Brain

Imagine your delight while enjoying your favorite Mexican food – perhaps a fully loaded bean burrito topped with an ample supply of thinly sliced jalepeño peppers. What happens when you bite into a few more peppers than you bargained for? Does this thought conjure up the thought of a little heat? Perhaps even a bit of sweat on the brow? Indeed, food scientists can tell you that hot peppers contain a substance called capsaicin that not only adds spice to our foods but can actually cause your body to heat up.

Washington, DC — A protein called fibrinogen that is known to help form blood clots also triggers scar formation in the brain and spinal cord, according to new research in the April 28 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers found that fibrinogen carries a dormant factor that activates when it enters the brain after an injury, prompting brain cells to form a scar. Scars in the brain or spinal cord can block connections between nerve cells and often keep injury patients from reaching full recovery.

Milan, Italy, 27 April 2010 – Psychopaths are known to be characterized by callousness, diminished capacity for remorse, and lack of empathy. However, the exact cause of these personality traits is an area of scientific debate. The results of a new study, reported in the May 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex), show striking similarities between the mental impairments observed in psychopaths and those seen in patients with frontal lobe damage.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. — They are both nest-building social insects, but paper wasps and honey bees organize their colonies in very different ways. In a new study, researchers report that despite their differences, these insects rely on the same network of genes to guide their social behavior.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Using a new mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found that Alzheimer's pathology originates in Amyloid-Beta (Abeta) oligomers in the brain, rather than the amyloid plaques previously thought by many researchers to cause the disease.

The study, which was supported by the "Oligomer Research Consortium" of the Cure Alzheimer Fund and a MERIT Award from the Veterans Administration, appears in the journal Annals of Neurology.

ANAHEIM, CA: Providing healthier food choices for our nation's schoolchildren is a hot-button issue in Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. And a team of researchers from Cornell University have recently identified one simple solution to help schools serve more fresh vegetables and salad items.

Laura Smith, a researcher at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, presented the findings of the study "Convenience Drives Choice in School Lunchrooms" at this week's Experimental Biology conference in Anaheim, Calif.

St. Louis, MO, April 26, 2010 – According to the United States Department of Agriculture, about half of U.S. children between birth and age 5 receive services from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). With more than 8.2 million low-income women and children receiving services in 2009 alone, it is imperative that nutrition education, which is required as part of the WIC services, effectively encourages healthful eating.

Whether it's for money, marbles or chalk, the brains of reward-driven people keep their game faces on, helping them win at every step of the way. Surprisingly, they win most often when there is no reward.

That's the finding of neuroscientists at Washington University in St. Louis, who tested 31 randomly selected subjects with word games, some of which had monetary rewards of either 25 or 75 cents per correct answer, others of which had no money attached.

ANAHEIM, CA – Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an imaging protocol that allows them to visualize the activity of the brain's reward circuitry in both normal individuals and those addicted to drugs. The technique could lead to better insight into why people take recreational drugs as well as help determine which treatment strategies might be most effective.

Individuals who screen positive for possible depression appear to consume more chocolate than those not screening positive for depression, according to a report in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

"A rich cultural tradition links chocolate consumption with putative mood benefits," the authors write as background information in the article. Several potential mechanisms for these benefits have been proposed, but little scientific research has examined the association between chocolate and mood in humans.

SAN ANTONIO (April 26, 2010) — A substance similar to capsaicin, which gives chili peppers their heat, is generated at the site of pain in the human body. Scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio have discovered how to block these capsaicin-like molecules and created a new class of non-addictive painkillers.

Babies born to women who do not consume enough folic acid (sometimes referred to as folate or vitamin B9) are at high risk of developing neural tube defects (i.e., defects in the development of the spinal cord or brain). This is the reason underlying the recommendation that women who are pregnant take a folic acid supplement. A team of researchers, led by Bermans Iskandar, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has now generated data in rodents suggesting that folic acid might also help promote healing in injured brain and spinal cord.

ANAHEIM, CA: Can eating less be as simple as leaving serving dishes on the stove and off the table? According to a team of researchers from Cornell University, it can.

At this week's Experimental Biology conference in Anaheim, Calif., researchers led by Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, shared findings of their "Serve Here; Eat There" study of 78 adults.

"We looked at whether serving foods from the kitchen counter, instead of at the table, would reduce the number of times a person refilled his or her plate," Wansink said.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – A new tool may help neurologists predict which coma patients may be candidates for organ donation, according to a study published in the April 27, 2010, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Organ donations must take place within 60 minutes of when the heart stops beating. Coma patients and other people with irreversible brain injuries are often potential organ donors because their other organs are usually healthy.

EVANSTON, Ill. --Race matters on a neurological level when it comes to empathy for African-Americans in distress, according to a new Northwestern University study.

In a rare neuroscience look at racial minorities, the study shows that African-Americans showed greater empathy for African-Americans facing adversity – in this case for victims of Hurricane Katrina – than Caucasians demonstrated for Caucasian-Americans in pain.