"Culture Affects The Way We Use Our Brain"

"A new MIT report suggests people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks. Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects.

Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns?"

Liger

Gigantic cross between lion mother and tiger father.

"Reversal Of Alzheimer's Symptoms Within Minutes In Human Study"

"“It is unprecedented that we can see cognitive and behavioral improvement in a patient with established dementia within minutes of therapeutic intervention,” said Griffin. “It is imperative that the medical and scientific communities immediately undertake to further investigate and characterize the physiologic mechanisms involved. This gives all of us in Alzheimer’s research a tremendous new clue about new avenues of research, which is so exciting and so needed in the field of Alzheimer’s. Even though this report predominantly discusses a single patient, it is of significant scientific interest because of the potential insight it may give into the processes involved in the brain dysfunction of Alzheimer’s.”"

"DNA Deletion Linked to Autism"

"A specific structural variation on chromosome 16 dramatically boosts the risk of autism, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The finding--one of the most significant to date--permits the development of new diagnostic tests to identify children at risk, and could ultimately point to specific biochemical pathways to target in drug development.

"This is one of the single largest [influences] and most frequent genetic causes for autism identified so far," says Bai-Lin Wu,director of the Genetics Diagnostic Laboratory at Children's Hospital Boston and one of the senior authors on the study."

"Despite the news coverage the discovery has received, The mutations, described yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, are present in just 1 percent of all kids with autism. At least 31 different stories appear in Google News, with all the usual heavy hitters -- the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, New York Times et al. -- weighing in.

From the sheer bulk of coverage, a reader might imagine that something truly significant has taken place. But is this merely part of the daily science journalism news cycle, in which a relatively technical finding is virtually assured of wall-to-wall exposure if it comes out in a major journal and touches on a timely issue?

The answer: a bit of both. "

"Genetic Cosmetic Makes Old Skin Like New"

"Scientists at Stanford have reversed the aging of skin in mice, making it look and act like new skin.

The researchers first discovered a protein that plays a role in skin aging. Then they used a lotion that inhibited the protein in a genetically engineered mouse. After two weeks of treatment with their genetic cosmetic, the skin of older mice displayed the look and genetic profile of younger skin.

"It would be the best wrinkle cream ever, because it would actually work," said Alexander Hoffman, a biochemistry professor at the University of California at San Diego who did not participate in the study. "

Making Skin Cells Into Stem Cells Minus the Cancer"

"Shinya Yamanaka, leader of one of two research groups responsible for turning skin cells into embryonic stem cell equivalents, has duplicated his breakthrough without using a gene that made the new cells cancerous.

The results, published today in Nature Biotechnology, could answer some of the fine-print questions that dogged the original research, hailed last week as a potential peacemaker in the intractable ethical battle over embryonic stem cell research. "

"Biotech Conference: New Focus on Politics, Old Focus on Money"

The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference faces stiff competition from CES for headlines next week. But the 26th annual gathering of investors and companies is the event of 2008 in biotechnology.

More than 300 companies, ranging from public corporations like Genentech to tiny startups, will get 30 minutes each to impress the 3,500 investors there. Designed for investors, the conference has long been where the smart companies have found smart money.

"Anti-Aging Drugs Could Change the Nature of Death"

"A new class of drugs aimed at age-related physical and mental deterioration could change not only the nature of life, but of death.

The drugs target mitochondria, the cellular power generators that provide our bodies with chemical energy. Over time, mitochondria accumulate damage, causing cells and eventually tissues to malfunction and break down. Some scientists believe that such seemingly disparate diseases as cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes and heart disease -- all of which become more common with age -- share a mitochondrial root. Fix the mitochondria, and you might fix aging itself.

Preliminary research suggests that mitochondria-rejuvenating drugs are capable, at least in lab animals, of halting these diseases and extending longevity. The research also suggests that, once they've reached the end of their traditional lifespans, these animals tend to die quickly and inexplicably, without any indication of disease or systemic breakdown.

If the pattern holds in people, death would not be preceded by months or years of suffering. It would also come without warning, forever catching family and loved ones by surprise."

"Drug companies spend nearly double on marketing compared with research: study"

Drug companies spend almost twice as much on marketing and promoting their products than on research and development, says a new study.

"Cloned Livestock Poised To Receive FDA Clearance"

"After more than six years of wrestling with the question of whether meat and milk from (cloned animals) are safe to eat, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to declare as early as next week that they are."

Ken Miller on Intelligent Design

A very helpful presentation. Ken Miller is the author of "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution"

"Scientists find missing evolutionary link using tiny fungus crystal"

"The crystal structure of a molecule from a primitive fungus has served as a time machine to show researchers more about the evolution of life from the simple to the complex.

By studying the three-dimensional version of the fungus protein bound to an RNA molecule, scientists from Purdue University and the University of Texas at Austin have been able to visualize how life progressed from an early self-replicating molecule that also performed chemical reactions to one in which proteins assumed some of the work.

"Now we can see how RNA progressed to share functions with proteins," said Alan Lambowitz, director of the University of Texas Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology. "This was a critical missing step."

Results of the study were published in Thursday's (Jan. 3) issue of the journal Nature. "

61% of Americans Polled Agree with Evolution

"In the new FASEB poll, researchers asked half of the respondents about their views on the evolution of "all living things" and found that 61 percent accepted that "all living things have evolved over time." Of those, 36 percent thought all living things "evolved due to natural processes such as natural selection," and 25 percent thought "a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating life in the form it exists today."

The researchers asked the remaining respondents to consider human evolution and found that 53 percent accepted that "humans and other living things" evolved. This majority included 32 percent who accepted that humans and other living things evolved through natural processes and 21 percent who thought they had evolved with guidance.

Scientists accept evolution as the best and only theory that accurately explains how humans and other species came to be so diverse. The theory is supported by many studies in many different fields of science. Intelligent design is a thinly veiled creationist argument designed to make the public doubt the theory of evolution, according to nearly all scientists and a 2005 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.

The coalition, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics and the National Science Teachers Association, released this statement:

"The introduction of 'non-science,' such as creationism and intelligent design, into science education will undermine the fundamentals of science education. Some of these fundamentals include using the scientific method, understanding how to reach scientific consensus, and distinguishing between scientific and nonscientific explanations of natural phenomena." "

"'08 forecasts: food at least 3% higher; gas up 10.7%"

"The sharp rise in food prices seen in 2007 is expected to be followed by another higher-than-normal jump next year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said last week. And 2008's punch will be to the breadbasket.

Items made with wheat (breads and crackers) and soybean oil (cooking oil and fried foods) are expected to rise so much next year that they'll boost the cost of cooking at home by up to 4.5 percent — half a percentage point more than predicted just a month ago.

So pinched consumers thinking they can cut back by eating at home more will find little relief there. Home cooking remains less expensive than eating out, but the gap is closing.

This year is expected to go on record as having one of the largest increases in food prices since 1990 — a jump of 4 percent, according to USDA economists. And 2008 will bring an additional rise of at least 3 percent, according to the USDA forecast. Both rates are substantially higher than the 2.4 percent gains seen each year in 2005 and 2006 and the 1.8 percent rise in 2002."

Thomas Edison's Take on Frankenstein

the long-lost first film of Frankenstein, produced by Thomas Edison's studio in 1910

Using Drugs to Replace Sleep

"A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery's first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy....
"New research indicates that not getting enough sleep is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders," said Twery.

Still, Siegel said that Americans already recognize that sleepiness is a problem and have long treated it with a variety of stimulants.

"We have to realize that we are already living in a society where we are already self-medicating with caffeine," he said. "

Using Drugs to Make You Smart

"Despite the potential side effects, academics, classical musicians, corporate executives, students and even professional poker players have embraced the drugs to clarify their minds, improve their concentration or control their emotions....The medicine cabinet of so-called cognitive enhancers also includes Ritalin, commonly given to schoolchildren for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and beta blockers, such as the heart drug Inderal. Researchers have been investigating the drug Aricept, which is normally used to slow the decline of Alzheimer's patients."

"New method enables scientists to see smells"

" Animals and insects communicate through an invisible world of scents. By exploiting infrared technology, researchers at Rockefeller University just made that world visible. With the ability to see smells, these scientists now show that when fly larvae detect smells with both olfactory organs they find their way toward a scented target more accurately than when they detect them with one.

“Having two eyes allows us to have depth perception and two ears allows us to pinpoint a noise precisely,” says Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. “Sensing odors in stereo is equally important.”

In research to be published in the December 23 online issue of Nature Neuroscience, Vosshall and her colleagues show that odor information is easier to perceive when it is smelled with both olfactory organs. By genetically manipulating flies to express odorant receptors in one olfactory organ or both, they show that the brains of Drosophila melanogaster larvae not only make use of stereo cues to locate odors but also to navigate toward them — a behavior called chemotaxis. "

Resuscitation Science Challenges the Notion of Death

"Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead."

So, About All That Plutonium...

(If we aren't going to blow up the world with it,) what should we do with all that plutonium, asked European scientists?

"European governments with large plutonium stockpiles could manage those reserves via a range of different means, a new collection of scientific papers will show this week. The special edition journal, co-edited by scientists from Cambridge University and the European Commission, will offer a range of strategies for Europe's expanding plutonium reserves in the wake of recent assertions that the UK stockpile should be used as fuel.

Plutonium stocks are already a source of mounting concern to the scientific community. Plutonium is highly toxic, especially if inhaled, and can in some forms be used to make nuclear bombs.

...The new collection of reports, however, shows that turning plutonium into fuel is not the only option left for countries harbouring large quantities of the radioactive substance. For the first time, the special edition of Progress In Nuclear Energy brings together the views of scientists who believe that it should be used to feed power stations, and of those with other ideas."

FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics

"The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law."

Science Magazine's Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year

I'll save you the anticipation: it's human genetic variation.

"Nearly seven years ago, the human genome was first sequenced. Since then, continued rapid advancement in the field of genomics has allowed us to look even closer at ourselves to see what makes us, well, us. From studying our genetic makeup, scientists have found that there are about 15 million places along the genome where a person or population can differ. By the end of 2007, more than 3 million of these single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified. An international scientific undertaking known as the HapMap Project is seeking to quantify the differences within the human genome by tracking these SNPs."

Runners up are also fascinating, including stem cells from skin cells, "Seeing Your Senses", and "Transition Metal Oxides".

"Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms"

According to the Washington Post, "Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce. In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell...While the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive."

The article goes on to point out, "'We're heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming, but who will own these programs?' asked Drew Endy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...Unlike conventional biotechnology, in which scientists induce modest genetic changes in cells to make them serve industrial purposes, synthetic biology involves the large-scale rewriting of genetic codes to create metabolic machines with singular purposes.
...
Safety concerns also loom large. Already a few scientists have made viruses from scratch. The pending ability to make bacteria -- which, unlike viruses, can live and reproduce in the environment outside of a living body -- raises new concerns about contamination, contagion and the potential for mischief.

"Ultimately synthetic biology means cheaper and widely accessible tools to build bioweapons, virulent pathogens and artificial organisms that could pose grave threats to people and the planet," concluded a recent report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, one of dozens of advocacy groups that want a ban on releasing synthetic organisms pending wider societal debate and regulation.

"The danger is not just bio-terror but bio-error," the report says.

Depending on how people adjust to the idea of man-made life -- and on how useful the first products prove to be -- the field could go either way, Light said.

"It could be that synthetic biology is going to be like cellphones: so overwhelming and ubiquitous that no one notices it anymore. Or it could be like abortion -- the kind of deep disagreement that will not go away."