Brain

York, November 3, 2011 – Impulsive individuals tend to display aggressive behavior and have challenges ranging from drug and alcohol abuse, to problem gambling and difficult relationships. They are less able to adapt to different social situations. Impulsivity is also a common feature of psychiatric disorders. New research in Biological Psychiatry shows that people may react this way, in part, because they have lower levels of GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), the most important inhibitory neurotransmitter, in a specific part of their brain involved in regulating self-control.

Boulder, Colorado, USA - The November GSA Today science article, "Why did the Southern Gulf of California rupture so rapidly? -- Oblique divergence across hot, weak lithosphere along a tectonically active margin," is now online at http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — An ancient Egyptian mummy has had quite an afterlife, traveling more than 6,000 miles, spending six decades in private hands, and finally, in 1989, finding a home at the World Heritage Museum (now the Spurlock Museum) at the University of Illinois. The mummy's travels did not end there, however. It has made two trips to a local hospital – once in 1990 and again this year – for some not-so-routine medical exams.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that a protein may help prevent the kind of brain damage that occurs in babies with cerebral palsy.

Cigarettes and alcohol serve as gateway drugs, which people use before progressing to the use of marijuana and then to cocaine and other illicit substances; this progression is called the "gateway sequence" of drug use. An article in Science Translational Medicine by Amir Levine, MD, Denise Kandel, PhD; Eric Kandel, MD; and colleagues at Columbia University Medical Center provides the first molecular explanation for the gateway sequence.

A landmark study in mice identifies a biological mechanism that could help explain how tobacco products could act as gateway drugs, increasing a person's future likelihood of abusing cocaine and perhaps other drugs as well, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study is the first to show that nicotine might prime the brain to enhance the behavioral effects of cocaine.

Roughly 1 million people die by suicide each year. In the U.S., where nearly 36,000 people take their own lives annually, more than 4,600 victims are between the ages of 10 and 24, making suicide the third leading cause of death in this age group.

BATON ROUGE – The use of credit scores as employment screening tools is a hotly debated topic. According to a 2010 poll by the Society for Human Resource Management, 60 percent of surveyed employers conducted credit checks for some or all candidates as part of the hiring process. With unemployment rates in the United States at double digits, losing a career opportunity has a potentially higher impact than nearly ever before, while the nationwide wave of foreclosures simultaneously makes it more likely for an individual to have a black mark on their record.

In a recent study published in Mind, Brain and Education, researchers at Temple's Infant Lab found there are some very real benefits to playing with that old toy classic — blocks.

Parents and researchers have long speculated that play with construction toys might offer a rich environment that would support later learning in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

One of two proteins that regulate nerve cells and assist in overall brain function may be the key to preventing long-term damage as a result of a stroke, the leading cause of disability and third leading cause of death in the United States.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Bonnie Firestein, professor of cell biology and neuroscience, in the School of Arts and Sciences, says the new research indicates that increased production of two proteins – cypin and PSD-95 – results in very different outcomes.

Oversensitivity diseases, or allergies, now affect 25 per cent of the population of Denmark. The figure has been on the increase in recent decades and now researchers at the Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood (COPSAC), University of Copenhagen, are at last able to partly explain the reasons.

Investigators estimate that there are currently more than 15 million photographs of child abuse victims circulating on the Internet. By the time this material has been tracked down and deleted, pedophiles have long since downloaded it to their computers. Many are avid data collectors: when suspects' data media are confiscated, detectives must often click their way through hundreds of thousands of files to find the illegal images they seek. An extremely time-consuming process – until now. Because researchers working with Dr.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Both boys and girls who play video games tend to be more creative, regardless of whether the games are violent or nonviolent, according to new research by Michigan State University scholars.

A study of nearly 500 12-year-olds found that the more kids played video games, the more creative they were in tasks such as drawing pictures and writing stories. In contrast, use of cell phones, the Internet and computers (other than for video games) was unrelated to creativity, the study found.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers at Ohio State University Medical Center and Nationwide Children's Hospital have developed a viral vector designed to deliver a gene into the eyes of people born with an inherited, progressive form of blindness that affects mainly males.

The vector is part of a clinical trial investigating the use of gene therapy to cure choroideremia, a disease that affects an estimated 100,000 people worldwide. The trial is being conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford in England.