Can we have too much water?

ARTICLE...
Liquid H₂O is the sine qua non of life. Making up about 66 percent of the human body, water runs through the blood, inhabits the cells, and lurks in the spaces between. At every moment water escapes the body through sweat, urination, defecation or exhaled breath, among other routes. Replacing these lost stores is essential but rehydration can be overdone. There is such a thing as a fatal water overdose. Earlier this year, a 28-year-old California woman died after competing in a radio station's on-air water-drinking contest. After downing some six liters of water in three hours in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" (Nintendo game console) contest, Jennifer Strange vomited, went home with a splitting headache, and died from so-called water intoxication. There are many other tragic examples of death by water. In 2005 a fraternity hazing at California State University, Chico, left a 21-year-old man dead after he was forced to drink excessive amounts of water between rounds of push-ups in a cold basement. Club-goers taking MDMA ("ecstasy") have died after consuming copious amounts of water trying to rehydrate following long nights of dancing and sweating. Going overboard in attempts to rehydrate is also common among endurance athletes. A 2005 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that close to one sixth of marathon runners develop some degree of hyponatremia, or dilution of the blood caused by drinking too much water. Hyponatremia, a word cobbled together from Latin and Greek roots, translates as "insufficient salt in the blood." Quantitatively speaking, it means having a blood sodium concentration below 135 millimoles per liter, or approximately 0.4 ounces per gallon, the normal concentration lying somewhere between 135 and 145 millimoles per liter. Severe cases of hyponatremia can lead to water intoxication, an illness whose symptoms include headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, frequent urination and mental disorientation. In humans the kidneys control the amount of water, salts and other solutes leaving the body by sieving blood through their millions of twisted tubules. When a person drinks too much water in a short period of time, the kidneys cannot flush it out fast enough and the blood becomes waterlogged. Drawn to regions where the concentration of salt and other dissolved substances is higher, excess water leaves the blood and ultimately enters the cells, which swell like balloons to accommodate it. Most cells have room to stretch because they are embedded in flexible tissues such as fat and muscle, but this is not the case for neurons. Brain cells are tightly packaged inside a rigid boney cage, the skull, and they have to share this space with blood and cerebrospinal fluid, explains Wolfgang Liedtke, a clinical neuroscientist at Duke University Medical Center. "Inside the skull there is almost zero room to expand and swell," he says. Thus, brain edema, or swelling, can be disastrous. "Rapid and severe hyponatremia causes entry of water into brain cells leading to brain swelling, which manifests as seizures, coma, respiratory arrest, brain stem herniation and death," explains M. Amin Arnaout, chief of nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Where did people get the idea that guzzling enormous quantities of water is healthful? A few years ago Heinz Valtin, a kidney specialist from Dartmouth Medical School, decided to determine if the common advice to drink eight, eight-ounce glasses of water per day could hold up to scientific scrutiny. After scouring the peer-reviewed literature, Valtin concluded that no scientific studies support the "eight x eight" dictum (for healthy adults living in temperate climates and doing mild exercise). In fact, drinking this much or more "could be harmful, both in precipitating potentially dangerous hyponatremia and exposure to pollutants, and also in making many people feel guilty for not drinking enough," he wrote in his 2002 review for the American Journal of Physiology—Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. And since he published his findings, Valtin says, "not a single scientific report published in a peer-reviewed publication has proven the contrary." Most cases of water poisoning do not result from simply drinking too much water, says Joseph Verbalis, chairman of medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center. It is usually a combination of excessive fluid intake and increased secretion of vasopression (also called antidiuretic hormone), he explains. Produced by the hypothalamus and secreted into the bloodstream by the posterior pituitary gland, vasopressin instructs the kidneys to conserve water. Its secretion increases in periods of physical stress—during a marathon, for example—and may cause the body to conserve water even if a person is drinking excessive quantities. Every hour, a healthy kidney at rest can excrete 800 to 1,000 milliliters, or 0.21 to 0.26 gallon, of water and therefore a person can drink water at a rate of 800 to 1,000 milliliters per hour without experiencing a net gain in water, Verbalis explains. If that same person is running a marathon, however, the stress of the situation will increase vasopressin levels, reducing the kidney's excretion capacity to as low as 100 milliliters per hour. Drinking 800 to 1,000 milliliters of water per hour under these conditions can potentially lead a net gain in water, even with considerable sweating, he says. While exercising, "you should balance what you're drinking with what you're sweating," and that includes sports drinks, which can also cause hyponatremia when consumed in excess, Verbalis advises. "If you're sweating 500 milliliters per hour, that is what you should be drinking." But measuring sweat output is not easy. How can a marathon runner, or any person, determine how much water to consume? As long as you are healthy and equipped with a thirst barometer unimpaired by old age or mind-altering drugs, follow Verbalis's advice, "drink to your thirst. It's the best indicator."


SUMMARY...
This article talks about how people used to think that you can never get enough water but in reality you can definitely get too much water. Many people have died because they have been trying to rehydrate themselves and they over hydrate. What happens is the kidneys can't work fast enough to flush it all out and you can get water intoxication and you can get nausea, fatigue, dizziness or even die. The water goes everywhere in the body and the cells start to swell. Most cells in your body can handle this but when the cells in your skull swell and there isn't room for cells to get bigger around your brain. When the cells surrounding your brain become hypotonic it can cause severe problems and bad swelling.


MY OPINION...
I didn't know that people could actually die because of drinking too much water! It's amazing that God created thirst and how we know when our body needs water and we know when to stop. It is important that we listen to our bodies and trust what their telling us because they know what they need. Our body has such an amazing balance and it's neat to think about how just one little thing like too much or too little water will throw everything off. I really enjoyed this article and learned a lot about how our bodies rely on water.

Searching for God in the Brain

Is there a “God-spot” in the Human Brain? For years scientists have been working on screening the brain by various techniques to discover if there is a certain spot that is activated when one communes with “God”.
Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal had developed an experiment using fMRI imaging to pinpoint the areas active in the brain when Carmelite Nuns are being tested. Their instructions were for three different states: one to recall a time of intense communion with God and two other times to recall an intense social experience. The MRI recorded cross sections of their brains every three seconds, therefore roughly the whole brain in two minutes. The researchers found that six specific areas were invigorated by the religious memories. For example there was increased invigoration in the caudate nucleus a central brain region to where scientists have ascribed the role of memory ad falling in love. This according to scientists might be a reason why the nuns feel unconditional love. Another spot was the insula, a small part in the brains outer layers.
Michael Persinger of Laurentian University believes that the “God spot” is in the brain’s temporal lobe. He sought to artificially create feelings of “God” by his device the “God Helmet”. This generates weak electromagnetic fields and focuses them on the temporal lobes of hundreds of people. The researchers were able to successfully induce people with the sense that someone was in the room, or a state of cosmic bliss. Because of hid findings Persinger insists that “religious experience and belief in God are merely the results of electrical anomalies in the human brain.” To him when people say that religion is good to have, he believes the only reason is that we have conditioned our minds to think that by associating good things with religion, such as praying before a meal associates prayer with eating. Based off his research, Persinger opines that the religious tendencies of great figures like Saint Paul, Muhammad, Moses, or Buddha only result from their natural neural quirks.
Instead of artificially inducing religious experiences, Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’ Aquili of the University of Pennsylvania decided to study Buddhist monks at the peak of their meditative states. When the monks reached the peak state where they no longer feel separate than the universe, researchers inject them with a radioactive isotope that the blood carries to the most active parts of the brain. They found that the height of activity was associated with the right prefrontal cortex.
In conclusion Mario Beauregard states, “there is no single God spot, localized uniquely in the temporal lobe of the human brain, these states are mediated by a neural network that is will distributed throughout the brain.”
It fascinates me that we could maybe one-day see how God connects with human beings on a scientific level. I do not believe that if a place in the brain was found that it would threaten Christian beliefs. There must be some chemical way that God can put ideas into our minds. This would logically require our brains. Our “spot” would only help prove that the connection between God and humans is real. Unfortunately in this article it seems that the scientists try to put God in a box. They see it as: finding a “spot” means God is only a neural imagination. To Persinger God is just something that we will one day be able to created ourselves with technology only a little better than his “God helmet”. This minimalizes everything we feel about our God. It would be interesting though to see what Christian researchers would discover if they started researching this topic.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=434D7C62-E7F2-99DF-37CC9814533B90D7&sc=I100322

summary of "10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain; What We Know--and Don't Know--About How We Think"

The article “10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain; What We Know--and Don’t Know--About How We Think”, by David Eagleman, discusses ten questions about the brain’s activities that have been somewhat answered but are still bewildering scientists. The first question covers how information is coded in neural activity. Neurons produce short “spikes” of voltage (what we call impulses) that travel down the cell’s axon to other neurons. These spikes occur throughout the nervous system and have different causes. Some spikes in the brain, though, are hard to trace to a cause, such as memory and instinct. Scientists believe that these types of information are stored in groups of cells rather than individual cells. However, this is hard to test because electrodes placed in the brain cannot monitor thousands of neurons at once, and a single neuron’s impulses cannot be measured because the average neuron receives impulses from approximately 10,000 other neurons; therefore, when scientists consider the way information is stored in the brain, they look to other possibilities of transfer between cells, such as signaling substances like gases or peptides, rather than just impulses.
When considering the specific topic of memories, their storage, and their retrieval, scientists find complications related to how many different types of memory there are. The brain recognizes short-term memory and long-term memory as well as declarative memories (distinct facts) and non-declarative memories (skills, such as how to ride a bike, etc.), which both fall under long-term memory. Scientists believe that the storing of memories is dependent upon synapses, which are the connections between neurons. When two neurons are used at the same time, the synapse between them strengthens; when they are not used at the same time, however, the synapse weakens. When the synapse is strengthened, an association between the cells is born. For example, an association can form between the smell, warmth, taste, and color of hot chocolate, so that this association can be activated by the smell by itself, causing all of the hot chocolate’s features to be recalled. This aspect of memory is not all there is, though, because memory seems to tend towards remembering relationships between things more than specific details about the things themselves. This is apparent when you sing a song you know in a different key without any trouble, because the brain memorized the relationships between the notes rather than the actual notes themselves. Also, scientists wonder how it is possible that memories that are currently being recalled are more vulnerable to change than when they are stored away in the brain.
Scientists are starting to look with interest at the brain’s “baseline” activity, which is the activity of the brain at rest as well as things in our mind such as emotions, drives, and plans, which are not linked at all to an external stimulus. The resting brain uses twenty percent of the body’s oxygen, which implies that the brain is busy even when we feel that it isn’t. This was verified when scientists found that certain areas of the brain decreased in activity right before the person being studied carried out a goal-related task. These areas were found to be the same regardless of the task, which led scientists to believe that these areas are what carry out baseline activity. Scientists are beginning to believe that external stimuli revise continual internal brain activity rather than cause the activity. This is why it is possible for us to see things while we are dreaming even though our eyes are closed. With this view, the awake state is simply a dream reinforced by stimuli detected by our senses.
Intelligent brains often put time into “practicing” for the future through mental or physical scenarios; therefore, the brain does not just sense and respond to stimuli, but also paints a model of the world and creates rules for how it functions. This can affect not only motor skills, but also perception. It has been shown that the act of seeing uses information stored in the brain as well as information from the retina itself. Scientists today are going back to a belief that scientists such as Aristotle, who lived 2,000 years ago, also believed: the belief that the sole purpose of memory is to make an accurate model and good predictions of the future. Even things remembered about one’s life may point to this purpose.
One cannot study the brain without taking into account emotions. The difference between emotions and feelings is that emotions are distinct physical responses to situations (sweating when you’re nervous, sweating when you’re scared, etc.), while feelings are subject to the situation and accompany the physical effects of emotions (sadness, envy, etc.). Emotions tend to be caused by the subconscious, because people (who were tested) will react to an angry face that is quickly hidden even though they do not remember ever having seen the face. This is similar among humans, birds, and even reptiles. Modern scientists have deduced that emotions are the brain’s way of making a quick summary of one’s surroundings that leads to appropriate reactions, almost like a reflex that tells you to stop whatever you are focusing your brain on and react to the world around you. When your “emotion regulator” is not quite right, the results are emotion disorders such as depression and impulsive violence.
Scientists are mystified when they consider the biological definition of intelligence. What distinguishes a “smart” person from the average person and a human from a monkey, for example? There are many possibilities, and most of them have not yet been tested by experimentation. Short-term memory capacity, the ability to resolve cognitive conflict quickly, the strength of associations between neurons, better reconstruction of information stored in the brain, and superiority of the brain’s model of the future are just a few of the areas which scientists are interested in probing for information about intelligence. Any one of these things (or all of them) could be what distinguishes between different intelligences and what sets humans apart from other animals.
Scientists are stumped when they consider the amazing “editing effects” the brain employs to make occurrences simultaneous. Auditory signals are processed by the brain slightly faster than visual signals, yet your brain can put a sound and a sight together as one. For example, when you clap your hands together in front of your face, the sound of the clap is processed before the sight of the clap; however, the two still seem to happen together even though they were processed at different speeds. This leads scientists to the conclusion that our perception of smooth passage of time is made by the brain; if the brain could not make different sensed phenomena simultaneous, we would not have any sense of time.
All mammals, reptiles, and birds (in general, organisms with brains) need to sleep, and the average human spends one third of his/her life sleeping. This suggests that sleep has a great importance. One of the theories for the reason why we sleep is restoration and saving of energy, but this is disproved when scientists look at the high level of brain activity during sleep. Another theory is that sleep lets the brain “test out” simulations of problem-solving, etc., before using them in the real world. The third theory, which is the most widely-accepted, is that sleep is when the brain stores away in memory what is important and forgets what is unimportant. A test was done on rats in which they were trained to run around a track for a treat while their brainwaves were being monitored. They continued to monitor the rats’ brains during sleep and found that the pattern of activity was exactly the same as when they had been participating in the activities when they were awake. This shows that the brain replays information during sleep that needs to be stored.
The brain is composed of many separate areas with distinct functions, yet all of these areas work together amazingly. The coordination of these areas happens extremely fast compared to the speed of the impulses themselves, which is one hundred-millionth the speed of a signal transmission in a computer; on the flip side, a human can recognize a friend or family member instantly while a computer struggles (sometimes unsuccessfully) to recognize a face. The reason for this is that a brain performs parallel-processing (multi-tasking) and also combines those multiple tasks into a single output incredibly fast. While computers can parallel-process, they are slow to analyze the resulting information. In addition, there is no set area in the brain that is responsible for putting together multiple pieces of information; rather, all the areas of the brain interconnect to form a complex network, which is why our brain processes information so much faster than a computer.
Trying to explain consciousness is difficult for scientists because it is trying to find what “clicks on” when you wake each morning that is not there when you are sleeping. It is known that consciousness emerges from the physical material of the brain because even very small changes to the brain have great effect on our subjective experiences. The only way that scientists know of to study consciousness is through experimentation. In one such experiment, test subjects see the image of a house in one eye and the image of a cow in another. Instead of mixing the images together and seeing a “house-cow”, the brain perceives one, then sees the other, then back again so that the brain’s conscious experience changes as the stimuli stay the same. This experiment leads scientists to wonder what areas of the brain correlate with what we consciously perceive and why.
The complexity of the brain is astounding and awe-inspiring. The questions posed in this article are just some of the many questions we have about the functioning of the human brain. Looking at this information, I find it very hard not to look towards an Intelligent Designer who created the vast workings of our bodies. The details of how our brains work are too many to have occurred by chance, and I am sure that many of the questions scientists have cannot be answered by scientific means alone. For example, the question of how our brains distinguish morals and a higher purpose (which was not asked in this particular article) can only lead back to the fact that we were made in God’s image and have His Spirit in us. I am amazed by God’s creativity and attention to detail that are exhibited in the structure and function of the human brain. doc10092007112239.pdf

Obscure fungal infection defies diagnosis

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071012.wlfungus12/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

Summary: Tyler Thorkildsen, a native of Pointe au Baril, Ontario, was diagnosed in late November 2004 with a rare fungal infection called blastomycosis. However, due to the nature of this disease to be "the great mimic" according to Dr. John Embil, Thorkildsen's exact ailment was wrongly concluded to be first pleurisy (an inflammation around the lungs) and second lung cancer (due to a mass found between his eighth and ninth ribs). When the doctors realized that he wasn't responded to any treatments, one doctor suggested he be tested for blastomycosis, after having treated a small girl with the same infection. It was concluded that Thorkildsen contracted the disease from the family dog, Rufus. Because his case had advanced so far, an easily treated illness then required injections of amphotericin B, an anti-fungal drug which causes swelling, fever and kidney damage. Due to the side effects of this drug, after a few days his doctors switched him to Sporanox, the same drug being administered to Rufus.
Blastomycosis, or "blasto" for short, is known as the great mimic because it tends to imitate diseases such as pneumonia, cancer, skin disease, and bone and joint problems. When the fungus enters your body it converts to a yeast; this yeast multiplies itself and attacks the tissues. Six percent of cases of blastomycosis are fatal. This infection is most commonly found in Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, Thunder Bay, Georgian Bay, Temiskaming districts, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta. In the America it is native to Wisconsin, Ohio and the Mississippi River basin. Blasto is caused by the fungus Blastomyces dermatitidis, which is commonly found in dirt. Because dogs' snouts are closer to the ground, blastomycosis is more common in dogs than humans. However, this infection is very elusive, and can sometimes disappear from an area within a day. This makes the chances of spreading blasto to other humans very slim. It can, however, be spread in any way, even through the air.

My Response: This article was interesting because the characteristics of this infection make it so hard to pin down. It makes me wonder if there are any symptoms that somehow get overlooked when diagnosing a patient with blastomycosis that would distinguish from any of the other diseases it copies. I also think research could discover a better, less dangerous form of treatment for more severe forms of the infection. The "copycat" tendencies of blasto show that little details that have been put into God's creation truly make a difference!

Less Sleep Means More Dreams

http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa029&articleID=239C577A-E7F2-99DF-38DA961471472CDD








According to neurologist Mark Mahowald of the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, "When people are sleep deprived we see greater sleep intensity, meaning greater brain activity during sleep." An example of this suggestion came from a woman named Eva Salem. As a new mother Eva became sleep deprived, getting only four hours a night. She had very vivid, and active dreams, but when she did get a full night of sleep her dreams became so vivid that she felt as if she wasn't sleeping at all.


REM, rapid eye movement, is the state in which we dream the most. Sleep is divided into REM and four stages of non-REM. We experience our first period of REM, lasting only five minutes, after approximately seventy minutes of non-REM sleep, and as the night progresses, non-REM stages shorten and the REM periods grow. Scientists' only way of studying sleep deprivation is by torturous sleep deprivation. Tore Nielsen, psychologist, and director of the Dream and Nightmare Lab at the Sacré-Coeur Hospital in Montreal, says, "We follow the electroencephalogram tracing and then when we see subjects moving into REM, we wake them up, as soon as you start to rob them of REM, the pressure for them to go back into REM starts to build." Sometimes the patient will have to be woken forty times in one night, because they go straight into REM as soon as they are asleep.



In a 2005 study, Nielsen showed that losing thirty minutes of REM one night can lead to a thirty-five percent REM increase the next night. Another thing Nielsen found, from subjects only getting about twenty-five minutes of REM sleep, is that dream intensity increased with REM deprivation; these subjects rated the quality of their dreams between eight and nine (one being dull, nine being dynamite).



Although REM is so persistent, and we spend about twenty-seven years dreaming, scientists still can't agree on why it's important. However, there are theories that suggest that REM helps regulate body temperature and neurotransmitter levels. There also is evidence that dreaming helps us assimilate memories. John Antrobus, a retired professor of psychology and sleep research at the City College of New York, says our dreams are tied with our anxieties. He also believes, " The brain is an interpretive organ, and when regions are less connected as they are in sleep, we get bizarre narratives." Antrobus is assured that we cannot answer the question of "What is the purpose of dreaming?", without answering the question "What is the purpose of thought?"







RESPONSE: It's interesting to see how being sleep deprived can really mess up your nightly routine. I thought the comment at the beginning of the article was intersting saying that if you miss a few dreams from lack of sleep, your brain keeps score, forcing payback soon after your eyelids close. Although, we may not remember dreaming, when we wake up in the morning, we most likely did and just cant recall them. Even if we only had a few that night, we'll be all caught up the next night! Not only the fact that missing dreams, and making up for it the next night, but also the fact that they get more active and intense.

a link between smell and gender identity??

Conventional wisdom about the sexes—and most movies marketed to men under 24—work from the premise that men’s and women’s brains are just fundamentally different. The medical spin on this has been that testosterone, in addition to providing extra oomph for muscles, is a key component in the wiring of the male brain. The male brain is first exposed to testosterone in utero, changing basic brain biology and imposing masculinity. Then during puberty, another wash of testosterone results in distinctly male thoughts—the fodder for all that guns-girls-and-parties cinema—in the previously testosterone-primed brain. Deprive the brain of testosterone at either time and you risk perturbing the sublime development of maleness.
Well, it turns out that life may not be quite that simple—at least for mice. A new study in Nature suggests that the brain pathways for male sexual behavior are also present in female mice, and with those pathways comes the potential for male behavior. Even more intriguing is that the activation of these pathways appears to be regulated by the animal’s sense of smell. Mice, like many other animals, use chemicals known as pheromones to transmit sexual signals, among others. Investigators have recently found that disabling the part of the nose that receives these signals—the vomeronasal organ (VNO)—produces some pretty strange effects on the way a mouse acts out its sex.
Males without a functioning VNO appear to have trouble distinguishing between male and female. They will try to mate with either one and won’t fight other males. This is certainly strange, but our existing model can live with it. Maybe some pheromone turns on those testosterone-sculpted parts of the male brain. No pheromone, no male behavior.
But when female mice don’t have a functioning VNO, even stranger things begin to happen. Like their male counterparts, these mice will try to mount both male and female mice and they engage in the peculiarly male (and particularly attractive) behaviors of butt sniffing and pelvic thrusting. These female mice will also mate in the more traditional way. However, their maternal instincts are altered: they spend less time with their pups and are less aggressive in defending their nests.
What does this mean for us? Well, human mating is a bit more complicated than it is for mice, and our perfumes have far less power over our brains (whatever the beliefs of pushy department-store perfumers). But it may hint that biological gender differences are a bit less hardwired and more flexible than the conventional wisdom suggests. For now, let’s just inhale deeply and say that these studies raise important questions about how far apart Mars and Venus truly are. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/sep/girls-gone-boys-gone-wild

My opinion:This article caught my eye because i've always been interested in the link between smells and attractions, and about how the brain works. It's a pretty weird phenomenon. It'd be cool to run the same tests on humans just to see if it has the same effect. All in all it was interesting, but i tend to disagree that smell has to do with gender identity. Although i do agree that smell is a large part of attraction,I dont think there is enough evidence here to come to that conclusion. If the tests were ran on humans and had the same outcome that may be a huge step to finding out how the brains in males and females are different. But for now i think we should just accept that we are different i mean if we needed to know God would've told us and for now just knowing that we are different is sufficcient. Maybe mice are just weird. I definatly would like to see more research on this though; it'd be kinda neat!

is 9/11 still attacking?

An incredible amount of people died in the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001, but it didn’t stop there. Hundreds of Rescue workers gave their lives in service following the attacks and now many more people are dying indirectly from the aftermath. For miles, New York City was covered in dust and rubble.

One woman, who knew the danger of toxins because of her previous knowledge as a jeweler, took precautions by shutting her windows and covering her mouth with a homemade bandana. She rapidly packed up her animals and got out of town. Another lady, Felicia Dunn Jones, worked only one block away from the World Trade Towers. In the midst of many civilians of New York City loosing their lives, her family was able to celebrate her safe return. But within six months of her family rejoicing her return home, they were at her funeral. She died of an immune disorder caused by toxic exposure.

One lawyer, David Worby, is representing ten thousand victims of WTC aftermath. He started by doing something that many lawyers feared as being ‘unpatriotic’; he defended a cop against the cleanup and the EPA. Worby said that the people deserved to be not on a plaque for WTC victims, but on a plaque for victims of bad government, he was very angry with Rudy Giuliani, for telling the people of New York City it was safe, when indeed it was not. The people were told by Giuliani to go back to normality only a few days after the attack. There were precautions, on how to clean certain things, but only a very small amount of people were actually able to follow them. It costs between $10,000 and $20,000 to clean a single apartment the correct way!

The dust was a problem, but the biggest problem lied in the midst of the dust. Asbestos, which is a microscopic toxin was the worst part. Asbestos doesn’t develop or irritate someone overnight, it can take years or even decades. People in apartments had piles of dust, beyond what cleaning could get rid of. They couldn’t open their windows because of the horrific smell coming in and when they turned on their air conditioner dust just sprayed out. When they slept they’d have to wear a wet t-shirt tied around their neck.

There are just countless outcomes and types of sicknesses initiated by the whole 9/11 attack. One man had internal bleeding everywhere and his internal organs were deteriorating. One man had a cough, which would occasionally bring up bloody phlegm. Some people had coughs and some people had asthma attacks. Some people’s symptoms didn’t surface for a really long time. Some people will not know they are sick for years to come.

RESPONSE: I had no doubt in my mind that many people are still effected by the September 11th attacks emotionally, but I didn’t realize how it’s still effecting people physically. Due to poor information, citizens of New York City returned to the normality of life before a lot of important things were taken care of. The whole event was so tragic and I don’t think it’s fair to put the blame on Rudy Giuliani. Did he plan any of this? Looking back people can point the finger, and ask “what if?” but during the heartbreaking catastrophe the air quality was not the main focus. As a nation our focus was on the loss of many people and we sat worrying about their spouses and children, not the piles of dust. It was an overwhelming time of confusion and loss. It’s terrible that thousands of people are dealing with health symptoms now, but can we really blame one person?


http://discovermagazine.com/2007/oct/the-9-11-cover-up

Violent Developments

It appears that some kids are more proned to having anger issues than others. Is this simply based on the environmental conditions surrounding them or is there more behind this behavior? Studies show that some people inherit genes that alter there ability to control themselves in certain situations. An enzyme called monoamine oxydase A (MAOA) controls the supply of an important brain chemical. There are two different types of genes that you can inherit that will affect your MAOA. The first causes weak activity from the MAOA and allowing too much serotonin to enter the brain, causing you to have less control over your emotions. The other gene is one that causes intense activity of the MAOA. This leads to lower than average amounts of serotonin in the brain.

While both of these can cause chemical imbalances, they are only greatly effective based on the environemental conditions surrounding them. A test taken among 57 men and women show that people with the MAOA-light gene show characteristics of being weak in the ability to control there emotions. It was also more prevelant in the men than it was in the women. A second test was done on those with the strong-MAOA. These people experienced less intense responses to emotional input and more actively related to impulse control.

The affect that parents have on their children, who have inherited these genes, was also tested, along with how kids react regarding reward sensitivity. It was discovered that children who grew up with emotionally cold parents and a high reward sensivity, were more inclined to turn to violence, crime, and substance abuse by the time they were 21. This was a very strong pattern among the boys especially. The test was done using a card game involving gambling. The children who would exit the game early with the money they had, versus those who chose to stay and risk more, were recognized as those with a low reward sensitivity. These kids had more reslience when facing harsh parenting, as well as showing less signs of bad behavior.

Parents and kids can bring out the worst in each other, as well as peer influences. People who relate to each other in violence and distress, feed off of each other and their relationships influence each other into certain behavioral patterns. Research shows that these relationships have the greatest affect on children when they are going through major changes in life. It is suggested that programs offering parenting advice are best used when a child is facing some sort of developmental transition.

A program was designed for schools to help kids with behavioral problems, especially those involving the chemical imbalances and environmental issues that can affect the body so much. The program focused on getting the children to react to situations and hardships based on peaceful negotiating rather than violence. Schools who used the program showed a great decrease in violent behavior. Dr. Stuart W. Twemlow, who designed the program said," In the end, the goal is finding out the truth about yourself so that you can better control yourself."


My Opinion...
I thought the most interesting and vital part of this article was the final quote by Dr. Twemlow," In the end, the goal is finding out the truth about yourself so that you can better control yourself." I think that this is very prevelant in the people we see around us who struggle with there behavior and managing issues. People who are lost, don't understand there purpose, and wonder why they struggle the way they do, find it so hard to understand and take there anger out in ways that some of us can't comprehend. The mind is a very delicate thing, which we can only attempt to understand. The article had an impact on me that I didn't really expect it to have. I knew that chidren who face behavioral problems often have a mental issue or a social issue that contributes to there struggle. But it made it more aware to me how much we need God. These people are searching for a way out, and a way to be "normal", but because of the families were born into, or the mental conditions we face, it is obvious that at times God alone is the only way out of our misery.


....My Dear Brothers, to the anatomy class scattered among first and second period, greetings...this is Kyle Brechbuhler posting on Ryan Spengler's blog due to technical difficulties.

The PFO and the Heart

Summary
Everyone is born with foramen ovale, a flap between the left and the right of the heart. It usually closes up soon after birth. However, in one out of every four human beings, the flap doesn’t close, causing it to become a patent foramen ovale (PFO). Sleep apnea happens when your upper airways collapse while you sleep and you stop breathing for ten or more seconds. In people who have sleep apnea, if they have a PFO the pressure build-up from the struggle to breathe can force the PFO open.
When the PFO opens up it can lead to oxygen desaturation, where you blood-oxygen concentration falls a lot very fast. When desaturation occurs it can lead to cardiovascular disease.
Studies have shown that closing the PFO helps reduce migraines. They think that closing the PFO might help reduce desaturation. This however, is not the only treatment. There is another treatment called continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). This is when a face mask is worn to bed and it pumps air into your lungs. It stops you air way from collapsing, which reduces apnea. This isn’t popular because it is uncomfortable and people don’t like wearing the masks when they sleep.
It is important to treat the PFO, whether by closing it or CPAP. If you don’t treat it, specifically in apnea patients, it can lead to severe problems.
There has also been a study to show the relationship between the PFO and high-altitude pulmonary edema. This is occurs when you are a mountain climber and you go into areas where the air is thinner. The blood pressure increases in you lungs to make up for the lowering blood-oxygen concentration. This causes fluid to develop in your lungs.
It is more common for people who have a PFO to experience high-altitude pulmonary edema. It is unknown whether or no closing the PFO will reduce cases of high-altitude pulmonary edema.
They are now performing tests to see whether or not divers should worry about PFO’s.
My Opinion
This article impacted me for several reasons. It impacted me because I never thought about how something in your heart could effect how you sleep and that it could cause you to have migraines. Another reason this article impacted me is because of the overwhelming number of people that have PFO. It is astonishing to me that one forth of every human being has PFO and never knows about it. It is also interesting that a little hole in your heart can effect your blood-oxygen concentration, which is important because it can cause strokes and makes you have difficulties if you have sleep apnea.

https://createpdf.adobe.com/cgi-pickup.pl/HEART.pdf?BP=IE&LOC=en_US&CUS=96eac199fb42b3f907cc12121056ca5a&CDS=471104B5-71AE-288564

This is actually Adam Honeycutt's post, I couldn't log on under my name so instead of just not doing this or waiting for Mrs. Forgrave to find in the email I sent her on Monday morning, Ashley is letting me use her name to post.

Consciousness in the Raw

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070915/bob9.asp

Dr. Bjorn Merker, a neuroscientist originally from Sweden, recently proposed an intriguing idea after visiting with five families in Disney World in Florida. Each of these families had a child with a rare condition called hydranencephaly. This condition, usually experienced before birth or shortly thereafter as a result of a stroke or other serious medical issues, causes about 80% of the child's brain to be destroyed, including the cortex. Hydranencephaly is when the cerebrospinal fluid floods the hole in a child's head and these children typically die within a year due to other ailments brought on by the crippling damage to their brain. The cortex is the outer layer of the brain, and until recently, scientists believe it to be the center for all awareness. Merker, however, proposes an alternative.
While most families with children who have hydranencephaly are told their children will be "vegetables" for the duration of their short lives, Merker observed that these same children exhibited a number of emotions and remained alert. During his visits to each family's home, Merker noticed that the children recognized adults, toys, sounds, and settings. Many of the children, even with restricted mobility, were able to perform normal behavioral functions. Merker also noted a curious fact about all the children: they had relatively good hearing, but had poor eyesight. This was unusual, as most children who suffered from their condition retained parts of their visual cortex, but none of their auditory cortex.
Merker proposes in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that the fundamental awareness of the world, inside and out, is not dependant on the cortex, but on the brain stem. According to Merker, the brain stem not only provides children who have hydranencephaly with a basic form of conscious thought, but also with auditory structures that would be previously destroyed along with the cortex. He also states that the condition damages the optic nerves, completely independently of the brain stem. While more complex thought patterns may rely on the cortex, Merker believes that "primary consciousness", or the ability to integrate stimulus and feelings, comes from the tissue located between the spinal cord and the cortex, otherwise known as the brain stem. If this proposal is true, not only would all vertebrates be primarily conscious, but doctors and scientists would be forced to administer pain medication and anesthesia to patients with hydranencephaly.
Merker drew his ideas from the earlier work of Doctors Wilder Penfield and Herbert Jasper. Neurosurgeons from more than fifty years earlier, Jasper and Penfield removed massive parts of their patients cortex as a treatment for epilepsy. However, their patients would remain conscious and awake during the surgery and used only small amounts of anesthesia. Although the patients would lose parts of their mental abilities, they would retain a conscious stream of thought. Jasper and Penfield electrically stimulated parts of the brain during the operations in order to find functional areas, and were duly surprised when they found all types of seizure could be reproduced - except what is known as "absence epilepsy", when a patient loses consciousness for several seconds. Based on this observation, Jasper and Penfield believed that absence epilepsy was triggered by the brain stem, and direct corroboration with the cortex provided conscious thought and independent actions.
With these observations added to his own, Merker states that three adjacent parts of the brain stem are responsible for basic consciousness. The top part of the brain interprets the surrounding, below that is the area responsible for emotion-related actions, and the furthest region accounts for eye gaze and decision making. Merker proposed that even with little cortex, the brain stem simulates a two-dimensional map of moving shapes. Based on experiments over the last forty years performed on cats and lab rats, the animals with no cortex were still able to participate in normal activities, such as grooming and and climbing. Merker also records a phenomenon called the Sprague effect: when the removal of the visual cortex on one half of the brain causes total blindness in the opposite side. However, subjects are able to distinguish moving objects when a small incision is made in the midbrain. Merker proposes that the Sprague effect interrupts the visual stimulus from the brain stem and by cutting the midbrain, the activity from the Sprague effect is halted.
Merker's research challenges the assumption that newborns and fetuses cannot feel pain. According to Dr. K.J.S. Anand, the brain stem is responsible for the feelings of pain before and after birth. The cortex, which expands greatly during growth, takes over the pain perception. Although Merker's research and observations are fascinating, many scientist disagree with his work. They insist that the cortex is at least partly responsible for consciousness, and they suggest that the consciousness seen in the children with hydranencephaly is due to the remnants of their cortex, however small.
Further research into children with hydranencephaly shows that, while physicians usually give the children fewer than two years to live, many exert consciousness and emotions when raised in a comfortable, loving environment. These children often exhibit happy feelings when presented with happy songs, and sad feelings when presented with sad songs. Merker believes that since the children often experience absence epilepsy, this only furthers his proposal of a basic consciousness. Even more importantly, the observations made based on children with hydranencephaly provide intriguing evidence that the brain stem is not merely a remnant of more reptilian days. While the mystery of consciousness is still at large, scientist can all agree that children with no cortex provide infallible clues to aid in solving the mystery.

I found this article both fascinating and horrifying. The new research explained in this article gave me hope for the advancement of medicine, and the ability to provide answers to those who are most in need. But I was equally horrified that patients, especially children, were often operated on with very little aid from pain medication. I believe that the research done by Dr. Merker was not only breakthrough, but extremely informative. This article shows how far scientists have come in understanding the human body, and with the new information they find daily, people everywhere will be able to receive the help they need. I found the complexity of the brain, as explained in the article, intriguing and fascinating. I enjoyed reading about how the brain interprets signals, and which parts of the brain do what. I think it was extremely interesting that an animal's brain is able to perform many of the same functions as human brains. But I found the part about the brain stem not being a relic of a reptilian ancestry (aka evolution) extremely interesting.

Stem Cells: The Real Culprits in Cancer?
A dark side of stem cells--their potential to turn malignant--is at the root of a handful of cancers and may be the cause of many more. Eliminating the disease could depend on tracking down and destroying these elusive killer cells
By Michael F. Clarke and Michael W. Becker

After more than 30 years of declared war on cancer, a few important victories can be claimed, such as 85 percent survival rates for some childhood cancers whose diagnoses once represented a death sentence. In other malignancies, new drugs are able to at least hold the disease at bay, making it a condition with which a patient can live. In 2001, for example, Gleevec was approved for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). The drug has been a huge clinical success, and many patients are now in remission following treatment with Gleevec. But evidence strongly suggests that these patients are not truly cured, because a reservoir of malignant cells responsible for maintaining the disease has not been eradicated.
Stem cells' power to self-renew already exempts them from the rules.
Conventional wisdom has long held that any tumor cell remaining in the body could potentially reignite the disease. Current treatments therefore focus on killing the greatest number of cancer cells. Successes with this approach are still very much hit-or-miss, however, and for patients with advanced cases of the most common solid tumor malignancies, the prognosis remains poor.
Moreover, in CML and a few other cancers it is now clear that only a tiny percentage of tumor cells have the power to produce new cancerous tissue and that targeting these specific cells for destruction may be a far more effective way to eliminate the disease. Because they are the engines driving the growth of new cancer cells and are very probably the origin of the malignancy itself, these cells are called cancer stem cells. But they are also quite literally believed to have once been normal stem cells or their -immature offspring that have undergone a malignant transformation.
This idea--that a small population of malignant stem cells can cause cancer--is far from new. Stem cell research is considered to have begun in earnest with studies during the 1950s and 1960s of solid tumors and blood malignancies. Many basic principles of healthy tissue genesis and development were revealed by these observations of what happens when the normal processes derail.
Today the study of stem cells is shedding light on cancer research. Scientists have filled in considerable detail over the past 50 years about mechanisms regulating the behavior of normal stem cells and the cellular progeny to which they give rise. These fresh insights, in turn, have led to the discovery of similar hierarchies among cancer cells within a tumor, providing strong support for the theory that rogue stemlike cells are at the root of many cancers. Successfully targeting these cancer stem cells for eradication therefore requires a better understanding of how a good stem cell could go bad in the first place.
Orderly Conduct The human body is a highly compartmentalized system made up of discrete organs and tissues, each performing a function essential to maintaining life. Individual cells that make up these tissues are often short-lived, however. The skin covering your body today is not really the same skin that you had a month ago, because its surface cells have all since sloughed off and been replaced. The lining of the gut turns over every couple of weeks, and the life span of the platelets that help to clot blood is about 10 days.
The mechanism that maintains a constant population of working cells in such tissues is consistent throughout the body and, indeed, is highly conserved among all complex species. It centers on small pools of long-lived stem cells that serve as factories for replenishing supplies of functional cells. This manufacturing process follows tightly regulated and organized steps wherein each generation of a stem cell's offspring becomes increasingly specialized.
This system is perhaps best exemplified by the hematopoietic family of blood and immune cells. All the functional cells found in the blood and lymph arise from a single common parent known as the hematopoietic stem cell (HSC), which resides in bone marrow. The HSC pool represents less than 0.01 percent of bone marrow cells in adults, yet each of these rare cells gives rise to a larger, intermediately differentiated population of progenitor cells. Those in turn divide and differentiate further through several stages into mature cells responsible for specific tasks, ranging from defending against infection to carrying oxygen to tissues. By the time a cell reaches that final functional stage, it has lost all ability to proliferate or to alter its destiny and is said to be terminally differentiated.

The stem cells themselves meanwhile remain undifferentiated, a state they maintain through their unique capacity for self-renewal: to begin producing new tissues, a stem cell divides in two, but only one of the resulting daughter cells might proceed down a path toward increasing specificity. The other daughter may instead retain the stem cell identity. Numbers in the overall stem cell pool can thus remain constant, whereas the proliferation of intermediate progenitors allows populations of specific hematopoietic cell types to expand rapidly in response to changing needs.
The capacity of stem cells to re-create themselves through self-renewal is their most important defining property. It gives them alone the potential for unlimited life span and future proliferation. In contrast, progenitors have some ability to renew themselves during proliferation, but they are restricted by an internal counting mechanism to a finite number of cell divisions. With increasing differentiation, the ability of the progenitors' offspring to multiply declines steadily.

The practical significance of these distinctions can be observed when hematopoietic stem cells or their descendants are transplanted. After the bone marrow of a mouse is irradiated to destroy the native hematopoietic system, progenitor cells delivered into the marrow environment can proliferate and restore hematopoiesis temporarily, but after four to eight weeks those cells will die out. A single transplanted hematopoietic stem cell, on the other hand, can restore the entire blood system for the lifetime of the animal.
The hematopoietic system's organization has been well understood for more than 30 years, but similar cellular hierarchies have recently been identified in other human tissues, including brain, breast, prostate, large and small intestines, and skin. Principles of regulated stem cell behavior are also shared across these tissues, including specific mechanisms for controlling stem cell numbers and for directing decisions about the fates of individual cells. Several genes and the cascades of events triggered by their activity--known as genetic pathways--play key roles in dictating stem cells' fate and function, for example. Among these are signaling pathways headed by the Bmi-1, Notch, Sonic hedgehog and Wnt genes. Yet most of these genes were first identified not by scientists studying stem cells but by cancer researchers, because their pathways are also involved in the development of malignancies.
Many such similarities between stem cells and cancer cells have been noted. The classical definition of malignancy itself includes cancer cells' apparent capacity to survive and multiply indefinitely, their ability to invade neighboring tissues and to migrate (metastasize) to distant sites in the body. In effect, the usual constraints that tightly control cellular proliferation and identity seem to have been lifted from cancer cells.
Normal stem cells' power to self-renew already exempts them from the rules limiting life span and proliferation for most cells. Stem cells' ability to differentiate into a broad range of cell types allows them to form all the different elements of an organ or tissue system. A hallmark of tumors, too, is the heterogeneity of cell types they contain, as though the tumor were a very disorderly version of a whole organ. Hematopoietic stem cells have been shown to migrate to distant parts of the body in response to injury signals, as have cancer cells.
In healthy stem cells, strict genetic regulation keeps their potential for unlimited growth and diversification in check. Remove those control mechanisms, and the result would be some-thing that sounds very much like malignancy. These commonalities, along with growing experimental evidence, suggest that failures in stem cell regulation are how many cancers get started, how they perpetuate themselves, and possibly how malignancies can spread.

Achilles' Heel The presence of stem cells in certain tissues, especially those with high cell turnover such as the gut and the skin, seems to be an overly complicated and inefficient system for replacing damaged or old cells. Would it not appear to make more sense for an organism if every cell could simply proliferate as needed to supply replacements for its injured neighbors? On the surface, perhaps--but that would make every cell in the body a potential cancer cell.
Malignancies are believed to arise when an accumulation of "oncogenic" changes to key genes within a cell leads to the abnormal growth and transformation of that cell. Gene mutations typically happen through a direct insult, such as the cell being exposed to radiation or chemicals, or simply through random error when the gene is improperly copied before cell division. Because the rare stem cells are the only long-lived cells in the organs where most cancers develop, they represent a much smaller potential reservoir for cumulative genetic damage that could eventually lead to cancer. Unfortunately, because stem cells are so long-lived, they also become the most likely repository for such damage.

Indeed, stem cells' longevity would explain why many cancers develop decades after tissues are subjected to radiation--the initial injury may be only the first in a series of mutations required to transform a healthy cell into a malignant one. In addition to accumulating and preserving these oncogenic scars, a stem cell's enormous proliferative capacity makes it an ideal target for malignancy. Because nature so strictly regulates self-renewal, a cell population already possessing that ability would need fewer additional mutations for malignant transformation than would cells lacking that capacity.
Several possible paths to malignancy become apparent.
With these considerations in mind, several possible paths to malignancy become apparent. In one model, mutations occur in the stem cells themselves, and their resulting loss of control over self-renewal decisions produces a pool of stem cells predisposed to malignancy. Subsequent additional oncogenic events that trigger proliferation of the malignant cells into a tumor might happen in the stem cells or in their descendants, the committed progenitor cell population. A second model holds that oncogenic mutations initially occur in stem cells but that the final steps in transformation to cancer happen only in the committed progenitors. This scenario would require the progenitors' lost self-renewal capacity to be somehow reactivated.
Current evidence supports both models in different cancers. And at least one example exists of both processes playing a role in different stages of the same disease. Chronic myelogenous leukemia is a cancer of the white blood cells caused by the inappropriate fusion of two genes. Insertion of the resulting fused gene will transform a normal hematopoietic stem cell into a leukemia stem cell. Untreated, CML invariably progresses to an acute form known as CML blast crisis. Catriona Jamieson and Irving Weissman, both then at the Stanford University School of Medicine, demonstrated that in patients who progressed to CML blast crisis, the specific additional genetic events responsible for this more virulent version of the disease had conferred the ability to self-renew on certain progenitor cells.
Steady Pursuit Over the past decade, evidence that stem cells could become malignant and that only certain cancer cells shared a variety of traits with stem cells strengthened the idea that the driving force underlying tumor growth might be a subpopulation of stemlike cancer cells. The theory has a longer history, but in the past the technology to prove it was lacking.
By the 1960s a few scientists were already beginning to note that groups of cells within the same tumor differed in their ability to produce new tumor tissue. In 1971 C. H. Park and his colleagues at the University of Toronto showed that within a culture of cells taken from an original, or "primary," myeloma (a cancer affecting plasma cells in bone marrow), the cells displayed significant differences in their ability to proliferate. At the time, Park's group could not interpret this phenomenon decisively, because at least two explanations were possible: all the cells might have had the ability to multiply in culture but by chance only some of them did, or else a hierarchy of cells was present in the tumor and cancer stem cells were giving rise to cells that were nontumorigenic, or incapable of proliferation.

Philip J. Fialkow of the University of Washington had already demonstrated in 1967 that the stem cell model was probably the correct one for leukemia. Using a cell-surface protein marker called G-6-PD, which can identify a cell's lineage, Fialkow showed that in some women with leukemia, both the tumorigenic cells as well as their more differentiated nontumorigenic progeny had all arisen from the same parent cell.

These early studies were critical in the development of the stem cell model for cancer, but they were still limited by researchers' inability to isolate and examine different cell populations within a tumor. A key event in stem cell biology, therefore, was the commercial availability, beginning in the 1970s, of an instrument called a flow cytometer, which can automatically sort different living cell populations based on the unique surface markers they bear.
A second crucial event in the evolution of cancer stem cell studies was the advent during the 1990s of conclusive tests for self-renewal. Assays to establish self-renewal in human cells did not exist until Weissman of Stanford and John E. Dick of the University of Toronto developed methods that allowed normal human stem cells to grow in mice. Using flow cytometry and this new mouse model, Dick began in 1994 to publish a series of seminal reports identifying cancer stem cells in leukemia. In 2003 Richard Jones of Johns Hopkins University identified a cancer stem cell population in multiple myeloma.
Earlier the same year our own laboratory group at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor had published the first evidence of cancer stem cells in solid tumors. By transplanting sorted populations of cells from human breast tumors into mice, we were able to confirm that not all human breast cancer cells have the same capacity to generate new tumor tissue. Only one subpopulation of the cells was able to re-create the original tumor in the new environment. We then compared the phenotype, or physical traits, of those new tumors with that of the patient samples and found that the profile of the new tumors recapitulated the original. This finding indicated that the transplanted tumorigenic cells could both self-renew and give rise to all the different cell populations present in the original tumor, including the nontumorigenic cells.
Our study attested to the presence of a hierarchy of cells within a breast cancer similar to those identified in blood malignancies. Since then, the investigation of cancer stem cell biology has exploded, as labs across the world continue to find similar subpopulations of tumorigenic cells in other forms of cancer. In 2004, for example, the laboratory of Peter Dirks of the University of Toronto identified cells from primary human central nervous system tumors with the capacity to regenerate the entire tumor in mice. In addition, he found a high number of the purported cancer stem cells present in one of the fastest-growing forms of human brain cancer, medulloblastoma, compared with far fewer tumorigenic cells found in less aggressive brain tumor types.
A related area of recent intensive investigation is also providing support for the cancer stem cell model. The signaling environment, or niche, in which tumors reside appears to strongly influence the initiation and maintenance of malignancy. Studies of normal body cells as well as of stem cells have already established the essential role of signals emanating from surrounding tissue and the supportive extracellular matrix in sustaining a given cell's identity and in directing its behavior. Normal cells removed from their usual context in the body and placed in a dish have a tendency to lose some of their differentiated functional characteristics, for example. Stem cells, in contrast, must be cultured on a medium that provides signals telling them to remain undifferentiated, or they will quickly begin proliferating and differentiating--seemingly as though that is their default programmed -behavior, and only the niche signals hold it in check.

In the body, stem cell niches are literal enclaves surrounded by specific cell types, such as stromal cells that form connective tissue in the bone marrow. With a few exceptions, stem cells always remain in their niche and are sometimes physically attached to it by adhesion molecules. Progenitor cells, on the other hand, move away from the niche, often under escort by guardian cells, as they become increasingly differentiated.
The importance of niche signaling in maintaining stem cells' undifferentiated state and in keeping them quiescent until they are called on to produce new cells suggests that these local environmental signals could exert similar regulatory control over cancer stem cells. Intriguing experiments have shown, for example, that when transplanted into a new niche, stem cells predisposed to malignancy because of oncogenic mutations will nonetheless fail to produce a tumor. Conversely, normal stem cells transplanted into a tissue environment that has been previously damaged by radiation do give rise to tumors.
Many of the same genetic pathways identified with signaling between stem cells and their niche have been associated with cancer, which also suggests a role for the niche in the final transition to malignancy. For example, if malignant stem cells were being held in check by the niche but the niche was somehow altered and expanded, the malignant stem cell pool would have room to grow as well. Another possibility is that certain oncogenic mutations within cancer stem cells could permit them to adapt to a different niche, again letting them increase their numbers and expand their territory. Still a third alternative is that mutations might allow the cancer stem cells to become independent of niche signals altogether, lifting environmental controls on both self-renewal and proliferation.
Closing In The implications of a stem cell model of cancer for the way we understand as well as treat malignancies are clear and dramatic. Current therapies take aim against all tumor cells, but our studies and others have shown that only a minor fraction of cancer cells have the ability to reconstitute and perpetuate the malignancy. If traditional therapies shrink a tumor but miss these cells, the cancer is likely to return. Treatments that specifically target the cancer stem cells could destroy the engine driving the disease, leaving any remaining nontumorigenic cells to eventually die off on their own.
Circumstantial evidence supporting this approach already exists in medical practice. Following chemotherapy for testicular cancer, for example, a patient's tumor is examined to assess the effects of treatment. If the tumor contains only mature cells, the cancer usually does not recur and no further treatment is necessary. But if a large number of immature-looking--that is, not fully differentiated--cells are present in the tumor sample, the cancer is likely to return, and standard protocol calls for further chemotherapy. Whether those immature cells are recent offspring that indicate the presence of cancer stem cells remains to be proved, but their association with the disease prognosis is compelling.
Stem cells cannot be identified based solely on their appearance, however, so developing a better understanding of the unique properties of cancer stem cells will first require improved techniques for isolating and studying these rare cells. Once we learn their distinguishing characteristics, we can use that information to target cancer stem cells with tailored treatments. If scientists were to discover the mutation or environmental cue responsible for conferring the ability to self-renew on a particular type of cancer stem cell, for instance, that would be an obvious target for disabling those tumorigenic cells.
Encouraging examples of this strategy's promise have been demonstrated by Craig T. Jordan and Monica L. Guzman of the University of Rochester. In 2002 they identified unique molecular features of malignant stem cells believed to cause acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and showed that the cancer stem cells could be preferentially targeted by specific drugs. Last year they reported their discovery that a compound derived from the feverfew plant induces AML stem cells to commit suicide while leaving normal stem cells unaffected.

Some research groups are hoping to train immune cells to recognize and go after cancer stem cells. Still others are exploring the use of existing drugs to alter niche signaling in the hope of depriving cancer stem cells of the environmental cues that help them thrive. Yet another idea under investigation is that drugs could be developed to force cancer stem cells to differentiate, which should take away their ability to self-renew.
Most important is that cancer investigators are now on the suspects' trail. With a combination of approaches, aimed at both targeting genetic pathways unique to the maintenance of cancer stem cells and disrupting the cross talk between tumor cells and their environment, we hope to be able soon to find and arrest the real culprits in cancer.

Summary:
In this article Clarke and Becker talk about how new reasearch is proving that cancerous cells are not all the same throughout a tumor. It is also stated that some of the variety of these cells may come from stem cells. This thought still occurred to cases that happened almost a decade after the stem cells were added because of the longevity of the stem cells. When they proliferate they don't always send the same messages on or in some cancerous cases they do. Through all this research it was also found that many different forms of cancers could not reproduce themselves when injected into other subjects; such as mice. Nobody got much closer to finding out how to stop cancer just other ways that cancer might be started.

Response:
Since I am mainly against stem cell research anyways this article not only furthered my point but added new ones to it. Stem cells can do good things for some people though done at the cost of embryo's lives. Not all stem cells completely do their job they sometimes cause cancer after being subjected to radiation. Should this be a surprise to many people... no because we don't let pregnant women even be subject to x-rays because it would damage the living baby that she is carrying. So when people decide to link to things together they may get that if you've been injected with stem cells maintain some of the same things that preganant women do.

A Link Between Abortion and Breast Cancer?

http://discovermagazine.com/2003/feb/feathated/article
Endocrinologist, Joel Brind, stumbled across an article in 1992 arguing that teenage girls who get pregnant seem to have a built-in protection against breast cancer. Brind asked himself, "What happens if the teen terminates her pregnancy?" Brind began to study and became convinced that abortion was a significant risk factor for breast cancer. He found that after only a few days of pregnancy, the corpus lutem secretes hormones which cause the breasts to increase in size. After a termination the woman is left with cells that are more likely to be sensitive to carcinogenic stimuli which increases a woman's chance of developing breast cancer by 30%.
Brind teamed up with other endocrinologists and a biostatician with different views on abortion but a desire to reduce the risk of breast cancer. They found that in a study with female rats, the rats who have had abortions more easily developed cancer. Brind also questions both healthy women and women with breast cancer about their pregnancy decisions and found that breast cancer was more common in women who had abortions.
Brind has found it very difficult to spread the results of his findings due to the number of organizations who are trying to keep these studies silent. Despite the efforts of the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the World Health Organization Brind thas fought hard to spread awareness. Many states have considered passing laws which require abortions clinics to inform the women of the link and two states have already passed the law.
Many believe Brind to be a bias scientist who is manipulating statistics to support his own view on abortion. Those who oppose Brind believe that many of the women who are questioned about their pregnancy history are lying due to shame. They also argue that the link between abortion and breast cancer cannot be proven due to too many variables. The argument continues on as Brind and other medical scientists search for facts that prove or disprove the link between abortion and cancer.

Response: The article tends to oppose Brind and his findings but I believe the link to be logical and seemingly factual. I think it's interesting that his "team members" (the other scientists who are trying to prove the link factual) are pro-choice but still see abortion to be a risk. It makes perfect sense that if you stop a natural process, which God especially created for a specific purpose, there will be repercussions. I find myself wanting to believe Brind to be correct not so that women who have abortions will develop cancer (that's not what i want) but to prove that God creates life and when you mess with it, everything is out of sorts.

New Predictors of Disease

Autoimmune diseases constitute the third leading cause of sickness and death, behind only heart disease and cancer. There are more than forty known autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. These diseases and others may soon be predicted and therefore, prevented almost ten years in advance. Antibodies directed against a body's own tissues and cells, called autoantibodies, can sometimes be created many years before clinical symptoms begin. By detecting these autoantibodies, doctors will be able to predict, to a certain extent, the likliehood that a disease will arise in the future.

Scientists first discovered the possibility of predictive autoantibodies when studying type 1 diabetes. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. After a disease is classified as "autoimmune", scientists can begin hunting for that disease's specific autoantigens . The autoantigens are the specific molecules that the autoantibodies target. Three autoantigens were subsequently discovered for type 1 Diabetes. With one of these corresponding autoantibodies, a patient has a 10 percent risk of exhibiting symptoms in the next five years; with two, a 50 percent chance; and with all three known autoantibodies, the risk raises to between 60 to 80 percent. This is not only good for its inherent predictive information, but it can also help researchers narrow down a field of subjects for preventive therapy testing. In the case of another autoimmune disease, however, preventive medicines have already been discovered. An autoantibody has been found to be present in 30-70 percent of patients diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis up to 10 years before clinical problems arose. Early or even preemptive treatment of this disease could severely slow the symptoms of this arthritis.
Other uses for these predictive autoantibodies include:to avoid known triggers in the environment for an autoimmune disease likely to develop; to gauge the rate and severity of an existing autoimmune disease; and to reveal diseases, previously thought not to be autoimmune, as autoimmune. Much more research needs to be done on these autoanitbodies and theit autoimmune diseases before they can be implemented into hospitals and doctor offices, but, in the near future, an autoantibody screening may become as standard as checking blood pressure.

I found this article to be very interesting not only because of the biological information presented, but also because it showed an insight into the research involved in order to use the newly discovered information. I guess I underestimate the amount of research that must be done before any action can be taken. Also the new information brings up ideas for new technology that must be designed, manufactured, and than sold at a cheap price in order for the benefits reach the masses.This is a side of science that you don't often see, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of that.

Buff and Brainy

http://sciencenews.org/articles/20060225/bob10.asp

Thousands of people go to the gym every day to lose weight, feel healthier, or tone up their muscles, but few people know that exercising is not just to improve those three things. Studies have also shown that working out significantly buffs up your brain. These studies have proved that fitness helps healthy brains to function at their optimal levels. Exercising helps nerve cells multiply, strenghten their connections, and protect them from harm. This finding could be a form of treatment for disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and spinal cord injuries.

After doing various tests on mice, researchers concluded that the reason the brain is stimulated while doing exercise is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. Researchers describe BDNF as a protein that directs the brain, along with other neural health, and promoting their chemicals to spring into action. When exercise occurs, the amount of BDNF increases, causing the brain to be stimulated. Carl Cotman, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine describes BDNF saying, "I think of BDNF as a brain fertilizer. BDNF makes the cells grow like crazy."

In order to test to see if exercising did in fact increase brain productivity, researchers separated a number of mice into two separate cages; one of which had running wheels for the mice and one of which had no wheels. During a period of several weeks, the researchers kept track of the activity of the active mice. The mice ran an average of 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) per night. The mice were then placed in a popular testing place known as the Morris Water Maze. The mice swam at a similar speed, however the mice that were active over the several week period found the platform (the end of the maze) much faster than the sedentary mice.

Researchers have also dissected the brains of the two groups of mice and found that the mice who exercised had nearly twice the amount of brain neurons as the sedentary mice.

Although the evidence that exercising is good for the brain is increasing, the amount of people exercising in the United States is plummeting. In a recent survey taken by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 20% of people 18 and older exercise for less than 10 minutes a week. This lack of exercise not only increases the chance of heart attacks and other health problems, it also effects the health of the brains in the United States. Dr. David Albeck of the University of Colorado said, "It's never too late to start working out." No matter what the age, improvement is made in memory and learning when exercise is work into your schedule. Michael Zigmond, of the University of Pittsburgh concludes by saying, "If somebody were to stop me in the street and ask me what to do, I wouldn't have any problem telling them to exercise. There are lots of reasons to exercise, and virtually no reason not to."

This article was very interesting because when people exercise, they usually exercise to improve their outward appearance or to improve their cardiovascular health. Although it is not generally recognized as a common benefit to working out regularly, evidence certainly supports the theory that exercise can improve your mental health as well as "buffing the brain." It will also be interesting to see if this can further help the prevention of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Stem cells found in adult hair follicles may provide alternative to embryonic stem cells

http://www.brightsurf.com/news/headlines/28015/Stem_cells_found_in_adult_hair_follicles_may_provide_alternative_to_embryonic_stem_cells.html

December 12, 2006 - Having recently identified the molecular signature of these epidermal neural crest stem cells in the mouse, their research resolves conflicting scientific opinions by showing that these cells are distinctly different from other types of skin-resident stem cells/progenitors. Their work provides a valuable resource for future mouse neural crest stem cell research.

A report on the research from Dr. Maya Sieber-Blum's laboratory, co-authored by Yao Fei Hu, Ph.D., and Zhi-Jian Zhang, Ph.D., researchers in cell biology, neurobiology and anatomy at the Medical College, was published in a recent issue of Stem Cells: The International Journal of Cell Differentiation and Proliferation.

Epidermal neural crest stem cells are found in the bulge of hair follicles and have characteristics that combine some advantages of embryonic and adult stem cells, according to lead researcher, Maya Sieber-Blum, Ph.D., professor of cell biology, neurobiology & anatomy. Similar to embryonic stem cells, they have a high degree of plasticity, can be isolated at high levels of purity, and can be expanded in culture. Similar to other types of adult stem cells, they are readily accessible through a minimally invasive procedure and could lead to using a patient's own hair as a source for therapy without the controversy or medical issues of embryonic stem cells.

"We see the potential for cell replacement therapy in which patients can be their own donors, which would avoid ethical issues and reduce the possibility of tissue incompatibility," says Dr. Sieber-Blum.

The Medical College team in collaboration with Prof. Martin Schwab, director of the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zürich, recently injected these cells in mice with spinal cord injuries. According to the study, when grafted into the spine, the cells not only survived, but also demonstrated several desirable characteristics that could lead to local nerve replacement and re-myelination (restoration of nerve pathways and sheaths).

Neural crest stem cells generate a wide array of cell types and tissues and actually give rise to the autonomic and enteric nervous systems along with endocrine cells, bone and smooth muscle cells. The cells can be isolated from the hair follicle bulge as multipotent stem cells, and then expanded in culture into millions of cells without losing stem cell markers.

"We grafted the cells into mice that have spinal cord injuries and were encouraged by the results. The cells survived and integrated into the spinal cord, remaining at the site of transplantation and not forming tumors," Dr. Sieber-Blum says.

According to Dr. Sieber-Blum, subsets of the epidermal neural crest stem cells express markers for oligodendrocytes, the nerve-supporting cells that are essential for proper neuron function. She has been awarded a grant from the Biomedical Technology Alliance, a Milwaukee inter-institutional research group, to determine in collaboration with Brian Schmit, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at Marquette University, if the grafts lead to an improvement of spinal reflexes in the injured spinal cord of mice.

Dr. Sieber-Blum points out that the cells may also be useful to treat Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, Hirschsprung's disease, stroke, peripheral neuropathies and ALS. Certain defects of the heart, and bone defects (degeneration, craniofacial birth defects) could also be treated through neural crest stem cell replacement therapy. Together, these conditions affect over 11 million people today in the US and are estimated to annually cost more than $170 billion.

Summary
This new research has found that stem cells from a mouse's hair follicles can be transplanted into the spinal cord and actually replace the damaged cells. The stem cells didn't form tumors and were accepted by the spinal cord. Dr. Maya Sieber-Blum believes that this could become a cell replacement therapy in humans that will work more conveniently and without ethical controversy. The stem cells would possibly be able to cure many diseases that over 11 million people suffer with in the United States.

Response
This new find is encouraging because of the success that it has had in mice. If people could use their own hair for stem cells it would much easier and convenient for everybody in the treatment of the patient. Also it would relieve ethical issues over the use of stem cells. The compatibility of the stem cells with the tissue in the body wouldn't be a problem either, which is a positive. I believe that in the years to come this discovery will be more efficient and will be a very helpful treatment for people who need it.

Chili Pepper Cocktail Blunts Pain

http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?articleID=674E972E-E7F2-99DF-39A3406D0D2B2A7C&chanID=sa022

A Harvard medical study shows that a key ingredient in chili peppers, along with a small amount of an anesthetic , could be perfect for ending pain during any type of surgery without the potentially dangerous side effects of "straight" anesthesia.

The reasearchers say a combination of capsaicin ( the thing that gives chili peppers their bite)and an anesthetic used by dentists that relieves inflammed, itchy skin, numbs the pain-sensing nerve cells without interrupting the other nuerons that are controlling other functions in your body. There is only one problem: they found that it won't work unless you get the "cocktail" inside of the nerve cells.

A physiology prfessor, David Julius, discovered that capsiacin binds selectively to a protein that lives on the membranes of the pain-sensing nuerons. When capsaicin binds to these proteins (called TRVP1) it causes the protein to "open" and lead to a small channel in the membrane (the nuerons not-containing TRVP1 are not affected). They also believe the anesthetic molecule (QX-314) will be small enough to go through the channel. If this is true, injecting the capsiacin first should clear the way, opening the channel for the QX-314 to come in and shut the cells down.

The researchers working on this theory tested it using nerve cells from rat's spinal cords placed in a petri dish. They found that electrical activity in the pain-sensing nerve cells dipped after injections of the capsiacin followed by the anesthetic. This shows that the cells would be too weak to send messages to the brain. They then did two more experimants, yet again, using rats. In one, they injected the "cocktail" into the rat's paws and placed them on heated surfaces until the rats felt pain. All of the rats in this test were numb even to the highest level of heat they were exposed to. In the second test, they injected it into the rat's sciatic nerves (the nerves in charge of the sensations in the lower back and extremities). Then they poked the rats with nylon probes at varied strengths to which half of them didn't react to even the strongest jab.

A potential side effect of regular anesthesia- temporary paralysis- wasn't experienced among any of the rats in either experiment, which indicates that the "cocktail" worked and only targeted the pain-sensing nerves. The injection also seemed to last an average of up to four hours.

Although this seems to be a major breakthrough there is still one thing that needs to be overcome; the burning sensation of the capsaicin. If the QX compound silences the nerve fast enough then it should work quite well, without very much irritation. There are scientists currently working on how to eliminate this negative effect by reversing the order of the substances. The team is also trying to look for another substance that is similar to the capsiacin to replace it without having the irritating side effects.

Review

This discovery could be a very successful breakthrough to reduce the risks and possible side effects of regular anesthesia. Though, if they do not find a proper substitute for the capsiacin it could be useless because then there would be another side effect that was created. This is the one element, I believe, that is holding this discovery back.

He Thinks, She thinks

How different are men from women? Are men and women's brains really different or is it a result of their environment? Recent studies done by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and professors at numerous universities have shown that gender differences do actually occur because of specific differences in the brain.
The brain is made up of two hemispheres. Each hemisphere controls the way that specific tasks are carried out. The right hemisphere is more visually oriented and the left is more logically oriented and is the control center for language. When women are called upon to do a task, they use both hemispheres simultaneously. Men tend to use one or the other at a time.
The structure of the male brain verses the female brain is distinctly different. The male brain is made of mostly white matter. White matter is constructed of long neuron fibers with a fatty myelin coating. The white matter is bulky and not very dense. Women’s brains, on the other hand, are eleven percent more dense than men’s and are made more gray matter than white. Gray matter is areas of neuron cell bodies. Women’s brains are also smaller than men’s and have a greater blood flow.
These differences in brain structure are the basic causes of the behavioral and learning differences in males and females. Women are generally more efficient than men in verbal and memory skills. At girls tend to be able to develop language skills sooner than boys. The male brain is stronger in areas like focus, processing, and navigation. Men are also more likely to get developmental disorders such as dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, and autism. Women’s brains are more resilient to these disorders because they tend to use both hemispheres more efficiently than men.
The brain structure also explains why men and women have differences in they way they handle anger. When women are angry their brain triggers the orbital frontal cortex, which controls “cool-headed decision making”, and the left hemisphere, which controls the inner environment and emotions. When men are angry their brains trigger the amygdala’s right hemisphere, which controls adrenaline and is more “in tune with the outside world.”
Even with all these differences, male and female brains operate with the same efficiency. The brain just accomplishes the tasks it is given in distinctly different ways.

I think that the way our brains use the different hemispheres is very interesting. The way that men and women use either one hemisphere or both determines how they think and act. I think its amazing that all this happens in our brains involuntarily without us having to make one conscious thought. If we had to make all those decisions, I cant imagine the effort that would take! Pretty much, our brain is amazing.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/she-thinks/article_print