Brain

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Scientists here and in France have made a new theoretical advance in atomic behavior that could lead to sharper magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pictures.

The discovery could one day help enable the development of portable MRI machines.

In the November 25 online issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics, they explain why scientists couldn't completely control the behavior of atomic nuclei during some nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments.

DALLAS – Nov. 25, 2008 – Once hailed as a miracle weight-loss drug, Fen-phen was removed from the market more than a decade ago for inducing life-threatening side effects, including heart valve lesions. Scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center are trying to understand how Fen-phen behaves in the brain in order to develop safer anti-obesity drugs with fewer side effects.

In a study appearing in the Nov. 25 issue of Neuron, the researchers define a circuit in the brain that explains the ways fenfluramine, a component of Fen-phen, suppresses appetite.

The next time you are reading a book, or even as you read this article, consider the words that you are seeing. How do you recognize these words? Substantial research has shown that while reading, we recognize words by their letters and not by the general shape of the word. However, it was largely unknown how we differentiate one letter from another.

November 25, 2008 -- Of all the threats facing U.S. soldiers in combat, among the most dangerous are roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices (IED's). At the 61st Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics this week in San Antonio, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) scientist David Mott is presenting research aimed at predicting the risk of traumatic brain injury for U.S. soldiers and other people who are wounded by improvised explosive devices.

The Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), the largest research initiative into education related topics ever undertaken in the United Kingdom, presents its major conclusions on 24th and 25th November after nine years of investigations across all sectors of education, from the importance of preschool education to lifelong learning. The programme was funded and managed by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

A team led by researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego has successfully completed record-setting, petascale-level simulations of the earth's inner structure, paving the way for seismologists to model seismic wave propagations at frequencies of just over one second – the same frequencies that occur in nature.

HOUSTON (November 25, 2008)–Starving "social amoebae" called Dictyostelium discoideum seek the support of "kin" when they form multi-cellular organisms made up of dead stalks and living spores, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston in a report that appears online today in the open-access journal Public Library of Science Biology.

The study was published in an online Early Edition issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the week of November 24. Scripps Florida is a division of The Scripps Research Institute.

The neuropeptide, hypocretin-1 (Orexin A), may initiate a key signaling cascade, a series of closely linked biochemical reactions, which maintains tobacco addiction in human smokers and could be a potential target for developing new smoking cessation treatments.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Overturning a century of prevailing thought, scientists are finding that neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections. In work reported in the Nov. 24 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Elly Nedivi, associate professor of neurobiology at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and colleagues found that a type of neuron implicated in autism spectrum disorders remodels itself in a strip of brain tissue only as thick as four sheets of tissue paper at the upper border of cortical layer 2.

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have reported for the first time that mammals can be stimulated to regrow inner nerve cells in their damaged retinas. Located in the back of the eye, the retina's role in vision is to convert light into nerve impulses to the brain.

Weight and appetite experts from around the world met at a conference in Bangkok earlier this year to discuss sex differences in obesity. One line of discussion looked at factors leading to women's weight gain during menopause, and how it might be avoided.

Co-chairs of the conference, Dr Amanda Sainsbury-Salis from Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research and Dr Jennifer Lovejoy from the University of Washington, Seattle have summarised the conference consensus for the December issue of Obesity Reviews. The paper is now available online.

A single hit on the head by the termite Termes panamensis (Snyder), which possesses the fastest mandible strike ever recorded, is sufficient to kill a would-be nest invader, report Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven, post-doctoral fellows at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Rudolf Scheffrahn from the University of Florida.

November 24, 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Sun City, AZ, USA -- A study published in the November issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (Volume 15:3) suggests the reliability of the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale – Cognitive (ADAS-Cog) may vary and possess the ability to affect clinical trial outcomes.

Moreover, this study further suggests that ADAS-Cog rater training and experience are factors that contribute to variances seen in this assessment tool.

People who witness an individual collapse suddenly and unexpectedly should perform uninterrupted chest compressions even if the patient gasps or breathes in a funny way, research from the Resuscitation Research Group at The University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center shows. The study is set to publish in the Nov. 24 online issue of Circulation, the official journal of the American Heart Association, http://circ.ahajournals.org.

Lining the upper portion of the small intestine with an impermeable sleeve led to both weight loss and restoration of normal glucose metabolism in an animal model of obesity-induced diabetes. Investigators from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Weight Center and Gastrointestinal Unit report in the journal Obesity that the procedure reproducing several aspects of gastric bypass surgery led to a significant reduction in the animals' food intake and a resolution of diabetes symptoms.