By FRANK BRUNI BORN this way. That has long been one of the rallying cries of a movement, and sometimes the gist of its argument. Across decades of widespread ostracism, followed by years of patchwork acceptance and, most recently, moments of heady triumph, gay people invoked that phrase to explain why homophobia was unwarranted and discrimination senseless. Lady Gaga even spun an anthem from it. But is it the right mantra to cling to? The best tack to take? Not for the actress Cynthia Nixon, 45, whose comments in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday raised those very questions. For 15 years, until 2003, she was in a relationship with a man. They had two children together. She then formed a new family with a woman, to whom she’s engaged. And she told The Times’s Alex Witchel that homosexuality for her “is a choice.” “For many people it’s not,” she conceded, but added that they “don’t get to define my gayness for me.” They do get to fume, though. Last week some did. They complained that she represented a minority of those in same-sex relationships and that she had furthermore handed a cudgel to our opponents, who might now cite her professed malleability as they make their case that incentives to change, not equal rights, are what we need. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16314 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By L. ALAN SROUFE THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning. But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled? In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder. As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs. Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth. Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs. What gets publicized are short-term results and studies on brain differences among children. Indeed, there are a number of incontrovertible facts that seem at first glance to support medication. It is because of this partial foundation in reality that the problem with the current approach to treating children has been so difficult to see. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16313 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By Morgen Peck When we drive somewhere new, we navigate by referring to a two-dimensional map that accounts for distances only on a horizontal plane. According to research published online in August in Nature Neuroscience, the mammalian brain seems to do the same, collapsing the world into a flat plane even as the animal skitters up trees and slips deep into burrows. “Our subjective sense that our map is three-dimensional is illusory,” says Kathryn Jeffery, a behavioral neuroscientist at University College London who led the research. Jeffery studies a collection of neurons in and around the rat hippo­campus that build an internal representation of space. As the animal travels, these neurons, called grid cells and place cells, respond uniquely to distance, turning on and off in a way that measures how far the animal has moved in a particular direction. Past research has focused on how these cartographic cells encode two-dimensional space. Jeffery and her col­leagues decided to look at how they respond to changes in altitude. To do this, they enticed rats to climb up a spiral staircase while the scientists collected electrical recordings from single cells. The firing pattern encoded very little in­formation about height. The finding adds evidence for the hypothesis that the brain keeps track of our location on a flat plane, which is defined by the way the body is oriented. If a squirrel, say, is running along the ground, then scampers straight up a tree, its internal two-dimensional map simply shifts from the horizontal plane to the vertical. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16312 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By KIRK JOHNSON DENVER — Proponents of marijuana have argued for years that the drug is safer than alcohol, both to individuals and society. But a ballot proposal to legalize possession of marijuana in small amounts in Colorado, likely to be on the November ballot, is putting the two intoxicants back into the same sentence, urging voters to “regulate marijuana like alcohol,” as the ballot proposition’s title puts it. Given alcohol’s long and checkered history — the tens of thousands of deaths each year, the social ravages of alcoholism — backers of the pro-marijuana measure concede there is a risk of looking as if they have cozied up too much, or are comparable, to old demon rum. “Why add another vice, right?” said Mason Tvert, a co-director of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, which has led the ballot drive. “But we’re not adding a vice; we’re providing an alternative.” The goal of legalization, Mr. Tvert added, is not to make access to marijuana easier, but rather, “to make our communities safer by regulating this substance, taking it out of the underground market, controlling it and better keeping it away from young people.” The debate here and in Washington State — where members of a pro-legalization group have also submitted what they say are more than enough signatures to secure a spot on the ballot — is premised on the idea that marijuana has become, if not quite mainstream, then at least no longer alien to the average voter. Medical marijuana is already legal in both states. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16311 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Your daily dose of caffeine may tinker with more than just your energy levels. A new study of women ages 18 to 44 found that drinking coffee and other caffeinated beverages can alter levels of estrogen. But the impact varies by race. In white women, for example, coffee appears to lower estrogen, while in Asian women it has the reverse effect, raising levels of the hormone. The study did not look at older women, but women of child-bearing age who enjoy a daily cuppa have little reason to fret, the researchers said. The effects of caffeine on estrogen are so minimal that in healthy women, it has no impact on ovulation or overall health, at least in the short term. “This is important physiologically because it helps us understand how caffeine is metabolized by different genetic groups,” said Dr. Enrique Schisterman, an author of the study and senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health. “But for women of reproductive age, drinking coffee will not alter their hormonal function in a clinically significant way.” The study, which was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, analyzed data on more than 250 women who were examined one to three times a week over two menstrual cycles. They provided blood samples along with details about behaviors like exercise, eating and smoking. On average, they consumed about 90 milligrams of caffeine a day, equivalent to roughly one cup of coffee. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16310 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News It may be possible to detect autism at a much earlier age than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers. A study published in Current Biology identified differences in infants' brainwaves from as early as six months. Behavioural symptoms of autism typically develop between a child's first and second birthdays. Autism charities said identifying the disorder at an earlier stage could help with treatment. It is thought that one in every 100 children has an autism spectrum disorder in the UK. It affects more boys than girls. While there is no "cure", education and behavioural programmes can help. One of the researchers, Prof Mark Johnson from Birkbeck College, University of London, told the BBC: "The prevailing view is that if we are able to intervene before the onset of full symptoms, such as a training programme, at least in some cases we can maybe alleviate full symptoms." His team looked for the earliest signs of autism in 104 children aged between six and 10 months. Half were known to be at risk of the disorder because they had on older sibling who had been diagnosed with autism. The rest were low risk. Older children with autism can show a lack of eye contact, so the babies were shown pictures of people's faces that switched between looking at or away from the baby. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16309 - Posted: 01.28.2012

by Michael Marshall For most of us, blurry vision is a bad thing, if only because it means we're going to have to spend a lot of money on a new pair of glasses. For one jumping spider, though, it's how it catches dinner. Adanson's house jumper, as the name implies, is a jumping spider. It springs on unsuspecting prey insects from several centimetres away and swiftly dispatches them. To pull off these leaps, it has to be an excellent judge of distance. And for that, paradoxically, it has part of its visual field permanently out of focus. It's the only animal known to judge distance in this way. Stalk, jump and bite The Adanson's house jumper is a cosmopolitan species – meaning it lives all over the place. It hunts during the day, pouncing on insects and other prey, although like many jumping spiders it may also take the occasional drink of nectar. To cope with its agile lifestyle, it must have excellent eyesight. How it works is not obvious, though. Lab tests have shown that it has top-class colour vision, but that doesn't help it judge distance. Other animals have all sorts of ways to work out how far away an object is, the most obvious being simply to have two eyes with overlapping fields of vision and compare what they see. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 16308 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By Jason G. Goldman Which limb do you prefer? If you’re like most members of our species, you prefer your right hand for most tasks. If you’re like a smaller minority of our species, you might prefer your left hand. Very, very few of us are truly ambidextrous. Most of us have at least a minor preference for one hand over the other. So do wallabies. On the one hand (ha!), this shouldn’t be all that surprising. Nervous systems became lateralized quite early in the evolution of vertebrates. For example, there is research showing that fish show a preference for touching the sides of aquariums with one side of their ventral fins or another. And it is not surprising that humans overwhelmingly favor their right hands. When it comes to feeding behaviors, fishes, reptiles, and toads all favor their right eye (and their brain’s left hemisphere). The same is true for birds like chickens, pigeons, quails, and stilts. The right-eye preference can be so strong that one bird – New Zealand wry-billed plover – evolved a beak that slopes slightly to the right. And a study of seventy-five whales showed that sixty of them had abrasions on the right side of their jaws, while the other fifteen had only injured the left side of their jaws. As Peter F. MacNeilage, Lesley J. Rogers and Giorgio Vallortigara pointed out in a 2009 article in Scientific American, the data indicated that whales tended to use one side of the jaw more than the other for gathering food, “and that ‘right-jawedness’ is by far the norm.” On the other hand, we have no real reason to automatically assume that wallabies would show a limb preference, just because a diverse handful of other species do. After all, the vast majority of research on limb preference and of behavioral laterality more generally has focused on primates, mainly because researchers’ main goal has been to discern the evolutionary origins of brain asymmetry and handedness in humans. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 16307 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By Laura Sanders Humankind’s sharpest minds have figured out some of nature’s deepest secrets. Why the sun shines. How humans evolved from single-celled life. Why an apple falls to the ground. Humans have conceived and built giant telescopes that glimpse galaxies billions of light-years away and microscopes that illuminate the contours of a single atom. Yet the peculiar quality that enabled such flashes of scientific insight and grand achievements remains a mystery: consciousness. Though in some ways deeply familiar, consciousness is at the same time foreign to those in its possession. Deciphering the cryptic machinations of the brain — and how they create a mind — poses one of the last great challenges facing the scientific world. For a long time, the very question was considered to be in poor taste, acceptable for philosophical musing but outside the bounds of real science. Whispers of the C-word were met with scorn in polite scientific society. Toward the end of the last century, though, sentiment shifted as some respectable scientists began saying the C-word out loud. Initially these discussions were tantalizing but hazy: Like kids parroting a dirty word without knowing what it means, scientists speculated on what consciousness is without any real data. After a while, though, researchers developed ways to turn their instruments inward to study the very thing that was doing the studying. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 16306 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By Tom Siegfried When Francis Crick decided to embark on a scientific research career, he chose his specialty by applying the “gossip test.” He’d noticed that he liked to gossip about two especially hot topics in the 1940s — the molecular basis for heredity and the mysteries of the brain. He decided to tackle biology’s molecules first. By 1953, with collaborator James Watson (and aided by data from competitor Rosalind Franklin), Crick had identified the structure of the DNA molecule, establishing the foundation for modern genetics. A quarter century later, he decided it was time to try the path not taken and turn his attention to the brain — in particular, the enigma of consciousness. At first, Crick believed the mysteries of consciousness would be solved with a striking insight, similar to the way the DNA double helix structure explained heredity’s mechanisms. But after a while he realized that consciousness posed a much tougher problem. Understanding DNA was easier because it appeared in life’s history sooner; the double helix template for genetic replication marked the beginning of evolution as we know it. Consciousness, on the other hand, represented evolution’s pinnacle, the outcome of eons of ever growing complexity in biochemical information processing. “The simplicity of the double helix … probably goes back to near the origin of life when things had to be simple,” Crick said in a 1998 interview. “It isn’t clear there will be a similar thing in the brain.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 16305 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By Rebecca Cheung The protein-based pathogens known as prions may pass between different species more easily than has been thought, a team of French researchers reports in the Jan. 27 Science. By infecting engineered mice with prions from cows and goats, scientists also have shown that the invaders readily target tissues other than the brain. “We may underestimate the threat posed by some of these diseases by focusing only on the brain,” says Pierluigi Gambetti, a prion researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “It adds a new element to the equation.” The research also raises the possibility that new prion strains recently identified in cattle and small rodents might be able to jump to other species, including humans. “We should, in the future, be more exhaustive when looking at the possibility of prions being passed from one species to another,” says Hubert Laude, a professor at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Jouy-en-Josas and a coauthor of the study. Prions closely resemble normal proteins made by a host. When prions invade a host, they propagate by forcing these normal host proteins, actually called prion proteins, to assemble improperly. When these malformed proteins accumulate in the brain, they cause mind-wasting conditions such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people and scrapie in sheep. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 16304 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By Amber Dance A fighter pilot heads back to base after a long mission, feeling spent. A warning light flashes on the control panel. Has she noticed? If so, is she focused enough to fix the problem? Thanks to current advances in electroencephalographic (EEG) brain-wave detection technology, military commanders may not have to guess the answers to these questions much longer. They could soon be monitoring her mental state via helmet sensors, looking for signs she is concentrating on her flying and reacting to the warning light. This is possible because of two key advances made EEG technology wireless and mobile, says Scott Makeig, director of the University of California, San Diego's Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience (SCCN) in La Jolla, Calif. EEG used to require users to sit motionless, weighted down by heavy wires. Movement interfered with the signals, so that even an eyebrow twitch could garble the brain impulses. Modern technology lightened the load and wirelessly linked the sensors and the computers that collect the data. In addition, Makeig and others developed better algorithms—in particular, independent component analysis. By reading signals from several electrodes, they can infer where, within the skull, a particular impulse originated. This is akin to listening to a single speaker's voice in a crowded room. In so doing, they are also able to filter out movements—not just eyebrow twitches, but also the muscle flexing needed to walk, talk or fly a plane. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 16303 - Posted: 01.28.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams What do you get when you combine a monkey's brain with the whiskers of a rat? A robotic rodent that can sense its environment almost as well as the real thing. The new rat-bot could lead to the development of robots that can feel their way through earthquake rubble and could provide clues to how live rats analyze sensory information from their whiskers. Although recent research has helped scientists understand what information whiskers send to the brains of rodents, deciphering how rats and mice interpret that sensory information has been trickier. Previous models assumed that rodents looked at whisker movement patterns and vibrations over a set duration of time and that their brain made a decision, based on the whole of the data, about the most likely surface the whiskers were touching. If the overall data best matched the known patterns for a hard vinyl floor, for example, the rats would conclude that's the surface that they're on. But different robots created using this model of reasoning were only 50% to 80% accurate at guessing the floor underneath them after 0.4 seconds of exposure, multiple studies have found. Computational neuroscientist Nathan Lepora of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and his team thought that a model of information processing recently discovered in monkeys might help the robots make better judgments on floor type. The primates don't use a single piece of evidence to make a decision about what they're seeing. Rather, their brains rely on an accumulation of data. When the monkeys watch screens of randomly moving dots, for example, different neurons sense each direction of movement: up, down, left, and right. As dots on the screen flit about, more neurons of each type begin to fire, accumulating a total activity level for the group of neurons. Once, say, the "up" neurons reach a specific threshold, they pass on the message that the dots are moving in that direction. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 16302 - Posted: 01.26.2012

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer Morgellons disease - a creepy illness that leaves patients with painful lesions, gives them a feeling that bugs are crawling all over their body, and has them seeing colorful, threadlike fibers poking through their skin - isn't infectious and probably isn't caused by anything in the environment, according to the first government study of the condition. Rather, Morgellons is likely to be a mental illness and should probably be treated with the same drug and psychiatric care that works for people who suffer delusions, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. "There were some possibilities of what could be causing this, and we've taken a couple of the big ones off the table. That's a really big step forward," said Dr. Mark Eberhard, director of the CDC's Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria and a lead investigator in the study. Seeking acknowledgement The study focused on patients in the Bay Area, where a cluster of Morgellons cases have been reported over the past several years. Patients all complained of the same strange, often horrifying symptoms, and they became increasingly angry and frustrated that physicians weren't taking their condition seriously. Just getting the research done was a major coup for Morgellons sufferers, who had been clamoring for a serious scientific study of their illness for years. But by ruling out infectious and environmental causes of the disease and suggesting it's a delusional condition, the CDC report was disappointing, patients said Wednesday. © 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16301 - Posted: 01.26.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY When does a broken heart become a diagnosis? In a bitter skirmish over the definition of depression, a new report contends that a proposed change to the diagnosis would characterize grieving as a disorder and greatly increase the number of people treated for it. The criteria for depression are being reviewed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is finishing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., the first since 1994. The manual is the standard reference for the field, shaping treatment and insurance decisions, and its revisions will affect the lives of millions of people for years to come. In coming months, as the manual is finalized, outside experts will intensify scrutiny of its finer points, many of which are deeply contentious in the field. A controversy erupted last week over the proposed tightening of the definition of autism, possibly sharply reducing the number of people who receive the diagnosis. Psychiatrists say current efforts to revise the manual are shaping up as the most contentious ever. The new report, by psychiatric researchers from Columbia and New York Universities, argues that the current definition of depression — which excludes bereavement, the usual grieving after the loss of a loved one — is far more accurate. If the “bereavement exclusion” is eliminated, they say, “there is the potential for considerable false-positive diagnosis and unnecessary treatment of grief-stricken persons.” Drugs for depression can have side effects, including low sex drive and sleeping problems. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16300 - Posted: 01.26.2012

by Debora MacKenzie Sleeping sickness is a formidable foe, killing thousands in Africa every year. There are only five drugs to combat the parasite, which is carried by tsetse flies, and they can have severe side effects. Worse, the parasite is becoming resistant. "If we knew how the drugs work, we could perhaps design better ones," says David Horn of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. To investigate, Horn's lab exploited a phenomenon called RNA interference (RNAi) – the ability of certain small RNA molecules to block the activity of individual genes. Horn's team used a previously created DNA library, in which the parasite's genome was cut into chunks, and these were put into bacteria in a way that generated the interfering RNAs. Each of these inactivated a parasite gene with the corresponding genetic code. The researchers then exposed parasites to all of the interfering RNA molecules as well as each of the five drugs. If the parasites survived, it meant that the RNA sequences that had bound to them must have blocked a gene or genes needed for that drug to work. They then mapped those RNA sequences in the parasite's DNA. This revealed 55 genes that the drugs interact with – a step towards working out how they kill the parasite and finding safer drugs with the same effect. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16299 - Posted: 01.26.2012

By Erica Westly Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a progressive neuromuscular disease that affects about 130,000 people worldwide a year. The vast majority of patients are isolated cases with no known family history of the disease. They usually start developing symptoms of the loss of motor neurons in middle age and die within five years of diagnosis. Researchers know very little about what causes ALS. Now a recent study in Nature Biotechnology suggests that the neuron death associated with the disease may be caused by astrocytes, a type of brain cell that normally helps neurons. Previous research had suggested that astrocytes could become toxic in the rare form of ALS known to have genetic roots, and the study authors wanted to see if a similar phenomenon might happen in the more common iso­­lated cases. The answer turned out to be yes: when they cultured astro­cytes from those ALS patients, the healthy motor neurons in the culture began to die off after a few days. Other types of neurons were unaffected by the astrocytes, suggesting that they specifically harm the neurons involved in controlling the body’s movements. Lead author Brian Kaspar, a neuroscientist at Ohio State University, and his collaborators next will attempt to figure out what makes the astrocytes behave this way. If researchers can understand why motor neurons die in ALS, they may have a better chance of finding a cure. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Glia
Link ID: 16298 - Posted: 01.26.2012

By GINA KOLATA Fat people have less than thin people. Older people have less than younger people. Men have less than younger women. It is brown fat, actually brown in color, and its great appeal is that it burns calories like a furnace. A new study finds that one form of it, which is turned on when people get cold, sucks fat out of the rest of the body to fuel itself. Another new study finds that a second form of brown fat can be created from ordinary white fat by exercise. Of course, researchers say, they are not blind to the implications of their work. If they could turn on brown fat in people without putting them in cold rooms or making them exercise night and day, they might have a terrific weight loss treatment. And companies are getting to work. But Dr. André Carpentier, an endocrinologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec and lead author of one of the new papers, notes that much work lies ahead. It is entirely possible, for example, that people would be hungrier and eat more to make up for the calories their brown fat burns. “We have proof that this tissue burns calories — yes, indeed it does,” Dr. Carpentier said. “But what happens over the long term is unknown.” Until about three years ago, researchers thought brown fat was something found in rodents, which cannot shiver and use heat-generating brown fat as an alternate way to keep warm. Human infants also have it, for the same reason. But researchers expected that adults, who shiver, had no need for it and did not have it. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16297 - Posted: 01.26.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Alzheimer’s disease, with its inexorable loss of memory and self, understandably alarms most of us. This is especially so since, at the moment, there are no cures for the condition and few promising drug treatments. But a cautiously encouraging new study from The Archives of Neurology suggests that for some people, a daily walk or jog could alter the risk of developing Alzheimer’s or change the course of the disease if it begins. For the experiment, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis recruited 201 adults, ages 45 to 88, who were part of a continuing study at the university’s Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Some of the participants had a family history of Alzheimer’s, but none, as the study began, showed clinical symptoms of the disease. They performed well on tests of memory and thinking. “They were, as far as we could determine, cognitively normal,” says Denise Head, an associate professor of psychology at Washington University who led the study. The volunteers had not had their brains scanned, however, so the Washington University scientists began their experiment by using positron emission tomography, an advanced scanning technique, to look inside the volunteers’ brains for signs of amyloid plaques, the deposits that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. People with a lot of plaque tend to have more memory loss, though the relation is complex. Next they genetically typed their volunteers for APOE, a gene involved in cholesterol metabolism. Everyone carries the APOE gene, but scientists have determined that those who have a particular variation of the gene known as e4 are at 15 times the risk of developing Alzheimer’s compared with those who do not carry the variant. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16296 - Posted: 01.26.2012

Ewen Callaway Skin cells from patients with Alzheimer’s disease have been reprogrammed to form brain cells, offering clues to their dementia and, for others, the prospect of early diagnosis and new ways of finding treatments. An estimated 30 million people worldwide have Alzheimer’s disease, which causes neurodegeneration and typically strikes late in life. The disease is nearly impossible to diagnose before symptoms develop, and no drugs exist at present that can change its course. Scientists aiming to learn the causes of Alzheimer’s have looked to brain biopsies of patients after they die, blood tests and animals as diverse as fruitflies and fish. Until recently, it has not been possible to probe the neurons of Alzheimer’s patients before they show symptoms. “By the time you can see dementia in a person, their brain cells have been behaving in an abnormal way for years, perhaps decades or longer,” says Larry Goldstein, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study published online today in Nature1. Goldstein and his team created induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from four patients with Alzheimer’s and two people without dementia. iPS cells are made by treating fibroblasts, a type of skin cell, with reprogramming factors to revert them to an embryonic-like state. Like the stem cells in early embryos, iPS cells can form any tissue in the body — including neurons. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16295 - Posted: 01.26.2012