Our most traumatic memories could be erased, thanks to the marine snail

Our most traumatic memories could be erased, thanks to the marine snail

Alasdair Wilkins — Although the idea of erasing your memories may sound horrific, there may be nothing better for those dealing with severe trauma. Now we're one step closer to making it a reality, with a little help from the tiny marine snail.

UCLA researcher David Glanzman led the study, which discovered that it's possible to erase long-term memories in snails by inhibiting a specific protein kinase known as PKM. While researchers have previously made headway with memory-erasing drugs, this new work focuses on the actual neurons of the brain, potentially allowing far finer control over the memory erasure process. If the methods used here could be adapted to humans, Glanzman hopes it could be used to help treat severe post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and possible long-term memory disorders such as Alzheimer's.

Glanzman explains how it all works:

"Almost all the processes that are involved in memory in the snail also have been shown to be involved in memory in the brains of mammals. We found that if we inhibit PKM in the marine snail, we will erase the memory for long-term sensitization. In addition, we can erase the long-term change at a single synapse that underlies long-term memory in the snail."

...

via Our most traumatic memories could be erased, thanks to the marine snail.

Many negative behaviors, I think, can be attributed to bad memories. You can reprogram your bad memories, because the way memory works, you only remember the last time you remembered something. You don't remember the actual event. You rebuild your memories every time you remember them.

Reprogramming takes time ... although if you do it in lucid dreams, you might reclaim the lost 1/3rd of your life as well as making your waking life better. I'd like to be able to get into my head and switch off a few things, make it as if they never happened. ... with the option to switch them back on later.

Here's how. Step 1: Start having lucid dreams. Step 2: Meditate and cultivate your objective observer. Step 3: Observe your dream as you dream. If fun stuff happens, enjoy it. If anything bad happens, take the opportunity to solve the problem. It's your world in the dream, so create a solution and see how it feels.

Squids In Space--Seriously

The last flight of the space shuttle Endeavor will be both manned and squidded.

The most famous science experiment on board, of course, will be the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which will set up shop at the ISS to measure cosmic rays, dusting for the fingerprints of dark matter and antimatter. So that's cool. But is it as cool as baby squid in space?

...why exactly would you want to put squids in space? I mean, besides the cool factor, what is there to be gained? I did a little more poking around, and, bless the internet, there's a webpage on the project. It turns out that the particular species of squid to be shipped off-planet is our old friend the bobtail squid.

What makes this squid unique is its light organ, which glows at night and hides its shadow from prey lurking underneath. The light is powered by a particular bioluminescent bacteria (Vibrio fishceri) that the squid draws in from the surrounding water. Every day it expels the old bacteria and takes in a new batch. Newly born squid can’t produce the light, but within several hours they become bioluminescent as they take in the bacteria. This development gives scientists a close look at morphogenesis, which is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape—one of the fundamentals of development biology. The squid experiment came about when Ned [faculty sponsor] learned about the work of Dr. Jamie S. Foster at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Dr. Foster’s work is focused on what happens to this morphogenesis process under micro-gravity conditions.

A-ha! So the real question is morphogenesis under micro-gravity, or, what is the effect of gravity on how an organism makes its shape? And the squid/bacteria symbiosis happens to be a good model system to answer this question.

If you're having a hard time making that connection, it's because a critical piece of information was omitted from the otherwise excellent summary above. That is, when a newly born squid takes in the bacteria that it needs to produce light, those bacteria induce an serious physical restructuring of the squid's body so that it can host them appropriately. The baby squid actually changes shape as a result of taking in bacteria.

Which is a pretty wild thing to study all by itself, on Earth, but when you decide to study it in space . . . whoa.

via Squids In Space--Seriously.

Curse of the Pharaoh's DNA

Mummies found in King Tutankhamun's tomb are at the centre of a dispute over DNA analysis.

Jo Marchant  - Some researchers claim to have analysed DNA from Egyptian mummies. Others say that's impossible. Could new sequencing methods bridge the divide?

Cameras roll as ancient-DNA experts Carsten Pusch and Albert Zink scrutinize a row of coloured peaks on their computer screen. There is a dramatic pause. "My god!" whispers Pusch, the words muffled by his surgical mask. Then the two hug and shake hands, accompanied by the laughter and applause of their Egyptian colleagues. They have every right to be pleased with themselves. After months of painstaking work, they have finally completed their analysis of 3,300-year-old DNA from the mummy of King Tutankhamun.

Featured in the Discovery Channel documentary King Tut Unwrapped last year and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1, their analysis — of Tutankhamun and ten of his relatives — was the latest in a string of studies reporting the analysis of DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies. Apparently revealing the mummies' family relationships as well as their afflictions, such as tuberculosis and malaria, the work seems to be providing unprecedented insight into the lives and health of ancient Egyptians and is ushering in a new era of 'molecular Egyptology'. Except that half of the researchers in the field challenge every word of it.

Enter the world of ancient Egyptian DNA and you are asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. "The ancient-DNA field is split absolutely in half," says Tom Gilbert, who heads two research groups at the Center for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen, one of the world's foremost ancient-DNA labs.

Unable to resolve their differences, the two sides publish in different journals, attend different conferences and refer to each other as 'believers' and 'sceptics' — when, that is, they're not simply ignoring each other. The Tutankhamun study reignited long-standing tensions between the two camps, with sceptics claiming that in this study, as in most others, the results can be explained by contamination. Next-generation sequencing techniques, however, may soon be able to resolve the split once and for all by making it easier to sequence ancient, degraded DNA. But for now, Zink says, "It's like a religious thing. If our papers are reviewed by one of the other groups, you get revisions like 'I don't believe it's possible'. It's hard to argue with that." ...

The disagreement stems from the dawn of ancient-DNA research. In the 1980s, a young PhD student called Svante Pääbo worked behind his supervisor's back at the University of Uppsala in Sweden to claim he had done what no one else had thought was possible: clone nuclear DNA from a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy². Soon researchers realized that they could use a new technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify tiny amounts of DNA from ancient samples. There was a burst of excitement as DNA was reported from a range of ancient sources, including insects preserved in amber and even an 80 million-year-old dinosaur³.

Then came the fall. It turned out that PCR, susceptible to contamination at the best of times, is particularly risky when working with tiny amounts of old, broken-up DNA. Just a trace of modern DNA — say from an archaeologist who had handled a sample — could scupper a result. The 'dinosaur' DNA belonged to a modern human, as did Pääbo's pioneering clone. Once researchers began to adopt rigorous precautions⁴, including replicating results in independent labs, attempts to retrieve DNA from Egyptian mummies met with little success⁵.

That's no surprise, say sceptics. DNA breaks up over time, at a rate that increases with temperature. After thousands of years in Egypt's hot climate, they say, mummies are extremely unlikely to contain DNA fragments large enough to be amplified by PCR. "Preservation in most Egyptian mummies is clearly bad," says Pääbo, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthroplogy in Leipzig and a leader in the field. Ancient-DNA researcher Franco Rollo of the University of Camerino in Italy went so far as to test how long mummy DNA might survive. He checked a series of papyrus fragments of various ages, preserved in the similar conditions to the mummies. He estimated that DNA fragments large enough to be identified by PCR — around 90 base pairs long — would have vanished after only around 600 years⁶.

Yet all the while, rival researchers have published a steady stream of papers on DNA extracted from Egyptian mummies up to 5,000 years old. ...
via Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharaoh's DNA : Nature News.

How Bacteria Could Generate Radio waves

Can bacteria generate radio waves?

On the face of it, this seems an unlikely proposition. Natural sources of radio waves include lightning, stars and pulsars while artificial sources include radar, mobile phones and computers. This is a diverse list. So it's hard to see what these things might have in common with bacteria that could be responsible for making radio waves.

But today, Allan Widom at Northeastern University in Boston and a few pals, say they've worked out how it could be done.

They point out that many types of bacterial DNA take the form of circular loops. So they've modelled the behaviour of free electrons moving around such a small loop, pointing out that, as quantum objects, the electrons can take certain energy levels.

Widom and co calculate that the transition frequencies between these energy levels correspond to radio signals broadcast at 0.5, 1 and 1.5 kilohertz. And they point out that exactly this kind of signal has been measured in E Coli bacteria.

Let's make one thing clear: this is a controversial area of science. The measurements of bacterial radio waves were published in 2009 by Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2008 for the discovery of HIV. However, Montagnier is a controversial figure and it's fair to say that his claims are not accepted by most mainstream biologists.

However, one of the criticisms of the work was that there is no known mechanism by which bacteria can generate radio waves. That criticism may now no longer hold.

That means Widom and co may be able to kickstart more work in this area. It is well known that bacterial and other types of cells use electromagnetic waves at higher frequencies to communicate as well as to send and store energy. If cells can also generate radio waves, there's no reason to think they wouldn't exploit this avenue too.

via How Bacteria Could Generate Radio waves - Technology Review.

Bacteria Grow Under 400,000 Times Earth's Gravity

Proving that you don't have to be big to be tough, some microbes can survive gravity more than 400,000 times that felt on Earth, a new study says.

Most humans, by contrast, can tolerate forces equal to about three to five times Earth's surface gravity (g) before losing consciousness.

The extreme "hypergravity" of 400,000 g is usually found only in cosmic environments, such as on very massive stars or in the shock waves of supernovas, said study leader Shigeru Deguchi, a biologist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

Deguchi and his team were able to replicate hypergravity on Earth using a machine called an ultracentrifuge.

The scientists rapidly spun four species of bacteria—including the common human gut microbe Escherichia coli—to create increasingly intense gravity conditions.

The bacteria clumped together into pellets as the gravity increased, but their forced closeness didn't seem to deter growth: All four species multiplied normally under thousands to tens of thousands of times Earth's gravity.

Two of the species—E. coli and Paracoccus denitrificans, a common soil bacteria—grew under the strain of 403,627 g. ...

via Bacteria Grow Under 400,000 Times Earth's Gravity.

Factory Uses Robots To Grow Human Skin

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology in Germany oversee a skin-making process controlled by robots. They currently produce 5,000 penny-sized disks of tissue every month, at around $72 per unit. It is hoped that in the future there will be many similar factories, mass-producing skin at a low cost for use in clinical testing and transplants in humans.

With robots and computers controlling the process, this maintains a sterile and climate-controlled environment for the skin to be developed, reducing the risk of contamination. Successfully engineered tissue for humans has been achieved but it is very costly and labor-intensive. Using robots as automated manufacturers would reduce both the cost and the manpower needed, enabling the efficient production of tissue, cartilage and even entire organs.

via Factory Uses Robots To Grow Human Skin - PSFK.

Lemming hordes perish in Swedish roadside 'massacre'

Hordes of lemmings have been spotted leaving the safety of the mountains to make their way down to more inhabited areas, falling victim to traffic and being preyed upon by other animals.“I must have seen a thousand just since Saturday. They are absolutely everywhere. They are swimming about in the lake close to our house, they jump on the ice floes, and they scurry around the outside of our house,“ said holiday-maker Magnus Lundberg, to the local Östersundsposten (ÖP) daily.

Road users are reportedly struggling to avoid the advancing lemming hordes with many of the small furry animals ending up as road kill in what has been described as a real massacre on the roads.

However, Sweden's pets and wild animals alike stand to gain as the lemming-strewn roads present a veritable feast for hungry predators.

Favourable weather has created the conditions for 2011 to become what Swedes call "a real lemming year".

According to Birger Hörnfeldt, of the department of wildlife, fish and environmental studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå, these traditionally occur every 3-4 years.

But the last three decades have seen such unfavourable weather that the number of lemmings had diminished considerably. ...
Lemmings have traditionally been believed to undertake the occasional mass exodus, sometimes to meet their death by following each other off a cliff.

However, today this kind of migration behaviour is believed by experts to be a myth based on lies or at least highly exaggerated.

According to Bengt Landström of the mountain unit at the County Administrative Board in Norrbotten, this may well be a record year for lemmings, but he does not believe in a bona fide ‘lemming exodus’, where the lemmings blindly follow one another to their death.

“No, that kind of lemming migration is just a fairy tale, a tall story,“ he told local paper Piteå Tidningen.

Unfortunately, exodus or no exodus, the move from the mountaintops often means that the little rodents go to their death.

If they are not hit by cars wild or domestic animals are very keen to get their paws on them.

“Our dogs are eating the lemmings while we are out walking. It is not much we can do about it. The dogs just bite down on them, throw them up in the air and then swallow them almost whole. They probably devour between five and ten a day,” Magnus Lundberg told ÖP.  ...

via Lemming hordes perish in Swedish roadside 'massacre' - The Local.

The Brain's Time Sense

... “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

A few years ago, Eagleman thought back on his fall from the roof and decided that it posed an interesting research question. Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed, or is some other mechanism at work?

via David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker.

'Immortal' Animals Reveal Anti-Aging Secrets

... The animals that can possibly achieve immortality under ideal conditions, such as sea squirts, certain corals, Hydra, and Turritopsis nutricula (the immortal jellyfish), often activate telomerase. Helen Nilsson Sköld of the Department of Marine Ecology, University of Gothenburg, and colleague Matthias Obst are studying sea squirts and starfish to learn more about how these marine creatures seem to ward off aging.



Out of the animal immortality A-list, sea squirts and starfish have genes that most closely resemble those of humans.

“Animals that clone themselves, in which part of an individual’s body is passed on to the next generations, have particularly interesting conditions related to remaining in good health to persist," Sköld was quoted as saying in the press release. "This makes it useful to study these animals in order to understand mechanisms of aging in humans.”

“My research has shown that sea squirts rejuvenate themselves by activating the enzyme telomerase, and in this way extending their chromosomes and protecting their DNA," she added. "They also have a special ability to discard ‘junk’ from their cells. Older parts of the animal are quite simply broken down, and are then partially recycled when new and healthy parts grow out from the adult bodies.”

Starfish are also amazingly immune to problems that affect

the rest of us. If they lose a body part, for example, many species can simply grow another one. Reproduction involves tearing apart their bodies, somewhat akin to growing a new plant from a broken off piece of a "mother plant."

Eternal life, from an evolutionary standpoint, however, has a big drawback. Due to asexual reproduction, the species as a whole retains very low genetic variation. This means they could be particularly vulnerable to climate change and not enjoy immortality after all.

Scientists are therefore rushing to study such species, which may hold the secrets of increasing our own longevity. ...

via 'Immortal' Animals Reveal Anti-Aging Secrets : Discovery News.

Switzerland: Smelly corpse flower draws thousands

Thousands of people are flocking to the northern Swiss city of Basel to see a giant, stinky flower bloom for the first time.

The amorphophallus titanum - known as corpse flower because it exudes a smell of rotting flesh - is the first to blossom in Switzerland in 75 years.

The Basel Botanical Gardens expects the 6.6ft (2m) plant to attract 10,000 people whilst in bloom.

The bloom is set to wilt late Saturday or Sunday.

Worldwide, there have been only 134 recorded blooms from artificial cultivation, according to AP news agency.

The flower first began to poke out of the soil in March, and in the past few days it had been growing at about six centimetres a day, according to Swissinfo news website.

Its mother plant last bloomed in the Frankfurt Palm Garden in 1992.

Originally native to the tropical rainforests on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the plant requires a humid climate to grow and rarely blossoms, even in the wild.

The flower's smell, said to be a cross between burnt sugar and rotting flesh, is designed to attract insects for pollination.

via BBC News - Switzerland: Smelly corpse flower draws thousands.

Mostly fat diet 'can reverse kidney failure' in mice with diabetes

A controlled diet high in fat and low in carbohydrate can repair kidney damage in diabetic mice, according to US scientists.

The study, published in journal PLoS ONE, showed a "ketogenic diet" could reverse damage caused to tubes in the kidneys by too much sugar in the blood.

In the UK around a third of the 2.8m people with either type 1 or 2 diabetes go on to develop kidney damage.

Diabetes UK said it was "questionable" whether humans could sustain the diet.

Damage reversed

The researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York used mice with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Once kidney damage had developed, half the mice were put onto the ketogenic diet for eight weeks.

The highly controlled diet, which is 87% fat, mimics the effect of starvation and should not be used without medical advice.

After eight weeks the researchers noted that kidney damage was reversed.

Professor Charles Mobbs, who led the research at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said: "Our study is the first to show that a dietary intervention alone is enough to reverse this serious complication of diabetes.

"I certainly think it has promise, but I can't recommend it until we have done clinical trials."

The researchers also need to figure out the exact process that leads to repair.

via BBC News - Diet 'can reverse kidney failure' in mice with diabetes.

Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Report

In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.

Blood type, meet bug type.

“It’s an important advance,” said Rob Knight, a biologist at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first indication that human gut ecosystems may fall into distinct types.”

The researchers, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, found no link between what they called enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.

Nor could they find a connection to sex, weight, health or age. They are now exploring other explanations. One possibility is that the guts, or intestines, of infants are randomly colonized by different pioneering species of microbes.

The microbes alter the gut so that only certain species can follow them.

Whatever the cause of the different enterotypes, they may end up having discrete effects on people’s health. Gut microbes aid in food digestion and synthesize vitamins, using enzymes our own cells cannot make. ...

Dr. Bork and his colleagues have found that each of the types makes a unique balance of these enzymes. Enterotype 1 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B7 (also known as biotin), for example, and Enterotype 2 more enzymes for vitamin B1 (thiamine).

The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road.

“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example.

Or, he speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. “You’d try to restore the type you had before,” he said.  ...

via Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Report - NYTimes.com.

I don't think you can change your blood type, but couldn't you change your bug type just by taking probiotic bacteria?

Scientists observe single gene activity in living cells

Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have for the first time observed the activity of a single gene in living cells. In an unprecedented study, published in the April 22 online edition of Science, Einstein scientists were able to follow, in real time, the process of gene transcription, which occurs when a gene converts its DNA information into molecules of messenger RNA (mRNA) that go on to make the protein coded by the gene.

Robert Singer, Ph.D., co-director of the Gruss Lipper Biophotonics Center at Einstein and professor and co-chair of anatomy and structural biology, is senior author of the paper. The study's lead author is Daniel Larson, Ph.D., previously a member of Dr. Singer's lab and now an investigator at the National Cancer Institute and head of the institute's Systems Biology of Gene Expression Section.

Using florescent proteins, the researchers were able to follow mRNA activity by inserting DNA sequences into a gene in live yeast cells. RNA made from these sequences bound a modified green fluorescent protein; expression of the entire gene resulted in mRNA molecules that were visible with fluorescent light. Gene transcription is a key step in synthesizing proteins, which govern the body's structure and function and underlie many diseases when present in mutated form or in aberrant amounts.

The study involved monitoring the activity of RNA polymerase—the enzyme that constructs mRNA molecules by linking single nucleotides together into a molecular chain. The researchers were able to directly observe and measure the key steps involved in transcription: initiation (triggered when proteins called transcription factors bind to the promoter region of the gene), elongation (the progressive lengthening of mRNA as RNA polymerase adds more nucleotides to it) and termination (when mRNA breaks free from its DNA template, eventually migrating from the cell nucleus to the cytoplasm to serve as a blueprint for protein construction).

"The view of transcription in yeast that emerges from this study is that its initiation seems to be a random event that depends on the success of transcription factors searching through the yeast nucleus looking for a particular gene's promoter region," said Dr. Singer. "By contrast, once initiation occurs, RNA polymerase recruits individual nucleotides for the growing mRNA molecule in an efficient and predictable manner."

"Understanding how gene expression is regulated in a single-celled organism such as yeast is a first step in understanding the same processes in humans, which have a vastly larger and more complex genome," said Dr. Larson. "But fundamentally, the same molecular laws governing transcription factors will still apply."

via Scientists observe single gene activity in living cells.

1/2 foot long fossilised spider 'biggest on record'

The legs would have spanned up to 15cm, front to back (scale-bar: 5mm)

Scientists say a fossilised spider from the Inner Mongolian region of China is the biggest yet found.

The female, which lived about 165 million years ago, belongs to a collection of spiders well known today - the golden orb weavers.

These creatures make webs from a very tough and distinctively golden silk.

The researchers tell the journal Biology Letters that Nephila jurassica, as they have called their specimen, would have had a leg span of some 15cm.

"She is the largest known fossil spider," said Professor Paul Selden from the University of Kansas, US.

"Her body is not the biggest, but if you add in her long legs then she's the largest," he told BBC News.

Today's Nephila species are found around the globe in tropical and sub-tropical regions.

Until this new fossil turned up in Inner Mongolia, the most ancient example from this grouping, or genus, was about 35 million years old.

So, this discovery pushes the existence of the Nephila back to the Jurassic Period, making them the longest ranging spider genus known.

No-one can say for sure how this particular arachnid met her end, but she may have succumbed to a natural catastrophe.

The spider was encased in volcanic ash at the bottom of what would have been a lake.

via BBC News - Fossilised spider 'biggest on record'.

This is Your Brain on Shakespeare

Shakespeare's literary career, which spanned a quarter century roughly between the years 1587 and 1612, came at a time when the English language was at a powerful stage of development. The great fluidity of Early Modern English gave Shakespeare an enormous amount of room to innovate.

In all of his plays, sonnets and narrative poems, Shakespeare used 17,677 words. Of these, he invented approximately 1,700, or nearly 10 percent. Shakespeare did this by changing the part of speech of words, adding prefixes and suffixes, connecting words together, borrowing from a foreign language, or by simply inventing them ...

In the past, most brain experiments would involve the study of defects, and use a lack of health in the brain to show what it can do. Professor Philip Davis from the University of Liverpool's School of English is approaching brain research in a different way. He is studying what he calls "functional shifts" that demonstrate how Shakespeare's creative mistakes "shift mental pathways and open possibilities" for what the brain can do. It is Shakespeare's inventions--particularly his deliberate syntactic errors like changing the part of speech of a word--that excite us, rather than confuse us.

With the aid of brain imaging scientists, Davis conducted neurolinguistic experiments investigating sentence processing in the brain. The experiments showed that when people are wired they have different reactions to hearing different types of sentences.

One type of measured brain responses is called an M400, which occurs 400 milliseconds after the brain experiences a thought or perception. This is considered a normal response. On the other hand, a P600 response indicates a peak in brain activity 600 milliseconds after the brain experiences a quite different type of thought or perception. Davis describes the P600 response as the "Wow Effect," in which the brain is excited, and is put in "a state of hesitating consciousness."

... For Davis, we need creative language "to keep the brain alive." He points out that so much of our language today, written in bullet points or simple sentences, fall into predictability. "You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence" he says. "This represents a gradual deadening of the brain." ...

via This is Your Brain on Shakespeare | How to Think Like Shakespeare | Big Think.

Primitive Sea Creature Sports Eyes Made of Rock

A tiny sea mollusk uses eyes made of a calcium carbonate crystal to spot predators lurking above, researchers say of the first such rocky lenses found in the animal kingdom.

While scientists had discovered the hundreds of eye-like structures on the surface of this armored mollusk, called a chiton, decades ago, they didn't know what they were made of or whether they could actually see objects or just sensed light. [Image of chiton eyes]

"Turns out they can see objects, though probably not well," said study researcher Daniel Speiser, who recently became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

For comparison, the study found that chiton vision would be the equivalent of humans looking in the sky and seeing a disk the diameter of 20 moons, making human vision about a thousand times sharper than chiton vision, the researchers said. [Jellyfish Have Human-Like Eyes]

Chitons first appeared on Earth more than 500 million years ago. But according to the fossil record, the oldest chitons with eyes didn't emerge until the last 25 million years, making their eyes among the most recent to evolve in animals.

The eyes likely evolved so chitons could see and defend against predators, Speiser said ...

via Primitive Sea Creature Sports Eyes Made of Rock | Chitons & Primitive Creatures | Evolution of Vision | LiveScience.

Nationwide study finds US meat and poultry is widely contaminated

Steve Yozwiak - Drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria linked to a wide range of human diseases, are present in meat and poultry from U.S. grocery stores at unexpectedly high rates, according to a nationwide study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen).

Nearly half of the meat and poultry samples — 47 percent — were contaminated with S. aureus, and more than half of those bacteria — 52 percent — were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics, according to the study published today in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

This is the first national assessment of antibiotic resistant S. aureus in the U.S. food supply. And, DNA testing suggests that the food animals themselves were the major source of contamination.

Although Staph should be killed with proper cooking, it may still pose a risk to consumers through improper food handling and cross-contamination in the kitchen.

Researchers collected and analyzed 136 samples — covering 80 brands — of beef, chicken, pork and turkey from 26 retail grocery stores in five U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Flagstaff and Washington, D.C.

"For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial," said Lance B. Price, Ph.D., senior author of the study and Director of TGen's Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health.

"The fact that drug-resistant S. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from the food animals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food-animal production today," Dr. Price said.

Densely-stocked industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics, are ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria that move from animals to humans, the report says.

"Antibiotics are the most important drugs that we have to treat Staph infections; but when Staph are resistant to three, four, five or even nine different antibiotics — like we saw in this study — that leaves physicians few options," Dr. Price said.

"The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — including Staph — remains a major challenge in clinical medicine," said Paul S. Keim, Ph.D., Director of TGen's Pathogen Genomics Division and Director of the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at Northern Arizona University (NAU).

"This study shows that much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with multidrug-resistant Staph. Now we need to determine what this means in terms of risk to the consumer," said Dr. Keim, a co-author of the paper.

The U.S. government routinely surveys retail meat and poultry for four types of drug-resistant bacteria, but S. aureus is not among them. The paper suggests that a more comprehensive inspection program is needed.

S. aureus can cause a range of illnesses from minor skin infections to life-threatening diseases, such as pneumonia, endocarditis and sepsis.

via Nationwide study finds US meat and poultry is widely contaminated.

There are good reasons some things are not even tested for. Out of sight, out of court.

How magnets affect the human brain

Put a powerful magnet against the side of your head and it can interfere with the neurons working underneath. The technique is being used to treat severe depression, but it can also produce some nifty party tricks. In this video, a magnet held to left side of New Scientist editor Roger Highfield's skull interrupts his ability to speak a nursery rhyme. But when Highfield sings the same rhyme, there's no effect. That's because the neurons that control speech and the neurons that control singing are in separate parts of the brain. The magnet disabled Highfield's speech centers, but left his ability to sing untouched.

via How magnets affect the human brain - Boing Boing.

Feeling down? Grab an electromagnet and hold it close to your skull. Thanks to a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), you can enhance or suppress the activity of neurons just beneath it.

You can see the process at work in this video posted by New Scientist .

The magnetic fields interfered with the camera and made the video look somewhat psychedelic.

In the video, New Scientist editor Roger Highfield tries to recite "Humpty Dumpty" but is interrupted by magnetic interference. He was able to sing parts of the nursery rhyme though, as singing is control by a different part of the brain that the speech center.

Vincent Walsh from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London used magnets to shut off Highfield's speech center.

Highfield also demonstrated TMS in 2008 while science editor at The UK Telegraph .

New Scientist reported that because TMS does not require surgery, it is considered one of the safer forms of brain stimulation. However, some people experience pain in the scalp, headaches or facial spasms.

Fortunately, those side effects can be relieved by limiting TMS intensity and frequency and giving patients regular breaks in treatment.

Another plus for TMS is that researchers can disable parts of the brain at will, and the procedures can be reversed entirely.

In the United States, TMS is a legal way to treat severe depression. Unfortunately, treatment is done at a hospital, for about 35 minutes a day, five days a week, for four to six weeks.

Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta last year made a promising discovery regarding TMS. They found that a month's worth of treatment could be done in a few days with no apparent ill effects. Those results could lead to wider use of the procedure, according to New Scientist.

via my9tv

Once they learn a bit more focus I wonder what else they can stimulate in there? Could you turn someone into a puppet?

One billion-year-old life form fossils found on edge of Scottish loch

Fossils of some of the first life forms to make the pivotal jump from the oceans to land have been found on the edge of a remote Scottish loch.

Rocks around Loch Torridon, on Scotland's west coast, contain the preserved remains of organisms that once lived at the bottom of lakes a billion years ago.

They mark a key moment in evolution when simple bacteria started to become more complex collections of cells capable of photosynthesis and sexual reproduction.

Professor Martin Brasier, from Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, said: 'These new fossils show that the move toward complex algal cells living in lakes on land had started over a billion years ago, much earlier than had been thought.'

His research is reported in the journal Nature.

Unlike their bacterial ancestors, the cells had specialised structures including a nucleus, as well as machinery vital for photosynthesis.

They also reproduced sexually, which helped to speed up evolution.

Experts believe the organisms ultimately gave rise to green algae and land plants. ...

'We have discovered evidence for complex life on land from one-billion-year-old deposits from Scotland.

'This suggests that life on land at this time was more abundant and complex than anticipated.

'It also opens the intriguing possibility that some of the major events in the early history of life may have taken place on land and not entirely within the marine realm.'

Around 500million years after the appearance of the life forms, the land surface began to be colonised by simple vegetation such as lichens, mosses and liverworts, said the scientists.

At about the same time the first simple animal organisms began to migrate out of the sea.

They were followed by the emergence of fish, reptiles, mammals, ferns, conifers and flowering plants.

Professor Brasier added: 'None of this would have been possible without advances long ago made by these little microbes, now entombed within phosphate from the Torridon lakes.

'It was arguably these organisms that helped to turn our landscape from a harsh and rocky desert into a green and pleasant place.'

via One billion-year-old life form fossils found on edge of Scottish loch | Mail Online.

Long live the Horta.

Vaccine in Development Could Cure Cat Allergies

Sniffly-nosed kitten-lovers rejoice: A new vaccine could soon banish allergies to cats.

The vaccine isn't ready for prime time yet, but a new study finds that the shots are safe, researchers reported March 31 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. They're also effective at reducing allergic reactions, the researchers reported.

About 10 percent of peopleare allergic to cats. Currently, the only solutions are to stay far away from felines or to get multiple injections of kitty allergens to help the body build up a tolerance. But that process can take years, wrote McMaster University immunologist and study researcher Mark Larche. [

Larche and his colleagues developed the vaccine by isolating the protein shed by cats that causes the most allergic reactions. They then used blood samples from people with cat allergies to determine which segment of the cat protein binds to and activates immune cells. (An allergic reaction occurs when the immune system interprets benign substances, such as cat dander, as invaders and launches an attack.)

Next, the researchers made synthetic versions of these segments, called peptides. A mix of seven synthetic peptides makes up the vaccine. The idea, the researchers wrote, is that the immune system will encounter these peptide strands, which fit into the immune cells like a key to a lock, and recognize them as harmless. That action stops the sniffling, sneezing inflammatory response in its tracks, even when the peptides are attached to real cat proteins.

An early clinical trial on 88 patients resulted in no serious side effects, the researchers reported. A single injection reduced the skin's inflammatory reaction to cat allergens by 40 percent, the researchers wrote. To get an equivalent response with current anti-pollen allergy treatments, they wrote, patients would have to get 12 weeks of treatment with pollen extract. ...

via Vaccine in Development Could Cure Cat Allergies | Pet Allergies | Immunology | LiveScience.

Great, so this way, more people can become infected with mycoplasma resulting in more Lupus, Scleroderma and Rheumatoid Arthritis. I think the bodies of some people react negatively to cats for a good reason.