night because we’re at a disadvantage in the dark and would waste energy attempting activities. Support for this hypothesis comes from the fact that sleep needs vary massively across the animal kingdom. Some animals need 14 hours (see cats), while others need just 2-3. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Sleep
Link ID: 17347 - Posted: 10.09.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey The 2012 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded for the discovery that adult cells can be reprogrammed, as scientists did to these neurons, created from skin cells reprogrammed into a type of primordial stem cell and then coaxed into brain cells that control movement.G. Croft and M. Weygandt/The Cell: An Image Library Two scientists who showed that a cell's fate is reversible have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The Nobel committee announced October 8 that John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka are being honored for showing that cells once thought to be locked into a specific identity could remember and revert to the supremely flexible state they have in an early embryo. Gurdon’s 1962 work forever changed the view that adult cells are stuck in their fate. In a series of experiments, he transplanted the nucleus — the cellular compartment that contains DNA — from an intestinal cell of an adult frog into a frog egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed. The cell developed into a normal tadpole, demonstrating that DNA contains all the information necessary to make an embryo. More than four decades later, Yamanaka, of Kyoto University in Japan, changed the debate over stem cells when he created induced pluripotent stem cells, which are capable of becoming nearly any cell in the body. He was trying to understand the factors that make stem cells isolated from embryos so malleable; many genes seemed to be involved. Yamanaka used viruses to insert combinations of candidate genes into skin cells, and found that only four genes are required to turn a mouse skin cell into a stem cell. The technique has since been used to convert adult human cells into embryonic-like cells and even to convert skin cells directly into heart or brain cells. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 17346 - Posted: 10.09.2012

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. Speed, instant gratification, accessibility — these are a few of the appealing hallmarks of digital technology. It’s no coincidence that we love our smart wireless devices: Humans are a notoriously impatient species, born with a preference for immediate rewards. But the virtues of the digital age are not always aligned with those of psychotherapy. It takes time to change behavior and alleviate emotional pain, and for many patients constant access is more harmful than helpful. These days, as never before, therapists are struggling to recalibrate their approach to patients living in a wired world. For some, the new technology is clearly a boon. Let’s say you have the common anxiety disorder social phobia. You avoid speaking up in class or at work, fearful you’ll embarrass yourself, and the prospect of going to a party inspires dread. You will do anything to avoid social interactions. You see a therapist who sensibly recommends cognitive-behavioral therapy, which will challenge your dysfunctional thoughts about how people see you and as a result lower your social anxiety. You find that this treatment involves a fair amount of homework: You typically have to keep a written log of your thoughts and feelings to examine them. And since you see your therapist weekly, most of the work is done solo. As it turns out, there is a smartphone app that will prompt you at various times during the day to record these social interactions and your emotional response to them. You can take the record to your therapist, and you are off and running. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17345 - Posted: 10.09.2012

It may be possible to use a drug to prevent some of the lasting and crippling damage caused by a stroke, according to doctors in the US and Canada. A safety trial, published in the Lancet Neurology medical journal, suggested the chemical NA-1 was safe to use. The study on 185 people also hinted that patients given the drug developed fewer regions of damaged brain tissue. The Stroke Association said that it was promising, but needed more research. Tests in primates had suggested NA-1 prevented brain cells dying when a stroke starved them of oxygen. A small trial was set up at 14 hospitals in the US and Canada. Patients who took part were having an operation to repair a brain aneurysm, a weakened blood vessel which could rupture, are at increased risk of a stroke. Ninety-two people had the drug injected into a vein, while another 93 were injected with salty water. The doctors concluded that NA-1 was safe, with only two patients having mild side effects. However, brain scans also showed that fewer brain lesions, damaged areas of tissue, formed in patients given the drug. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 17344 - Posted: 10.08.2012

By NORIMITSU ONISHI LOS ANGELES — One year after federal law enforcement officials began cracking down on California’s medical marijuana industry with a series of high-profile arrests around the state, they finally moved into Los Angeles last month, giving 71 dispensaries until Tuesday to shut down. At the same time, because of a well-organized push by a new coalition of medical marijuana supporters, the City Council last week repealed a ban on the dispensaries that it had passed only a couple of months earlier. Despite years of trying fruitlessly to regulate medical marijuana, California again finds itself in a marijuana-laced chaos over a booming and divisive industry. Nobody even knows how many medical marijuana dispensaries are in Los Angeles. Estimates range from 500 to more than 1,000. The only certainty, supporters and opponents agree, is that they far outnumber Starbucks. “That’s the ongoing, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ circus of L.A.,” said Michael Larsen, president of the Neighborhood Council in Eagle Rock, a middle-class community that has 15 dispensaries within a one-and-a-half-mile radius of the main commercial area, many of them near houses. “People here are desperate, and there’s nothing they can do.” Though the neighborhood’s dispensaries were among those ordered to close by Tuesday, many are still operating. As he looked at a young man who bounded out of the Together for Change dispensary on Thursday morning, Mr. Larsen said, “I’m going to go out on a limb, but that’s not a cancer patient.” In the biggest push against medical marijuana since California legalized it in 1996, the federal authorities have shut at least 600 dispensaries statewide since last October. California’s four United States attorneys said the dispensaries violated not only federal law, which considers all possession and distribution of marijuana to be illegal, but state law, which requires operators to be nonprofit primary caregivers to their patients and to distribute marijuana strictly for medical purposes. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17343 - Posted: 10.08.2012

Two pioneers of stem cell research have shared the Nobel prize for medicine or physiology. John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan were awarded to prize for transforming specialised cells into stem cells.

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 17342 - Posted: 10.08.2012