Brain

Using sleep or napping to cope with chronic pain caused by tension-type headaches could lead to chronic insomnia according to a new study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center. The study, published in the February 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, found that napping to relieve headache pain could serve as a behavioral link between headache and sleep disturbance.

CHICAGO – European food companies already use nanotechnology in consumer products, but few volunteer the information to consumers, said Dutch food scientist Frans Kampers.

He is among the panelists gathered in Chicago for the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting symposium "From Donuts to Drugs: Nano-Biotechnology Evolution or Revolution."

Kampers from Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands will take a look at food science issues in his presentation, "What Nanotechnology Can Do for Your Average Donut."

What do you do when you learn that about one-sixth of the world's population -- nearly one billion people, according to UNICEF -- lack clean water on a daily basis?

If you happen to be one of 15 student engineers at the University of Iowa, you roll up your sleeves and design a $5, hand-held device to sanitize water and potentially save lives.

It is estimated that 4 million people world-wide are suffering from Parkinson's, a complex disease that varies greatly among affected individuals. Understanding the brain chemistry that leads to the onset of Parkinson's is vital if we are to develop methods for early MRI diagnosis and new treatments for this devastating disease.

Many a love-besotted soul has declared they would move the world for their true love, but how many actually accomplish that task in their quest to unite with a lover?

Poets and romantics may argue the point, but research has shown that elephants issuing calls, including those of love—more precisely, females in estrus—produce not only audible sounds, but also low-frequency seismic vibrations that can travel through the near-surface soils for distances up to several kilometers.

Animals can re-establish their use of smell to detect siblings, even following an interruption such as prolonged hibernation, research at the University of Chicago on ground squirrels shows.

Smell is an important animal survival tool. Female ground squirrel sisters, for instance, bond in groups for protection and use smell to recognize each other. Animals also need to recognize siblings to avoid inbreeding, which would have a negative effect on their genetic fitness, said Jill Mateo, Assistant Professor in Comparative Human Development at the University.

CHICAGO -- In nature, the threat level is always at least orange: Predators and plagues are an unrelenting menace to the well-being (and successful reproduction) of every living thing.

So does your body make every gulp of air take off its shoes before entering your lungs to ensure that it's not smuggling pathogens?

Current treatments for diseases like cancer typically destroy nasty malignant cells, while also hammering the healthy ones. Using new advances in synthetic biology, researchers are designing molecules intelligent enough to recognize diseased cells, leaving the healthy cells alone.

"We basically design molecules that actually go into the cell and do an analysis of the cellular state before delivering the therapeutic punch," said Christina Smolke, assistant professor of bioengineering who joined Stanford University in January.

CHICAGO -- Basic arithmetic and "number sense" appear to be part of the shared evolutionary past of many primates; it's the use of language to explain abstractions that apparently takes human math to a higher level.

Elizabeth Brannon, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, studies how human adults and infants, lemurs, and monkeys think about numbers without using language. She's looking for the brain systems that support number sense and trying to figure out how this cognitive skill develops.

Researchers from the Peninsula Medical School, the University of Cambridge and the University of Michigan have published the results of the first large-scale study to indicate that second-hand smoke exposure could lead to dementia and other neurological problems.

The results will be published by the BMJ online on Friday 13th February 2009.

LA JOLLA, CA—Fruit flies and humans share most of their genes, including 70 percent of all known human disease genes. Taking advantage of this remarkable evolutionary conservation, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies transformed the fruit fly into a laboratory model for an innovative study of gliomas, the most common malignant brain tumors.

The research, published today in the British Medical Journal, highlighted a 44% increase in risk of cognitive impairment when exposed to high levels of second-hand smoke.

Previous studies identified active smoking as a risk factor for cognitive impairment and dementia. However, this is the first large-scale study to conclude that second-hand smoke exposure could lead to dementia and other neurological problems in adults. (Previous findings suggested that second-hand smoke exposure could impair cognitive development in children and adolescents.)

Exposure to second-hand smoke could increase the risk of developing dementia and other forms of cognitive impairment, according to research published today on bmj.com.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Worldwide, nearly 2 million people per year die from diarrhea, the vast majority of them in poor countries in Africa and Asia. The disease accounts for 18 percent of all deaths among children — and yet is almost always preventable with proper treatment. Now, new research from MIT indicates that underlying, low-level undiagnosed infection may greatly add to the severity of a significant number of these cases. This realization could lead to changes in health-care strategies to address the problem.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.— Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California, San Diego have developed a set of molecular tools that provide important insight into the complex genomes of multicellular organisms. The strategy promises to clarify the longstanding mystery of the role played by vast stretches of DNA sequence that do not code for the functional units—genes—that nevertheless may have a powerful regulatory influence.