Tastes Like Neuroscience
retrospectacle | August 10, 2006"New Zealand's indigenous Maori population reacted angrily on Wednesday to a researcher's findings that Maori have a high representation of a gene linked to aggression, as the nation faces a domestic violence crisis."
According to a Yahoo news story, genetic epidemiologist Rod Lea recently presented research in Australia that Maori men were twice as likely to carry monoamine oxidase than European men, describing it as "the warrior gene." This gene has apparently been tied to aggression and risk-taking behaviors such as smoking and gambling.
"I believe this gene has an influence on behavior of…
retrospectacle | August 9, 2006In addition to the below post on gene therapy, keep a watch out for a review paper on the topic (by yours truly) that was just accepted into Hearing Research.
Deafness and hearing impairment are serious medical concerns in America, with nearly 30 million Americans affected to some degree. This is such a widespread problem in our society due to the combined effects of loud noises, aging, and heredity. Hearing loss happens when cochlear hair cells are lost (for a primer on the cochlea and hair cells, go here). Mammals, including humans, are unable to re-grow hair cells although birds and a few…
retrospectacle | July 20, 2006When Pepper (my African Grey parrot) was just a wee bird, I talked to him constantly. I was told by the bird breeder that not all Greys talked; even though their mimicry is famed, there's no guarantee that the bird will ever mutter a word. But, to my delight, at about one year old, Pepper began making sounds. These sounds were strange because they kinda sounded like the things that I was saying to him, but just barely. He was playing with the word, the syllables------he was babbling! This phase lasted about 2 months, after which he became much more proficient at repeating sounds and words.…
retrospectacle | July 17, 2006
Physicians are beginning to use a novel therapy for treating aneurysms: the use of a platinum coil, which is threaded to the site of concern and seals off the potential rupture. (More, with pictures and info about aneurysms, under the fold.)
What is an Aneurysm?
Aneurysms among Americans are both quite prevalent and quite deadly. It describes a local dilation (ballooning or distortion) of a blood vessel, which is usually cause by a build up in pressure due to blockage. When this pressure builds up, the wall of the blood vessel is progressively weakened and the liklihood of bursting increases…
retrospectacle | July 17, 2006A short communication in the International Journal of Obesity caught my eye this morning. A research group from Cornell explored some seemingly-obvious questions: Do people eat food just because its there, and will they eat more if the food is close in proximity and unlimited in supply? And one not so obvious: Do we underestimate how much we eat when the food is closer (the idle munching effect)? (More below the fold!)
The team recorded the chocolate consuption of 40 adult secretaries for 4 weeks. They manipulated proximity by placing the chocolates on the desk of the participant or 2 meters…
retrospectacle | July 13, 2006A growing number of people under 50 are getting Parkinson's disease, according to this news story. The "early-onset" Parkinson's is fundamentally different than its "late-onset" counterpart, similar to the two time-dependent forms of Alzheimer's. (More under the fold.)
Some 1.5 million Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, most in their 60s and 70s. The disease gradually destroys brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical crucial for the cellular signaling that controls muscle movement. Too little dopamine causes increasingly severe tremors and periodically stiff or frozen…
retrospectacle | July 6, 2006Although I haven't seen the journal article about the case yet (it was published in the Journal of Clinical Research, I believe) , its already been reported on CNN and other news venues. A crash victim who has been barely conscious for over 20 years suddenly regained speech and movement after his damaged brain spontaneously repaired itself. This is an extremely unusual case, but an important one due to the fact that now that we know it CAN be done, we can gain a better understanding of how to induce it in other more mundane injuries. (More under the fold.)
Severe head injuries resulting in…
retrospectacle | July 5, 2006On the 4th of July, its been a tradition since 1918 to hold the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Championship in Coney Island, NY. During this event, the scrawny and the portly from all over the world compete for the Mustard Belt. This belt is, of course, bestowed upon the person who can eat the most hot dogs (buns too) in 12 minutes flat. How are some people able to devour all that food and not get full or puke? (More beyond the fold.)
If you know ANYTHING at all about the eating contest circuit, you know who Kobayashi is. Besides being a 132 lb 5'6 Japanese kid, he's the 6-time winner of the…
retrospectacle | July 3, 2006The head of the Kresge Hearing Research Center here at UM (link to the left) is Dr. Jochen Schacht. His team recently discovered that taking the antioxidents Vitamin E and aspirin significantly reduced hearing damage after noise trauma (ie, a rock concert.) Info below the fold..........
From the NIDCD's site:
Exposure to loud sounds or noise can lead to noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) by damaging and/or destroying the inner ear's sensory hair cells. Scientists believed that NIHL damaged the hair cells by the pure force of the loud sound vibrations. In that case, the only NIHL prevention…
retrospectacle | June 30, 2006RNAi, or RNA interference, is a rapidly developing and powerful tool to achieve gene silencing (turning a gene "off"). Gene silencing shows what happened in a system or organism when that gene is no longer functional. In a recent study, described in a story in Technology Review, female mice lose all interest in sex when a specific gene in the brain is silenced.
(More, including a video of the un-horny mice, below the fold!)
The mating behavior of female mice is heavily influenced by the hormone estrogen--up-regulation of estrogen provokes "lordosis," where the females arch their spines in…
retrospectacle | June 28, 2006It's all over the news: elecrtomagnetic fields (EMFs) from cellular phones have been found to excite the brain close to where the phone is being held. As more than 500 million people in the world use cell phones, it is quite important to clarify the extent of the activation and whether it is harmful. (More under the fold.....)
The most recent study was published in July's Annals of Neurology and investigated the effects of EMF exposure on brain physiology for the first time. The authors exposed 15 volunteers to EMF signals from a GSM900 phone for 45 minutes. Motor evoked potentials (MEPs)…
retrospectacle | June 26, 2006I'm currently working on a paper regarding learning and memory in honeybees. Actually I've been working on it for about 3 years. It got put on the backburner when I entered graduate school, but I finally decided its time to get this thing published. So, why not give you a little preview of the remix?
The paper's topic is a common and well-studied phenomenon in humans, the serial position effect. In the 1960s, Sperling conducted studies on human sensory storage, demonstrating that people have an extremely accurate memory for visual stimulation although the duration is brief. Essentially,…
retrospectacle | June 24, 2006
I just couldn't resist that title. A more accurate title would have been "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Prevents Migraines From Progressing," but, when in doubt, err on the side of drama. And, I actually wasn't THAT far off, really. (Note: Ray gun above is not real (duh). Real device under the fold.)
As reported in Medical News Today , a handheld device which relies on transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deliver an mild electric current for about 1 millisecond is able to interrupt migraines from progressing to the headache stage. This is extremely useful clinically, as migraine…
retrospectacle | June 22, 2006What if we lived in a world with no secrets? As the field of neuroscience matures, the need for a new brand of ethics--"neuroethics"--is becoming clear, as highlighted in this month's Nature. .
Society would be a different place if all our lies, however trivial, were abandoned in favour of blunt honesty. In some areas, such as criminal prosecution, this might be advantageous. In others, where little white lies help life run smoothly, knowing all the facts might be uncomfortable. These thoughts are brought to the fore by the arrival of two US start-up companies, No Lie MRI and Cephos, which…
retrospectacle | June 21, 2006'If man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments
merely to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own
homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care
of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.'
-Cline and Clyne (1960), on the creation of the word "cyborg"
During the summer, the Neurokids (University of Michigan Neuroscience pre-docs) have a journal club…