Imagine a contraceptive that could, with one or two painless 15-minute non-surgical treatments, provide months of protection from pregnancy. And imagine that the equipment needed were already in physical therapists’ offices around the world.
Sound too good to be true? For years, scientists thought so too. But new research headed by Dr. James Tsuruta in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, published Monday in the journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology, is gaining the contraceptive method increased respect. The kicker: This treatment would be for men—giving them the first new option since condoms and vasectomy were introduced more than a century ago.
HOW IT WORKS
The testes need to be slightly cooler than the rest of the body to properly produce sperm—the subject of countless jokes and warnings about hot tubs, laptops, and tight pants. But although hot tub or laptop use can push a man’s sperm count over the edge if he’s already low, it’s not reliable enough for contraception. What if this heat effect could be enhanced?
That’s where ultrasound comes in. Relatively inexpensive and already in use in physical therapists’ offices around the world, therapeutic ultrasound (as opposed to diagnostic ultrasound) heats deeply and increases circulation to injured joints. The physical therapist applies lubricating gel to the joint, turns on the machine, and runs the wand back and forth over the joint for 5 or 10 minutes, creating a pleasant warming sensation.
It turns out, though, that ultrasound can be used on other body parts as well. That includes the testes, and it would be for contraception rather than healing. In the current study, researchers got more than 2 1/2 months—and possibly long-lasting—contraception in rats with two 15-minute sessions of ultrasound, two days apart. And their study is the first to provide detailed insight into how ultrasound might be working, using modern equipment. But the published evidence that it works has been in plain sight for more than 35 years—not taken seriously until recently.
Scientists in Edinburgh who pioneered cloning have made a technological breakthrough that could pave the way for better medical treatment of mental illnesses and nerve diseases.
Scientist Ian Wilmut with Dolly, the worlds first cloned sheep, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in 2001. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
The news that Edinburgh scientists had created the world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, at the university’s Roslin Institute made headlines around the world 16 years ago. Her birth raised hopes of the creation of a new generation of medicines – with a host of these breakthroughs occurring at laboratories in the university over the following decade.
And now one of the most spectacular has taken place at Edinburgh’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine, where scientists have continued to develop the technology used to make Dolly. In a series of remarkable experiments, they have created brain tissue from patients suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar depression and other mental illnesses.
The work offers spectacular rewards for doctors. From a scrap of skin taken from a patient, they can make neurones genetically identical to those in that person’s brain. These brain cells, grown in the laboratory, can then be studied to reveal the neurological secrets of their condition.
“A patient’s neurones can tell us a great deal about the psychological conditions that affect them, but you cannot stick a needle in someone’s brain and take out its cells,” said Professor Charles french-Constant, the centre’s director.
Written by Robin McKie, The Observer. Continue HERE
Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists – the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider’s web.
It is part of a new field of research, synthetic biology, with a radical aim: to break down nature into spare parts so that we can rebuild it however we please.
This technology is already being used to make bio-diesel to power cars. Other researchers are looking at how we might, one day, control human emotions by sending ‘biological machines’ into our brains.
Seven years after a motorcycle accident damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed, 30-year-old Tim Hemmes reached up to touch hands with his girlfriend in a painstaking and tender high-five. For more information about the trial, visit UPMC.com/BCI
Lawrence Bonassar, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, describes a cutting-edge process he has developed in which he uses a 3D Printer and “ink” composed of living cells to create body parts such as ears.
Proteus Biomedical, a company based in Redwood City, California, announced on 13 January that it would be launching a “digital health product” in the United Kingdom in collaboration with the pharmacy chain Lloydspharmacy.
This product, called Helius, will include “sensor-enabled tablets” to monitor patients’ medication use. Compliance with doctors’ instructions has been identified as a problem area in medicine, especially when patients are prescribed multiple drugs that may need to be taken at different times.
“The most important and basic thing we can monitor is the actual physical use of the medicine,” says Andrew Thompson, chief executive of Proteus. “We have tested the system in hundreds of patients in many different therapeutic areas. It’s been tested in tuberculosis, in mental health, in heart failure, in hypertension and in diabetes.”
Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. It comes as a kit so that you can hone your soldering skills (or teach someone else) while you build a line of communication between you and your houseplant!
This kit comes with everything you need to get your plant tweeting in no time. The ATmega328 comes pre-programmed, but you can customize it with your own messages. The only thing you need to provide is a plant, network connection (and Ethernet cable), and a power outlet.
A study that looked at biomarkers in the blood to correlate vitamins and brain function found very clear links between nutrition and brain health.
A new study goes deeper in understanding the connection between good nutrition and a healthy brain. Previous studies have linked individual vitamin deficiencies to cognitive decline. But new research looks at a wider range of vitamins, and even better, it uses biomarkers in the blood to correlate vitamins with brain health, both good and bad.
Many studies exploring the relationship between nutrition and cognitive health rely on people’s personal reports of their diets — a notoriously unreliable way to gather personal nutritional information. For this reason, the researchers behind the current study decided to use a more objective means of studying the nutrition-brain link: they looked at biomarkers in the blood to measure the vitamin levels in 104 participants. They also had participants take tests to measure thinking and memory function, and 42 participants had MRI scans to measure their brain volume.
The researchers found some striking connections between nutrition and brain health. People who had higher levels of B family vitamins, as well as vitamins C, D, and E had higher scores on cognitive tests than people with lower levels. The same positive relationship was found for omega-3 fatty acids, which have previously been linked to better brain health.
Written by Alice G. Walton. Via The Atlantic. Continue HERE
“The smell of a body is the (bacteria themselves) which we breathe in with our nose and mouth, which we suddenly possess as though (they) were (the body’s) most secret substance and, to put the matter in a nutshell, its nature. The smell which is in me is the fusion of the (bacteria) with my body…”
Adulterated, in the interest of good science, from Sartre 1967, p. 174.
A man can live many lives. Paul Ehrlich has. Once, he was a butterfly biologist. Another time, he wrote the book called The Population Bomb, a book that triggered global conversations about the fate of humanity. Still another, he described the relationship between plants and the animals that eat them. A plant evolves, he says, to escape its herbivores and then the herbivores evolve, in response. This war goes on, he found, forever.
All of these and others of the lives of Paul Ehrlich have been lauded. I want to talk about the life of Ehrlich no one ever seems to mention at the award ceremonies, Ehrlich’s life as the guy at the party with the one good liner, the one that everyone laughs at even though it crosses, some say tramples, unspoken social lines.
The specific one liner I am talking about here is one I heard when Ehrlich visited North Carolina State University, where I work. I was helping to host his visit and he and I were talking at the back of a large conference room. We were both looking at the backs of a crowd of hundreds gathered in front of us and, of all things, discussing back pain. We agreed—back pain is terrible. He told me to take care of my back and then, as he looked to the audience and stepped forward through the crowd to give his talk, he left me with a sentence somewhere between punch line and universal truth…“ back problems all started when we began walking upright. The other bad thing about walking upright is that it made it hard to sniff each other…1” With that, he strode, upright, to the stage and began to speak.
Sometimes, when I think of Paul Ehrlich, I think of people sniffing each other. And as several new studies reveal, when it comes to sniffing each other, men are like dogs. Women are too.
Written by Rob Dunn for Scientific American. Continue HERE
The claim by Ion Torrent on Tuesday that a reasonably affordable machine capable of mapping an individual’s complete genetic makeup for $1,000 will be ready by the end of the year has technology geeks in a tizzy.
The $1,000 genome has been hotly sought ever since a crude map of the human genome was first published in 2001. The Carlsbad, Calif. biotech company, part of Life Technologies, will sell its device to research labs and medical clinics for $99,000 to $149,000, compared to the current price of about $750,000 for existing sequencers, Reuters reported on its website Tuesday. According to Reuters, a doctor will be able to sequence a patient’s entire genome for $1,000, compared to the current rate of $3,000 just to test for breast cancer gene mutations, for example. And the company says its new machine can complete the genome analysis within a day, rather than the two months previously needed.
It’s widely believed this type of genetic analysis will revolutionize medicine, that patients will learn their risk profile for potential diseases by having their DNA read right in the doctor’s office. Drugs and vaccines will be designed to fit our genes, in order to maximize efficacy and minimize any side-effects. Newborn babies would have someone peek at their genes so parents could take steps to prevent genetic risks from becoming realities.
UC San Diego: In an example of life imitating art, biologists and bioengineers at UC San Diego have created a living neon sign composed of millions of bacterial cells that periodically fluoresce in unison like blinking light bulbs.
Their achievement, detailed in this week’s advance online issue of the journal Nature, involved attaching a fluorescent protein to the biological clocks of the bacteria, synchronizing the clocks of the thousands of bacteria within a colony, then synchronizing thousands of the blinking bacterial colonies to glow on and off in unison.
A little bit of art with a lot more bioengineering, the flashing bacterial signs are not only a visual display of how researchers in the new field of synthetic biology can engineer living cells like machines, but will likely lead to some real-life applications. Continue HERE
Something is very wrong with the bees. Since 2006, the mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder has wiped out countless honeybee colonies throughout Europe and North America, and nobody knows why. But a weird parasite may hold the answer.
Honeybees are a natural target of a parasitic fly species called Apocephalus borealis. These tiny insects actually deposit their eggs in the bee’s abdomen, and after seven days the newly hatched larvae push their way out of the bee through the space between the bee’s head and thorax. This, of course, kills the bees.
It’s what happens between those two events that is capturing the attention of scientists. The bees, seemingly aware in some way of their impending doom, abandon their colony and fly around aimlessly, spending most of their time buzzing around the nearest bright lights. Researchers at San Francisco State who have observed this phenomenon say the bees simply walked around aimlessly, as though the parasites inside them had transformed them into the bee equivalent of zombies.
According to researcher Andrew Core, that connection became particularly strong as the parasitized bees tried desperately to keep moving. Like a normal bee at the point of death, these bees would sit in one place and curl up in a ball. But the zombie bees kept trying to move despite their deathlike pose, repeatedly stretching out their legs and trying to stand up before falling down once again.
Fertility researchers created sperm-producing germ cells in a lab and transferred them into infertile mice, which after the treatment were able to produce healthy offspring.
The development, which was described by experts as “hugely exciting”, could help thousands of infertile men become fathers if the method proves similarly effective in humans.
Japanese scientists at Kyoto University used stem cells from mouse embryos to create primordial germ cells, which drive the production of sperm in men.
When transplanted into the testicles of infertile mice, the cells produced normal-looking sperm.
Researchers led by Dr Katsuhiko Hayashi injected the sperm into mouse eggs and implanted them into female mice, which give birth to healthy pups.
The babies, when they grew up, were capable of reproducing naturally, according to a study in the Cell journal.
Previous experiments to make sperm from embryonic stem cells have not been so successful, and in most cases led to unhealthy offspring which soon died.
Fertility expert Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: “This is quite a step forward in developing a process by which sperm could be made for infertile men, perhaps by taking as a starting point a cell from their skin or from something like bone marrow.
“Clearly more work needs to be done to refine this process, but it’s hugely exciting.”
The technique may not fall foul of British laws which ban the use of lab-made mature sperm in fertility treatments because the scientists only created germ cells which produced sperm naturally.
Dr Pacey said: “The philosophy of the law is to stop that kind of thing happening. But in this case you’re not technically creating sperm, so it might be that you can sidestep this regulation. It all depends on definition.”
Dr Jane Stewart, British Fertility Society spokesperson and consultant gynaecologist at Newcastle Fertility Centre said the ability to create human sperm-producing cells in the lab would be a “landmark achievement” in fertility treatments.
She said: “This publication in an animal model marks a further step towards this goal, however as the authors clearly point out much work remains to be done.”
Wiki: Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography (EEG) and Steady state topography (SST) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one’s physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.
Companies such as Google, CBS, and Frito-Lay amongst others that have used neuromarketing services to measure consumer thoughts on their advertisements or products.
The word “neuromarketing” was coined by Ale Smidts in 2002.
A scanning electron microscope image (500X) of the mold found outside the Hiram Walker Distillery. Photo: Caren Alpert
Adam Rogers at Wired: The air outside a distillery warehouse smells like witch hazel and spices, with notes of candied fruit and vanilla—warm and tangy- mellow. It’s the aroma of fresh cookies cooling in the kitchen while a fancy cocktail party gets out of hand in the living room.
James Scott encountered that scent for the first time a decade ago in a town called Lakeshore, Ontario. Just across the river from Detroit, Lakeshore is where barrels of Canadian Club whiskey age in blocky, windowless warehouses. Scott, who had recently completed his PhD in mycology at the University of Toronto, had launched a business called Sporometrics. Run out of his apartment, it was a sort of consulting detective agency for companies that needed help dealing with weird fungal infestations. The first call he got after putting up his website was from a director of research at Hiram Walker Distillery named David Doyle.
Doyle had a problem. In the neighborhood surrounding his Lakeshore warehouses, homeowners were complaining about a mysterious black mold coating their houses. And the residents, following their noses, blamed the whiskey. Doyle wanted to know what the mold was and whether it was the company’s fault. Scott headed up to Lakeshore to take a look.
When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.
Megan Erickson: The field of neuroscience evolved so rapidly in the past twenty years that it will pose unprecedented challenges to the legal system in the decades to come, changing the way we understand crime and punishment, says neuro-pioneer Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center at Columbia.
Functional imaging, for instance, has given scientists the ability to identify which specific areas of the brain are active during specific tasks. It’s a development that Hirsch compares to manna from heaven.
“I was at Kettering in 1991, when the blood oxygen level dependent signal – the primary signal of functional imaging – was discovered,” she says. “I had a feeling that this was going to change the course of neuroscience, because if that signal was real then it meant that we would actually be able to observe, physiologically, the function of the brain that we had made inferences about from more or less the black box system of study.”
By 2005, a technique utilizing this knowledge had been adopted by the AMA, resulting in widespread use in research and community hospitals across the country. Over the course of about five years, the way surgeons plan and execute operations was entirely revised.
Now, imaging technology creates a map of the patient’s brain, allowing his or her surgeon to pinpoint the areas most vital to the performance of tasks memory storage and sight in that individual patient. Before operating, a surgeon knows exactly where to cut and what to avoid.
“It’s [one] example of [an application] that has gone all the way from the bench stage, the place where the science actually happened, to the bed stage, where patients actually benefit from the new procedure,” says Hirsch. “We’ve begun to tap in to the dynamics of the language of the brain as opposed to just understanding specific areas.” Continue HERE
John H. “Jack” Byrne, Ph.D., and other UTHealth neuroscientists are using sea snails to learn more about memory mechanisms.
Newswise — Efforts to help people with learning impairments are being aided by a species of sea snail known as Aplysia californica. The mollusk, which is used by researchers to study the brain, has much in common with other species including humans. Research involving the snail has contributed to the understanding of learning and memory.
At The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), neuroscientists used this animal model to test an innovative learning strategy designed to help improve the brain’s memory and the results were encouraging. It could ultimately benefit people who have impairments resulting from aging, stroke, traumatic brain injury or congenital cognitive impairments.
The proof-of-principle study was published on the Nature Neuroscience website on Dec. 25. The next steps in the research may involve tests in other animal models and eventually humans.
The strategy was used to identify times when the brain was primed for learning, which in turn facilitated the scheduling of learning sessions during these peak periods. The result was a significant increase in memory.
“We found that memory could be enhanced appreciably,” said John H. “Jack” Byrne, Ph.D., senior author and chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the UTHealth Medical School. Continue HERE
The cultural diversity of culinary practice, as illustrated by the variety of regional cuisines, raises the question of whether there are any general patterns that determine the ingredient combinations used in food today or principles that transcend individual tastes and recipes. We introduce a flavor network that captures the flavor compounds shared by culinary ingredients. Western cuisines show a tendency to use ingredient pairs that share many flavor compounds, supporting the so-called food pairing hypothesis. By contrast, East Asian cuisines tend to avoid compound sharing ingredients. Given the increasing availability of information on food preparation, our data-driven investigation opens new avenues towards a systematic understanding of culinary practice.
As omnivores, humans have historically faced the difficult task of identifying and gathering food that satisfies nutritional needs while avoiding foodborne illnesses1. This process has contributed to the current diet of humans, which is influenced by factors ranging from an evolved preference for sugar and fat to palatability, nutritional value, culture, ease of production, and climate. The relatively small number of recipes in use compared to the enormous number of potential recipes, together with the frequent recurrence of particular combinations in various regional cuisines, indicates that we are exploiting but a tiny fraction of the potential combinations. Although this pattern itself can be explained by a simple evolutionary model10 or data-driven approaches11, a fundamental question still remains: are there any quantifiable and reproducible principles behind our choice of certain ingredient combinations and avoidance of others?
Although many factors such as colors, texture, temperature, and sound play an important role in food sensation palatability is largely determined by flavor, representing a group of sensations including odors (due to molecules that can bind olfactory receptors), tastes (due to molecules that stimulate taste buds), and freshness or pungency (trigeminal senses). Therefore, the flavor compound (chemical) profile of the culinary ingredients is a natural starting point for a systematic search for principles that might underlie our choice of acceptable ingredient combinations. Continue HERE
Eye surgeon looks through microscope during operation. Robert Llewellyn/Getty Images
Bob Yirka at Medical Xpress: For thousands of years, people have used maggots to clean out wounds, particularly in battlefield situations when there were few other options. Use of maggots (fly larvae) virtually disappeared in the modern world though once antibiotics arrived on the scene, but that may change as a new study conducted by a team in France has shown that at least for some types of wounds, maggots may be the preferential form of treatment. The team, made up of doctors and researchers from various facilities in France, conducted a study with elderly male volunteers who had lower leg wounds or skin ulcers that weren’t healing well, and as they describe in their study published in Archives of Dermatology, the patients that were treated with maggots, fared better, at least in the first week, than did those treated with conventional surgical procedures.
In order to reproduce, flies lay their eggs in the carcasses of dead animals. The eggs develop into maggots which eventually grow into adults by eating the meat in which they exist. To accomplish this feat they secrete a substance into the dead tissue that helps to break it down first. The maggots then simply eat the result. When introduced into injured human flesh, the maggots perform the same trick, eating dead flesh while leaving healthy flesh alone, though not necessarily in the same fashion. In the wild, as anyone that has stumbled upon the carcass of a dead animal and found it literally crawling with the small rice looking larvae knows, it’s a truly stomach retching sight. In a medical environment, on the other hand it can be a truly innocuous experience. Continue HERE
Magnetotactic bacterium from the Chiemsee, Bavaria, Germany (Biomagnetism Group, University of Munich). Dark blobs are sulfur granules.
S.E. Gould: I’ve mentioned magnetic bacteria a couple of times now, so I got quite excited when Lucas Brouwers alerted me to a recent paper in Science (ref below) that explored a whole new group of magnetic bacteria. As I’ve covered before, these magnetotactic bacteria contain small nanoparticles of magnetic material which allow them to swim along magnetic field lines.
It isn’t just one clear species of bacteria that has magnetotactic ability, rather there are several different groups of bacteria of different shapes and sizes. Some of these are large multicellular bacterial groups, while others are single-celled large and rod-shaped. It is these large rod-shaped bacteria that the paper has been exploring, putting together a comprehensive description of them as a group. Continue HERE
Images of different species of magnetotactic bacteria HERE
This program shows some of the latest medical advances towards healing injured soldiers and how this innovation may translate to the general public. Also how this technological look into the future would not be possible without military funding of these programs.
A scan showing the tiny artificial intestine developed in the lab (right) and a close-up of the engineered bio-scaffold.
Alyssa Danigelis: Science has given us working artificial hearts, hips, limbs and bladders, and even a trachea. But no one has successfully created an artificial intestine, until now. A team of researchers has created a tiny one in the lab made from collagen and stem cells. They plan to scale the tube up within three years so it can be tested in human trials.
“We’re going to be taking these and inserting them into animals to see if it actually works,” said John March, an assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University who developed the artificial intestine structure.
March is developing the artificial intestine with Dr. David Hackam, a pediatric surgeon and scientist at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who specializes in treating bowel disorders. Continue HERE
Lee: “A few hours north of San Francisco, along the coast, lies a rugged landscape of towering Redwoods and Douglas Firs. Cut with rivers and fog, it is iconic American terrain, which draws countless RV-towing tourists who wind up and down logging roads all summer long.
But beneath this layer of green and golden splendor, there exists an unseen world that no maps can find, only a discriminating eye for unmarked dirt roads. To the initiated, there are signs, as clear as the highway billboards offering hydroponic paraphernalia, medical cannabis consultations, trimming solutions and turkey bags in bulk. These services are welcome flags to cannabis country, where droves of marijuana growers, both indoor and outdoor, hide in the hills and make their living.”
“The first time I entered this world, I was totally ignorant to the world of pot farming, and riddled with judgment. It took some time for my outsider eyes to adjust to see what was all around me — behind locked gates and camouflaged cabins, past generators and barking dogs, protective firearms and diesel trucks — but also to gain the trust of the community. It is an eclectic group, bound together by a deep knowledge of growing techniques, along with a strong distrust for outsiders; suspicion is a necessary survival trait. These farmers are lured by the single magical and medicinal plant; a plant whose cultivation or possession holds the promise of profit, coupled with possible jail time. As state and local laws, along with public acceptance, are now changing, this once-furtive farming community is coming out of its greenhouses, building bigger ones and growing giant plants in full sun, less fearful of the hum of helicopters, more exposed and confident than ever before.
I have come to understand and applaud this unique universe, so closed and cautious, protected and protective, and courageously strong in its beliefs. This series respectfully shares and bares witness to cannabis cultivation, illustrating a full season of plant production, from farm to table.”
NSF/December 8: New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “Matrix” franchise.
Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person’s visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.
Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.
“Adult early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning,” said lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe of the part of the brain analyzed in the study.
Neuroscientists have found that pictures gradually build up inside a person’s brain, appearing first as lines, edges, shapes, colors and motion in early visual areas. The brain then fills in greater detail to make a red ball appear as a red ball, for example. Continue HERE
View a video showing researchers explaining Decoded Neurofeedback.
Courtesy of Randy Buckner and Bruce Rosen of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Visualization group, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging
A pair of initiatives to improve brain imaging is revealing how its structure differentiates humans from other animals and could lead to cures for mental illness.
Anita Slomski // The MGH Research Issue 2011: Using a new technology called diffusion spectrum imaging, scientists are able to see for the first time—and in stunning detail—how neural fibers crisscross the brain and connect its regions. The imaging technique, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital, greatly increases the power of conventional scanners and uses mega-magnets to map the way water molecules move in the brain’s gray matter, delineating in real time which neurons are activated and in which direction they are sending impulses. Continue HERE
New York, NY (December 2, 2011) — Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have found the first direct evidence that an acquired trait can be inherited without any DNA involvement. The findings suggest that Lamarck, whose theory of evolution was eclipsed by Darwin’s, may not have been entirely wrong. The study is slated to appear in the December 9 issue of Cell.
“In our study, roundworms that developed resistance to a virus were able to pass along that immunity to their progeny for many consecutive generations,” reported lead author Oded Rechavi, PhD, associate research scientist in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at CUMC. “The immunity was transferred in the form of small viral-silencing agents called viRNAs, working independently of the organism’s genome.”
In an early theory of evolution, Jean Baptiste Larmarck (1744-1829) proposed that species evolve when individuals adapt to their environment and transmit those acquired traits to their offspring. For example, giraffes developed elongated long necks as they stretched to feed on the leaves of high trees, an acquired advantage that was inherited by subsequent generations. In contrast, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) later theorized that random mutations that offer an organism a competitive advantage drive a species’ evolution. In the case of the giraffe, individuals that happened to have slightly longer necks had a better chance of securing food and thus were able to have more offspring. The subsequent discovery of hereditary genetics supported Darwin’s theory, and Lamarck’s ideas faded into obscurity. Continue HERE
Manipulation of voltage of embryonic frog cells located in midsection of the tadpole caused the cell to develop into a working eye. (Credit: Michael Levin and Sherry Aw)
For the first time, scientists have altered natural bioelectrical communication among cells to directly specify the type of new organ to be created at a particular location within a vertebrate organism. Using genetic manipulation of membrane voltage in Xenopus (frog) embryos, biologists at Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences were able to cause tadpoles to grow eyes outside of the head area.
The researchers achieved most surprising results when they manipulated membrane voltage of cells in the tadpole’s back and tail, well outside of where the eyes could normally form. “The hypothesis is that for every structure in the body there is a specific membrane voltage range that drives organogenesis,” said Pai. “These were cells in regions that were never thought to be able to form eyes. This suggests that cells from anywhere in the body can be driven to form an eye.”
To do this, they changed the voltage gradient of cells in the tadpoles’ back and tail to match that of normal eye cells. The eye-specific gradient drove the cells in the back and tail — which would normally develop into other organs — to develop into eyes. Continue HERE
ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2011) — We put a lot of energy into improving our memory, intelligence, and attention. There are even drugs that make us sharper, such as Ritalin and caffeine. But maybe smarter isn’t really all that better. A new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, warns that there are limits on how smart humans can get, and any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems.
The authors looked to evolution to understand about why humans are only as smart as we are and not any smarter. “A lot of people are interested in drugs that can enhance cognition in various ways,” says Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick, who cowrote the article with Ralph Hertwig of the University of Basel. “But it seems natural to ask, why aren’t we smarter already?” Continue HERE
Scientist Ian Wilmut with Dolly, the worlds first cloned sheep, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in 2001. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Helius: Proteus Biomedical intelligent pills
The mechanical design of Philips Research’s intelligent capsule (iPill)
Image by 
A scanning electron microscope image (500X) of the mold found outside the Hiram Walker Distillery. Photo: Caren Alpert
Functional imaging package.
John H. “Jack” Byrne, Ph.D., and other UTHealth neuroscientists are using sea snails to learn more about memory mechanisms.
Eye surgeon looks through microscope during operation. Robert Llewellyn/Getty Images
Magnetotactic bacterium from the Chiemsee, Bavaria, Germany (Biomagnetism Group, University of Munich). Dark blobs are sulfur granules.
A scan showing the tiny artificial intestine developed in the lab (right) and a close-up of the engineered bio-scaffold.
Courtesy of Randy Buckner and Bruce Rosen of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Visualization group, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging
Manipulation of voltage of embryonic frog cells located in midsection of the tadpole caused the cell to develop into a working eye. (Credit: Michael Levin and Sherry Aw)
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