Anatomy Shared Article Research

A New Movement in Parkinson’s

2009-05-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

By: Adrienne Lindsey

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-movement-in-parkinson-2005-07

My Summary:

Parkinson’s disease is among the most prevalent of neurological disorders. It is estimated that at least four million people have it worldwide. It is also estimated that about 500,000 to one million people have the disease in North America, with about 50,000 cases being diagnosed each year. These numbers are expected to double by the year 2040 as the world’s elderly population grows. James Parkinson first described this neurodegenerative disease in the 1800s as “shaking palsy”.
Like other neurodegenerative diseases, Parkinson’s is on its way to surpassing cancer as the leading cause of death in the elderly. But the elderly are not the only ones affected by this debilitating disease. About fifty percent of cases are diagnosed or start before the age of forty. Although treatments such as drugs and brain stimulation for the disease do exist, researchers have not yet found a way to prevent or slow down the onset of Parkinson’s. However, in recent years scientists who study the role of proteins have linked some proteins to the genetic foundations of this disease. Such findings give hope that the cause of the disease can be identified.
Many people are familiar with the affects of Parkinson’s due to the efforts of celebrities in recent years that currently live with the disease. Parkinson’s is characterized by movement disorders. Tremor in hands, arm rigidity, impaired balance and coordination and slowness of movement are some of the disease’s chief symptoms. Some also have trouble walking, talking and sleeping among other things. Such impairments are a result of neurons dying. The cells that are hit the hardest are those that produce the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Initially the brain can function normally, but when half or more of the cells disappear the brain can no longer support them. In the case of Parkinson’s the damages to the brain that are seen through autopsies are protein masses also featured in Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s. Investigators debate on whether the protein clusters cause destruction or whether they try to protect and remove toxic molecules from the neurons.
In recent years scientists have come to believe that Parkinson’s develops when some form of injury to the substantia nigra triggers a cascade of cellular stresses. These stresses result in a wealth of misfolded proteins that congregate. Chaperones star eliminating proteins that cannot be refolded and when the production of poorly folded proteins overwhelms the body’s ability to process them neuronal death follows. Recently scientists have found that perhaps chaperone-type drugs can be developed to limit degeneration in people. Scientists also believe that gene therapy could possibly be used to trigger the production of needed chaperones. Although there is still so much to be learned about Parkinson’s disease, the cellular insights that have come about encourage researchers and give hope for the development of future treatments that could improve and help control this disorder.

My Response:
I was encouraged to read about all of the new research that had come about regarding Parkinson’s disease. Although I don’t know anyone personally who is affected by the disease, I have seen celebrities who have the disease and how it affects them. I was also astonished at the growth of this disease. 50,000 new cases a year is a little scary. I was surprised to hear that half of new Parkinson’s cases affect those forty and under. The fact that the number will double in the next twenty years also concerned me. It is good to know that efforts are being made to improve the lives of those with this disease.

Cure in the Mind

2009-05-28T23:34:00.000-07:00

Summary:

A man referred to as “Mr. Wright” was dying from cancer of the lymph nodes. His neck, groin, chest, and abdomen were being occupied by orange-size tumors. Doctors had tried many treatments, none of which were successful. “Psychological Variables in Human Cancer”, a report by psychologist Bruno Klopfer of the University of California, Los Angeles had convinced Mr. Wright that Krebiozen, a newly discovered anticancer drug was the answer. Prior to receiving his first treatment, Mr. Wright was bedridden and gasping for each breath. Within just three days Mr. Wright was happily walking around and making jokes, and his tumors had shrunk to half their size. Ten days later he was released from the hospital. Others patients who received the same treatment of Krebiozen remained unaffected by the treatment.

During the next two months Mr. Wright was troubled by reported who questioned Krebiozen’s efficiency, and suffered a relapse. The doctors decided to test the placebo effect with Mr. Wright. They told him that a new doubly effective version of Krebiozen was arriving the next day, which thrilled Mr. Wright. This time after receiving the treatment, which contained absolutely no Krebiozen, Mr. Wright improved even more than he had after receiving the actual Krebiozen the first time. After a short while he left the hospital with no remaining symptoms. Over the next two months Mr. Wright remained perfectly healthy, until he read reports stating that Krebiozon was a worthless/useless treatment; he died within the next few days. Mr. Wright’s case is an example of the placebo effect, of how a patient’s expectations and beliefs can affect the course of their illnesses.

The psychological component of placebos can help to alleviate pain, depression, and anxiety as well as to lessen symptoms of certain diseases or as in Mr. Wright’s case shrink tumors. New research has shown that placebo effect does not only arise from a conscious belief, but also subconscious associations between recovery and the actual experience of being treated. If a patient has previously experienced a situation, for example: receiving a shot, that has made them feel better, a reenactment of the same situation could (with the placebo solution in the shot of course) have the same effect.

My Response:

I think it is really interesting that Mr. Wright’s adamant belief in the supposedly “anticancer” drug Krebiozen was enough to shrink the size of his tumor drastically. It reminds me when the Bible talks about having faith as small as a mustard seed. Mr. Wright truly believed that Krebiozen would cure him; it ended up that it was actually the drug but his belief in the drug that cured him. Within mere days of learning that Krebiozen was worthless Mr. Wright died-it was as if the rug had been pulled out from under him. In a similar way when we lack faith we fall flat on our faces, which reminds me of when Peter walked on the water with Jesus but as soon as he looked down he become afraid and began to sink. Faith is crucial to the Christian walk.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=placebo-effect-a-cure-in-the-mind

Addicted to Starvation: The Neurological Roots of Anorexia

2009-05-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

Out of the United States population, up to 3.7 percent of girls and women suffer from anorexia. Twenty percent of these young girls and women will die because of it. This high death rate makes anorexia the most deadly mental illness found in young females. Anorexia is characterized by several behaviors: compulsive dieting (or not eating at all), compulsive exercise, obsession, constant pursuit of thinness and constant dissatisfaction with ones own body. Over the years, society continues to blame media, Hollywood, and even families for girls’ ongoing struggle with anorexia. But if it were just the pursuit of a better physique that influenced these women and girls to partake in anorexic behaviors, then why do they continue to afflict themselves with starvation long after their bodies have reached the point of emaciation? Furthermore, culture and environment alone, although capable of great influence, cannot account for an anorexics loss of the necessary survival instinct, that is, to eat as a reaction hunger.
Anorexia is not just a reaction to negative influence; it’s a full blown mental illness. The effects of anorexia go far beyond mere changes in appetite. In fact anorexia can be directly related to a disturbance in the brain’s reward circuitry that causes loss of enjoyment in life’s many pleasures such as: winning a game, vacation, sex, and most importantly eating. This disturbance in the brain’s reward circuitry not only can deprive an anorexic of feeling pleasure when eating, but can in turn generate pleasure when they are being starved. When the majority of population diets, their metabolic rate slows down and they feel tired, sluggish, even agitated. On the other hand, when an anorexic is in a state of dieting (starvation) their metabolic rate actually increases. They feel more alert, energetic, and just better overall. This particular characteristic of anorexia has lead many doctors and scientist to believe that anorexia is underlined by a seemingly dangerous drug addiction, in which case the drug is starvation itself. Like anorexia’s drug, that is, starvation, many drugs of abuse act on the brain’s reward circuitry. These drugs specifically affect a pleasure hub called the nucleus accumbens in order to increase the levels of a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which in turn rapidly promotes good feelings (in the case of abused drugs, causes a “high”). After several tests scientists were able to link activation of the brains reward system to the lack of appetite found in anorexics. This significant connection proves that an anorexic individual is completely capable of linking reward to hunger, therefore, becoming addicted to starvation the same way an individual may become addicted to a drug of abuse.
There are many reasons why one might turn to anorexia (media, pressure, family, depression, control), but there are several biological reasons why a certain individual person may be specifically prone to anorexia. The most common biological reason for being at risk for anorexia is chronic anxiety. About eighty to ninety percent of anorexics report suffering from chronic anxiety before becoming anorexic. Their anxiety brings about a sense of perfectionism which has the consequence of feeling as though one must live up to society’s standards, avoid mistakes, and avoid anything negative. The second reason for the onset of anorexia is hormones, specifically estrogen. Puberty tends to be the most prominent trigger of anorexia. Forty percent of newly reported cases of anorexia are found in teenage girls ages fifteen to nineteen. The final reason for the onset of anorexia is the deprivation of food. A person who has been exposed to starvation over a period of time, such as one who is fasting, or dieting, is susceptible to becoming anorexic as well. Even normal men with no former symptoms of anorexia, began showing anorexic like behavior after going through twenty-four weeks of eating nearly half their normal calorie intake. If anorexia in a normal male could be spawned by deprivation of calories, then there are millions more out there susceptible to this dangerous illness.

My Response:
Having known several persons who have struggled with anorexia, I have sadly witnessed its consequences. For example, one friend of mine is no longer capable of having children because of her inability to quit starving herself. She would constantly get better then relapse again. Until reading this article I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just eat, but it’s so much more than that. After reading this I realize how hard it must be for someone to stop a habit that makes them feel happiness when without it they feel no pleasure. I also realized how dangerous anorexia really is. Before I viewed it as a phase some people go through that you can quit at anytime. Now I see it is a lot like drug abuse, it’s physically and psychologically hard to quit and stay that way. Anorexia is a downward spiral that is close to impossible to get out of, and with so many who are susceptible to it, we must be careful.
Article: Addicted to Starvation

Can stress cause gray hair?

2009-05-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

People tend to see gray hair at about thirty years of age of men and around thirty-five years of age for women. It can happen earlier or later in life. Is it possible for stress to cause gray hair?
Each person has about 100,000 follicles on their scalp. This is where gray hair is produced from. Hair is assembled from the bottom to the top by keratinocytes. When the cell dies, it becomes keratin. This protein accounts for the texture and strength of hair.
Summary:

Melanin is a pigment made by keratinocytes that gives hair one of two shades: Eumelanin, dark brown or black, and pheomelanin, which is blonde or red. Variations of these create a vast *****.. When hair loses melanin, it turns gray; however, when hair loses pigment, it is white.
Hair cells have a life of anywhere between two and seven years. After it dies and falls out, a new follicle must be made. Stem cells re-make the keratinocytes and melanocytes in the bottom of the hair follicle.
It is unsure if stress truly causes gray hair. Hormones from stress may cause the life of melanocytes to change, but its not proven yet. Stress may cause and inflammation of the hair follicle. This produces free radicals, which are unstable, cell damaging molecules. The creation of these can bleach the melanin, causing gray hair.
General practice physicians have seen that more stressed people tend to gray faster by two or three years on average. Tyler Cyment, Sinai Hospital in Boston, observes that graying is genetic, but lifestyle and stress levels can change the age of graying by five to ten years.

Response:

If graying is really related to stress level, that would be unfortunate. Sometimes people can control their stress level, while others cannot. If someone is constantly being thrown difficult and stressful situations, they could produce gray hair faster. It makes sense for someone to age by genetics. That is the way things are suppose to be. Stress is an outside force that could tamper with the genetic timing.
Thinking about this, it would make sense for Christians to gray later on average than non-Christians. Because of Christ, we do not have to be anxious about anything. Christ paid the price for our mistakes. As humans, we have someone who will take all our problems and give us a peace that surpasses all understanding. We can know that God has a perfect plan for our life and will take care of us. As Christians, our lives should be less stressful because of God's gift of peace.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-stress-causes-gray-hair

Can a person be scared to death?

2009-05-28T19:45:00.000-07:00

Our bodies have a natural protective mechanism called the fight-or-flight response in which our autonomic nervous system responds to life-threatening situations by increasing heart rate, increasing blood flow to muscles, slowing digestion, and dilating pupils. These increase in order to give us the chance to out run or fight off danger.

The autonomic nervous system uses the hormone adrenaline to send signals to various parts of our body to active the response. This chemical is toxic in large amounts and can damage our internal organs. Almost all sudden deaths are caused by damage to the heart because almost no other organ would fail fast enough to cause sudden death.

When the heart is flooded with too much adrenaline, the chemical lands on the receptors of the cardiac muscle causing calcium channels in the membranes of the those cells to open. The calcium ions rush in and cause the heart to contract. Because there is an overwhelming amount of calcium, it keeps pouring in and the heart won’t be able to relax. The heart then goes into abnormal rhythms that are not compatible with life causing death. The most common of these deadly rhythms is ventricular fibrillation, which is when the ventricles vibrate in a way that impedes their ability to deliver blood to the body.

While someone who is predisposition to heart disease is most likely to suffer a risk, it can happen to someone at any age and even someone who is considered healthy. If doesn’t just have to be fear, it can be any strong emotion such as happiness or sadness. For example, after 9/11 there was an increase of sudden cardiac deaths in New Yorkers.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scared-to-death-heart-attack

My response:

While I have heard the expression of being "scared to death", I never knew that it could actually happen. I have also heard of people dying of sadness after their spouse passed away. What I personally find the most interesting is that someone could be so happy that they would die. I find that to be incredible; yet, after learning about our hearts it makes perfect sense. Our hearts pumps vital oxygen to our brains which tells our bodies how to run. If our heart stops for just a few seconds and our brains do not receive oxygen, it could result in brain death, which is the legal definition of death that refers to the irreversible end of all brain activity, or death.

Can a DVD Teach Emotions?

2009-05-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/04-can-a-dvd-teach-kids-with-autism-to-understand-emotions

Autism is on the rise. It may be from vaccinations or better diagnosing or a higher awareness, but whatever it is, more children have autism now. It had risen ten times in the past two decades. One of the very sad symptoms of autism is that the children have trouble comprehending emotions, especially complex ones, such as jealousy. Simon Baron-Cohen has created a DVD that strives to lessen this gap. He has created a DVD that actually tries to teach emotions.
His DVD, The Transporters, features animated trains with human faces. Actual human faces are used to help the children familiarize what happens in the movies with real life. Children with autism love trains and predictable, one-way movement. Trains are perfect for this because kids with autism like mechanical objects and linear movements. There are eight characters that all move slowly and predictably along the tracks. Simple story lines are incorporated, such as a surprise party or a train stuck on the tracks. The actors portray very clear facial expressions, such as surprise, and the movie names each emotion with a close up of the actor’s face. The movies are about fifteen minutes long and have interactive quizzes and questions, including a guide for the parents. Parent involvement is crucial to the success of the videos; the lessons have to be reinforced in the home.
The DVD was tested by taking three groups of twenty children. The first two groups were formed of highly functioning autistic children very close in age, skills, language, parent background and IQs. The third group consisted of children in the same age bracket that did not have autism. For four weeks Group one watched the videos while groups two and three did not. They were then tested on recognition of facial expressions they had seen in the DVD in new situations with new characters they had not yet seen. Group one improved dramatically and actually tested near the children without autism who had not watched the videos in their ability to recognize and understand emotions.
The videos are believed to work because of Baron-Cohen’s theory of systemizing. Everyone learns, and everyone has to have a way to understand things. People learn and understand things differently and understand on different levels. Autistic children tend to seem separate, lost in their own world. This is because they are extremely aware of things happening- hypersystemizing. Trying to understand the way these kids think is a big part of being able to connect with them and help them learn difficult things.
Some critics thought that the facial expressions were too subtle for autistic children to notice, especially with the eyes. Others mentioned that they thought the videos were unpredictable and hard to follow. This would be a very unfortunate flaw, because the whole video has to do with systematic thinking and movement, especially since it is such a big interest to autistic children.
There are many treatments or attempts of treatments for autism out there. The reality is, with more kids diagnosed with autism, more kids need help. This may be a small step in the right direction but sometimes a small step can be huge to a family. Even if the video doesn’t work a miracle- which it does not claim to do by the way- it is very promising and encouraging and not going to hurt any possible development.

My response: I have no idea why there are so many more autistic children now, but I think it is really great that there is now a DVD to try to help teach them emotions. The fact that he tries to understand the way they think is key. This program is designed to be interesting and interactive while being very helpful. It doesn’t simply repeat and emotion and name it. It is hard to think of not being able to understand emotions- something I can’t really wrap my mind around. That must be very frustrating and confusing. It would be very important for a parent or sibling to be able to connect with their autistic family member in any way, even if it is small thing. I do agree that with autistic or disabled kids that very small things can mean the world and really change things. Even if this DVD is not perfect, I believe that it is a step in the right direction and I hope more people will catch onto this. It is encouraging to see research and programs being developed in a growing area of need. The parents of autistic children would probably be very ready to try this, as it seems to be effective. I haven’t seen any of the videos but this is probably something worth trying over a medication or something with possible side effects. It’s a video. It’s spending time with your child. It just might work. It definitely sounds good to me.

Eyes on th Swine

2009-05-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

We live in an age where the public believes someone, or thing, is always watching. Yet recently the Swine Flu has jumped into the human population. It made its first appearance in March and April, yet by late May officials were still trying to figure out where it came from.

The recent outbreaks of Swine Flu has tested systems that watch for human flu outbreaks, and proves a theory that pigs could be the “mixing vessels” of pandemic viruses. It has also pointed out how little progress has been made showing where and how such viruses evolve and predicting their transmissions to humans. Both would be great in preventing or warning of an approaching pandemic.

Though much funding and attention have been given to flu research, we are no closer to soundly finding animal diseases that could harm humans. For example in 2007 Jürgen A. Richt and his colleagues at the US Department of Agriculture’s National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa found an H2N3 virus thought to have potential in going to humans; no one was interested. They put their findings in a scientific journal concluding with “it would be prudent to establish vigilant surveillance in pigs and in workers who have occupational exposure.”

When speaking of the disease, surveillance means doctors and diagnostic labs report every instance of certain pathogens found. Every human flu case is “reportable” to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDCP tracks the incidence and movement of the illness. In both animals and humans voluntary lab testing only finds a small percentage of cases involving a doctor’s visit. Mandatory reporting and systemic sampling in swine herds are limited to a very small number of devastating illnesses.

Richt thinks veterinary labs could play a bigger part in animal screening by testing every sample for every pathogen. Richt says, “We need a better network to look in animal populations for emerging infectious agents with 21-st century technology.” A couple labs already have the technical ability to do this, says Richt. Microarray chips able to test pigs, cattle, and poultry could give small labs a large capacity to keep watch for microbial threats developing in livestock. Identifying animal flu strains is one thing, but finding whether or not they could pass to human is another thing altogether. “I'm a lot more pessimistic about being able to predict these things,” says Jeffery K. Taubenberger of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He wrote a book about two swine branches of the H1N1 family tree. Both had a common H1N1-type ancestor, but they evolved differently, and little changes have let them transfer to different host species. Scientists looking for clear patterns about whether a virus is switching hosts have failed so far.

Because of this, no one can explain why avian H5N1 has infected about 400 people worldwide, but has, thus far, failed to totally adapt to humans. They also don’t know where the original pandemic virus from 1918 came from or where H1N1, its descendant, is going. H1N1 might fizzle out or learn to pass between people more easily. It could later return powerful or weak.
Taubenberger thinks that if we keep watch over an entire rural ecosystem, we might find some deeper insights as to why and how the flu virus evolves.

Money and research directed toward pandemic preparations have dramatically improved human flu surveillance and response systems. Unfortunately, without closer monitoring of animal sources of flu strain, human surveillance must remain the ultimate first line of defense.

Response
I found it quite interesting that so much goes on behind the scenes with viruses such as the flu. I never had thought about how these viruses develop and change to be able to transfer from animal to human. I had also never heard that the new H1N1 (Swine Flu) outbreak is a descendant of a 1918 pandemic. It’s weird to think that we may come into contact with a flu virus, and later be challenged by the same virus after it has developed and become much stronger.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=eyes-on-the-swine

Musicophobia: When Your Favorite Song Gives You Seizures

2009-05-28T17:51:00.000-07:00

Response: I think this was a very intersing article. It caught my eye because I couldn't understand how your favorite song could give you any seizures. It is so interesting how our brain works. It also amazed me how there were only four people before Stacey Gayle who had ever had the surgery and it was a complete success! It must have taken a great amount of courage and bravery to go through the surgery.

Musicophobia: When Your Favorite Song Gives You Seizures by Nikhil Swaminathan

2009-05-28T17:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=musicophobia-when-your-fa
Stacey Gayle is what we would consider a normal person who loved music. She had many CD’s in her car of her favorite artists and was a active member of her church choir. Everything was fine until Stacey Gayle started having seizures. The first one occurred in her bedroom on March 3, 2005. She was 22 and her mother took her to the hospital from her home in Queens New York. The doctors were able to stabilize her but they could find no reason for the seizure. Later, she went to her friend’s cookout where she blacked out and started to shake uncontrollably.
The Seizures seemed to be occurring randomly until Stacey Gayle noticed a pattern in the spring of 2006. One of the top songs at the time was “Temperature” by Sean Paul and was played at almost every social outing. Every time Stacey Gayle heard the song, she would begin to seize. However, Gayle was afraid that no one would believe her story and told no one but her neurologist, Alan Ettinger at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He offered her many medications but none of them seemed to offer any real help. In order to treat Gayle, Ettinger and a colleague decided to try something new in early 2007. They monitored her for four days to see if she would have a seizure and put a cap over her head to try to observe her brainwaves. Nothing happened and therefore forcing them to release her and her I pod. That night, Gayle listened to “Temperature” and seized over three times. The doctors were amazed that what she said was true.
Throughout the next year Gayle responded in similar ways when songs such as “Umbrella” by Rihanna and “Beautiful Girls” by Sean Kingston came on. The only music that didn’t cause a seizure was classical or jazz, of which Gayle did not particularly like. She had to drop out of school because of people’s phone going off in class. “I remember sitting outside of stores in the mall and crying because I can’t even go shopping or sit in a restaurant and eat” Says Gayle. Doctors began to wonder if they could help her in any way since medication was not working and keeping music away from her was impossible.
The first time anyone heard of musicogenic epilepsy- seizures caused by music- was in a 1937 paper. Ashesh Mehta, a neurosurgeon at LIJ Epilepsy Center says that the condition is “exceedingly” rare and only 150 cases have been reported. Researcher Dan Friedman says that the people are not seizing because of a specific tune “but an emotional reaction to it.”
Scientists still do not know what causes epilepsy although 2.5 million Americans have it. The activity in the brain is very chaotic although it looks as if it were controlled. The brain becomes “unstable when activity patterns sync up” meaning that the brain activity during a seizure is one of activity falling into step says Mehta. Charles Schroeder, a neurologist in Ney York, says “music generates a pattern of rhythmic activity that if the rhythm is similar to a negative pattern that your brain has a tendency toward, the seizures.” When medications will not help, the only way to get rid of seizures is through surgery. They must take out enough, not too much to damage the brain.
Ettinger began to look in this same direction he told Gayle that in order to stop the seizures, he suggested that Mehta remove all of the brain cells that acted throughout her episodes. Gayle at first refused but then called Mehta and decided to do the surgery. This surgery was one of which only four people had ever had before. After some tests, Mehta found that the area of the overexcited brain cells was located in the lower section behind her right ear. Mehta sent her to a nuerophyschologist who put parts of her brain to sleep and gave her speech and memory tests, the areas left would be the ones Mehta would cut out. Gayle went through a surgery in September then one in October. Since then she has been seizure free. She also has had no mental side effects of her surgery.

With a Wave of the Hand: How using gestures can make you smarter

2009-05-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

Summary

Most people have noticed the frequent use of hand gestures during a conversation. You see a man at a hardware store looking ask an employee where the hammers are located while acting out the action of nailing with a hammer. Or you see a woman telling her friends about what her new dress looks like, showing them with her hands how it is shaped. Most people do this. But why do people do this? Is it because they want their listeners to fully understand what they are talking about, or could it possibly be another reason? More and more scientists actually think that the gestures serve the speaker. The belief is that the moving of your hands can help you think more clearly and better. This means that our physical body shapes abstract mental processes so that the speaker can deliver the words easier. Now scientists believe that hand movements may help the person learn, particularly on how students learn how to solve math problems at school.

University researchers did a study focused on how third and fourth graders solving math problems that required grouping. The students who were taught to make a "V" symbol with their index finger and middle finger, pointing to the two terms they were going to combine, learned how to solve the grouping problems better than those who didn't use the "V" gesture. The researchers believe that the use of their hands solidifies the method in the student's mind, such as speech does. This study has brought on a new school of thought, called Embodied Cognition. Embodied Cognition views the basic elements of thought as bodily representations with bases in perception, action, and emotion.

So next time your in a conversation with a friend and they are using hand gestures during the conversation, think about whether they are trying to describe something better, or they are trying to verbalize their thoughts in an easier way.

My Response

This article was very interesting to me because I have a close friend who uses hand gestures just about everytime he talks. It's amazing how deeply connected our brain is to the rest of our body. Even something like this is legitimate evidence for the intelligent design of a creator. Next time I am in a conversation I am definitely going to think about the person's motives in using hand gestures, that is wheter they are using them for me or for themselves.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=with-a-wave-of-the-hand

The Benefits of Bleeding

2009-05-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

http://discovermagazine.com/1997/dec/thebenefitsofble1308/?searchterm=the%20benefits%20of%20bleeding

Before menopause, women suffer only about half as many heart attacks as men of similar age do. After menopause the statistics balance out because estrogen production drops sharply after menopause, the hormone might somehow help ward off heart disease. The monthly loss of blood may protect women from heart disease and men might benefit by blood donation. Dacid Meyers who is a cardiologist at Kansas University, became interested in a possible link between lossing blood and heart disease. In the survey he followed up on 3855 men and women and they were all over 40. he noted how manydonated blood in the past and how many went on to develop heart disease. He found that men who had donated blood at least once in the last 3 years were 30% less likely to have developed heart disease but he found no difference for women between donors and nondonors. The blood loss also reduces their stires of iron. Women have about half as much iron as men. Iron acts as a catalyst in cholesterol oxidation, transforming cholesterol into a more dangerous molecule. Cholesterol is kind of a mild irritant, but oxidized cholesterol is hust a really nasty irritant. The blood loss does indeed lower the risk of heart disease.

I thought the old women get heart attack easily because of the age before i read this article. If we become healther by doneting blood, we should donete our blood so we are gonna be healther and people who need blood for surgery can fine blood easily.

How Could Explosions cause Brain Injuries without Piercing the Skull?

2009-05-28T16:53:00.000-07:00

This article is talking about how people can get brain injuries without actually piercing/damaging their skull. An example used was soldiers. Soldiers can get brain injuries in war without actually getting hit by different pieces of shrapnel. They can get brain injuries from the force of pressure made by the shrapnel or other explosives. If an explosive went off in a close distance from the solider, but it didn’t actually physically hit the soldier, he could still have been hit by the waves of the explosive. The force of pressure could have gone straight through his skull and hit his brain. Scientist Willy Moss and his colleague Michael King proved this at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. They made a three-dimensional simulation of a soldier and had it stand less than 15 feet from an explosive. They used data on blast waves from explosives and properties of the human brain, cerebrospinal fluid, and skull to calculate this experiment. Once the explosive went off Moss stated, “There’s lots of oscillation. The skull is ringing. It’s not pleasant.” He states that the skull is actually flexed and the brain is rippled because the pressure of the blast is so intense. Any change in pressure than our normal atmospheric pressure can do this kind of damage. They then repeated the experiment using helmets that had webbing on the inside. This experiment showed that these helmets actually made more damage to the brain because the helmet trapped the pressure inside and focused the blast. They then tried the experiment with recent helmets with padding on the inside. Even though the pads feel soft, they actually stiffen during the blast causing not only the helmet to flex, but the skull to also. This flexure gets transmitted to your skull. Helmets are still needed though because fragments are still coming after you. This has been proven in the lab and will soon be tested in the field.
I think this article was interesting. When I thought of brain injuries, I thought they were made because of damage done to the skull. It’s interesting to see how waves of an explosive can be so powerful that they actually flex the skull. With all the new technology coming out, we could see how others injuries can come about in the body without the body actually being physically injured. It’s cool.

Five ways to protect yourself and others from swine flu

2009-05-28T16:43:00.000-07:00

1. Wash Your Hands
Don’t touch your face. Keep your hands away from your eyes, nose and mouth, because they serve as pathways to viruses. If you must touch your face scrub your hands, including under your fingernails for twenty to thirty seconds. Wash them with hot soap and water because soap has surfactants in it, which is also used in detergent, which will damage fats that protects the virus.

2. Cover your nose and mouth
Sneezes and coughs contain flu viruses and is why they travel as far as three feet. Maintain at least an arm’s length between people with viral sings. To help others when you sneeze or cough cover your mouth and nose with a tissue. Then wash your hands.

3. Use sanitizer
Use alcohol-based sanitizer. About a quarter sized spot, and rub until the sanitizer evaporates completely. Alcohol inactivates viruses by destroying the structure of their proteins.

4. Consider a mask
Surgical masks could be helpful when needed, but they may not be very effective because they filter out water droplets containing the virus. They do little unless hand washing is also frequent. Use facemasks when it is impossible to avoid crowded areas or close contact with infected people, such as caring for a sick family member.

The article could have done a better job thickening the reasoning behind the protection of swine flu, however the just of the protection options are explained in manner that can be circulated and used in public places.

Stress Fractures

2009-05-28T16:40:00.000-07:00

Sandra is a patient who claimed to have diabetes. When she saw Mark Siegel she was dressed as any normal person would. He tested her diabetes and glucose level, which was in the normal range. Sandra didn't complain about being thirsty, having tingling feet, or having blurred vision, which are the common factors of a diabetic. She didn't have regular doctor visits like she should have done, instead she had been giving herself insulin shots. Although she claimed she was diabetic, Siegel couldn't find any case of her being diabetic. Sandra made an appointment to see Seigel, but she missed it and the next one.

Sandra came back awhile later without an appointment and a different person. She was rude and dressed inappropiatly. Her glucose level was 250mg per deciliter. Normal glucose is 70-140. Sandra came back for another appointment as a total opposite as she was when Siegel first saw her. She claimed her name was Donald and that she was a male of twenty-two years, who was not a diabetic. Siegel decided to send "Donald" to a psychiatrist. Siegel was coming to the conclusion that Sandra was suffering form multiple personality disorder.

Sandra was admitted into the hospital. Siegel thought her different personalities and glucose level was due to her blood sugar. Sandra can't make the insulin she needs to increase her blood sugar. Sandra was there for two months and was reported to have shown forty different personalities. Siegel never did find the actual reason why Sandra was acting like different people. None of her personalities that claimed to be diabetic free were found to have a glucose level higher then 200. She was released from the hospital and is doing well. She has to have five insulin injections a day and still see Siegel and the psychiatrist. In conclusion, the one thing Siegel did find out about Sandra is that she is diabetic.

I thought this article was very interesting. I never knew that someone could have forty different personalities. I was dissappointed to find out that they couldn't find what was exactly wrong with her. It's strange how something so little can mess you up in such a big way.

http://www.discovermagazine.com/1996/may/stressfractures767

Head Attack

2009-05-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

Head Attack
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=head-attack&SID=mail&sc=emailfriend

Summary:

How is your head able to to hurt your heart? Well for example during times of danger the body releases stress hormones, which pour into your blood for the flight or fight response. Stress is also just in everyday life, turning the body into overdrive causing a vicious cycle that can knock us out of our routine giving us more of a chance for arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat). Therefore causing a blockage and most likely later on a heart attack.

It also seems that emotional tension is a significant factor of physical factors. Even Type A personalities are more susceptible to heart attack because their behavior is characterized by ambition, competitiveness and impatience. The agression and hostility sometimes felt by Type As adds more levels of stress at a faster deterioration rate. Anger, depression, hoplessness, and the loss of a loved one can increase the risk of a person getting arrhythmia.

On the bright side, the frontal brain which is important in fibrillation is connected to nerve cell bodies of the sympathetic nervous system in the spinal cord. Meaning we can influence our heart function in a positive way. Another way to slow heart disease, depression and so on is with cognitive behavioral therapy. Along with eating healthy and exercising.

My reaction: I find this article to be a little bit of what I already knew. Of course the brain has some control over the heart, its other things like emotional stuff and stress that adds to the way of the heart... However it was interesting to see in what ways exactly the mind can cause something to happen with the heart, along with the other factors.

The Blind Climber Who “Sees” With His Tongue

2009-05-28T15:28:00.000-07:00

Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoschisis, a disease that is macular degenerative and affects the nerve in the eye. Weihenmayer was completely blind by age thirteen. He had a deep love for climbing and even after going blind he still climbed. In 2001 Weihenmayer was the first and only to date blind man to climb to the summit of Mount Everest.
Now Weihenmayer climbs with the help of a devise called a BrainPort. This tool allows for Weihenmayer to see things with his tongue. People who see with their eyes see things when light hits the retina making electrical impulses and the brain translates them into pictures. The BrainPort takes light and makes it into electrical impulses that stimulate the tongue instead of the retinas and the impulse is sent to the brain and the brain translates them into pictures. Visual inputs are sent from the tongue to the brain in much the same way they would be sent from the eyes of a seeing individual. The tongue is full of tactile nerve endings that can differentiate two points that are less than a millimeter apart.
The information the BrainPort sends to the user is two dimensional. The user sees lines and has to figure out location, dimension, and perspective. When Weihenmayer is climbing with the BrainPort he uses his hand as a scale because he knows its size and distance. He waves his hand in front of the rock that he is reaching for to judge the distance and size.
The BrainPort is a very incredible tool that gives sight to those who would otherwise not be able to see. With the BrainPort Weihenmayer is able to kick a soccer ball back and forth with his daughter from fifteen feet away. He is also able to identify the x’s and o’s in tic-tac-toe. The hard thing for Weihenmayer is to differentiate shadows from objects because the BrainPort is unable to distinguish between them.
Paul Bach-y-Rita a co-creator of the BrainPort believed that one sense could take the place of the other. Kind of like how a blind person can read by using their sense of touch. Bach-y Rita used this idea of substitution to develop the BrainPort. He said that, “We see with our brain and not our eyes.”
The defense advanced Research Agency is also looking into the BrainPort technology and they are funding research for devises that could benefit the military. They want a device that makes it possible for a diver to swim in a straight line in a dense fog at night. Many advancement have been made in this area and are greatly benefiting the blind and military.

Response:
I think that the BrainPort is a great devise that helps those who would otherwise not be able to see anything. It is amazing how the tongue is used to help a blind man see. The idea that the brain uses visual inputs from the tongue and creates an image from them shows how intricate the brain is. I think that it is amazing that people can use their tongue to see when they have lost the use of their eyes.

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/23-the-blind-climber-who-sees-through-his-tongue/?searchterm=the%20blind%20climber

What causes insomnia?

2009-05-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

Summary:

During some time during most people's lives, they will deal with trouble sleeping, usually due to stress or pain. Some of these sleep problems turn into insomnia, which is the inability to fall asleep or to have uninterrupted sleep. Some researchers say that a persons attitude about sleep makes them vulnerable to insomnia.

In 2002, The National Sleep Foundation surveyed over a thousand adults and thirty-five percent said that they had problems sleeping within the last year. Of the thirty-five percent, fifteen percent took sleep medication a few times a month. Age does not seem to be a factor, but other research shows that insomnia increases with age.

Many people believe that depression and anxiety cause insomnia. A study that was done shows the risk of developing depression was 39.8 times higher for insomniacs. Another study done shows that too much sleep can cause depression. Combining these two studies, we can say that insomniacs who are depressed get to much sleep. However, it is known that insomniacs don't get enough sleep, so this statement can't be true.

Evidence is showing that insomniacs are actually getting as much sleep as they need, and maybe more. They spend more time in bed that non-insomniacs. They just underestimate the amount of sleep that they get. One cause of insomnia is voluntarily extending your sleep.

So why would someone spend more time in bed that they actually need? It depends on your attitude towards sleep. Charles M. Morin found that insomniacs have stronger beliefs about the affects of insomnia on mental and physical health. Their mood changes more often and they have a lack of energy. People with sleep-onset insomnia (trouble falling asleep) think about worries and problems prior to sleep and think about what happened throughout the day. One night of bad sleep may make someone stay in bed later or take a longer nap. This could make the insomnia chronic.

It is often said that a person needs eight hour of sleep at night. However, sleep is an individual thing and some people may need more or less than eight hours of sleep.

Even after a good night's sleep, a person is still likely to be drowsy early in the morning. However, if you have trouble staying awake throughout the day, then it most likely means you aren't getting good enough sleep. Taking ten minute naps will most likely refresh you, but longer naps will make you have problems sleeping at night. However, if you're tired and can't fall asleep during the day, it's probably fatigue instead of sleepiness. If a person experiences this kind of tiredness with insomnia, this suggests thath a person is getting more sleep than necessary.

There is therapy that can change attitudes about sleep. Insomniacs should practice "sleep hygiene". Sleep restriction could also help. These treatments are more effective and last longer than medication.

My Reaction:
I really liked this article. I never realized that if you have insomnia you could actually be getting more sleep than you really need. I also never realized that too much sleep could cause depression. I think it's really interesting how not every person needs eight hours of sleep a night and that it varies from person to person. I think it's really cool that they have found ways to help insomnia other than medication.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-causes-insomnia

Head Attack

2009-05-28T12:56:00.001-07:00

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=head-attack

Summary:
Many patients who enter a hospital with a suspected heart attack have experienced the effects the mind can have on the body. Although these patients felt the same symptoms as a heart attack, a physical cause will not be found. The cause is psychosomatic; however, that does not make them insignificant. There could be many causes for these physical attacks, but the one that stands out is stress. Studies show that every year in the U.S. 1.5 million people have heart attacks, and for more than 200,000, it results in death. It is unclear how many of these are related to stress; however, in a study of how people were feeling and what they were doing soon before a heart attack, a very common factor was emotional stress.
Stress has a great effect on the physical body. When the brain senses danger, it causes the body to prepare for a "fight of flight" reaction. The heart pumps harder and faster and blood vessels constrict. This is a good temporary reaction, and it protects us in dangerous situations. When this happens on a daily basis, however, it can have damaging effects. Everyday events, such as runnning late, can cause our bodies to remain under constant stress. This causes our bodies to "keep working in overdrive", which can lead to problems such as hypertension, arrythmia (irregular heartbeat), or a heart attack.
The method in which a person handles problems can influence that person's risk of a heart attack. Individuals who are typically ambitious, competitive, and impatient are known as having a "Type A personality." These individuals are at a higher risk for having heart attacks than those who do not have those traits. This information was gathered from a study done by Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman of people with Type A personalities. Having a Type A personality does not necessarily increase an individual's lifetime risk, but it increases the likelihood that he will have one soon. Another study done by Bruce C. Jonas and James F. Lando shows that strong emotions, such as anger and depression, also increase the risk of a heart attack.
According to multiple studies, the human mind can highly impact the heart. James A. Blumenthal suggests that relaxation techniques are helpful and can reduce the risk of a heart attack. Another good method is "cognitive behavioral therapy." This is when people concentrate on positive events more than negative events. Relationships are also important in reducing stress levels. Other people can help minimize stress. Two other ways to reduce stress are eating healthy foods and exercising on a regular basis. Both have been proven to improve the stress levels of individuals. Through different studies, specialists have shown that as much as physical health can affect our state of mind, our thoughts and emotions can have a powerful effect on our bodies.

My Reaction:
I have definitely experienced some of the effects stress can have on the physical body. I think it's important that we pay attention to the amount of stress in our lives so we can work on reducing it, therefore lowering the risk of health problems, such as a heart attack. Understanding the significance of stress could potentially prevent many people from having a heart attack, because we can learn techniques to help reduce our stress levels. I hope that as more research is done, more treatments can be found that will help more people live longer, healthier lives.

How we find our identities.

2009-05-28T12:31:00.000-07:00

It is a well known fact that teenagers are usually very self conscious. Many wondered why that
might be. A scientist by the name of Sarah Blakemore did a study on this and noticed how when thinking of one's self, a teen tends to think of what other people think of them. She discovered the part of the brain used when thinking of one's identity is the medial prefrontal cortex. (MPFC) In people this part of the brain develops last. This would explain why many teens have a self conscious demeanor. Our feeling of self develops from what others think of us, and what we see in ourselves.

My response:
I thought this article was very interesting because this issue is a problem many teens have today, and it explains it very well. It was very well written and helps the reader understand how the brain works without being confusing. Altogether, an impressive article.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-teenagers-find-themselves

How Down syndrome works against cancer

2009-05-27T16:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/43950/title/How_Down_syndrome_works_against__cancer

How Down syndrome works against cancer

Down syndrome is a result from an extra chromosome. Researchers of cancer believe that the extra chromosome carries a cancer suppressing gene that reduces the possibility of a person with Down syndrome to acquire cancer. A tumor grows rapidly from a blood vessel by mimicking a process called angiogenesis. The researchers believe the extra chromosome makes extra protein for an anticancer effect, which works against the production of angiogenesis. The chromosome has an Endostatin, which also stops the production of angiogenesis. The article said, “A recent study found that people with Down syndrome are only about one-tenth as likely to get a solid-tumor cancer as are people without the syndrome. “ The researchers have done tests on mice and even on fetal tissues. The results came out that those who were injected with Down syndrome had twice as many protein encoded by RCAN1 than normal tissues. “The RCAN1 protein dampens vessel growth by inhibiting the actions of vascular endothelial growth factor, preventing it from instigating a cascade of vessel-growth orders”, says study coauthor Sandra Ryeom of Harvard Medical School. The RCAN1 could be a factor that helps keep cancer away.

Response:
I’ve never really thought about people with Down syndrome not having cancer. It is really a blessing to them, because they already have a major life problem and wouldn’t be able to understand what is happening to them. It is a big help to researchers to study their proteins and maybe in time find a cure for cancer. Maybe by studying Down syndrome it might help find a cure for Down syndrome itself.

The Big Similarities & Quirky Differences between Our Left and Right Brains

2009-05-27T16:21:00.000-07:00

While the brain may initially seem like a mass of squishy tissue that can be easily taken apart, it holds the ability to control the body and send out thousands of impulses at once at speeds up to 250 mph. While it was originally thought that humans were uniquely right- or left-brained, but it has more recently been discovered that more animals are also this way, such as parrots, toads, zebra fish, and bees. Lesley Rogers, a biologist at the University of New England in Australia, performed an experiment on chicks while they were still on the eggs. Since most chick embryos have their right eye facing the egg wall, Rogers found if someone shines a light on the egg for an amount of time, the chick will have a more lateralized brain than a chick on whom no light was shone. Other similar experiments were performed on humans and songbirds which, for the sake of time and space, I will not mention here. However, it was discovered that: it is likely while one hemisphere is busy performing a task, the other side relaxes; the front of the brain is usually less synchronized than the back; and the left side deciphers what words and sounds mean, and the right side recognizes the emotion and tone of the words.
While all this seems like it will work out perfectly for ever and ever, amen, there are failures as are always present in our world. There are disorders in which the two hemispheres of the brain are not in sync with each other, such as in dyslexia or Alzheimer's. Nevertheless, it is possible to remove one side and be able to survive with only the other (a lot of physical therapy is needed, no doubt).

My Response
I found this article intriguing because I know the thoughts about how right vs. left brained people think, and I knew there were some differences between the thought patterns of men and women, but beyond this was unknown territory. I learned while the brain is in some ways symmetrical, there are distinct differences not only between each hemisphere but between the front and back as well.

2009-05-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

The human brain is directly affected by its immediete surroundings. Scientists have been studying the affects of open spaces or tight surroundings on the brain and people's emotions. Human beings who have alot of space and are not confined to a tight area appear to feel more secure and are less affected by brain activity. On the other hand, people who are in an enclosed space are have a more exaggerated response to brain activity. when scientists had test subjects read traumatic or extreme things, those who were feeling confined or trapped had a much more intense and extreme response, whereas those at a normal state of mind were nearly unaffected.

In another test, the patients were asked questions regarding the health threats of french fries and chocolate, and brown rice and yogurt. The subjects who were in a mental state of relaxation due to the openeness reasoned that the unhealthiness was the same. Those who where primed thought that the chocolate and french fries had more. Lastly, both sets of test subjects where asked questions about their homes. Those who were primed were anxious, but the others were relaxed and unaffected.

Response:
This article was really interesting because of the way that your mental state actually affects how you react physically. It just proves further that what you think about has a profound affect on who you are, what you do, and who you become. It was also interesting to read just how much the sense of security is involved in the descisions we make and how we react to certain things.
. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=arranging-for-serenity&page=1

Does Sleep Make You Smarter?

2009-05-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

When we sleep, our brains are active. During the cycles of sleep, our brains process the information we have learned during the day, it makes our memories stronger and eliminates the least important details of the day, and help to solve problems that complex us during the day.

In 2006, Robert Stickold performed an experiment to prove that sleep stabilizes memories. They had the volunteers memorize words in an A-B pattern. Then they let half of the volunteers sleep and kept the other half awake all night. In the morning, they taught them words in an A-C pattern. The group that was able to sleep remembered far more of the A-B pairs than the group that had obtained no sleep.

Besides stabilization, our brains also may be deciding what of the day's information is important to remember and what can be discarded. One study that was conducted tested the memory of neutral objects against a neutral background against emotionally evocative objects. The memory of the neutral objects decreased by 10% only twelve hours later, and the memory of the emotional objects improved in twelve hours. During sleep our memories are recalling and reviewing our memories, which makes them stronger. This also increases the possibility of long-term retention.

Studies have also shown that the popular phrase "sleep on it" may actually be true. In 2007, Jeffery Ellenbogen conducted a study that proved we learn during our sleep. He did a cognitive study use premise pairs that built on each other. They had to learn which pairs to choose (purple ring over brown, brown ring over green, etc). After twenty minutes, the volunteers had still not noticed the hidden theme that one object is superior to another. Twelve hours later, after sleep, they picked the correct superior pair 70% of the time. Therefore, the brain needs longer time to process and piece together information.

My response:

This article was very interesting, but i think that it still lacked some details. Some of these details might not be known yet, but I was curious about some things. How does the brain know what is important? What causes these reactions? The amazement I have for God's creation of the brain has increased since reading this article. Its incredible that our brain can process information to the point of solving problems while we are not even awake.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-snoozing-makes-you-smarter

Hiccups

2009-05-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=this-old-body
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-causes-hiccups

The information in this article summary is from the second half of the article "The Evolutionary Origins of Hiccups and Hernias" and the full response of William A. Whitelaw in "What Causes Hiccups?".

Hiccups vary from short annoyances to long-term, problematic conditions. Persistent or dramatic hiccups can be caused by various disorders. Some causes include expansion of the stomach and movement of stomach acid into the esophagus, disease or irritation in the thorax, irritation of the phrenic nerve, and neurological lesions. Any hiccup, whether from a severe, prolonged problem or a short annoyance, results from a spasm or sudden, strong, contraction of the muscles in the throat and chest. The "hic" sound comes when, after the contraction begins, one sharply inspires air as the epiglottis closes.
Since hiccups are rarely isolated events, but rather occur consistently for quite some time, there is believed to be a "central pattern generator" somewhere in the brain. This means that, like those for breathing, coughing, and walking, there is a neuronal circuit that generates hiccups. The CPG for hiccups is a conditional oscillator because while it sends a reoccurring signal to cause a hiccup, it sends this signal only under certain conditions.
Observations of hiccups in a variety of animals and in the fetus body suggest that the CPG for hiccups comes from a previous stage of evolution. One bodily activity in animals similar to the hiccup in the humans is the tadpoles' use of gill ventilation. The tadpole, with both lungs and gills, cannot suck air into its lungs. The tadpole uses the pressure pump action of the mouth to fill the lungs and to push water through the gills. When breathing air, the tadpole closes its nose, mouth, and passage to the gills in order to compress the mouth cavity and force air into the lungs. It breathes water by closing the glottis and forcing the water out the gills. When pushing water through gills, tadpoles must keep water from the lungs. Therefore, while the tadpole inspires, the glottis closes. This is essentially the same action happening in the human body during a hiccup.
Along with connecting humans to an amphibian history, hiccups demonstrate a connection to a history shared with fish. Major nerves used by humans in breathing are inherited from fish. The phrenic nerves travel from the base of the skull in humans, through the chest cavity, and through the diaphragm. Anything interrupting these nerves can inhibit breathing. If these nerves are irritated hiccups can result. The unfortunate design of humans' phrenic nerves comes from fish who have gills closer to the neck instead of a diaphragm a good distance below it. Humans' shared history with animals like tadpoles and fish seems to reveal once useful and necessary mechanisms that now cause unnecessary, annoying, and even problematic issues.

The discussions in the two articles I read are presented in a clear and extreme evolutionary perspective. The arguments and information in the articles have challenged me to think of an adequate response correctly defending my faith and belief in creationism. I believe God created each species of animal as unique from other species and humans as different from all other animals. Different living species, as this article discusses, have evident similarities in both structure and function. While this may seem to point to evolution, I believe this fact shows that the essentially same structure or action used to help one living thing can create problems for another. This structure or action did not evolve from one creature to another, but is rather used in a different way producing different effects. I believe the authors of these articles stress ways similar structures and actions in animals and humans cause problems for humans. However, they neglect to discuss potential problems similar elements could cause in the animals. The articles discuss the mechanisms and structures involved in hiccups which are logical and useful in amphibians and fish, while cumbersome in humans. I find myself wondering if there are structures or mechanisms afflicting an animal species while similar structures or mechanism cause no such harm in humans.
The idea that an element similarly found in two different beings could cause harm to one and help another seems to reflect a larger connotation involving various aspects of life. For example, just as the same mechanism that helps tadpoles breathe causes unwanted hiccups, the same mouth that speaks kind, uplifting words can tear someone down with unkind, harmful words. Our creator choose to use similar elements in different species of his creation. The mechanisms useful for the tadpole and the nerve logical for the fish are both seen in the humans with seemingly less use and logic. Our creator also choose to give each person the ability to use his or her mind, mouth, and tongue to speak both kind and harmful words. The same mouth used kindly can be seen at a different time used harmfully. While our hiccups are not a matter of free will and personal choices, they can be seen, like unkind words, as an unbeneficial use of a mechanism that can be beneficial in other circumstances.

The Brain

2009-05-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

The human brain appears to be two separate brains glued together. When the corpus callosum is cut, people wonder why we have two hemispheres in the first place.
Many scientists believe that human symmetry is linked withy our “evolutionary history”. They believe that there was one common ancestor that caused symmetry in most living organisms. Other truths hold that symmetry is imperative for survival. With muscles and bones on each side of the body, animals and people can move more efficiently and quickly. Symmetry also allows for one side of the body to pick up the slack if the other is weak. Many prey animals use the different sides of their brain to do different things. For example, a chicken uses the left part of their brain to look for food and the right to look for predators. They can do this because each hemisphere controls one side of the body.
There are other indications of why we have two hemispheres. Many people prefer to use one side of their body over the other and are considered left brained if they are more logical and right brained if they are more emotional.
Even though the brain has two seemingly identical hemispheres, each half is not responsible for the same functions. The way the two halves are connected to each other is also different in different regions of the brain. The front halves have looser connections between them than the back, because the front is responsible for thought and ideas and the back is in control of sight and hearing. These functions call that the two sides work together, so the connections between them must be stronger. The brain’s two sides work very well together. For example, the left side of the brain interprets sounds and words in a conversation, and the right side interprets the way the sounds and words were presented. This is why it is so remarkable that that a young child can survive with only one hemisphere. An adult cannot because they cannot break the habit of using both sides of their brain and a child can. Our symmetry seems to be at the very core of our existence.

http://http://discovermagazine.com/2009/may/15-big-similarities-and-quirky-differences-between-our-left-and-right-brains

I thought this article was very interesting and thought is was cool about how well the two hemispheres can work together. The only thing that I didn’t agree with was the whole evolutionary history thing. How can scientists look at something as complex as the human brain and not realize that it was designed?

Why Babies don't Talk like Audults

2009-05-25T14:45:00.000-07:00

We often don't ask ourselves why babies don't speak like all adults. It is commonly believed that children learn to talk by imitating what they hear from other, older people. However, the theory that babies simply copy and regurgitate what the hear does not explain why young children are not as articulate as adults. Babies and toddlers often talk in one or two word phrases like, "Me want cookie" or "kittie"; most adults speak in complex, grammatically correct sentences, making it unlikely that babies copy exactly what they hear, because if they did, they too would speak in complex, multi-word sentences. Over the years, scientists have produced two possible theories hoping to explain why young toddlers speak in short phrases if they are in fact coping what they hear. One such theory is called the mental developmental hypothesis which says that babies speak in "baby talk" because their brains are immature and cannot process complex adult speech.This hypothesis states that babies don't speak more complicated sentences until their brains are ready and more mature. The second theory, the stages-of-language hypothesis, says that the levels of progress in child speech are necessary stages in language development. Basically, children will not speak in multi-word, complex sentences until they have first mastered small, basic phrases and sentences and have learned a certain number of words. The main difference between the mental development hypothesis and the stages-of-language hypothesis is that with the mental development theory, the patterns in learning how to talk are directly related to the child's level of mental development and maturity, while with the stages-of-language theory, learning a language should not depend on the child's level of mental development, but on time.
In 2007, researchers studied adopted children from non-English speaking countries and found that even older children with more mature brains than babies first spoke in single words and short phrases.Compared to children born in the United States, the children adopted from non-English speaking countries started putting words into complex sentences around the same as native born children, and this was once their vocabularies reached the same size. Scientists do, however, acknowledge that there is a period when children are younger that makes learning a new language easier compared to older adults trying to learn a new language. This discovery-that is is not whether your brain is more mature but how many words you know- explains why babies do not talk as articulately as adults. It is not because their brains are immature but that babies have just begun learning words and need time to build their vocabularies.
I never really wondered why babies and toddlers don't talk like adults, and I found this article very interesting because it attempted to explain why this is. I think the fact that non-English speaking adopted children and American born children both starting speaking when their vocabularies were the same size shows that there is truth in the stages-of-language hypotheses. Like anything people do, whether learning a language or learning a sport, one can't move onto the next stage before first mastering the first stage. I do, however, believe that learning how to speak and how quickly it happens has something to do with babies' brains and how developed they are, and I also believe that there is a critical learning period that makes learning to speak or read easier for children than for adults.

Autism Genes that control Early Learning

2009-01-08T19:35:00.000-08:00

Autism is a mental disorder where the people have trouble with communication, doing things repeatedly, and it causes antisocial behavior. Every year 150 babies are born with autism in the United States.
The Children's Hospital Boston has scientists who discovered six more genes. They hadn't been linked to autism in the past. The things wrong with them were usually due to deletion, mainly of the genes that help in smooth connections. These genes help to create a tight and smooth connection between nerves in the brain. These genes also deal with learning and responses to the world/environment.
This discovery shows that with an early diagnosis of autism followed by treatment can improve the affects of autism. They use behavioral therapy and enriched environments for learning at a young age in hopes to strengthen the connections in the brain. The mutations damage the connections in the brain during a crucial age of development. Since only part of the gene is deleted, not all of the DNA, it's possible that some of the function can be regained. It has been shown that children with autism improve when they are put in places where repetitive learning happens. This trains the neurons not missing to pick up the slack from the deleted neurons.

This article gives hope to families who have a baby diagnosed with autism. There isn't a cure for autism, so anything that would improve the situation would do wonders for a family. This article hits home for me. I have an eighteen year old autistic sister. She functions pretty well, but still is hard to manage at times. She has gotten semi worse as she grew older. This article makes me wonder how she would be different if she had received treatment when she was first diagnosed. Would it have helped her or done nothing? I will never know how it would be if she was different. God had some other plan for her, me, and my family.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=autism-genes-that-control

Postpartum Depression Affects More than Just Mothers

2009-01-08T19:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=misery-in-motherhood

My Summary:
Postpartum Depression is a condition that plagues women worldwide. While the cause is not fully known, some experts believe that Postpartum Depression is possibly caused by the dramatic hormone fluctuations that occur in a woman after delivery. Whatever the cause, Postpartum Depression can weaken the natural bond between a mother and her child. Studies suggest that a weak bond between mother and child can cause the child to be more passive, insecure and socially inhibited; although in most cases a child’s intellectual development is not affected. Because of this, Psychologists and Psychiatrists focus on strengthening the bond between mother and child when treating Postpartum Depression.
In general, women seem to be most susceptible to depression in their reproductive years. Consequently rates of the disorder are higher in women ages twenty-five to forty-five. New data states that the incidence of depression rises modestly after giving birth. Patricia Dietz of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention stated that 10.4 percent of mother had been depressed in the nine months following childbirth and 8.7 percent of women had been depressed in the nine months before pregnancy as well as 6.9 percent during pregnancy. This data suggests that a previous occurrence of depression may be the biggest risk factor in acquiring the illness postpartum.
Of course the hormonal change that occurs after pregnancy does not fully explain postpartum depression. The demands of motherhood may also play a role in the illness. Many women feel exhausted from the lack of sleep and can become overwhelmed by child care duties. But the consequences of depression reach beyond the mother and affect the child. If a mother is overwhelmed by depression it prevents her from properly caring for her child; causing her not to perceive her child’s cries, smiles, gestures and other attempts to communicate with her. Ergo infants of depressed mothers look at their mothers less often and show fewer signs of positive emotion than do babies of mentally healthy moms.
Studies show that infants develop essential social skills in months two through six, building relationships with their mothers as well as other people. A child of a depressed mom may be at risk for social phobia which can be disastrous for their social development. While postpartum gloom does not usually have a long-lasting affect on a child’s development it impairs the child’s ability to bond with its mother and others.
Because of the fear of being judged by family members and others in society, many women shy away from getting treatment for their Postpartum Depression. Many new mothers require medication or Psychotherapy. The newest kind of treatment is that which also involves the child. Psychotherapy involves video intervention therapy which helps mothers to correctly perceive their infant’s behavior by recording and analyzing it. Video intervention therapy also helps mothers to feel better about their actions.
Most mothers can take steps to ease the emotional burden of having a child by asking for help from family and friends. It also helps mothers to sleep more, spend time with their spouse and getting out of the house can also help a depressed mother to not put pressure on herself. Usually mothers who receive adequate treatment recover completely within two months of starting treatment. Some mothers even emerge from their depression with a new sense of clarity and zest for life.
My Opinion: I believe that this article sheds some much needed light on a disease that is often frowned upon in today’s society, especially among Christians. When most people think of Postpartum Depression they think only of the mother. I never really thought about how it could affect the child. I think that many people frown on the illness because of all of the bad press it gets in the news with depressed mothers harming their children and such. This article allowed me to understand the reasons why a mother may become depressed and the alternatives mothers have to combat their depression. I feel a little more enlightened on the subject of Postpartum Depression and will be less inclined to judge it.

When Sleep becomes Violent

2009-01-08T18:33:00.000-08:00

Summary:
Normally, we cycle through two stages of sleep throughout the night: REM and NREM. REM sleep stands for rapid eye movement, and NREM is non-rapid eye movement sleep. We do most of our dreaming during REM sleep, and although we are moving in our dreams, our real bodies are basically paralyzed, a condition known as atonia. Only our eyes move, darting around as if watching the scenes from our mind. Even though our bodies lie motionless, our minds are just active as if we were awake.
In NREM sleep, an EEG--electroencephalogram--will show decreased brain activity.
There is, nevertheless, a condition called parasomnia which occurs between wakefulness and deep sleep in NREM sleep, and produces those famous activities such as sleep walking and talking. If one is woken from the former, he or she will be confused and disoriented, which is why people are advised not to wake them. The person will also not be able to recall their dream in the slightest amount.
There is a step beyond parasomnias, however: RBD, or REM sleep behavior disorder. When a person has this, he will literally act out his dream, as in the case of one man who dreamed he was playing baseball again. In his dream, saw the ball coming at him, and reached out for it. Next thing he knew was he was on the floor next to his bed and had nearly put his hand through the wall. Doctors usually connect this disorder with a degenerative neurological condition.
Although simply acting out the dream is not the whole story. People also tend to display Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type behavior—they may be kind in the waking world but say profanities and be belligerent in the sleeping one. In fact, this is usually the case with people diagnosed with RBD.
A polysomnogram, a test that employs sensors placed over muscles, is used to show if movements are interrupting the normal REM sleep stage. In the case of the man who dreamed of playing baseball, doctors discovered through the test that he did in fact have RBD. While there is no known cure for this disorder, doctors do know how it happens and have medication for it, a drug similar to Valium by the name of clonazepam.

Response:

I thought it interesting when I saw the title of this article, because I did not know one could be so violent while asleep. Sure, I thought, people toss around in bed, but to hit someone, all because of a dream was a different story (the wife of the baseball man in the article had actual bruises from him striking out at her.) It is comforting to know that there is a known cause for RBD and a drug for it, so that people with the disorder will not have to hear the words, “We don’t know what’s wrong with you.” Although it will be a hard road, I am sure researchers will be able to discover a cure for REM sleep behavior disorder.

Brain, Heal Thyself

2009-01-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

In our bodies, organs have their own stem cells that replace injured and dead cells. But according to the conventional wisdom, the brain doesn't have stem cells. Instead, nature gives us need replacement. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom on brain stem cell is changing these day. Samuel Weiss and other researchers maded mouse brain cells act like stem cells in the experiment. The result is that it can be possible to get cell in brain to act like stem cells for only one day. In 1992, Evan Snyder and his colleagues had removed stemlike cells from the newborn mice' brain. Snyder said that his manipulated cells meet the requirements of true stem cell. They can reproduce and maintain themselves, and they can give rise to all the major cell types in the brain. The marked cells had indeed differentiated in to neurons and other brain cells. After differentiating, the cell stopped dividing, just like normal brain cells because of some innate brain signal that dampens division. Snyder had found that his implanted cells could repair some kinds of brain damage. The cells get injured easily when the oxygen supply is cut off. Normal mature brain cells lost the ability to respond to brain signals, or the signals may have been suppressed. Snyder and his colleagues used stem cells to gene therapy. They put a gene into the cells that codes for an enzyme missing. The enzyme breaks down a cellular waste product in brain. The waste accumulates if there is no enzyme and it causing severe mental retardation and death. Snyder found the genetically enginered cells began producing the enzyme at levels thought to be sufficient to alleviate symptoms of the disease. The stem cells might naturally tend to spread and produce their crucial enzyme throughout the damaged brain. Weiss injection of egf into mouse brains spurred the growth of new neurons. These cells spread into regions near the subependmal layer and the striatum. This is so improtant because in people with Huntington's disease, neurons in this region die. The gap between experiments with mice and human cell therapy for brain damage is huge. Snyder and Weiss' experiment show us the human brain has the protenial to repair itself, and brain may have stem cells.

http://discovermagazine.com/1996/aug/brainhealthyself847/?searchterm=brain heal thyself

The Inner Savant

2009-01-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

http://discovermagazine.com/2002/feb/featsavant/?searchterm=the%20inner%20savant

Summery

An autistic savant is a rare condition marked by severe mental and social deficits but also a mysterious talent that appears spontaneously usually before the age of six. Autism is thought to occur during early brain development when neurons connect at random causing problems in the cerebellum with processing information and movement. Problems also occur in the limbic region which causes problems with processing experiences and emotions. When autistic children see an object they do not see the object as a whole, but rather the individual parts that make up the object.

Only one out of every ten autistic child is considered to be a savant. There are many different kinds of savant some can play a song on the piano perfectly after hearing it only once, some can multiply massive numbers together in a matter of seconds, some are artistic , and some are calendar savants and when they are given a date they can tell you what day of the week it fell on. A savant named Nadia at the age of three could draw an amazing picture of a horse from memory. When she went to draw it she did not start with the basic shape, but the details of the horse like his hoofs and mane and then drew the basic shape to connect all of the details together. This show that she saw not just a picture of a horse, but all of the components that make up the picture of the horse.

Allan Snyder, a physicist in Australia suggests that everyone has the capacity to obtain savant like skills, but we are unable to access them. When people who are not autistic see an object they just see the object as a whole and not all of the different components that make it up. Some people have been able to obtain savant like skills only under certain conditions. People who have frontotemporal dementia, a degenerative brain disease, which usually hits people who are around fifties or sixties, are able show savant like qualities in the areas of music and art. Even though they gain these new talents their disease makes them lose their ability to speak, read, and write. The only thing that they have in common with savants besides the ability is the decrease in blood flow and slowed neuronal firing in the left temporal lobe.

One reason why savants have these amazing abilities is because they process things differently and they see things differently. If a child who is not autistic is told to copy a picture of an optical allusion they would get frustrated and would be unable to draw it. An artistic savant would look at the picture and see the individual components that make up the picture. Sometimes artist who are having a hard time drawing an object will look at it upside down so that the do not see the object any more, but rather the components that make up the object, kind of like how a savant sees an object. People who are autistic have a single-minded drive. They can do the same thing over and over without getting bored. So those who are savants are able to practice there ability without getting bored, but getting better at what they do.

An autistic researcher did an experiment on seventeen people to see if they could perform savantlike tasks. The researchers inhibited their neural activity in the frontotemporal area. Only five out of the seventeen people improved in there tasks, but not at a savantlike level. This can expected because savants have repetitive practice of their skill. Researchers hope that one day that there will be a device that could help people tap into their creative abilities that they do not have access to.

Response

I think that the abilities that savants have are amazing, some of them can’t even tie their shoes, but can play a song on the piano after only hearing it once. One of the savants that I found most interesting was a boy who could stand in a room that is full of speakers and find were the sweat spot, the spot where the sound from different sources hits both of your ears at the same time, is. I also thought that it was amazing that researchers could get savant like responses from people who are not autistic. I think it is interesting that some day they want to make a device that could give great creative abilities to people who are not savants.

2009-01-08T18:02:00.000-08:00

From Noisy Eyeballs to Regulating Information Flow in the Brain.

R. Douglas Fields is a Neuroscientist that found out a lot about his area of study by studying a disfunction of his own brain. His disfunction was that he literally had noisy eyeballs. The problem, despite the fact that this was not normal, was that he was the only one who could hear his eyes move. The Neuroscientist was lucky to know a professor who had insight the scientist's problem. His problem was that his nucleus accumbens were smaller then normal. Now the nucleus accumbens are like the fliter of sensory input for the brain. With sound it helps fliter to what a person whats to hear and pay attention too. So for example, when your on a basketball court for your team you can still very clearly make out the coaches voice despite numerous more equally as loud voices. Or another example is when you talk on a cell phone in a nosy enviorment but you still only hear the person your talking too. This "zoneing out" of what you dont want to hear is credited to the nucleus accumbens. When this is smaller it cant block out all the sounds, so therefore unwanted noise is heard. Even interal bodly noises such as the noise of muscles pulling on the eyeball. A key component of the nucleus accumbens is serotonin which modulate's its activity. Moreover the Neuroscientist published his story and got many email replies back from people with similar, sometimes more sereve cases of his disfunction. In particular one person sent him an article from a scientific magazine that was inspired for the scientists own article. This article suggested sulfites were the problem. This hypothothis came about given the fact that sulfites, which are used as preservities for food, block enzymes that are very similar to the enzymes that are key in the production of serotonin. Therefore sulfites could impair the production of serotonion thus hurting the nucleus accumbens. But at this time this is only a possible theory. More scientific research is needed to find out more.

I thought this article was very intresting. Learning about the nucleus accumbens was fascinating as I never knew that our "zoneing out" of noses was actually a function of the brain that could be impared. I cant imagine not being able to block things out. It is also intresting to hear that we can hear many bodly noises but our nucleus accumbens just block the noises out.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=noisy-eyeballs-regulating-information-brain

Does Exercise Really Make You Healthier?

2009-01-08T17:57:00.000-08:00

Many people workout for various reasons such as: to lose weight, become healthier, or just to become more active. Mostly everyone has worked out sometime in their life, but when we workout do we ever think how it is affecting the body? How exercise can not only make us stonger, but help prevent us from various diseases? Most people when they workout don't think of these things. While some people think exercise makes you healthier, others think there is no purpose to exercising. This article shows some benefits to exercising. Exercise is good for the heart and blood vessels. Exercising lowers the risk for heart disease in many ways. When a person exercises, their heart is pumping faster casing more blood to be forced through the arteries. This forceful pumping causes changes in the autonomic nervous system that controls the contraction of the heart. Thus leads to lower resting heart rates which in return lowers the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Exercise also heightens the cardiovascular health by decreasing the plasma triglycerides, fatty molecules in the
blood that are associated with plaque build-up in the arteries. Exercise reduces low-density lipoprotein, bad cholesterol, and increases the amounts of high-density lipoprotein, good cholesterol, which occurs as less artery clogging. Exercise also lessens the risks to some cancers. Physical activity affects your body weight, said Albanes a researcher. Leaner people have lower circulating levels of insulin. People who are overweight develop insulin-resistance where the cells no longer respond to glucose, a primary energy source. When this happens, the pancreas produces great amoutns to try to absorb more glucose, causing higher levels of insulin which can be connected to some forms of cancer like colon cancer. Exercising also builds strong bones. Laying on the couch all day is making your bones not work, and your bones
not working are more open to fractures. Bones become stronger when more weight is forced on them causing the muscles to contract more to exert force on this particular area of your body. Exercising also wards off type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is where your body isn't producing
enough insulin so other tissues can't absorb glucose from the blood cauing nerve and blood vessel damage. Physical activity reverses this affect. Exercising causes the muscle to contract which heighten the production of an enzyme called adenosine momophosphate-activated kinase (AMPK) which promotes the breakdown of the fats with the cell glucose transporters. Finally exercising promotes weight loss. Exercising causes calories to be burned which loses weight. You can't just exercise to see these results though. You have to learm to eat a balanced diet on a regular basis. working out causes us to be physically and potentially mentally stronger.
I think this article was well written and explained each benefit of exercising well. It explained how each thing/benefit worked by using the inside of the body and the heart and blood blow from exercising. I think this article was really cool and jumped out to me. Playing basketball is exercising on a regular basis, and i never thought that it could prevent certain types of cancer and diabetes. It's amazing to see how working out regularly can help increase your health
and stenghten your body. Each part of the human body has a specific purpose and exercising help make it do it's job regularly. It's been shown that someone who exercises regularly can live up to 7 years longer than a couch potato. It's amazing to see how exercise can really affect you mentally and physically.

Fact or Fiction? Babies Exposed to Classical Music End Up Smarter

2009-01-08T17:54:00.000-08:00

The Mozart effect invokes the image of a pregnant woman playing classical music over her belly in hopes to improve her unborn child’s intelligence. In one study scientist used thirty-six college-aged kids to perform several spatial reasoning tasks after listening to one of Mozart’s relaxing sonatas. One of these tasks was to determine what a paper ,that had been folded several times and then cut, might look like when unfolded. The students that had listened to Mozart displayed a significant improvement in their performance by eight to nine spatial IQ points.

In sixteen studies related to the Mozart effect, it shows the only task that showed significant improvment was the paper-folding task. One scientist attributes it to the natural variability a person experiences between two test settings.

Scientist, Rauscher, doesn’t see how the two are connected saying, “I think parents are very desperate to give their own children every single enhancement that they can.” On the other hand, others still argue for the power of music saying that music has tremendous organizational quality to the brain. Some physicians use music therapy to aid children with dyslexia, ADD, and autism because they believe that music that is not very emotional or rhythmic can modulate mood and alleviate stress. They also believe it improves our ability to be intelligent. In Georgia and Florida, daycare centers went as far as to required classical music to be played while the children slept.

Rather than passively listening to music, Rauscher advices putting instuments into childrens hands to improve cognitive abilities. Phychologist Chabris goes even further to say that just playing the symphonies of a long-dead Austrian composer takes away from beneficial interaction that may be truly beneficial for the children.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-babies-ex

Response:

I had always heard that listening to classical music can improve our intellegent. After thinking about it, I do not think it is true, but I do believe that playing an intrument can. Since I am in band, I know that to play music you must actively think about what each notes is, how it will sound, and how to play it. When it comes down to it, I believe it is being the type of parent that would play the music for their child. The type of parent that would care enough to try. I guess you could say, it really is the thought that counts.

Existing Drug Reverses a Form of Mental Retardation in Mice

2009-01-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

Researchers report that if a study on mice holds true, a drug used for a completely different purpose could be used to treat a kind mental retardation linked to autism.

A medication, used by doctors for patients whose bodies may reject new organs in their bodies due to transplants, is used by scientists learning disorders by the name of tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) in mice. This disease is a rare genetic disorder that causes tumors, seizures, sores, and learning issues in 50,000 people in the US and 1,000,000 people in the whole world.

Half of everyone with TSC have autism, and 1 in 5 suffer from mental retardation. A neurobiologist, Alcinco Silva, says that the hope is that this medication (rapamycin) can be used to treat learning issues and short-term memory problems in all kinds of autism as well.

Silva and coworkers removed a copy of the gene TSC2 from mice (if both are removed the mice die short after birth) to have them be born with TSC. When both genes are there, in both mice and humans, the make proteins that aid innerve connections that help the brain learn.

The mice with TSC had issues in various learning tests. In the mice "learning and memory are disrupted just like they [are] affected in most patients with TSC," says Silva.

Their reason for using rapamycin, says Silva, is that it regulates the same proteins the TSC gene does, just in different parts of the body. When they tried the medication on animals 3-6 months old (far into adulthood for mice) it leveled the defferences between TSC and regular mice in as short as 3 days.

"What was surprising is that we could give rapamycin to adult mice and reverse their condition," says Silva. "We did not know...that this drug would be equally effective for the learning disabilities" because it is for tissue rejection.

For transplant patients rapamycin cost aroun $1,000 a month. It suppresses the immune system, thus the following side effects come about: impaired wound healing, infections, mouth sores, and skin cancer (rare instances).

SIlva also says that thye have "early, positive signs" from the mice models that rapamycin can help treat kidnye tumors, skin lesions, and the other effects associated with TSC. A director of a TSC Clinic, David Franz, has reported that the medicine reduced kidney and brain tumors in small clinical trials he has conducted.

Scientists were also able to reverse mantal retardation in mice suffering from fragile X syndrome and Rett syndrome. Put together and these results suggest that researchers are finding the brains malfunctions causing autism and thus might find a way to reverse them.

These studies "suggest that we're about to have a paradigm shift in how we look at developmental disorders, like autism," Silva explains.Silve believes these learning disabilities can be eliminated by altering the brain's biochemistry, so the illnesses should no longer be seen as something a person is born with.

Franz agrees that this medication can modify TSC, but thinks that Silva is over-estimating it insaying that it will work for all autism sufferers. Franz says, "You might make them better, but I don't think you're going to normalize them."

At the University of Cambridge in England, the next step, being clinical trials of rapamycin in human TSC sufferers, is already underway.

My Response:

I always thought that mental retardation was permanent and that there was no chance of reversing it. I am glad to say that this article totally changes this thought. This gives new hope to possibly "curing" mental retardation and autism. This research could lead to a way of making the mentally disabled have a possibility of fully living independent lives. This could be a bit of an exageration..but this research and experimentation definately opens a whole new world of possibilities for brain malfunctions and learning diasabilities.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=existing-drug-reverses-a

Simple Salves for Severe Brain Injuries

2009-01-08T17:42:00.000-08:00

Summary

Imagine that you or a loved one is involved in a car crash, and the impact produced a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). The extent of the damage is unknown at this point, but there is unconsciousness and lasting brain damage. Wouldn't you want doctors in the intensive care unit (ICU) to be able to treat you right away? Well, scientists and doctors are coming close to that with new healing methods. This article discusses how the "simple salves for traumatic brain injuries" work and what they do to the brain.

After a sever TBI, blood vessels can bleed into the brain, raising the pressure inside the skull. These vessels may even dilate to feed oxygen-starved brain, regions, increasing the brain volume which increases the pressure. This pressure build-up may even cause the brain to be pushed through the only available hole, at the base of the skull, crushing the brain stem and killing the patient. The doctors must slow metabolism and thereby reduce the brain's demand for oxygen rich blood. A new technique doctors are using is called hypothermia therapy. This is when doctors inject chilled saline or cover a patient with a blanket that circulates cool water, "quieting" the brain by lowering the patient's body temperature. The cooling acts as a "brake" on cellular metabolism. A 2007 analysis by the Brain Trauma Foundation suggested that hypothermia therapy had little or no effect on the survival rate of TBI victims, but it did improve their mental capacity and responsiveness.

Another concern to TBI victims is the release of biological poisons that ooze out of ruptured neurons and cause serious problems on neighboring cells. You can monitor the chemical imbalances by performing an analysis on extracted fluid from inside the skull. But doctors want to prevent the release of these toxins. Biomedical engineer Richard Borgens of Purdue University and his colleagues are developing a method that repairs cell membranes using polyethylene glycol, which is bicycle tire sealant. They did tests on brain-injured rats and found that the rats that received injections of polyethylene glycol navigated mazes more proficiently than ones that didn't receive the injection. Scientists do not know if the same thing will happen in humans, but they hope it will.

Doctors hope that advances in intensive care for TBI victims will reduce the long term effects of their brain injury. New discoveries, that will only occur through more research, will improve the lives of brain injury victims each year.

My Response

This article game me a little bit of an idea of how difficult and stressful a brain surgeon's line of work is. There's so much they must be concerned with. The new potential healings discussed in the article are quite fascinating. The fact that bicycle tire sealant can be used as a method for repairing damaged cell membranes is remarkable. I really enjoyed reading about this article. It was well written and easy to understand. I look forward to seeing what progress is made in the treatment of traumatic brain injury victims.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=simple-salves

Touch DNA

2009-01-08T17:24:00.000-08:00

Summery

The touch DNA method was discovered in the past five years. The method acquired the name “touch DNA,” because of the fact that it examines skin cells left behind on various objects, weapons, and victims the assailants touched at the crime scene.

The method of touch DNA has drastically improved the number of items of evidence that can be used in DNA detection. In the 1980s, to be able to perform a DNA analysis, forensic investigators had to have a blood or semen stain approximately the size of a quarter. In the 1990s the size of the sample needed dropped to about the size of a dime; after that they just needed a sample big enough to see, “if you can see it, you can analysis it.” With the touch DNA method you don’t have to be able to see the sample; it only requires seven or eight cells from the outermost layer of skin.

Here is how the DNA touch method works:

1) First, investigators recover cells from the crime scene by swabbing objects, victims, articles of
clothing, and other things that were or may have been touched by the assailants.

2) Next, a process called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, is used to generate several copies of
the genes.

3) Then scientists add in fluorescent compounds which then attach themselves to thirteen
specific locations on the DNA resulting in a very specific genetic portrait of that person.

The entirety of the process takes a few days.

The thirteen specific locations, to which the copied genes that are mixed with the fluorescent compounds, were intentionally chosen because they vary greatly from person to person and to not give away specific information like race, genetic diseases, gender, or personal health. The reason behind this being: authorities don’t want individuals’ personal health information to be used for law-enforcement purposes, like interrogations. The chances of two people having the same DNA profiles are extremely small.

My Response: I think it’s very beneficial that the touch DNA method only requires seven or eight skin cells as opposed to the methods in the 1980s and 1990, which required a sample of blood or semen the size of a quarter and later a dime. In some cases blood or semen may not be present at the scene of the crime. God made each of us differently; we all have our different DNA’s for example and this can be used to help fight crime. It’s just neat to see another reason/aspect as to why God made us all unique and different; clearly this is not the only reason why God gave us all our own DNA, but it is just gives us a little more insight to the human body and why God designed it the way he did.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=experts-touch-dna-jonbenet-ramsey

Hannah Eastwood

Can a Walk a Day Keep Alzheimer's Away?

2009-01-08T17:11:00.000-08:00

Alzheimers is a horrible disease that many people are at risk of. five million people have Alzeimers disease and ten million boomers are at risk for memory problems. Although medicine seems to always be the answer, scientists have found a non-medical way that could reduce risk factors for dementia, which is a form of Alzheimers. That non-medical way is to exercise. Studies show that adults who are more active in their lifestyles have a lower risk of dementia. Some of the activities that were tested were; swimming, walking, and ballroom dancing. Nicola Lautenschlager at the University of Western Australia studied 170 older people. Sixty percent of the people had a condition that seemed to be the beforehand of Alzheimers. The study went on for six months.
The study consisted of three fifty minutes of some sort of exercise each week. The study divided people into two groups. One group consisted of people who were already doing fifty minutes of exercise per week. The other group had people who were informed about health education. The group who had the people who were already exercising were asked to exercise for an additional fifty minutes per week for this study. By the end of the six months, the exercisers improved on an a long-term measure of cognitive abilities. The group of people who had a little bit of cognitive also improved. Aerobic exercise seemed to improve establishable cognitive abilities. The exercisers maintained a ten percent vantage on the cognitive scores and had less of a decline in memory measure a year after the study was over.This study is very important because it shows how exercise can benefit cognition in older adults with memory problems within an 18 month range. Although this test may seem to show that exercise can help reduce dementia, the effect size shown was too small for a persom to notice a change.

I thought this article was very imspiring. Scientists trying to find a way to postpone Alzheimers without using medicine shows that people don't always have to realize on medicine. I think that trying something other then the same thing (medicine) would get more people to really start thinking about their health and what can happen. I feel like this article is a good way to make people realize they should start exercising. Not only is it healthy for them, it could also save their memory. I am interested to see if they can actually get a better result if they double or triple the size of the groups.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fitness-and-the-brain

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fitness-and-the-brain

Set in Our Ways: Why Change is So Hard

2009-01-08T16:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways&print=true

Many people dream of doing something adventurous when they reach around the age of 20. They are often very willing to experience new things. When a person is past the early 20's, however, hia openness to change becomes less, and he tends to be more resistant. This often happens with any cultural background. Even though people become more resistant to change as they age, many still say they want change. Although this is the case, they typically won't make it happen. Researchers believe that this may partially be caused by unrealistic expectations and a numerous amount of responsibilities.
Openness to new experiences is one personality trait of the "Big Five", according to psychologists. Extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism are the others. Although there is disagreement about the amount of change of these personality traits in adulthood, most research agrees that openness decreases. A survey that evaluated the Big Five traits in people ages 21 to 60 was taken by more than 130,000 people. The results suggested that while women begin adulthood less open to new experiences than men, men often decline in openness quicker than women in their 30's.
Even though 30 is often associated with this change, it happens gradually over the coarse of many years. Almost everyone experiences this change, no matter the individual's personality. One can get an idea of how open he might become by looking at his childhood. A study done by psychologist Richard W. Robins showed that children who are very adventurous will continue to try new experiences as adults.
Psychologist and personality researcher Rainer Riemann suggests that adults from every culture face similiar loads and expectations. These include marriage, an occupation, and often children. Such responsibilities take devotion and regulation, and they may hinder a change in personality. At this stage of life, new experiences might be exciting, but they would likely bring insecurity. Brain researcher Gerhard Roth states that the brain constantly tries to form habits which bring pleasure as well as a sense of comfort and safety.
According to psychologist Brent W. Roberts, young adulthood is when most personality changes occur. Minor ones may take place past the age of 30, but one's personality becomes increasingly sound until the age of 60, which is about when most people have completed their lifetime commitments, such as a career and raising children. This allows them to again open their minds to new experiences.
WHen people look to accomplish major changes in their lives, they often fail. Psychologists Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman have named it "false hope syndrome". People often attempt making changes in their lives, yet they don't get anywhere, many times because their expectations are too high. Trying to accomplish too much too fast will set anyone up for failure. The key is to make reasonable goals and understand the difficulty of the challenge.

My Response:
This article brought up some points that really made me think about how much I accept change and how the people I know accept change. I tend to agree with what the article says about how young adults seem to seek adventure while older people who have settled down have done exactly that - settled down. But I, personally, think that sometimes it's hard for people to change, because they associate what they do with who they are. That's what people expect of them because "that's who they are". But I think we can encourage each other to help people achieve their goals. It's easier for anyone to take one step at a time when someone is beside him, cheering him on.

Are Immune System Molecules Brain-Builders---And Destroyers?

2009-01-08T14:29:00.000-08:00

Summary

A group of scientists from Stanford University, about five years ago, wanted to see how the developing of the brain starts the last set of synapses. A synapse is when cells in the nervous system converse with each other and with cells that are not of the nervous system. When the scientists tried to find the genes involved, they found something they did not expect: they found a gene, C1q, which is a protein important for the immune system.

Before this, it was believed that the brain had no immune cells. Scientists have discovered that these molecules exist and that they have an important role there. Experts say that these findings help show they way the brain works and why disorders such as autism and Alzheimer's disease occur and that this could help find new therapies to treat them.

Lisa Boulanger, a neurobiologist, says that the body is constantly under immune surveillance. The surveillance is not as quick in the brain, that is why it was thought that there were no immune cells in the brain.

A team from Harvard University ran a procedure to find genes controlled by neuron firing and they unexpectedly found a gene that is critical for the immune system to recognize pathogens that are invading. Studies showed that the immune proteins functioned differently in the brain than they did on the body. The proteins in the brain control the signals that are sent between neurons instead of looking for germs.

Other research that was done has shown that immune molecules are important to keep the brain working correctly. During childhood, unnecessary connections are slowly removed and that production of C1q climaxes at that time.

Scientists have discovered that C1q seems to be a connection between synapse loss and glaucoma. Also, scientists believe that the immune proteins are so important that if something disrupts them, it could cause autism and schizophrenia. Scientists have also discovered that if a pregnant woman is exposed to a virus it is more likely that the child could develop one of these disorders. They think that the immune molecules that are in the brain may be the cause.

Recently, Boulanger found that if the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules are decreased in both the bodies and brains of mice, symptoms of autism and schizophrenia occurred. She is now trying to see if this is the same in humans by checking bodily fluid samples of autistic and schizophrenic patients to check the MHC class I levels. If this research holds up it could help with the development of drug treatment for these disabilities and understanding the cause of them.

Basically, by determining the relationship between the immune molecules and diseases of brain degeneration and damage, this could help find new way to treat the diseases.

My Response

I think it's really interesting how immune cells have a totally different function in the brain than in the rest of the body. I also think it's interesting that scientists have found out that these could be what causes certain diseases and disabilities. I am glad that by researching this, scientists can try to find treatments for the diseases. I think it is amazing that God has made our bodies so complex and detailed. I also think that it is amazing that scientists can find out so much about us and our bodies and that they can find out how diseases are caused and how to treat them. Our technology keeps getting better and will help the scientists in their research and they will be able to find out even more things.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=are-immune-system-molecules-build-brains

Autism epidemic?

2009-01-08T14:02:00.001-08:00

Recently it has been discovered that every 1 in 166 children are diagnosed with autism. Originally it was 1 in 2500. It has been called an epidemic and many wondered what had caused it to rise so dramatically. Many have blamed vaccines that may have had small traces of mercury. However the way of diagnosing autism has changed quite a bit. Origianally a child had to have all 6 of 6 symptoms to be diagnosed, where now one can be diagnosed if they have 8 of the 16 symptoms. This has probably helped to raise the amount of those diagnosed, and also the awareness of autism has greatened which would also help doctors to recognize someone with autism much easier. It is most likely the number of those with autism hasn't changed, but rather that developements in science have increased our awareness of autism and therefore we more are diagnosed so the figures have changed. So if it has raised it is probable that it hasn't raised as much as we think.

My opinion of this article:
This article was well written to keep one informed but also to keep one interested. It helps to lessen the worries about a possible epidemic, and brings a logical and objective view on it's subject. The writer did well in staying away from rumors and basing his writing on facts. This article does it's purpose well in giving it's message without pointing fingers at vaccines and antibiotics and instead follows the history of diagnosing autism. This article is a good one to read and is worth the reader's time.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=is-there-really-an-autism-epidemic

blockbuster

2009-01-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

Blockbuster

Herceptin is a drug that is used for breast cancer. It shrinks the size of the tumor which makes it easier to control and allows some of the patients to live longer. It also stops the outside of the cancer cells to stop growing so that the cells don’t divide uncontrollably. It has only been used on twenty to twenty-five percent of woman who have breast cancer. It hasn’t been proven that this drug is useful on other cancers. A scientist from Health and Science University in Oregon named Adelman, is studying a new protein that he believes can be the cure for breast cancer. Adelman is also studying a chemical compound that has characteristics of this new protein. This protein is called the HER2 protein. It’s a small piece of the receptor component that comes through the cell’s domain. They say that when the cell that uses the HER2 protein needs a protein, it turns a gene into RNA and cuts out copies of DNA segments that are not used. Cancer cells sometimes have more cell-surface receptors than normal cells. Normally a cell uses a chemical signal to get a message to start replication, but since a decoy imitation of this receptor is involved the transmission of the chemical signal is set off. So scientists are testing a large amount of solid tumors to explore many methods of inhibiting receptors. Many drugs for beast cancer that are supposed to shrink the size of the tumor react negatively to herceptin. Scientists have studied different treatments for breast cancer for a long time. They hope to start chemical trial on mice to test the protein’s interaction with many receptors.
This article explains how herceptin affects other drugs and the depth of the problem with it not working with other drugs or proteins. It tells the science behind cancer treatment and how and why many solid tumors were tested and why some failed.

Strange but True: Less Sleep Means More Dreams

2009-01-08T13:21:00.000-08:00

Sleep, what Shakespeare would describe as "Nature's soft nurse," can quickly turn into nature's curse when messed with. One may think that the deprivation of sleep is no big deal, but in fact sleep deprivation can quickly turn back to bite you. Many people who sleep well after a long period of sleep deprivation declare that they experience dreams that are very vivid and feel terrifyingly real. " I imagine that's what it’s like when you're on heroine," Eva Salem said after experiencing a vivid dream of a crocodile attack after being sleep deprived for many months. Neurologist Mark Mahowald addressed this new discovery by stating, "When someone is sleep deprived we see greater sleep intensity, meaning greater brain activity during sleep; dreaming is defiantly increased and likely more vivid." This response to sleep deprivation is referred to as REM rebound.

REM stands for "rapid eye movement," a state of the sleep cycle in which our brain activity closely resembles that of being conscious. During the REM state of sleep our mind begins to experience what we might refer to as dreaming. Over the course of an average life span, a human being will spend about twenty-seven years dreaming. REM is one of five states that make up the sleep cycle. The first four states are called the four stages of non-REM. Each of the four states of non-REM generate an individual brain frequency. The first phase of the sleep cycle is identified by the state the body is in when it’s in-between sleeping and being awake. During this stage many people will experience a feeling of falling. The second phase of the sleep cycle is identified as the stage where the brain begins to slow with the exception of a few short bursts of activity. The third and fourth state of the sleep cycle is when the body changes into slow-wave sleep. During the third and fourth phase is identified by the bodies severe decrease heart and breathing rates. Finally after the four non-REM stages end, the REM stage can begin.

Throughout an average night of sleep the body will repeat the sleep cycle about five times. The cycle lasts about ninety minutes in all, however during the first cycle of the night REM will only last around a total of five minutes. As the night goes on, the total amount of time spent in REM will increase. Most often before waking we have experienced a forty-minute phase of REM. Because the brain gives most of its priority to slow-wave sleep (non-REM), REM is the stage that is reduced or lost when we become sleep deprived for a night. Scientist have proven that losing thirty minutes of REM one night can cause a thirty-five percent increase in REM the next night. Not only that, but subjects participating in the REM research stated that when they laid down to sleep, having about twenty-five minutes of REM from the night before, they experienced extremely vivid dreams.

No one is really sure why the body and the brain must make up for lost time spent in REM. Is it really that important? There are some very puzzling discoveries made by scientists researching REM. For example, some of the larger brained mammals, such as dolphins and whales, do not have a REM stage in their sleep cycle. However, studies show that when rats are deprived of the REM phase for four weeks, they die of a cause still unknown. Babies, both in and out of the womb, spend seventy-five percent of their time asleep in the REM phase. People who are using alcohol, nicotine, antidepressants, and blood pressure medicine, all lose time in the REM phase. Although the importance of REM is not scientifically proven, there are a few theories. Various theories put forward the idea of REM regulating neurotransmitter levels, and body temperature. Some Psychologists even believe that dream vividness has nothing to do with the deprivation of REM, but rather all our dreams are related to our anxiety level. There is however evidence that dreaming assists us process and soak in memories.

My Response:

I myself, having experienced very vivid dreams, found this article extremely intriguing. I never had any idea how important each phase of the sleep cycle was to our bodies. Although it does not apply to humans, death of the rats deprived of REM was shocking. I can’t help but wonder what the complete purpose of REM and our dreams is. I defiantly think that more research should be done in this area. In my opinion it seems like an open possibility that increasing REM could cure many mental diseases such as post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, memory problems, or stress in general. Even if there is no curing involved, I would love for the mystery and meaning behind dreams and REM to be solved. It is altogether fascinating to me and probably many others.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-less-sleep-means-more-dreams

2009-01-08T12:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=what-causes-insomnia&SID=mail&sc=emailfriend

Summary

What causes insomnia?

Insomnia is the chronic inability to fall asleep or to enjoy uninterrupted sleep. Sadly a larger proportion of people suffer from this. some research shows that sleep patterns, and behaviors from certain attitudes leave some people with the higher chance of having insomnia.

Symptons are difficulty falling asleep, waking a lot during the night, waking up to early and not being able to get back to sleep, or waking up feeling unrefreshed. Some of factors the factors with insomnia in the National Sleep Foundation survey included being female, being widowed or single, having a low education level, low income, unemployment, smoking, life stress, physical health problems, and pain or activity limitation. Also in some cases insomnia does increase with age.

Many people with insomnia believe that they are not getting enough sleep, when most people are likely are getting a sufficient amount. Insomniacs tend to stay in bed longer and sleep during the day bekieving that being in bed more will get them to sleep more. Really they are underestimating the amount of sleep they get each night, thinking it is less than it really is. So insomnia is really caused by the attempt to get more sleep than needed. If an insomniac believes thay need eight hours sleep when really it's six hours, that leaves them with two hours of wakefulness. The attitudes of insomniacs is the cause for most because they believe that with an insufficient amount of sleep thier day will not run smoothly. If they feel then that the night before they didn't get enough sleep their attitude, mood, and behavior might be different that day.

There is good news, cognitive-behavioral therapy can change insomniacs attitude toward sleep. They can practice good "sleep hygiene," it includes paying attention to the effects on sleep of environmental factors such as noise, light, and temperature; avoiding behaviors that can lead to conditioned insomnia such as reading or watching TV in bed; avoiding alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, or certain medications before bedtime; and paying attention to the timing of exercise, snacks, and bedtime itself. Shortening sleep time might also help. In the end these treatments seem to help more than certain medications.

Conclusion: I find it really intersting that it's the attitudes and certain other behaviors that cause insomnia. I originally thought that it would've been some chemical reaction in the brain that caused insomnia. Also it seems that more people, than I thought, suffer from insomnia and other sleep related problems. It was surprising to find that behavioral therapy helps more than medications . Simple things such as not reading or watching TV can help an insomniac get more sleep.

Sparkling Recovery with Brain "Pacemakers"

2009-01-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

A man in a video is doing a short demonstration, holding a remote control in his hand. He clicks a button on the remote and his arm starts to shake uncontrollably. The man clicks the remote again and his arm stops as if it was never shaking. The man has Parkinson disease, which is an unhealthy basal ganglion that is in charge of quick fluid movements. In this demonstration he was showing a kind of pacemaker that is placed inside the collarbone that receives pulses of electricity from a battery in the pacemaker. This is a miracle for the patients of Parkinson’s disease. By using the remote it can stop tremors and even help people gain control over walking again! And yet this is not a cure, but it can help people for many years with the disease. With this new wave of pacemaker it is bringing about more advanced and helpful technology. This is not only helpful for those with Parkinson, but also other kinds of disorders like some types of depression, OCD, and Tourette’s syndrome. To be able to further the advanced technology, scientist have to be able to identify where the brain areas where electrical stimulation will be most effective for each patient. The brain is perfect and complex, which they are still learning what each part of the brain controls. With the studying of human brain they might get the answer to cure and fix these diseases.
My Response:
This new pacemaker is a very important for people struggling with Parkinson’s disease and other associated diseases. It is a miracle for the people who have lost hope in their life. I know if I was under the same circumstances; I would like something that could give me a normal life. This new pacemaker can help the people live a normal life. As time goes on the pacemaker will only continue to improve and even help other diseases. The pacemaker is the stepping stones to a new and better future for those struggling with diseases. Through this study many new things can be learned.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=sparking-recovery-with-brain-pacemakers&print=true

The Reason Behind Panic Attacks and Disorders

2009-01-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

A panic attack is defined as a quick experience of intense fear or discomfort. The symptoms are an extremely high heart rate, difficulty to breathe, trembling, sweating, and worries about losing control. People who suffer from these attacks are feeling more than just brief anxiety, but instead say that is the most terrifying experience in their life. There are two reasons why people experience panic attacks: genetics and triggered "false alarms."
A psychologist names Regina A. Shih claims that panic attacks and panic disorders run in families. This is found true especially in identical twins who are two to three times more likely to have an attack if the other twin did than fratermal twins. This is called "biological vulnerability" toward anxiety.
Also, attacks stem from "false alarms". This is when your body reacts as it would if there was a real danger. Your "fight or flight" instinct takes over even though there is no real danger. This is dangerous because our body remembers what triggered the attck and it is more likely to have another attack the next time that trigger is prevelant. This is caused either from being taught as a child certain things are dangerous even if they are not or the fear that world is dangerous and cannot be controlled.
A panic disorder is diagnosed when the person suffering from attacks begins to avoid all situations which would trigger another attack. These situations include places where it would be embarrasing to have an attack, places where it is difficult to escape, and places where it is difficult to find help. One symptom of panic disorder is a prolonged experience of stress just thinking about having an attack, which can actually cause you to have one.
I personally have had three panic attacks and so have other members of my family. While I myself have never had a panic disorder, I can attest that panic attacks are extremely terrifying. You know you are scared and are very aware that it is irrational, yet you cannot bring yourself to overcome your fear. In my family's case it is genetic since it spans a couple generations. It was very ecouraging to know that it can be genetic and that there wasn't something seriously wrong with me.

Science American Online Article
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-panic&print=true

Restoring Scents

2009-01-07T20:41:00.000-08:00

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_1_172/ai_n19377487

Faulty sniffers may get help

Imagine having to spend practically your whole life without ever smelling a thing. This is the story for many people including one woman named Betty (not her real name). Betty, however, was one of the lucky ones. At the age of fifty-one, Betty smelled an orange for the first time in her life. Because of her olfactory problem, Betty had never been able to receive the same sense of smell that many of us have today.
There are around 25 million people with an olfactory problem in this country today. Many of these people are deprived of good olfaction which can lead to dangerous situations. Without good olfaction, a person could be unable to identify gas leaks or spoiled food, which can both cause great harm.
Jason Feifer, an associate editor at Boston magazine, had a similar problem to Betty’s. However, it wasn’t until college, when his girlfriend constantly asked his opinion on foods, that he realized he had an olfaction problem. You may ask, how could you know that you can’t smell what you are eating? Well the truth is that Feifer’s taste buds and color helped him know what he was eating. However, if he was blindfolded, Fiefer could have never told the difference between mint and peanut butter-cup ice cream. When Fiefer saw what he was eating, his mind was able to “fill in some sensation that helps [him] differentiate between foods.” Luckily, Feifer was tested negative for a brain tumor- whose symptoms often include smell loss.
The Olfactory system is the only one of the human senses whose nerves from the brain makes contact with the outside world from inside the nose. An Olfaction problem can often occur during head trauma in which the nerves are severed or, respiratory infections and allergies. The most common causes of smell loss in middle age are chronic inflammation of the nose due to infections and obstructions by growths called polyps.
Most Olfactory cells in the nasal lining live for a while then die when the tumor necrosis factors (TNF’s) give their command. Growth factors then tell stem cells to wake up and divide to create new scent-sensing cells. In May, D.C. Henkin, at the Experimental Biology Meeting, found that the poorer an individuals sense of smell, the higher ratio of these death signaling agents to growth factors in the persons mucus. Henkin reported new data that treated patients with a drug that inhibits the breakdown of cyclic-AMP and cyclic-GMP, pivotal signal messenger compounds. Although 13 patients responded, Henkin warns that there can be a long time before patients see the difference.
Another treatment that has been looked into is Vitamin A therapy. Although it proved to be very successful in animals, many doctors warned that too much Vitamin A could be toxic, especially to a fetus. However, nothing has been found to work well to fix this problem. Scientists are now trying something along the lines of sniff training in Germany. People are tested by having to sniff all different kinds of things daily. Nancy E. Rawson of the Monell Center thinks that the treatment may help the brain pick up scent signals from what had been olfactory noise. While Rawson takes this approach, other scientists are trying to grow “nasal” epithelium stem cells in the lab. However, the stem cells do not grow well in the lab and hardly ever recognize the donor’s nasal tissue.
I think that this article opened my eyes to how much we take smell for granted. The most interesting thing that I thought was in this article was the story about Jason Fiefer. He knew the difference between foods when he saw them, but blindfolded, he could tell nothing. This shows how amazing the brain works that it is able to make up for the loss of one sense and use its other abilities to almost replace it.

Stephanie Kariuki

Pass it on

2008-12-30T10:34:00.000-08:00

We inherit many things from our parents; they pass along traits from their genes to ours.However, for 1 in every 116 newborn babies, their parents may have passed along the herpes virus, known as HHV-6. Researches suspect the HHV-6 infections are passes along from parent to child when the HHV-6 virus injects its genetic makeup into a parent's DNA. A parent then passes the virus to the child one of two ways: either through the placenta (when viral particles of mother cross into placenta) or more commonly through the chromosomes and DNA that a child receives from a parent.

In children who have the herpes virus, they often develop a slight infection marked by a high fever and sometimes a rash. In more rare and serious cases respiratory and intestinal problems may occur along with seizures. The greater problem, however, is that when the HHV-6 virus is passed on by chromosome integration, it enters into areas of DNA on chromosomes that are responsible from immune regulation and aging, called telomeres. Telomeres that possess viruses such as HHV-6 can trigger more serious problems such as cancer, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue syndrome. While scientists continue to study the correlation between the HHV-6 virus and more serious problems, doctors are now able to detect the HHV-6 infection at birth, so parents and children can be better informed.

My Response

I always thought that herpes (HHV-6) was only spread through skin to skin contact. I never thought of it as being able to be passed on through DNA. It is incredible to think that the virus inserts its genetic material into a parent's DNA, and then the parent passes it along to their offspring. This just goes to prove how complex and intricate one person's DNA really is. The HHV-6 virus does not seem initially too harmful in early childhood, with a high fever and rash being the main symptoms.However, if HHV-6 teolmeres can really lead to more serious health issues like cancer, epilepsy, and MS, then I definitely think that researchers need to spend more time studying the connection between the two and then they can hopefully find a way to cure the herpes virus altogether.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=pass-it-on-children-can-inherit-herpes

Could Our Own Proteins Be Used to Help Us Fight Cancer?

2008-12-26T17:35:00.000-08:00

Summary:
Heat shock proteins or HSPs were seen in 1962 when Furruccio Ritossa noticed that when the temperature was raised in an incubator with fruit flies, the chromosomes of the flies puffed up at certain places. This reaction was due to activated genes initiating the work of encoded proteins or HSPs. These proteins later were noticed in other forms of life other than fruit flies. HSPs are produced in response to stressful conditions and work to keep cell activities working well. In general, HSPs work to prevent undesirable interactions and promote beneficial interactions between proteins.
Unlike proteins inside a cell, which have a limited number of “matches” with which it can interact, HSPs can associate with a plethora of proteins giving rise to the wide variety of jobs HSPs can perform. For example, HSPs often become involved in the shaping of proteins. Each amino acid is either hydrophobic or hydrophilic. The HSP60 protein has both hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts and works to change the shape of the amino acid chain. The HSP100 protein, in contrast, works with the HSP70 protein to disassemble damaged proteins or cause a folded protein to unfold. The HSP70 proteins work by binding to peptides, which are short stretches of amino acid sequences. When ATP is present the molecule’s peptide-binding cleft is open. When ATP is absent the cleft is closed by a structure on the HSP70 protein and the peptide is trapped. HSP70 can trap a variety of peptides and therefore can work in many cellular processes like assembling complex proteins and protecting proteins affected by high temperatures. HSPs can be used during emergency conditions to alleviate stress by rescuing essential proteins, dismantling and recycling damaged proteins, and keeping cell processes operating smoothly.
Along with responding to hazardous conditions, HSPs can be used to fortify immune responses. A protein named gp96, identified as a member of the HSP90 family, can initiate immune resistance to tumors. Since identical gp96 molecules are found in tumors and in normal tissues, it is not the structure of the amino acids that provides immunity to cancerous cells. In 1990 it was found that HSP70 from tumors could also elicit tumor immunity. However, immunization did not occur when the molecule interacted with ATP. The ATP was causing HSP70 to release any bound peptides. When either HSP70 or HSP90 comes from cancers or virus-infected cells they have peptides from cancer-specific or viral antigens. HSP molecules, therefore, have a vital role in the recognition of cancerous and virus-infected cells. Peptides composed of antigens made inside cells associate with various HSPs and are eventually put onto a specific class of proteins. Cells called T lymphocytes are able to recognize the peptide complexes and eliminate any that portray a diseased cell. The ability of HSPs from tumors or pathogen-infected cells to carry and display peptides is essential in the immunization of those tumors or intracellular pathogens.
HSPs help T lymphocytes to recognize harmful peptides by interacting with immune cells called antigen-presenting cells. These cells are in almost every tissue of the body and are used to present antigens from their surrounding to T lymphocytes. They do this by taking in an HSP-peptide complex through a receptor and then revealing it to the T lymphocytes. T Lymphocytes then destroy or fight off cancerous or infected cells. HSPs can also alert the immune system of danger by causing antigen-presenting cells to go through changes in reaction to the presence of HSPs.
By taking HSP-bound peptides from a patient with a tumor it is possible to purify the peptides and create a vaccine that could initiate an attack against tumor-associated cells. In many cases this process has been successful. It even seems as if the process could be used to treat infectious diseases like genital herpes and tuberculosis.
The specific heat shock protein HSP90 is proven to buffer harmful effects and cover up variations and genetic mutations. When this function of HSP90 is deterred by extreme conditions, the accumulated variations are revealed and natural selection can take place. A loss of the function of HSP90 may make cancer cells more sensitive to stress, which could allow them to be destroyed more easily by chemotherapy. HSP90 inhibiters are, therefore, being tested in cancer patients along with chemotherapy.
Cancer immunotherapy involving HSP-peptide complexes can be very effective. However, very high doses of HSPs can cause the suppression, rather than stimulation, of immune responses. One danger of treating various diseases with HSPs is that drugs changing HSP levels may harm systems dependent on the proteins. Scientists, however, have learned to avoid side effects while altering proteins. In conclusion, heat shock proteins or HSPs are known to play essential parts in cell functions. They help create, degrade, and protect proteins, protect cells from the effects of mutations, and even facilitate immunity by associating with cells involved in antigen presentation. Among the many known functions of HSPs, however, are many more that have yet to be discovered.

My Response:
I continually marvel at the complexity of the life God has given to all creatures. This article presented proteins, processes, and associations, which I never knew existed let alone played such a vital part in life functions. HSPs are involved in many processes to protect the body and defend against harmful factors. Cancer and other infectious diseases are devastating and harmful. However, the effects of these diseases would be more extreme if the body had no way to defend itself. I believe the immune system is one of the most phenomenal systems of the body. Our bodies are constantly faced with adversity and potentially hazardous conditions. Each cell of the immune system including HSPs has a specific and unique function. As the various cells work together, much like any cooperation of people work together, they are able to defend against unwanted, undesirable effects. The information in this article allowed me to appreciate the diligent and faithful functions of the body’s immune system. Our knowledge of the functions of various cells like HSPs is minimal although constantly increasing. Yet these functions, known and unknown, continue to take place to keep our bodies operating smoothly.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=new-jobs-for-ancient-chaperones

How Magicians Trick the Mind

2008-12-08T16:05:00.000-08:00

Summary
Magicians are masters at attention and awareness. They have the ability to control what what people are aware of andwhat they are not. They do this by creating visual and optical illusions. But perhaps the most pivotal tool, is the ability to make cognitive illusions. Cognitive illusions are like visual illusions in the way that both cover one's perception of physicalm reality. They are different from visual illusions in the sense that they are based on things sensory in nature. These include attention, memory, and and casual interference. With the ability to use these illusions, magicians make it almost impossible to figure out what is actually going on.

Neuroscientists are interested in understanding cognitive functions to learn how to make better experiments and to create more effective visual and cognitive illusions for learning about the neural bases of attention and awareness. They hope that a better understanding of these things will lead to diagnostic and treatment options for people who suffer from cognitive disorders such as deficits resulting from brain trauma, attention disorders, and maybe even Alzheimers. The treatment for these disorders might be able to "trick" the patients into focusing on the things they normally can't pay attention to, and tune out the distractions. Just like a magician makes his audience focus on what he wants them to.

Magicians use the practice of turning a person's focus away from a secret action called "misdirection." This causes viewers' attention to go to the effect of an action instead of the action or the cause of the action. Magicians, however, can also use a method called covert misdirection. This allows the audience to look at a method behind a trick and be completely oblivious to it. One type of covert misdirection is called change blindness, meaning that people don't notice something different about a scene. Studies show that it doesn't even have to be a small change to a scene. If people are really concentrating on something, a huge change can be right in their line of vision, and they still can fail to notice it. Magicians like to use this method.

Also, Magicians play with your head by triggering circuts in your brain. If a magician pretends to throw a ball, all eyes go to where the people thought the ball should have landed. This must mean that implied and real motions activate similar neural circuits in one's brain. Perhaps that is why illusions feel so real. There are many other ways that magicians can play with people's heads, and if neuroscientists can learn to use the same methods, they too could could control awareness. And if they manage to link awareness to the functioning of neurons, they will have the power to discover some mysteries of the consciousness.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?=magic-and-the-brain

My Thoughts

I thought this article was intersting because it shed some light about how magicians can play with your mind. I never thought of studying a magicians tricks to figure out key principles of my own mind before. I also thought it was cool that scientists are studying some methods that magicians use to people with cognitive disorders. Who knows? Maybe cognitive therapy will be the next type careerthat people will be encouraged to get into.

2008-12-06T12:29:00.000-08:00

When someone goes into cardiac arrest his or her heart stops suddenly. This causes the blood to stop flowing, and cells use up all of their oxygen in about ten seconds and all of their glucose in five minutes. After this happens, one’s cells actually poison themselves with a wash of deadly chemicals. Usually doctors use a defibrillator to shock the heart back into action which would get the blood moving and deliver the oxygen and glucose to the cells. Unfortunately, if you are not already at a hospital and this is not done quickly enough, permanent damage can result, including brain damage within five minutes. One out of twenty people survive cardiac arrest, but Peter Safar wants to make it one in three. Peter Safar is well-known in the field of resuscitation studies and researches at the University of Pittsburg Medical Center. He discovered that your body will slow the deadly chemicals if its temperature is lowered enough- by around 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. He tested his theory on dogs and discovered that he could extend the five minute time limit to ten. In these experiments he had used a small heart and lung machine that cooled the blood and sent it back in the system. But however great Safar’s discovery was, it was not able to transfer it to the field because it was too complex and not transportable.
Safar was not the only one working on this. Michael Darwin of the 21st Century Medicine (now the Critical Research Center) was also looking for a way to quickly cool victims of cardiac arrest. He knew about a mouse who had survived after being submerged in the liquid perflurocarbon. Not only does this liquid does not harm air pockets in the lungs, it can also be made to carry oxygen and carbon dioxide. According to Darwin, paramedic would treat someone who had just suffered from their heart stopping by using an endotracheal tube to send the perflurocarbon into the person’s lungs. This amazing liquid would conatin enough oxygen to keep the person going and cool the blood that would circulate and then cool the brain.
Once again, Darwin and Safar were not the only people to have discovered this. Another group of people had been working with perflocarbon but had used two tubes, one inside the other, to transfer the liquid and oxygen separately which was ultimately better for cooling the brain. Darwin paired up with Steven Harris of his Critical Research Center and their method for cooling was three times as high as any other external methods. Using dogs, they found that the blood temperature could fall by fourteen degrees in eighteen minutes, which in turn cooled the brain by about thirteen degrees.
These discoveries were announced in 1999 at a medical conference and spread the word and excitement of rapid brain cooling procedures. Other researchers got involved, including Ken Kanza who had perfected the shape of ice particles that would aid in the cooling process. So far, they had successfully cooled a living dog and brought it back to its normal temperature- twelve times. Currently five prototypes are being made and the future looks promising for this new development. They are working on designs that will be easily transported, like on an ambulance for emergencies and its estimated this new development could save one hundred thousand lives a year.

My Response: I think that is amazing- to admit someone into some sort of hypothermic state. And that liquid- perflurocarbon I have no idea how it carries oxygen or how it can be in your lungs and not damage anything but I am really glad it does. I like how all the researchers came together to pull this off. Each one on their own couldn’t accomplish it but together they made it happen. I hope this really ends up in the field, and that it will save all the lives they are hoping it will. Five minutes is a small window in which the brain damage could occur, but if they can get that up to ten minutes, many more will have a second chance at life.

http://discovermagazine.com/2001/oct/feattech

Head Attack

2008-10-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

Mind over Matter”, a phrase often used to encourage one another to overcome a physical obstacle that can be subdued by mental strength. However, “Mind over Matter” is not all positivity and accomplishments, it has its negative affects as well.. For Example, ulcers high blood pressure and asthma are all believed to be direct results of stress. Another question that has been recently researched is whether or not heart attacks are cause by stress. Around 1.5 million people suffer from a heart attack each year, 200,000 of them die, and many of them are believed to be brought on by stress. A recent study shows that out of 224 patients who had suffered heart attacks, more than half had experienced stress within twenty-four hours prior to the heart attack. About a quarter of all suspected heart attack victims reported to hospitals are not even suffering a heart attack, and no possible cause for their heart attack-like symptoms can be found. This phenomenon is yet to be explained, but is suspected to be a direct effect of emotional stress.
Stress resulting in a heart attack is caused by the body’s misinterpretation for stress as a dangerous situation. When the brain recognizes a dangerous situation occurring it immediately prepares the rest of the body for “fight or flight”. In the process of preparing for “fight or flight” the body experiences several changes. First, stress hormones such as epinephrine, norepinephrine, and glucocorticoids are released into the bloodstream. Next, unnecessary processes such as your digestive tract are shut down in order to preserve energy for leg muscles. In order for enough oxygen to be supplied to the legs, the heart rate increases rapidly, circulatory veins constrict to drive blood back to the heart more quickly. The blood that is driven back to the heart slams into the heart walls which snap back with even greater force. At the same time, arteries relax to increase blood flow from the heart to the needy muscles.
Unfortunately the body often undergoes the same reaction when faced with stressors such as depression, aggression, competitiveness, anxiety, ambition, or impatience. These stresses can cause high blood pressure, which leads to a fierce cycle of physical changes that ultimately lead to arrhythmia or a heart attack. Heart attacks can also be triggered by traumatic emotional stresses such as death of a loved one, an emotionally intense fight, a natural disaster, or heavy deadlines. Men that anticipate the worst and/or explode with anger make them thirty percent more likely to develop arrhythmia. Also a intense emotion such as anger or fury doubles the risk of a heart attack during the next few hours.

My Response:
The effect the mind has on the heart, although harmful, can be used in positive ways as well. After recent experiments on pigs, scientists find that the frontal brain appears to be connected to the nerve cell bodies of the sympathetic nervous system in the spinal cord in such a way that the mind should be capable of having a positive influence on the heart. Thorough relaxation techniques and stress management methods that are based on this theory, heart patients may be able to increase their survival chances more than they would with daily exercise. Two major steps to decreasing the risk heart attack other than relieving stresses are exercising daily and developing healthy eating habits.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=head-attack

Is There Really an Autism Epidemic?

2008-10-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=is-there-really-an-autism-epidemic
Summary:
This article explains the shocking proportion of children who suffer from autism. As of now there are one in every 166 children will be diagnosed with autism which leads to a 657 percent increase between the years of 1993-2003. These statistics are vastly different from the one in every 2,500 that researchers quoted for decades. Because of these new statistics, many educators and researchers have referred to autism as an epidemic.
Autism is a spectrum disorder, meaning that it can be very mild or extremely severe. Children that have autism tend to be very limited in their communication or even mute. They do not like create close relationships with others and prefer to be alone. Autistic children have a high aversion to change and two thirds of them are mentally challenged. For reasons unknown autism affects more males than females. There are many things that are said to play a role in children developing autism, one of which is genetic, but genetics alone do cannot possibly explain the extraordinary rise in cases of children with autism. Some other factors that have been proposed are allergies, viruses, antibiotics and even increased rates of television viewing. Although these possible causes remain speculative one possibility that seems to attract more attention than the others are vaccines.
Because autism is usually diagnosed around the age of two, which is shortly after young children have received many vaccinations, vaccines could be seen as a possible culprit. Many parents recall their children developing autism shortly after being given a vaccine for mumps, measles or rubella (German measles) but recent published research seems to convey different. Many researchers claim that Japanese, American and European studies say that even with the decline of MMR vaccines, the number of new cases of autism has continued to rise. Because of this, researchers claim that there is very little evidence, if any, that vaccines cause autism. Even with the evidence that exists there is still a question of whether or not an autism epidemic even probable. Research suggests that the diagnostic process of autism has loosened in recent years leading to a substantially higher number of children being diagnosed with autism.
It has been said that legal changes also have played a big role in the rise of autism. Laws now require schools to provide the number of students within the school who have disabilities. Because of this there has been a huge surge in the number of children with the disease. It is said though, that these numbers are not based on carful diagnoses. Although the article does not rule out autism’s growing prevalence to our society, it does suggest that there not near enough evidence to claim it as an epidemic.
My Opinion:
I believe that autism is very prevalent in today’s society. But I also think that our society puts way to much emphasis on labeling children with autism instead of helping them to succeed. Because autism is a spectrum disorder I think it can sometimes be hard to diagnose. I don’t think that just because a child has trouble expressing their feelings or likes to be by themselves, they should be automatically characterized as autistic. In the same sense, I do not believe that just because a child has outbursts or does not like change he or she should be automatically punished with no thought about the fact that something could possibly be wrong with their mental state. I think that instead or attributing so much time to diagnosing children, researchers should spend more time finding the cause and trying to fix the problem.

Bypassing Paralyzed Nerves

2008-10-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37657/title/Bypassing_paralyzed_nerves

Scientists have developed technology that electronically connects the muscles of an animal to its brain. This allows for the paralyzed animal to have slight control over their muscles. In the case of the monkey, it was able to control small movements in its hand. The device sends electrical signals to the brain which allows the animal to have control over its muscles even though the actual nerves aren't sending the message. This experiment was a great success since it was the first time that scientists have been able to link the brain artificially to the muscles.

Unfortunately, the control of necessary muscles in the human body can take control of many muscles rather than just one. The person would have to learn to use there muscles on an individual basis and then put them together. The most recent idea, however is to develp technology to stimulate the nerves in the spinal chord rather than in the muscle itself.

This is a very interesting and complex idea. The concept of creating an artificial control center is mind boggling. At the same time, if this were to become a reality, many people's lives would change drastically. With the development of science, the world can and will change for the better.

Progeria

2008-10-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=new-hope-for-progeria-drug-for-rare-aging-disease

Progeria
Progeria is a childhood disorder that can have a two-year-old child resemble a grandparent. It afflicts one out of every four to eight million kids, and right now there are ten or so kids in the United States and fifty reported worldwide. Symptoms are hair loss, wrinkling skin, fragile bones, limited growth and stiff joints, appearing as early as age two. A few children with progeria have lived to be twenty, but about ninety percent die of heart attacks or strokes by thirteen. Progeria strikes at random and is a result of a mutation in the sperm before conception. This changes one letter of DNA and disfigures the nucleus. It also makes a toxic protein that builds up in the arteries of the heart that harden and can cause heart attacks.
But there is hope for these families. Researchers have genetically engineered mice with the progeria problem to test a promising new drug. Farnestyltransferase inhibitors or FTIs, were shown to restore the nucleus and prevent damage in younger mice. This drug also affected the older mice in that it reversed the damage. Currently, they are still testing for safety and efficiency with a Phase II trial consisting of eleven kids from sixteen different countries. Other than this fledgling drug, treatments are only a high calorie diet so as not to lose weigh and physical therapy to help with joint stiffness. Though it’s still too early to say, this drug could someday be widely accepted as the treatment for progeria.
And researchers have found that the infamous toxic protein in progeria is made by all of us, though at significantly lower levels. It’s possible that this increases with your age, causing the signs of aging.

My reaction: That is such a sad thing to imagine, that your child ages and dies before they are a teenager. People worry about fine lines and wrinkles and the signs of aging, and these kid’s lives are shorten by it. It definitely puts things in perspective. The children should be able to be like children and the aging should stop acting like children about their appearance. You have your run with your youth and your looks and when it’s over, it’s over. These kids don’t get their run. They have fragile bones and lose their hair and have wrinkles! They can’t play like other kids and people probably don’t say ‘Your look so much like your mother.’ It’d be more accurate to say they look like the grandparent or perhaps the mother in another fifty years. Age and the signs of aging are something to be earned. Hair loss should be from too many crazy styles back in the day, and laugh lines from the joys of life. Joints should be stiff from overuse and dancing all night. Birthdays should always be celebrated, whether over the hill or at the bottom- just not underneath it. To not only shorten life at the beginning, but add the elements from the end seems so cruel. And to think one letter in the DNA, one mutation can change it all. I hope the drug ends up being the answer these families have been looking for.

2008-10-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

Bypassing paralyzed nerves

Summary:
Scientists are now experimenting with restoring movement to paralized limbs. Currently they have been testing on a monkey with a paralyzed arm. They electronically connect the brain to the arm by way of an Electrode planted in the brain that connects to one neuron. This process has promising results except for the fact that they can only have the monkey control one muscle at a time. And to have a functioning arm in daily life one has to be able to control many different muscles at once. Therefore the stumbling block for the scientists right now is how to connect and control all the muscles of the arm at once. Another issiue would be making the electronic chip wireless so someone wouldnt have wires sticking out of there head. Though scientists did admit that the recent experiment was only to show that electronic connection was possible and that they are years if not decades away from anything that could be benifical to humans.

My Response:
I think this kind of research is good. There's nothing controversial about what there doing and its for a good cause. This can provide some hope to people that have been paralized and cannot function on there own. They should continue research since there first experiments have shown that the electronic connection was possible. It could be a while before anything usable is avaliable for humans but this is a step in the right direction.

Tongue Bugs

2008-10-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

http://discovermagazine.com/1995/oct/tonguebugs581/?searchterm=tongue%20bugs

Summary:
A lot of bacteria are in our mouth especially, on the back of the tongue. The bacteria converts food-derived nitrate in saliva into a chemical that kills harmful germs in the stomach. Processed meats that have been treated with nitrate as preservatives and have formed nitrosamines as a result. We take lots of nitrate from in the green leafy vegetables so nitrosamines take place in our bodies. Nigel Benjamin discovered that 25% of nitrate makes its way back to cells in the mouth. The cells are secreted in the saliva, and the saliva is converted into nitrate. The nitrate that is made mixes up with the food we eat. The nitrate becomes acidified when it is mixed with the food, and it generates a lot of nitric oxide. The nitric oxide kills all the germs we eat with food. In this hypothesis's test, if salivary nitrite is put in acid, it will be convert to E. coli-killing nitric oxide. A lot of bacteria exist on back of the tongue and near the throat. When the nitrite is swallowed, it mixes with acid in the stomach and turns into nitrate oxide which kills germs in the stomach. Organisms on the tongue are used in a symbiotic relationship to kill organisms in the stomach. The tongue bugs help protect against bacterium such as the Helicobacter pylori. This bacterium has been identified as a cause of stomach ulcers and stomach cancer.

Opinion:
This article gave me many information about the bacteria: where they live and what they do. I didn't know that the lots of bacteria exist in humen's mouth, especially tongue and I thought the bacteria is the only bad thing before I read this article. I think the green vegetables are good for our bodies because of the nitrate so we have to eat more green vegetables!

White Matter Matters

2008-10-16T19:37:00.000-07:00

Summary:
For decades scientist focused on the gray matter of the brain and not that white matter. Gray matter is the site of mental computation and memory storage. It is composed of neuronal cell bodies or neurons. White mater is underneath this gray matter and takes up nearly one-half of the human brain. This white matter is composed of millions of communication cables with long wires called axons. These axons connect neurons in different brain regions and are covered by a white fatty substance called myelin. The functioning of this white matter is just as critical to mental and social skills as gray matter and appears is different amounts in people with different experiences of with mental dysfunctions. The extent of the white matter in the human brain also changes throughout one's life.
Not every axon is insulated or coated by myelin. On those which are gaps occusr in the insulation at about every millimeter. These gaps are named nodes of Ranvier after Louis-Antone Ranvier. Myelin is wrapped up to 150 times between each of these nodes, and the white substance allows nerve impulses to travel 100 times faster through the axons according to modern investigation. Te extensive wrapping of myelin id done by two types of glial cells: an octopus-shaped oligodendrocyte cell and a sausage-shaped Schwann cell, the latter working outside the brain and spinal cord. However, the formation of myelin by these cells is not completely random. Strict proportions excist between the insulation thickness and the diameter of the axon. The ration 0.6 of bare axon diameter divided by total fiber diameter is optimal for maximum conduction velocity. The Schwann cell, as discovered by Klaus-Armin Nave in Gottingen, Germany, is able to detect neuregulin, a protein coating axons, and respond to the amount of this protein by wrapping more or fewer myelin sheets.
As the formation of myelin occurs, it moves from the back to the front of the cerebral cortex. The last sites of myelination are the frontal lobes which are responsible for higher-level reasoning, planning and judgment. The myelination process begins in early life and may not be completed until ager twenty-five or thirty partly because axons continue to grow and change in response to experience. Studies by colleagues at the Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden show that changes occur in the white matter when and individual is learning a complex skill. For example, one investigation of these colleagues shows that regions connecting parts of the cerebral cortex, which help coordinate movement of the fingers with other cognitive processes, are more highly developed in profession pianists than non-musicians. Myelin can also change in response to the environment. Some reports show that 17% less white matter is in the corpus callosum of children who suffer sever neglect.
The conclusion that experience can influence myelination is plausible for several reasons. When the brain responds to experiences and neurons send electical impulses through the axons, the impulses can regulate specific genes in neurons. One of these genes produces L1-CAM which is a sticky protein essential for putting the first layer of membrane around the axon so that myelination can occur. One type of glial cell can also sense the movement of impulses. .This cell is called an astrocyte and can release chemicals which cause oligodendorcytes tot make more myelin. A mutation of the astrocyte gene causes Alexander disease which can bring about mental retardation and abnormal myelin.
The information sent through the axons must arrive at the right areas of the brain at the right time. Because neurons exist both far and near the final destination of the information being sent, the information must be delayed in some situations. This delaying can occur because myelin exists in greater amounts on some axons and because the nodes of Ranvier are more frequent and abundant on some axons than others. The more myelin insulating the axon, the quicker the information a nd impulses are transferred. Likewise, the greater amount of nodes allows the signal to be generated and regulated at a quicker pace. The precise timing of various impulses and signals strengthens certain neuronal circuits and, therefore, facilitates learning skills. Among learning skills affected by white matter is Dyslexia which is t he result of disrupted timing of information transmission in circuits required for reading. Tone deafness is the result of defects in processing in the cerebral cortex, the site of sound analysis. Schizophrenia is now believed to be the result of abnormal white matter with a less than ideal number of oligodendrocytes and of mutated genes involved in the formation of myelin. Other abnormalities linked to the white matter or to myelination are ADHD, bipolar disorder, language disorders, autism, cognitive decline in aging and Alzheimer's disease.
Myelination has a great deal to do with a person's extended ability to obtain new skills at a young age. The insulation of nerve fibers dictates when learning can best occur. Young children can better learn a foreign language because the brain circuits detecting speech rewire in accordance to sounds of a person's childhood. Certain skills, like piano-playing and tennis, which require much practice and repetition, are best learned during childhood because a child's brain is involved in myelinataion more than that of an adult. Because this process mainly occurs during childhood and adolescence, the environment of one's childhood greatly affects one's brain and neural connections. It is probable that the firing of neurons can stimulate myelination as a result of intensive training at any age. However, treatments have yet tot be made to alter the white matter in order for this to occur.

Opinion:
This article concerning the intricate, complex and fascinating control center of the human body brings to light for me many of the brain's complexities, functions and influences. Man is just beginning to touch upon the details and design of the body. Within the simple discovery of the importance of white matter are more discoveries about the functions and mechanisms of this group of cells. I find it fascinating and awe-inspiring that along with the great diversity of each part of the body from organs to individual proteins, God has created a specific functions for each of these parts. For example, the astrocyte cell which senses impulses plays a big roll in stimulating other cells to form myelin essential for the body's health. One mutation in the astrocyte gene can bring about Alexander disease. This possible result does not, however, show me that God makes mistakes . Rather it shows me that even the smallest part of God's creation has huge importance to the body. The design and creation of the human body and all its components is also a testimony to the incredible ability of God to work everything in perfect timing. If He can orchestrate the timing of two different signals from different neurons to arrive simultaneously at the same brain region, how much more can He control the timing of events in our daily lives.

Could peope lose weight by injecting fat into their stomach?

2008-10-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

Summary:
Two-thirds of American adults and seventeen percent of people under the age of nineteen are obese. A new breakthrough in science believes that injecting fat into the stomach area could promote weight loss. There are two kinds of fat cells: white and brown. White cells store calories and are found mostly in the waistline area. Brown fat cells capture energy, then release it causing calories to be burned.
Brown fat cells from immature muscle and fat cells are created by two different proteins. The process of turning white fat cells into brown fat cells could be produced by a drug. It is believed that one day brown fat cells will be injected into peoples' abdominal areas to increase calorie burning. White cells release fatty acids to the brown cells which burn them.
Brown fat cells are typically found in infants to regulate and stable their body temperature. When the cells are done with this role, the disappear. There are few of them scattered throughout the body. However, there are immature cells that could grow into brown cells.
Yu-Hua Tsend, a biologist at Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard University, used a growth protein to turn on the genes that make brown fat cells. This discovery was first tested on mice. The ones that had the protein injected into them were leaner than the ones who didn't receive the proteins. The cells that were injected to the mice also caused the immature cells to turn into brown cells instead of white.
There is a protein that determines whether a cell will grown into brown fat cells and muscle. Lower levels of this protein create muscle and higher levels turn the cell into brown fat cells. Higher levels of this protein also may turn white fat cells into brown ones. This is why they believe that if proteins and cells are injected into the abdominal region, it would promote weight loss.

Opinion:
When I first saw this article, I was confused. How could losing fat happen by injecting more fat into the body? It sounds crazy. I was unaware that there are two types of fat cells. It would be harmful to inject white fat cells into the body because they would just store more fat. However, brown cells would promote weight loss.
Healthy diets and exercise are always going to be encouraged, but maybe this technology could be helpful in the future. Some people might need that extra push to help them lose weight and this could be just what they need. It would help the person's weight loss to become easier. We are unsure of what this discover will bring about, but it looks like the results are positive.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=lose-weight-by-injecting-fat-in-belly

New Hand, Same Brain Map

2008-10-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37445/title/New_hand%2C_same_brain_map

Summery:

At the age of nineteen David Savage was involved in a machine-press accident, which led to the amputation of Savage’s right hand. About thirty five years later in December of 2006, Savage underwent hand transplant surgery. And now David Savage has someone else’s right hand attached to his right arm. Four months after his surgery Savage regained partial sense of touch in his new right hand. One year after his surgery Savage was able to lift a ten pound weight with his right hand.

Doctors questioned if the hand transplant surgery would work because when savage had both of his original hands part of his left brain responded to his right hand and part of his right brain responded to his left hand. When Savage lost his right hand the sensory receptors that responded to his right hand became sensory-deprived and they had to find something else to respond to like his right arm. For about thirty five year Savage's sensory receptors for his lost right hand were responding to something else, but when Savage received his new right hand the same sensory receptors that responded to his original right hand now responded to his new right hand. Doctors were amazed that the brain map for his old right hand was reclaimed for his new right hand especially since Savages brain was full grown at the time of the amputation.

Doctors did several tests to see the activity of Savage’s brain before and after his hand transplant and compared the tests that they took after his hand transplant with men who had never experienced an amputation and found that the activity of his left brain was about the same as the men who never experienced an amputation.

Doctors say that Savages brain went through reverse reorganization. This means that when Savage’s hand was amputated the brain had to reorganize its sensory map and then thirty five years later the brain had to reverse the reorganization of its sensory map that it did when Savage lost his hand to its original sensory map.

Response:

I think that it is amazing that even after thirty five years the brain is still able to reopen the connection that it had with Savage's original hand to his new hand. I also find it extremely amazing that Savage has regained feeling in his right hand, which is not his original right hand. I think that it shows how amazing, complicated, and capable the brain is. I know that the hand transplant surgery is very new and doctors are still trying to figure stuff out , but what I would like to know is were did they get the hand for his transplant?

Now Hear This: New Research Aims to Restore Lost Hearing

2008-10-16T18:51:00.000-07:00

Summary:

At fourteen months old, Peter Steyer’s life hung between life and death as he lay in a hospital bed. By injecting intravenous doses of streptomycin, an antibiotic, the doctors could save Peter’s life, but this lifesaving antibiotic could have lifelong side affects/consequences. Peter’s parents chose to give their son the antibiotic and he lived to tell about it; however Steyger suffered hearing loss, which he says has virtually affected every area of his life, even his career choice.

Now Steyger investigates hearing at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. He says, “What I’m doing is explaining why I’m deaf,” referring to his research.

Steyger’s research deals with how drugs, such as streptomycin, enter into the body and kill hair cells, which are sensory cells in the inner ear that are crucial to hearing. All hair cells have a bundle of hairlike extensions that protrude out from the inner surface of the cochlea, which is a snail-shaped coil of tissue deep in the inner ear. What happens is sounds pass into the ear and their vibrations rumble the cochlear fluid, which then results in the back and forth movement of the hair cells. The cells then translate every back and forth motion into an electrical signal that travels through nerve fibers to the brain. In the brain these signals are decoded as hearing.

People are born with about 16,000 hair cells. During the normal aging process, some of these 16, 000 hair cells eventually wear out and die. Most cases of acquired loss are due to the death of hair cells, but deafness can also be a result of other cause, for example: glitches in nerves that connect from the ear to the brain.

Previously scientists have believed that peoples hair cells-and good hearing-are irreplaceable. However, now genetic research deals with stem cells and studies of the fragile architecture of the inner ear propose that replacing lost hair cells, which would restore hearing, may in fact be possible.

Although human hair cells do not grow back after they wear out and die, animal hair cells do grow back. Most vertebrates are capable of growing hair cells back after old ones die, but eventually all mammals lose this innate replacement plan.

Scientists have been investigating genes that participate in hair cell information such as: hair cell development prompting, eliminating, stem cells, and the capacity to regenerate hair cells. Another important factor in the ability of hair cells to function efficiently is the exact positioning of the cell.

So far scientists are investigating cures, but what people like Steyger, who lost their hearing due to life-saving antibiotics, need is prevention of the damage in the first place; not to say that all their investigations are useless, but the ideal discovery would be a way to prevent life-saving antibiotics from having this lifelong consequence/side affect. For people who have already lost their hearing to life-saving antibiotics it is too late for prevention obviously, but in the future it will be very useful.

The way ototoxic antibiotics kill hair cells is by leaching into the cochlear fluid from the blood, collecting the hair cells inside, and killing them with their high concentrations. Steyger says that it is uncertain as to how ototoxic drugs get inside the hair cells. Some scientists believe that the cells take up the drugs using endocytosis, but experiments have shown that endocytosis is not the only process used to take in the drugs, because it occurs too qucickly for endocytosis to be the only process present. One of Steyger’s experiments suggests that ototoxic drugs enter cells by way of ion channels.

By continuing to study and experiment with animals, scientists may by able to develop a drug that can be given prior to or with ototoxic drugs that would close ion channels, preventing the drugs from entering into, and killing the cells.

My Response:

I thought this article was interesting because I guess I never really thought about actually “restoring” hearing, or preventing it from being lost in the first place. I guess I thought it couldn’t be done and that’s why people who are hard of hearing use hearing aids. Also it is very unfortunate that many life-saving antibiotics are ototoxic, or hair cell killing, but life is more valuable than the ability to hear.

I think that it would be difficult to try and come up with a cure and then eventually a solution by experimenting on animals because scientists have already established that the way humans and animals hear, and how their hearing works is different. A certain solution that works to restore an animals hearing, may not be able to restore a humans hearing. I suppose that once they find a solution on animals hearing loss, it will help them further in their research pertaining to a solution for human hearing loss.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_20_169/ai_n16533041/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

Subliminal Thoughts or Unconscious Flicks?

2008-10-16T17:52:00.000-07:00

Your eyes are constantly moving. Even when your eyes are fixated on something, they are still flickering back and forth. However, these movments are imperceivable to us. The largest of these flicks are called microsaccades and the smallest are called tremors. Originally, scientists thought that microsaccades actually impaired vision, and in 1980 University of Maryland Steinman concluded that microsaccades were "merely a kind of nervous tic." However, a group of scientists have determined that microsaccades are actually essential to good vision.

The first argument is that these fixational eye movements keep your vision from fading.Animals are stimulated by movement. Frogs, for instance, cannot see a fly that is still, but once the fly moves the frog immediatley reacts to eat the fly. The frog cannot see the unmoving fly, because their microsaccades have slowed down. The fading of these objects is called adaption. The Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix conducted a test where they asked a group of volunteers to fixate on a small spot while releasing or pressing a button to indicate when they perceived a peripheral target. The scientists measured each individual's fixational eye movements on a high-precision video system. The data, which was published in 2006, revealed that the microsaccades decreased in speed and size as the target vanished, but increased in speed and size right before the target reappeared. This proved that the lack of microsaccades leads to adaption and fading.

The second argument takes into consideration eye diseases. A lack of fixational movements occur in people with a "lazy eye", and is the leading cause of vision loss in people ages 20-70 years old.

Also, psychologists now have research that suggests that microsaccades reveal your subliminal thoughts. Neurologist Ralf Engbert of the University of Potsdam in Germany published research in 2003 that when an object of interest appeared in someone's peripherals their microsaccades decreased rapidly and then shot up to a frequency above normal. This also suggests that sudden changes in movement can draw our attention without us actually looking at the cause of the change.

My Opinion: I found it really interesting that microsaccades are basicaly like a continuing "refocus" method. Also, the thought about them revealing our thoughts and desires is why I chose this article. What would happen if people could eventually decipher these movements and read are minds? However, they don't really reveal our thoughts as much as they are constantly reminding our brains about what is around us. This article brought a new meanig to the phrase "your eyes are the window of your soul."

http://www.tolcs.org/downloads/anatomy/joy.pdf

Hypnosis, Memory and the Brain

2008-10-16T16:32:00.001-07:00

Hypnosis is a technique used by scientists to study psychological phenomena. An example is a technique known as posthypnotic amnesia (PHA). This models disorders like functional amnesia (sudden memory loss due to psychological trauma). PHA is produced by suggesting to someone hypnotized that he will forget certain things until "cancellation" (i.e. "Now you can remember everything"). PHA usually happens only when specifically suggested. It is much more likely to happen to a person with high levels of hypnotic ability. A new study shows that the hypnotic state influences brain activity related to memory.

Highly hypnotizable people with PHA usually show difficulty recalling whatever is suggested. They also show dissociation between explicit and implicit memory; even though the can't pinpoint the forgotten information it influences them. This is reversible, when the suggestion is cancelled their memories return to them. Dissociation and reversibility show the PHA in not the result of poor encoding of memory or normal forgetting. This is because as soon as the PHA is cancelled the memories return. PHA just makes the person unable to retrieve safely stored information. This is why PHA is useful for research.

Scientists use PHA to model functional amnesia because the conditions share similar features. Reports of functional amnesia show that people who are unable to remember certain things of the past still show evidence of the forgotten. As suddenly as these memories were forgotten they can be recovered.

Neuroscientist Avi Mendelsohn and colleagues at the Weizman Institute identified the brain activity petterns realting to PHA using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They selected 25 participants, of which half were PHA responsive (PHA group), while the other half was not (non-PHA group). The participants watched a 45-minute movie. One week later the participants were hypnotized, while in the fMRI scanner, to forget the movie until a certain cue came about as the cancellation.

After hypnosis the participants were tested twice, once while hypnotized and once again after the cue to remember had been given (the exact same test both times). They were asked 40 questions specifically about the movie and 20 questions about their surroundings while watching the movie (all yes or no answered questions).

In Test 1 Mendelsohn and colleagues found that the PHA group forgot more about the movie than the non-PHA group. The PHA group had no problem with the questions about their surroundings during the movie, though they struggles with the movie questions. In Test 2, after the remembrance cue was given, both groups remembered the same amount of details. Somewhat surprisingly though, the suggestion to forget was selective in impact.

The findings of Mendelsohn's fMRIs of the participants was that; when the non-PHA group answered the questions the fMRI showed high levels of activity in places responsible for visual and verbal sequences. In the PHA group there was little or no activity in these regions while other areas were more active than usual, as to heighten the senses of the other regions.

For participants in the PHA group, brain activity in the fMRI correlated with forgetting. We can rule out the possibility of reduced activity regardless or remembrance or forgetting. This is because the PHA group showed the reduction only when the answered incorrectly; when they answered successfully though, they nearly matched the non-PHA group.

Hypnotic effects are real! Mendelsohn's study shows that hypnotic suggestions influence brain activity as well as behavior and experience. This has been shown earlier by psychologist David Oakley, who compared the brain activity of people simply asked to fake hypnosis and paralysis, and genuinely hypnotized people with suggestions for leg paralysis.

Mendelsohn's study is also important because begins to specify the underlying brain processes, which are guessed to be shared by PHA and functional amnesia. The effects of PHA shows a dampening in brain activity due to heightened activity in the prefrontal cortex.

Memories are an interwoven web of "what," "how," "where," and "when," thus the distinction between content and context could quite possibly be blurred. In this study, movie content but not movie context wasinfluenced byPHA. To make such small distinctions, the suppressor module of the brain needs to process information at quite a high level. thi module needs to act quickly;preconciously subdueing activation of information before it enters awareness. Brain imaging superior to fMRI might help clear up the paradox of suave, but quick, activity.

Whereas some forgetfulness is seen as conscious and using effort, other forgetting is automatic, effortless, and unconscious. After mapping the usual features of PHA and functional amnesia, we need to discover and compare their common processes in much greater detail.

When we incorporate the dissociation of implicit and explicit memory the neural underpinnings of PHA will become even more clear. In PHA the person cannot explicitly recall certain information, though we can see evidence of this on implicit measures. Recognition in a sense is both explicit and implicit memory. Scientists would liek to compare scans of the PHA group trying to remember the movie, with the non-PHA group. This would be challenging, but would contribute much more to complete the picture of processes in the interesting forms of forgetting.

My Response:
Though I have heard and been fascinated by hypnosis I have never really looked into it enough to see the complexity of it. This article shows that there are a great many processes and variations of what can, and cannot be done with hypnosis. This article shows mainly one type of hypnosis, but has enough information to be much longer. The possibility of controlling someone's forgetfulness about a good, or bad, memory seems alien to me. There would be many possible good uses if we could totally work this out. We could help peopl forget instances of great trauma such as a car accident, or the death of a loved one etc. This atricle really started me thinking of all the possibilities to come of hypnotism. The future looks bright!

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hypnosis-memory-brain

Migraines

2008-10-16T16:21:00.000-07:00

There are more than 300 million people who suffer from migraines and as a result also experience nausea, sensitivity to light, and terrible headaches. Migraines have existed for thousands of years, and there is still no cure; many people who suffer from the severe pain of migraines do not even seek medical attention. The truth is that migraines are a very disabling disorder, and they cost the government over 17 billion dollars a year for loss of work, disability, and health expenses. Many people are now realizing how serious of a problem that a migraine is, and there has been a great deal of interest in research that may work to prevent and treat migraine pain.

No one knows for sure what causes migraines. It was once thought that the pain is caused from the dilation and stretching of blood vessels in the brain. A more recent theory is that migraine pains develop from a problem in the nervous system, specifically the brain stem. While it’s uncertain why migraines occur, an attack can be brought on by alcohol, menstruation, stress, weather, lack of sleep, allergies, hunger, and a plethora of other things. Victims usually experience an attack once a month, and the pain lasts two to three days. There are two parts of a migraine: the aura (what precedes the headache), and the actually headache. Aura is often a bright visual illusion followed by dark spots and is not experienced in all migraine sufferers. It is thought to come from cortical spreading depression which is a time of strong nerve cell activity, or when the neurons become very excited, followed by neuronal inhibition. When the neurons are in a state of inhibition they cannot be excited. This has to do with migraines because the changes in how the neurons behave explain the changes of blood flow-when neurons are excited and active, the require lots of blood, and when they aren’t active, the need less blood. When someone experiencing an aura has a bright visual hallucination, excited neurons are crossing the cortex, the same area of the brain that controls visual, sensory, and motor skills. The dark spots one experiences after the bright illusions are consistent with the neurons not being active.

There have been many studies regarding genetics and how they are related to migraines. While scientists aren’t sure which exact genes influence migraines, there are three genes that carry mutations powerful enough to cause migraine pain. These mutations increase the excitability of the nerve cells, which is related to cortical spreading depression. Researchers have developed strong theories about the connection of aura to cortical spreading depression, and they also have an idea where the headache itself comes from. The researchers think that cortical spreading depression stimulates the trigeminal nerves, a network of nerves that carry pain signals. As the excited neurons travel across the cortex of the brain, glutamate, oxide, and ions are released causing the trigeminal nerves to send out the pain signals. Another theory of the cause of migraine pain is that the base of migraine pain is in the brain stem. Many researchers think that the migraine headache comes from a problem in brain stem activity which brings on the pain.While it is not sure whether migraines are caused from cortical spreading depression or a problem in the brain stem, there is much work being done in efforts to stop the problem and pain of migraines. There are only a few drugs that stop migraines from occurring, but they only work half the time. Researchers have come up with a drug that prevents cortical spreading depression, and it is being tested in those with migraines. The drugs hinder gap junctions from opening, and therefore stop the flow of calcium between brain cells. Treatments used during a migraine block the trigeminal nerves from transmitting pain signals, but also constrict blood vessels. While there is no one definite treatment to prevent and treat migraines, there have been many new breakthroughs that have given many migraine sufferers hope.
My Review

This article really made me think about things I’d never thought about before. Since I’ve never experienced a migraine, like many Americans I did not think they were a big deal. The article made me realize that migraines are a very debilitating problem. While researchers are not positive, they think that aura comes from cortical spreading depression. It was interesting to learn about the change of neurons from a state of extreme excitability to inhibition, and how that makes sense that during aura one experiences a time of bright illusion and then dark spots. If researchers can come up with a way to treat and prevent migraines, many people would benefit. The drug that prevents cortical spreading depression is interesting because keep gap junctions shut, stopping the flow of calcium. The drugs that are used during a migraine to block the nerves from transmitting pain signals seem effective, and if there was a way to stop them from constricting blood vessels they would be even more effective. I think researchers are definately on the right track in their studies. Migraines are a serious problem, and not many people are aware of how serious they are. Hopefully with all the research that is being done, investigators will be certain of the cause and treatment of migraine pain.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-migraines-strike

Political Science

2008-10-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

Researchers may have found a link between a person's bedroom or office condition and their political affiliation. According to controversial new study, you can tell what a person's political affiliation is by looking at their bedroom and office décor.

The bedrooms and offices of Liberals, who are categorized as carefree, "loose" individuals, tend to be colorful, have books about travel, ethnicity, feminism, and music. They have rock 'n' roll CDs, art supplies, movie tickets, and travel mementos.

Conservatives, on the other hand, surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons, and sewing materials. Their rooms are well-lit and have sports paraphernalia and display American flags.

There are differences in personality traits too. Positive traits associated with Liberals include: independent, tough, controlling, and animated and negative traits associated with conservatives include: easily victimized or offended, irresolute, hesitant, and rigid. Scientists have even connected the strength of a person's startle response to their political association. Conservatives get frightened much easier than liberals.

What causes these differences in personalities and interior design? That is a question that experts and researchers are debating. Many experts have rejected these conclusions, saying the statements are based only on public opinion. One explanation is that mirror neurons, circuits of cells that transmit signals when we see someone act or speak in a was that is familiar, played a major role in the upcoming 2008 presidential election. When Republican candidate John McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, many white, female Obama supporters may have switched parties and supported McCain and Palin. The mirror neurons in your brain set off alarms that say "this person is just like me." This causes you to question your political party and to decide whether you are truly conservative (republican) or liberal (democratic). Another major result is that genetics may play a role in politics. Researchers have found that people with variants of the MAOA and 5HTT genes , which affect serotonin, which regulates social interaction, trust, and fear, were 10 percent more likely to vote in the 2000 presidential election than people with less efficient versions of the genes.

In conclusion, there may not be an Obama gene or a McCain gene, but genes have an effect on the way we think socially, which affects our political beliefs, which has an impact on many things.

My response:
This article was very intriguing to me because of the upcoming presidential election. It gave suggestions that the way people vote, election participation, and the way that people decorate their rooms are all controlled by mirror neurons or genetics. I personally believe both of these possible explanations. The author did an excellent job in explaining the possible explanations and providing quotes to support the beliefs of experts. God plays a role in everything in life, including politics, and whatever happens in elections, it is important to understand that it is God's will.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=organization-and-political-leanings

Mini-Telescope Implants May Save Vision Damaged by Eye Disease.

2008-10-16T15:15:00.000-07:00

Summary

Many ophtalmologists believe in a new device that could stop or even reverse the advanced stages of macular degeneration. Macular degeneration is a disorder that causes a person to see a dark spot in the center of their field of vision. It is an age-related disease, that makes it difficult to read, watch TV, and recognize faces. This new device is a new miniture telescope, that would be implanted into the patient's damaged eyes.

Physicians could only try to reduce the risk of the disease, for there is no known treatment to fix the vision problem. They did this with special magnifying eyewear, checking it with laser treatments, and nutrtional supplements such as zinc and antioxidants.

The device works with the eye's cornea, basically allowing an image to appear at the area of diminished vision . It virtually would be undetectable inside the eye and mostly covered by the iris. The miniature telescope would not touch the back of the cornea, yet this is not easy, and surgeons are developing special techniques to keep the damage to the eye minimal.

In a study of 206 patients, 90% were able to read two lines on a reading chart, and 67% were able to see three lines basically doubling their vision. However these minature telescopes are not a cure for macular degeneration. Ophthalmologists are waiting for the approval of the FDA, so they can start implanting the device.

Respone: I found this article to be very interesting and informing. It opens a new window that I never knew existed, how a small telescope is able to be imlpanted in the eye and fix the vision of that person. The technology for this is amazing. With this we can take it and use it to learn more about other related topics. It's amazing how the telescope would fit in the eye and hopefully cause no discomfort. How excited someone would be to hear that there is a new device that would let them see again. I beleive the surgical procedure itself would be amazing to see how they get the telescope in the eye without further harming it.

http:/www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mini-telescope-implants&SID=mail&sc=emailfriend

2008-10-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

Scientific American
Searching for intelligence in our genes.

Some scientists today are trying to find intelligence in genes. They have purposely tested twins to see if their scores were different. In their studies they have always been close. Unfortunately everytime they believed they had found a certain gene, they ended up being wrong, even after gaining more advanced machines to look at more specific genes. They tried mapping out the genetic markers in children that did well in testing and did not, but they could not find anything. The scientists then noticed that the cortex of the brain would change shape differently depending on the intelligence of the child. It would constantly grow large and then small, depending on age. They did notice the changes were the same in twins so they're were some genetics involved.
They discovered that white matter in the cortex was found more frequently in intelligent people. They determined white controlled the speed of the brain and the gray matter provided processing power. They began to believe that scanning the brain with magnetic resonance imaging to determine intelligence better than an SAT test. Though many scientists did not wish to risk that.
However finging a specific gene for intelligence proved to be difficult. They began to believe there were many genes controlling different parts of intelligence. They soon realized that twins that were in different enviroments, such as a poor and rich family had a different intelligence. Therefore the enviroment also effected the intelligence genes. They became active in a thinking enviroment. They have not found the genes for intelligence yet but they will continue studying to perhaps in the future, detect learning disabilities, so the children can have that problem fixed from the beginning. In the end it will always be a problem scientists to wonder about.

My Review,
I found this article very informing and thought provoking. The writer was able to explain the story of these studies very well and used quotes of the scientist to help the reader better understand what was happening. The writer was able to write in a way so that people who didn't completely understand the science behind it still understand what was happening. Most people wouldn't have too much trouble understanding this article which can be helpful for those who might become interested in science if they just had an understandable way to read it. It was also thought provoking by giving the reader the true importance of this study, perhaps to bring inspiration to any future scientists. It was an altogether good article both intelligent and an easy read.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=searching-for-intelligence-in-our-genes

Tempering Tantrums Now May Prevent Aggression Later

2008-10-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tempering-toddler-tantrums

Summary:
As babies grow, they quickly enter the toddler age, often called "the terrible twos." Temper tantrums, which sometimes include kicking, screaming, or even biting, are common at this age. However, a small number of children exhibit greater violence than others. These fits are difficult to calm and are often destructive.
This behavior is normal because children are developing a sense of individuality, while at the same time, experiencing new desires and emotions. When denied something, a child becomes angry and disappointed, causing him to feel helpless. A lack of knowledge of how to deal with these new feelings provokes a child to act in sever ways.
Although a toddler's temper tantrums might pass, the violence may not end there. Psychologist Susan B. Campbell states that children who display violence at a young age have a fifty percent chance of having similar reactions during early adolescence. Many factors contribute to a child's behavior, including genetics and the environment. Genetics determine the frequency of a child's physical aggression. Speech problems also contribute to this because the child becomes frustrated when trying to communicate.
A significant role in a child's behavior is played by the parents. Psychologists suggest that different parenting styles encourage different behaviors in a child. A parent who is demanding is more likely to raise an aggressive child than one who is calm and explains the guidelines to the child.
Since early aggression can lead to violence in adolescence, programs have been made to help prevent violent behavior in children. Different approaches include mental empowerment and increasing a child's awareness. Another way to improve a child's temperament may be to diminish language barriers by working with children and teaching them different ways to deal with their strong emotions. While these methods prove to be helpful, researchers are constantly searching for ways to reduce aggressive behavior in children of all ages.

Response:
I've always known that different parenting styles influence a child's behavior, but this article has helped me understand why children have temper tantrums. Contrary to what I thought, little children just don't know how to express these strong emotions, which are so new to them. Although I don't dismiss a child's ability to have some decent control over his actions, I now see how parents, as well as others, can work with the child to improve his understanding.

Why Calories Taste Delicious: Eating and the Brain

2008-10-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

There are two main neurological mechanisms that manage food intake: one controls the need to eat and the other controls the desire to eat. Because the hypothalamus in the brain monitors the homeostatic control of food intake by collecting, organizing, and responding to metabolic signals from the digestive system, it tells us when we need to eat. The dopamine reward system is a brain center that becomes excited when you eat something you want but do not need to suppress hunger. Many times the desire to eat can overpower the need to eat, so people will eat food that tastes good even when they are not hungry. The hypothalamus regulates intake based on metabolic value. When you are hungry, your body looks for food with a multitude of calories.

Researchers used a line of mice genetically engineered to lack a receptor for distinguishing sweetness, so if these mice prefer sweetness it is because of the larger amount of calories. In the first set of experiments, the genetically altered mice were indifferent to sucrose, table sugar, and the mice with no mutation strongly preferred the sucrose over the water. In the second set of experiment, both mice were given access to water and sucrose for six days. The genetically altered mice couldn't taste the sweetness, but they learned to like it more. Even without the receptor, the mice seemed to feel something enjoyable about eating the sweet food.

Both experiments were then repeated with sucralose, Splenda, in the place of sucrose. The mice without the mutation still consumed more Splenda than they did water, but the genetically altered mice did not. These results show the genetically altered mice preferred sucrose for the calories not the sweetness and that being able to sense metabolic value can affect feeding behavior. Although dopamine was increased in the mice without mutations with both sucrose and sucralose, the genetically altered mice were only affected by the sucralose. While the dopamine reward system responds to sweet taste, it may also be involved in monitoring calories.

My response:

While I have always known that sweeter food has more calories, I have never thought about how our bodies need those calories. I found it interesting that the genetically altered mice preferred the sweeter food even when they could not taste the sweetness. I also think that taste must still determine it more because the mice without the mutation preferred the Splenda over the water. I wonder how much this plays in contributing to obesity.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-calories-are-delicious

Pain, Numbness, Pain

2008-10-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

Many patients when injected with general anesthetics state that they feel a burning sensation. Scientists at Georgetown University have discovered what causes that burning sensation. When injected, the anesthetics spark an ion protein called TRPA1. TRPA1 is on the sensory neurons and located in the body tissues. After TRPA1 is sparked the nerves "get hot" and the patient starts to feel the burning pain. The anesthetics that causes the pain and swelling are called noxious, which are pungent anesthetics. The chemical structure of the noxious determines if the cell will instigate the pain. Many tests have been done and the results of the tests are that TRPA1 is activated by pungent anesthetics and not by non-pungent anesthetics. Doctors inject the anesthetic into the patient to put them into an unconscious state, but they also inject the patient with another anesthetic (mostly lidocaine) to dull the burning pain of the general anesthetic.

Physiologist Matthew Jones from the University of Wisconsin explains that now that researchers have a better sense of where the pain is coming from they can design better anesthetics that don't activate TRPA1 or by using TRPA1 blockers with other drugs. They are finding it hard to find an anesthetic that will do that and still be strong enough to make the patient unconscious during surgery. Non-pungent anesthetics have been tested and doesn't cause a burning sensation, but it has side effects of it's own. For example one non-pungent anesthetic can cause cardiac arrhythmias, which is abnormal electrical activity in the heart. For now anesthesiologists have to choose to use pungent or non-pungent anesthetics based upon the patients condition and medical history.

My response:
I thought this article was pretty interesting. I never realized that something like anesthetics could not only help someone, but could also hurt them. It's amazing to see how far humans have come in the way of medicine and how it can effect a person in such a way to cause them pain. It also gave me comfort to know that people in the science and medical area are trying to make patients as comfortable as possible.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/33511/title/Pain%2C_numbness%2C_pain

The Danger of Stress

2008-10-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

This article is talking about how stress can affect not only others around you, but can also affect you and your body. When someone stresses, they are thinking about something big that is going to happen or are nervous for something in the future. They are worrying about something that might or might not be in their own hands. When a person stresses over something, say a paper, their work could be affected because they are spending time worrying about the grade or when it's do, then the content and thought of the paper. So, work and the output could be affected by stress. But, stress not only affects the work, it also affects your body in several ways; ways that could be as minor as a cold or major like heart disease or osteoporosis.
OSU psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and Ronald Glaser have spent years researching the affects of stress on the body. Some people believe that stress is just a state of mind, but these two people set out to prove stress can seriously harm the body. In one of their tests, Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser show how stress affects the immune system. Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser chose a group of caregivers who look after spouses or parents that are chronically ailing because thier job is stressful. They also chose a group of people who were very relaxed at the time. Kiecolt-Glaser gave each group flu vaccines and compared their number of anitbodies. 38% of the stressful caregivers had normal anitbody levels and 66% of the relaxed group had normal antibodies. This proves that the antibodies weren't doing a very good job in protecting the immune system and stress is what ultimately put these people at higher risks of infection.
Another experiment was how well the body would heal itself under stress. With the same two groups of people, the caregivers who were stressed, their body took 24% longer to heal than the wounds of the people who were not stressed. So, stress does affect your body in protecting you and healing you. Kiecolt-Glaser said that "stress causes the body to release pro-inflammatory cytokines, immune factors that initate responses against infection." This is where stress can affect your body in major ways. After a period of time, these cytokines build up and can lead to higher risks of heart disease, osteporosis, and two different types of diabetes.
So, the more you stress, the more strain you are putting on your body, which can lead to minor or even major problems. Whether you are stressing about school, or a new job, or even going to college learn ask yourself if it is really worth stressing about. Is worrying about something ,that might not even be in my control, worth risking to seriously hurt my body?

my opinion: I think that this article just shows you a few ways on how stress can really affect the body. Even something as simple as stressing over a homework problem could lead to you having autoimmune problems or diabetes. Stress is something we think about as being not a big deal, that everybody does it. That stress is just something that we believe, but doesn't actually affect us physically. For me, I stress all the time, sometimes without even knowing that I am actually stressing. I always knew that stress could affect my work, but I never actually thought of it as affecting my body. This was a suprise to me and really made me think about what I stress over. Some things are really not worth stressing over, but I do stress because sometimes I don't know what else to do. It really makes me think, is worrying over a certain thing really worth stressing? Is it really worth risking my body to stress over something I might not even be in control of? These types of questions really make you think if stressing is really worth anything, or if it's just a useless thing that we do because it the thing we always know how to do.
-Becca

Race in a Bottle

2008-10-15T16:40:00.000-07:00

For many years, we have known that congestive heart Disease is more common in African-Americans than in whites, but in was not Until June of 2003 that there was a drug specifically for decreasing these numbers. BiDil is the first approved ethnic drug by the FDA. Its purpose is to treat congestive heart-failure in African-Americans. However, this drug may not be what it seems. BiDil is actually composed of two generic drugs called hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate. The interesting thing is that these drugs have been used since the 90’s to treat heart failure.
In 1987 Jay Cohn, a cardiologist, understood how great these two drugs worked together to treat heart disease, in all races. Cohn quickly asked for a patent (right of the government to sell a product or manufacture) and when he received it, sold the drug to Medco. Through Medco, BiDil was created. Unfortunately, the FDA rejected the drug and Medco sold the rights back to Cohn. However, Cohn went back to the FDA and made a case for BiDil. He said that the drug worked very effectively and enrolled it in the V-HeFT (Vasodilator Heart Failure Trial) studies. After this, Cohn reapplied for another patent and got it, only this time, the drug was labeled as an ethnic drug. This time, Cohn sold the drug to NitroMed. When they conducted a trial, the death toll of 43 percent of the African Americans was lower than those who took a placebo. Soon after, the FDA approved BiDil. It was the first time a Drug had ever been labeled according to race.
Although the drug is labeled for a particular race, many have said that it is not. Even Cohn himself has said that the drug is meant for all races. It is clear that the reason behind this ethnic label is money. If BiDil had been approved for all races then the FDA would have put a restriction on the drug meaning it could only be sold by 2007, but since the drug was race specific, it can be sold until 2013. If the drug is sold longer, then it means more money for those who are selling it.
Another issue is that many insurance companies are reluctant to insure BiDil because of its high cost (six times the cost over the generic drug) and other non-African-American patients may not buy it because of its label as a race drug. However, the biggest problem is this- the FDA’s reason for approving this drug for those of color was because it was tested by an African American population. However, most drugs are tested in “white” populations yet we do not call these drugs “white” drugs. The drugs tested in these populations are assumed to be good for all people, but the drugs tested in the African American population are only for that race. It seems as if the FDA is trying to say that African Americans are less representative of society as a whole. Is this the type of message we want to keep being sent?
Regardless of this, many other companies are still attempting race specific drugs. In 2003, a company tried to propose a new AIDS vaccine called AIDSVAX. This vaccine was supposed to be specific in African Americans and Asians but there were very few hundred of these races that were involved in the study which could have messed up the results.
These “race” drugs could be made by those who want to make a difference, but the problem is that they are run by a commercial company. Drugs, such as BiDil, are greatly wanted by companies not to make a difference, but instead to make a profit. Before the FDA approves any more drugs such as BiDil, they should evaluate the motives and basis for these types of drugs. This simple act could be the step that the medical world needs take to grow and help those who need it the most.

My Response:

I thought that this article was very eye-opening. I always thought about whether these so called "race" drugs were actually real. It is very interesting to see how BiDil is made of the same things as two generic drugs. Also it was interesting that the person who invented BiDil, Jay Cohn, meant the drug to be used by all races. I think that these facts show how corrupt our society is. When the companies label a drug for certain races, even though it may be for everyone, they could be causing more harm. First the people who need the drug may not take it because of its label and others might not take it because of is cost. It is unfortunate that the corruption of the medical companies has gone so low that it is willing to dabble with peoples lives.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=race-in-a-bottle

Pregnancy Curiosity

2008-10-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

Summary

Gestational diabetes is when a woman is only diabetic during her pregnancy. It is well known that there is more of a chance of Asians having gestational diabetes. There is a new study that shows an increased risk of gestational diabetes for a pregnant woman in a mixed-race Asian-Caucasian couple. This seems to show that gestational diabetes is related to genetics. Also, if the woman in the mixed-race couple is Asian, she has a greater risk of having a cesarean section. Other studies that have been done show that some interracial couples, depending on what the race is, can have more pregnancy complications.

There has not been a lot of research in this area, so Yasser El-Sayed, a obstetrician at Stanford, went through records of the Caucasian and Asian couples at a specific hospital from 2000 to 2005. Gestational diabetes was five times more likely to occur in women from an Asian-Asian couple than women in a Caucasian-Caucasian couple. Gestational diabetes was two and a half times more likely to occur in women in an Asian-Caucasian couple then women in a Caucasian-Caucasian couple.

But, it did not matter which gender was Asian. This shows a definite biological difference in race and ethnicity. The study also showed that we still have a lot about how genes work with diseases.

The study also showed the following cesarean section statistics: Asian-mother/Caucasian-father couples 33 percent, Caucasian-mother/Asian-father couples 23 percent. Asian and Caucasian non-mixed couples were in the middle of those two numbers. It is possible that a smaller pelvic size is found in Asian women.

This one study is not enough information for doctor's to use in their practice, but it gives them more of an understanding about gestational diabetes in Asian-mixed couples.

Reaction

I thought that this article was very interesting. I never knew that the genes of a mixed-race couple could affect a woman's pregnancy. God has created the human body so complex that humans cannot always know how certain genes will interact and I find it amazing how far research has come that scientists can discover this. If more studies are done on this, the research can go even farther and could really help doctors in their practice.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37053/title/Pregnancy_curiosity

Vitamin D deficiency

2008-10-15T14:29:00.000-07:00

Vitamin D deficiency
The study of vitamin D deficiency is trying to explain why people have Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a loss of neurons that make a chemical, dopamine, in the brain. Dopamine is what controls the body movements of the whole body from the brain. Vitamin D is a source that comes mostly from the sun. A shortage of vitamin D can cause heart disease, stroke, multiple sclerosis, cancer and even respiratory problems. Vitamin D can turn on or off as many as 800 genes, determining the cell. The researchers did a few trials which included the studying of blood samples from people with Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and some healthy people. The conclusion of the results were: more than fifty-five percent of the people with Parkinson’s disease than the others, were deficient of vitamin D. The researchers still don’t know what vitamin D’s role is in Parkinson disease, but they are studying the first signs of the disease.
Reaction:
Reading the article about Parkinson’s disease I didn’t know much about Parkinson’s disease. From the study I have done on the article I realized that this disease controls the movements of the body. Without dopamine the brain can not make the body move properly. Even though the researchers still don’t know what causes this to happen to the brain. It could be possible that a lack of vitamin D is the problem, because the neurons need vitamin D. The people with Parkinson’s can barely move to go outside, therefore this would explain the lack of vitamin D. But it does not explain how the people in the first place obtained a vitamin D deficiency. This study could be true or false about the deficiency. On the other hand, even if they are wrong it is still a step closer to finding out what causes Parkinson’s and what doesn’t cause it.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37541/title/Vitamin_D_deficiency

The Human Instrument

2008-10-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

When listening to the voice of a great singer, such as Josh Groban, Sarah Brightman, or Steven Curtis Chapman, one may awed or inspired by music which they can produce; however, if the voice is lined up with other instruments in rank of size, it would be at the end of the group with the fifes. This is because marvelous it may be, the voice is only thirty-five centimeters long at the most, compared with other instruments, for example trombones, that stretch out to about three meters. The voice, or more specifically the vocal folds (the explanation of this will be presented later), contains everything an instrument does, except in a smaller and more efficient version.
The first scientists to study the voice thought the sound was fabricated via a linear theory of speech acoustics, but more recent studies have proven it is truly non-linear interactions, ones in which the source and resonator feed off of each other.
Every instrument contains the same basic parts: an origination for the sound that vibrates when air rushes past it to make fundamental pitches with higher ones that define timbre, or sound color, the human equivalent of which is air rushing past vocal cords (two specialized groups of pouchlike-tissue, hence vocal folds) and a glottis (the space between two folds); at least one resonator that reinforces the vibration and fabricate higher frequencies called overtones, or in other words a vocal tract and the laryngeal vestibule (an airway just above the larynx); and a radiating surface or opening to guide the sound into open space, also known as the mouth and lips.
There is one catch in how the voice works in comparison to an instrument, such as a viola: on an instrument like that, in order to increase frequency, one must increase tensile stress, or in simpler terms, tension while decreasing length, something that under normal circumstances is not possible. Nature, however, has solved this problem with a three-part material that exhibits qualities not normally found in instruments: the cords of the voice are made of a semi-stringlike ligament which has remarkable stretching characteristics--when stretched a little, the stress rises nonlinearly and it can be amazingly tense, but when not stretched, the ligament is quite limp.
The voice is also mostly made up of muscle tissue, which can shorten and become tenser concurrently. The voice also has groups of ligaments placed side-by-side with some having the ability to contract and others not, and a soft, flexible surface which ripples like waves when air blows across it. A mucous membrane is also in the muscle-ligament combination to provide greater energy transfer ability. The mucosa, a very thin epithelium with fluid-like substance on the bottom side of it, exists in the mucous membrane and is easily deformed, thus supporting the ripples of the membrane.
Now to put all of these ligaments, muscles, and mucous membranes to work. In order to sing low and moderate to loudly, the singer makes use of all the layers of the muscle folds, though the muscle itself does not vibrate--that's the mucosa's elasticity and ligaments' job. For higher tones, the singer's cords must become longer (in this case, ligament stress alone dictates frequency). The way these notes become energized enough to be heard by people is that the vocal tract can use energy from one oscillation cycle, keep it until the next one, and send that energy into the current cycle to give it a push to go farther. A simpler example of this is someone pushing a child in a swing. They push at just the right time to give the swing more energy to carry the child upwards. This is the same concept as what the vocal tract does with each oscillation cycle.
All of this to produce one sound.

My response:
Though the voice is amazingly small for the amount of "oom-pah-pah" it can produce, it is nonetheless a very intriguing part of the body in the way it weaves its way around what would normally be major hindrances or show-stoppers. In general, no one thinks about what all is happening when they speak or talk, but when it comes right down to it, there is a myriad of things which must occur for one note or sound to be made, all of which must work in perfect harmony. The beauty of this process and its orchestration can only logically be explained one way: by the work of a divine Creator.

2008-10-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

Seeking the Connections: Alcoholism and Our Genes

Summary

Scientists believe that the tendency to be dependent on alcohol is partially hereditary, since investigators have the power to examine the genes of large populations. There are about a dozen genes that have been identified to make a person susceptable to alcohol, but scientists believe there are more. Variations of these genes only mildly affect vulnerability to alcohol, but may have stronger impacts on drinking habits, depression, or anxiety. Scientists wish to discover the biological processes that are linked to alcohol dependency, so they can come up with better treatments to help alcoholics.

One gene that might have an impact on how much people drink is called ALDH1, (aldehyde dehydrogenase). The enzyme that comes from this gene is supposed to breakdown alcohol, but some people have varitaions of this enzyme that makes it work at a slower rate. When people have large amounts of the variation of this enzyme, they tend to feel uncomfortable because the enzyme is building up in their bodies. Many Asians experience this kind of discomfort when they drink, so they are not as susceptable to alcohol unlike the Europeans who are.

Multiple genes are included in alcoholism and people show problems with it in multiple ways. Reseachers have to be careful in identifying the problem. Some people really are dependent and others just suffer from alcohol abuse. In order to be diagnosed with a dependency to alcohol, or any other substance, one must experience three or more of the following symptoms:

" tolerance for large doses,
withdrawl reactions,
loss of control over use of the substance,
efforts to stop or cut down,
a large amount of time invested in the activity,
giving up other activities and,
continued use despite resulting physical or psycological problems." (page 48 in magazine)
Apparently, most of the people who are diagnosed with alcohol dependency have relatives with cases of alcohol.

A significant method in searching for genes linked to alcohol dependency has been an investigation of endophenotypes. Endophenotypes are measurable and not visible, but they can be examined to see if there are certain patterns that appear more in people with a disorder. The assumption is that endophenotypes can uncover the genetic links for a disorder than behavioral symptoms, because they show a crucial physical trait that is closer to the gene varient.

One form of an endophenotype is the brains activity patterns. The wave forms and spikes in neural activity in the brain vary among individuals. They also show the balance between excitatory processes in the brain, and the inhibitory processes.

These electrophysiological patterns vary between alcoholics and nonalcoholics. The excitation process overpowers the inhibitory one in alcoholics. This trait can also be seen in the children of alcoholics. It would appear that carriers with this pattern are predisposed to alcoholism. These patterns also inhibit a person's judgement.

50% of all risks for alcoholism comes from hereditary factors. Some risk factors include:

"low response

previous experience with severe depression and

specific drinking history patterns." (50)

There are also certain chromosomes linked to alcoholism. Chromosomes 1, 2, 4, and 7 are the most significant ones. Two of the major genes of these chromosomes are GABRA2, and CHRM2.

"GABA is the most common inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian nervous system. It modulates the activity of neurons by binding to GABA- specific receptors in their cell membranes literally inhibiting their responsiveness to signaling." (51) Several groups have found that a variation of GABA (GABRA2) is connected to alcoholism because it is a feature in alcoholic cases.

CHRM2 is a neurotransmitter that effects decision making. This protein changes the manufacture of the receptor protein instead of the structure unlike GABA. It is connected to alcohol dependence and severe depression. The most recently discovered links are providing new ideas for medications for alcoholism and depression.

Another genetic factor for alcohol dependence is a gene that controls taste perception. Some people have a decreased sensitivity for alcohol than others, putting them at a high risk for drinking. This effects many African American as opposed to European Americans.

The piont, is that genes play a big part in alcoholics chioces, and the different genes make people susceptable for different reasons. Some encourage early drinking, some encourage dependence, and others come about through depression to nurture drinking.

However, genes are not everything. People don't become dependent on alcohol without making bad choices, but some people are more vulnerable to drinking than others in certasin situations. Scientists believe that the demand for genetic testing for alcoholism will increase in upcoming years, and they also believe that if people are aware of their susceptability, they might make better chioces.

My Reaction

I thought this article was interesting and insightful because I always just assumed that people became alcoholics due to poor decisions. I never took into account that some people might be more vulnerable to it if they are depressed, or like the taste of it. I agree with the fact that genetics aren't the sole reason that people become alcoholics. And if people have relatives who are alcoholics, then they probably should not drink at all or rarely, since they could have a weakness for it as well.

The only thing I'm not sure on where this article stands is that people play a huge part in their drinking habits. This article says that alcoholism is 50% genetics. That means that people only 50% responsible for their addiction. I believe that genetics only increase risks to become an alcoholic, not that they make people become one. The article did admit that choices were involved, but I believe people have more than a 50% chance not to become alcoholics. This day and age, people are trying to shake the resonsibility for their wrong choices. I feel that this article, while insightful and interesting, is fuel for alcoholics not to blame themselves for their decisions.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=seeking-the-connections-alcoholism-and-our-genes

Self-Sterilizing Plastics Kill Drug Resistant Bacteria

2008-05-14T18:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=self-sterilizing-plastics

These days, seventy percent of bacterial infections are drug-resistant, which has made them the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. Because of the mutations of the bacteria which are making them resistant, the makers of antibiotics have had to begin a different approach to killing bacteria. These companies are attempting to mimic the human body's defense against bacteria, killing them by poking holes in the cell membranes and keeping them from mutating and becoming resistant.

Polymedix, with the help of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, is developing drugs and polymers which can destroy bacteria in ways similar to those of the human body. They are working on an antibacterial drug which will be able to kill bacteria without having to enter the cells, and they are developing a polymer which could be used to make "self-sterilizing" things. Since the polymer is not just a coating, it will never wear out. It is possible that eventually the polymer could be added to in almost anything, such as "bedding, carpeting, countertops, and towels." The polymers could also help to eliminate black mold in houses amd could fight against such biowarfare as anthrax, plagues, and tularemia. The drugs which are being created could one day make current antibiotics obselete. They are still waiting, however, for approval from the FDA before they can begin clinical trials.

RESPONSE
I just find it really interesting that bacteria, one of the simplest life forms known to man, are able to adapt to conditions so well that they can effectively outsmart man. Hopefully these developments will finally give mankind a permanent victory over bacteria. I found it almost unbelievable that bacterial infections were the fourth leading cause of death in the most developed country in the world. Both the polymer and the drug could save many lives. Hopefully they will get the FDA's approval.

Buried Prejudice

2008-05-14T09:05:00.000-07:00

Summary: Scientists are getting together to figure out where stereotypes originate and how much on an affect they have on our mind. One way of testing is to say random words like democratic and see what the persons initial response is. A neural scientist actually testesd the race-memory advantage in the brain and found that people remember faces of thier own race easier than those of others. They also found that black faces shoed more brain activity that is linked to fear. A study in Italy showed that children are highly afftected by what thier parents think of other races to in terms of the children choosing playmates. A former Harvard student expains that racial bias is fully emerged by age six. Reflexes and in-the-moment judgements also are afftected by this bias. Studies showed that people thought a cell phone was a gun when a black man was holding it, whereas; when another race was holding the same phone ptaients could easily identify it. It also showed that when whites were communicating with blacks thier body language was uneasy and they would rarely look them in the eyes. The article goes on to talk about how this bias afftects everyday life: in the school, workplace, law, and even in hospitals! They say that it is possible to consciously control your thoughts about other races but such work may lead to complete avoidance of communication with that race. They close the article by saying that it is possible for us to change our racial bias but we have to make that conscious decision on a regualar bases.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=buried-prejudice-the-bigot-in-your-brain

My Response: I thought this article was enilightening. While some of it may sound far-stretched it really sheds light on how much we let stereotypes affect us. I thought it was interesting when he was talking about our body language around other races. I do agree that we can make a conscious decision to change our thoughts about other races, and more than that I think it is a logical decision. I mean really not all arabs are terrorists and not all white people are racist against blacks. As christians I think its time that we fought against the stereotypes that America has instilled in us and let God rule our thoughts of others and not fear.

New Side of Stem Cells

2008-05-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/9369/title/Faulty_Fountains_of_Youth
Summary:
Adult stem cells were once believed to only be contained in tissues that need to rejuvenate often such as blood and skin. But recent new studies have found that stem cells are located is nearly every single tissue and organ in the adult body.
This seems to explain some of the mysteries of aging. As a person ages most of the stem cells begin to diminish causing weaker bones and immune systems and gray hair.One group began a study in which they surgically joined one old mouse and one young mouse. It is known that the cells that rejuvenate muscles grow weak with age. The question was whether or not this effect was irreversible. The blood of the young mouse did restore the tissue of the older mouse showing that the effect on the muscle stem cells is environmental.
This leads to the belief that the stem cells do not age but the bodies' internal environment does. However, other studies done by transplanting blood between mice from different generations shows the opposite. Despite the surrounding of the blood, old blood which doesn't weaken but seems to malfunction continues on the malfunctioning path. That malfunction is the limit in production of immune boosting blood cells which leads to weak immune systems.
Another link being studied with respect to stem cells is cancer. Cancer arises from malfunctions resulting from a cell dividing. The job of stem cells is to divide to replenish depletion. This could be a cause of cancer. The damage of stem cells seems to be linked to a higher level of anticancer genes.
Stem cells play a larger role than any scientist would have imagined fifty years ago. Who knows what advances have yet to be made towards the many things linked to stem cells.
Response:
I found this article interesting because it reminds me of how intricate the body God created is. Our bodies are so intricate and specialized that the idea of random chance is crazy. So many things are linked in ways we are just now finding: who knows how complex our bodies actually are. The fact that we only use a little percentage of our brains is proof enough of overwhelming complexity. All these links just reinforce it. I also think that at the beginning of the article when it talks about not knowing the reason for aging, it again proves Christianity because it answers a question science can't.

Mother Knows All

2008-05-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

During the nine months that an unborn fetal baby is in its mother's womb, it is safe from the world; but for the same nine months, doctors can only guess as to the current and future health of the baby. While some tests do exist, the most informative tests are also the most invasive - and also run the highest risk.
In the late 1990's, Doctor Dennis Lo studies developing fetuses in the hopes that he could produce answers by studying the blood of the mother. This proved more difficult than he had originally imagined. Fetal cells are hard to come by; one milliliter of the mother's blood could present just one - perhaps two - fetal cells. But a stroke of good luck handed Dr. Lo his big break: by reading several papers on cancer cells and the loose DNA cells they shed, Dr. Lo began to wonder if fetal cells did the same thing. Fetal cells, like those of cancer, are rapidly dividing and are essentially parasitic. Dr. Lo was able to prove that fetal cells also produced these loose cells, called "cellfree DNA", by showing Y chromosomes in the blood of pregnant women carrying male babies.
The development in the study of the fetal cfDNA has lead to break-throughs in understanding fetal development. Doctors are now able to show a babies blood type, as well as the sex, a full week before an ultrasound. By studying cfDNA more in depth, scientists can now predict a premature birth and birth defects, such as preeclampsia. The biggest problem, however, is that it is nearly impossible to detect a fetal gene if the mother possess the same gene. Scientists are also exploring the possibility of messenger RNA (mRNA) to detect multiple mental disorders by observing mRNA in the mother's blood and watching what the mRNA cells develop into.
While it is relatively simple to extract the mother's blood, it becomes increasingly more complicated when scientists begin to search for clues in the pregnant woman's blood as to the health of the fetus. But the most difficult part is distinguishing between the mother's cfDNA and the fetal cfDNA. Trying to detect genetic defects in the fetus is like looking for needles in haystacks: in order to have the defect, the child would have inherited the flaw from both parents. But child would have the same genes carrying the defect as the mother, thus making them nearly indistinguishable. Again, researchers are turning more and more to mRNA, which are only made when a cell makes proteins needed for development. Since an adult doesn't need to grow or develop, the cells wouldn't exist in an adult.
In an experiment done by the Tuffs-New England Medical Center, pregnant women had blood tests taken before and after birth to help pinpoint the genes that were present in the mother's blood before birth but disappeared after the child was born. Not surprisingly, many of the genes were connected to the development of the neural system. In light of this experiment, the Medical Center wants to continue its research by creating a timeline of normal fetal-gene expression in the duration of the pregnancy, as well as track abnormal fetal development, in the hopes of discovering new treatments.
Dr. Lo also wants to use mRNA cells to help detect Down Syndrome and the third set of 21 chromosomes that causes it. Lo found a gene, PLAC4, that is only in placental tissue. The PLAC4 gene was equally divided in one location, and Lo was able to test to see if the correct amounts of the gene were in the location. If there was an equal amount from both the mother and father, the child was normal. But if there was double the amount of one version than the other, then the child would have three sets of the 21 chromosome, and Down Syndrome. While this test is far from faultless, and cannot detect all types of Down Syndrome, Lo hopes that the development will help open doors to detecting, and perhaps curing, diseases related to multiple chromosomes.
"The hope, then, is that as the science advances, increasingly sophisticated blood-based tests will allow doctors to peer through the veil of mystery that obscures the developing fetus. While some bits of information may ruin surprises for moms and dads, other tests will confirm the health of their unborn baby - something every parent wants".

Response: This is something I have always struggled with, to be honest. I want to have children in the future, but the amount of kids born with defects or abnormalities is staggering. It has always worried me, and continues to do so, but this article gave me hope. If this research continues, it would provide more information that could eventually lead to more cures. And even if not cures, preventive procedures. It tears at my heart to think that parents want to detect a birth defect early in order to get rid of the child. While this is not always the case, and I genuinely hope that very few people think this way, it gave me hope for parents and children in the future. If scientists can detect defects early - and understand what causes them - then they can take preventive measures. Perhaps even develop cures. Honestly, I really enjoyed this article, though it hit much closer to home than I had imagined. It not only made me worry unnecessarily about the future, but it made me worry for the women I know that are pregnant, and may become pregnant in the future. It makes me want to warn them, almost, but at the same time, I know that a baby is a blessing - no exceptions. And God makes no mistakes: every baby turns out exactly the way it was supposed to.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Mother+knows+all:+next+generation+of+prenatal+tests+finds+clues+to...-a0171623518
(I couldn't find the original article on the actual Science News site, so I found it on this one instead. Its the same article, just printed somewhere else.)

Vice Vaccines: A New Way to Boost Your Power

2008-05-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

Link Info Week of Feb. 10, 2007; Vol. 171, No. 6, p. 90

Summary:

Many people suffer from a variety of addictive behaviors; unfortunately many of these behaviors are deadly such as over eating and drug abuse. Once they fall down the slippery slope of addiction, it is hard to turn around and climb back up.

This article begins in the realm of a smoker named Rachel who wants to quit. Her story is typical of many people in her situation. They know that their habit will kill them but no matter how hard they try they seem to revert back to that crutch. This is true of smokers, like Rachel, as well as in victims of obesity and illicit drug addictions; like addictions to cocaine and heroin.

Scientist decided to attempt to take a new approach to treatment of these deadly compulsions. Vaccines are nothing new to the scientific community. When some form of foreign bacteria or virus enters the system, a vaccine is administered to encourage the immune system to attack these invaders. The only reason that the immune system doesn't attack drugs like heroine and nicotine is that these drugs are tiny compared to infectious bacteria. The new vaccine aimed to target addictive behaviors acts in a similar way. Using a variety of molecules that range from a protein in cows blood to synthetically created proteins, they inject these vaccines into the bloodstream. The invading drugs piggyback onto the proteins. This greatly increases their size which then encourages the immune system to attack.

While creating vaccines that target invading drugs, finding a vaccine to encourage the immune system to stave off obesity is more complicated. Scientist narrowed the field of triggers for obesity down to a specific chemical called ghrelin. The vaccine, when injected, attempts to reduce and counteract the effects and production of ghrelin. All these vaccine are still in the clinical testing stages. Their results are showing promise.

While these vaccines would serve to encourage people to kick the habit, they would not be a miracle cure. The vaccines, which have been dubbed the "vice vaccines" would not create a hatred for the invading drugs; it would simply eliminate the high you receive from smoking or shooting up. But even this effect is not full-proof. The ability to get high is still available but it requires about five times the normal amount of the drug. One scientist points out that even if the vaccine doesn't eliminate the habit; it does make it very expensive to continue the behavior.

Results are promising. Obstacles are being over come. But just like every other sin n the world; no shot or hypnosis or other means can cure it without the will to be free.

Response: I found this article fascinating. Most of the articles I have read this year have convinced me of how ignorant we are of the wonders of the human body but this article was quite the opposite. It didn't ever speak of religion or faith but I hope that the great minds behind these vaccines have the greatest mind to guide them. It reminds me that we are born sinners. I know that the "vices" of this article are self-infused but their side-effects are pleasurable to us; something I believe that is ingrained in us from the Fall; we enjoy what we know is wrong and can ultimately kill us. I hope that these vaccines approach a promising future because they may not be a cure but I know they can help. My own family suffers from several addictions and anything that helps is beneficial. Another effect of the vaccines that wasn't mentioned in the article is the placebo effect. Even if the influence of the vaccine is minimal, the fact that you're getting a shot to cure your sin can be very effective mentally.

¡DISAPPEARING INK!

2008-05-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/9000/title/Disappearing_Ink

A tattoo, something formerly associated with the image of a 'bad boy' or rebel, now having made it's way into reality TV and onto the skin of many people who don't fit the typical image.

"Tattooing has almost become a right of passage for young people."

Tattoos have increased in popularity over the past several years, so has the business of tattoo removal. Many people wait many years and carefully plan their tattoo, but many other's also get a tattoo on a spur of the moment feeling crazy type of day. There are many reasons that people choose to have their tattoos removed you could probably guess them all. Nobody wants the name of a former lover engraved on their arm after a horrible breakup, sometimes people get a tattoo removed because it has faded [with time] and for some people, it's just "stupid".

Tattoo removal is and has been possible, but it's 1) expensive, 2) painful 3) a multiple visit process 4)not going to take you back to the original unblemished perfection of your skin's pre-tattoo days.

Finally, there has been a new innovative way to get a tattoo without being committed and binded to it for life! A company called Freedom-2 in New Jersey has come up with the recipe for an ink that can easily be removed with only one laser treatment.

Tattoos are an ancient form of art coming from all over the world and made from many different natural substances [charcoal & plant extracts]. In today's world we have no idea what is in the ink of the tattoo formula, although the FDA is supposably in charge of testing the ink it has fallen in the cracks of state and local government and is not regulated at all. on the website it even says that some things in the formula are ok for cosmetics, but "none is approved for injection under the skin... many pigments used in tattoo inks are not approved for skin contact at all." The suppliers will not let out their secrets or ingredients at all. A chemist and her students decided to study the ingrediens of a few inks and while they chemically broke down the substances they "found that some contained heavy metals, such as lead, while others had carcinogenic compounds."

If this isn't enough to make you think twice about getting a tattoo, good, it's not even the biggest health risk, it's the possibility that your tattoo artist has not sterilized the equipment.

Although the removable tattoo ink seems a relief for consumers, artist's may not be quite as adaptable in thought that their work may be removed by someone who hasn't thought through their decision well enough. One artist said, "we are not in the business of creating temporary tattoos.. we urge everyone who is thinking about tattoos to think of them as a permenant decision."

I really like the thinking behind the creators of the Freedom-2 ink, I'm glad they collaborated and came up with this ink. As a potential tattoo consumer, I would like to know that what they are using needles to put into my skin is approved as healthy and not full of carcinogens. I think it's good and people who may have always wanted a tattoo will be more likely to go for it, knowing that it is a decision that is important, but if someday for some reason they need to get it removed it is possible and won't be the most painful experience of their life! I can understand the artist's not completely accepting this, it might lower their esteem as an artist, knowing that their client is maybe not fully trusting them and their work. Overall I think the artists will have more customers because people who were scared before are probably a bit more likely to get a tattoo with the freedom-2 ink than before!

The Artificial Heart: Not Just a Pump By Wray Herbert

2008-05-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

The need/want for artificial hearts dates back to about the 1940s. It became more and more publicized in the hit 1970s television show "Six Million Dollar Man". Also the success of the space program of the 1960s gave much hope for other inventions such as the heart. Then in 1988 New York Times' editor said, "the Federal project to create an implantable artificial heart is dead", thus hope for the heart simple "died" off... but not for long.

Barney Clark was the first person to receive a permanent medical heart, called the Jarvik-7--inventor Robert Jarvik; however, he passed on 112 days later. He was hooked up to a very large and loud machine to power his heart. He went through many problems such as convulsions, cognitive problems, and kidney failure, where he eventually died of "massive organ failure". Even though this first trial was a failure, four more patients received the Jarvik-7 heart, one of whom was William Schroeder who survived 620 days!

Many thought that the heart was merely a simple four pump machine..they were mistaken. Alfred Bove said: "the God-given heart is dynamically balanced, finely-tuned organ, with the capacity to generate force, raise and lower pulse. It's impossible to get that in an artificial heart". But. Alfred, we can get mighty close, now. According to Robert Kung, chief scientific officer at Aboimed, a Danvers, Mass., we may have been too eager to implant the Jarvik-7 into patients. In this case building a rocket would be easier because the trajectory and velocities can be figured with math and science, building a heart is more like a feel, its more complex. Kung now is working on an improved Jarvik-7 called AbioCor.

Problems with the artificial heart was the inventors/medical scientists may no to have fully understood how the blood flows and circulates. Blood wants and needs to flow smoothly if it moves lazily it will clot, and yet can damage the cells and cause blockages. The AbioCor is made of special titanium and polyurethane blend that makes it easier for the blood to flow through the slick surface. The Jarvik-7's terrible pump caused jolting of the whole body, it was painful and uncomfortable. AbioCor had some clinical trials, only with the extremely ill though, and they were unable to save them, mainly because of stokes. Something needs to be done about clotting! The answer is cuffs that connect to the artificial heart and help regulate the circulation. Another big problem with any transplant surgery is infection.

AbioCor didn't use a large and painful pump but electricity--from an outlet or battery of some sort. It sends energy across the skin in waves so no tubes needed to be inserted. This also helped decrease infection. Thus far AbioCor is more convenient and efficient. However it is the size of a grapefruit, too large for anyone that's not a full grown man. AbioCor II is in the process of being drafted, this will be 30% smaller. The time of survival increased to 17 months. So it seems as if we are on the way to becoming successful in creating an artificial heart that can keep one alive longer.

My thoughts:
I find it intriguing that many scientists under estimated the complexity of the heart. It seems simple enough to have a four chambered pumping organism. But we cannot forget about how blood flows and the pressure needed to pump and keep from back flow. There are many things that the heart can do and I personally do not think we can ever recreate anything that is as good or better than the original, the first Creator is kind of hard to beat.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=not-just-a-pump&print=true

A moment on the lips...a lifetime on the hips!

2008-05-12T13:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/31755/title/A_moment_on_the_lips

When you lose weight, you may think you're losing those fat cells, but you're not! Neuroscientist, Kirsty Spalding and her colleagues, of the Karolinsha Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, used an a technique Spalding originally developed to figure out whether neurons replicate, to attempt to answer the question of whether people gain and lose fat cells as their weight moves up or down the scale. Above-ground nuclear bomb tests, during the Cold War, caused levels of the radioactive isotope, C-14, to skyrocket. Since then the level of C-14 has slowly decreased. Humans take in this isotope by eating herbivores, which incorporates C-14 through photosynthesis. Ergo, the level of C-14 in human cells created in a given year reflect the level of the isotope in the atmosphere that year. Spalding and her team used C-14 to determine how often fat cells turn over. After trackin the "birth dates" of fat cells in adults, Spalding found tat adults loose about ten percent of fat cells each year, but all those cells are replaced. The researchers reported in Nature on August 4, that obese people have about twice the number of fat cells as normal-weight adults, and the cells are bigger. Spalding and her colleagues concluded adults maintain a fixed number of cells throughout life. As cells die, the same number is replenished, and when people gain weight they do not gain fat cells, rather the cells are packed with lipids and expand in size.
The director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Samuel Klein, doesn't agree with Spalding in the fact that people don't make more fat cells as they gain weight, but he does agree that fat cells in obese people are larger than in lean people. Klein says, "If we never made more fat cells, they'd become huge in size, and that just doesn't happen." He states that there is a limit of how much lipid can fit in a fat cell, about 1.5 micrograms, and he believes some people gain much more weight than can be accounted for by the fat that can be stored. "Its fat cell size, not number, that causes metabolic problems," Klein says, because stuffed fat cells leak fatty acids or ive off hormones that trigger inflammation, or lead to high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. Small fat cells on the other hand, don't release those kinds of troublesome molecules.

I don't think I've ever really thought in depth about what's happening inside the body, while someone is gaining weight. I would have assumed that as you gained and lost weight, that you would gain and lose those fat cells, and it's interesting to me to read that that's not necissarily true. It's also interesting to read tw different opinions from two different researchers, it shows that there is still more researching to be done!

The Blood Pressure Mystery

2008-04-28T10:37:00.001-07:00

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/apr/16-blood-pressure-mystery

Summary:
A man, Mr. Dexter, came into the emergency room with a blood pressure of 66 over 40 and short breath and nausea. He had in the past had an obesity surgery but other than that no major medical history problems. He was given 3 liters of saline and dopamine(a blood pressure booster), but no change occurred. The doctors were confused and there was no fever, headache, chest pain, or abdominal pain. The EKG showed no signs of a heart attack, a thought was that maybe the ventricle wall wasn't contracting correctly. The three major possible causes of low blood pressure are pump failure, leaky blood vessels, or fluid loss. With a systolic pressure of 66, he was losing blood. The most common source to find leaking blood is in the GI tract, but the GI tract was clean. The doctors then looked at Morison's pouch, where the kidneys and liver meet. Sure enough the ultrasound found fluid in the abdomen. But there was no reason for Dexter to have ascites, the accumulation of fluid in the abdomen. The blood can irritated the lining of the abdomen and cause pain in the belly. But He had a small amount of belly pain when the doctors pushed on his belly, but no excruciating pain. Dexter should not have blood in his belly with his minimal pain. Since his gastric bypass surgery, his abdomen was anatomically different. The doctors had many theories for the belly to have blood in it but all the symptoms were normal. Then the blood pressure read 110 over 60 which made Dexter stable enough to have a CT scan. The doctors were looking for a clot, but instead found blood everywhere. The CT scan also found what was thought to be a tumor or an aneurysm.

Aneurysms are caused by a malformation of the blood vessel. Most produce symptoms of a common infection or a migraine. These cause hemorrhages and can burst at any time. A type of aneurysm is the splenic artery aneurysm. Pregnant women in the third trimester are at risk with the increases in blood pressure. Most symptoms mimic stomach viruses.

Doctors ruled out the the tumor and the aneurysm. Dexter had a splenic peliosis, which is blood-filled cavities within the parenchyma, which can burst at any time. Splenic peliosis is very rare. The reason he had no symptoms is because the adhesion from the surgery stuck his intestines against the walls of the abdomen causing the blood to flow to the sides. After an operation to correct the problem, Dexter went to intensive care and was lucky to live.

Response:
Wow, to think of how many factors can effect our blood pressure. I am just amazed with the skills of the doctors to know and find out these mysteries. This just shows how complicated our bodies are and it makes you thank God that there aren't more complications. Even when we have problems God is there to provide a way out for us.

The Memory Code

2008-03-10T18:37:00.001-07:00

The memory is something that has interested scientists for many years. Why do some people remember things better than others, and some have better long term or short term memories? The answer is a difficult one to find, but scientists believed they could discover the code of memory that could allow the design of smarter computers, robots, and even find new ways to peer into the human mind! They already knew that memory was greatly affected by a region of the brain called the hippocampus, but what they didn't know was how the activation of nerve cells in the brain represents memory. They wondered if there was a way to describe mathematically or pshysiologically what memory is.Scientists began there studies on mice, considering the size of their brain would facilitate the process, as well as many mice could be studied at once. They put each mouse through episodic events that they believed would leave a lasting memory on the mice. After the mice were tested they discovered that inside the brain, four "bubbles" appeared which all represented the four episodic events they went through. This allowed the scientists to see a distinct pattern of ativity in the brain corresponding with the events. They saw the activity begin resting in the bubble and then shoot out and return back to the bubble. This raised the interesting fact that the memory was continuing to play repeatedly and spontaneously in the mouse's head.Secondly, the brain encodes these different events based on cliques. Cliques are groups of nuerons that respond similarly to a select event and thus operate collectively as a robust coding unit. Each event will be coded differently based on how the regions of the brain view the event. Whether it is tragic, disturbing, or simply something that the brain wants to warn itself not to do again.All this information helped the scientists to determine a few different things. First, that nueral cliques serve as the functional coding units that give rise to memories. The amount of nuerons present may also affect how well something is remembered. Scientists also learned through these tests how to pass information from a brain to a computer as well as comparing memory patterns from brain to brain. Using Matrix inversion the scientists were able to translate the activities of the brain into a binary code. This will help with studying cognition and making it easier to design a more seamless for of communication between the brain and a machine.With these new discoveries scientists are beginning to wonder if in the future we will have the possibility to download our brains to computers considering we can translate the activities into simple numbers. Maybe someday we will be able to travel to far off places in the world and live forever in the network!

MY RESPONSE...
Personally I find this somewhat confusing but interesting at the same time. I guess that's why I'm not a scientist and they are. But the fact that we could transport the activities of our mind to a computer is crazy and kind of scary. But it would be cool to be able to travel this way. But what interests me the most is I wonder if they would be able to go into someones mind with a computer and possibly erase memories or even make memories that they never had. Possibly a way to remove tragic events from someones life or help someone with a mental disorder. Oh sooky sooky...

Are Immune Molecules Brain Builders?

2008-03-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

Researchers set out to answer the question of how the developing brain forms its last synapses. They suprisingly found C1q which is an important gene invovled in the body's immune system. Researcher Ben Barnes said, " It stunned us." Until now scientists were under the impression that the brain worked free of immune cells. Now they found that they not only exist in the human brain but that they play a large and neccessary role. Researchers also found that immune proteins act differently on the surface of nerve cells than they do in the rest of the body. They guide signals between neurons and help control synapses sonnection strength or weakness. In the developing brain are many more synapses than neccessary. REsearchers found that this C1q is produced at the same time that these synapses are being weeded out, and that animals that lack C1q have extra connections in thier adult brains. Scientists also belive that over exposure to this molecule during development can be harmful and lead to disorders such as glaucoma and autism. When a mother is pregnant and sick her immune molecules are produced heavily. This could cause nuerological problems in the baby. Since synapse loss is a huge factor in Alzheimer's and autism, these new developments could prove huge for future research of these disorders and also in the future treatment of these two.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=are-immune-system-molecules-build-brains

My Response:
I was really wowed by this article becuase it shows how little we actually know about the human brain. I think that it would be awesome if doctors could find improved ways to treat Alzheimer's and Autism. This opens new doors for brain researchers, doctors, and drug makers alike. This could prove to be great for a huge number of people and it could even help lead to prevention of these horrible diseases.

Do You See What I See?

2008-03-10T00:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=translating-images-from-brain-waves

Summary:
This article by Nikhil Swaminathan tells of new research developments in the mystery of decoding human thoughts and dreams, made possible by mathematical process developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. The possibilities for this new discovery, researchers are saying, are endless. They say, “We could use the decoder to investigate difference in perception across people, to study covert mental processes such as attention, and perhaps even to access the visual content of purely mental phenomena such as dreams and imagery.” Preceding tries at deciphering mental activity in tested persons required knowing what image the individual was being given. Knowing this gave scientists an idea of what pattern of activity should go with the thought. This time around, scientists used fMRIs to take note of activity in the visual parts of the brain, studying it in divided voxels, or 3-D pixels. Different voxels would respond to different parts of the picture. According to John-Dylan Haynes, a professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, the team of researchers could guess what the person was seeing by noting what certain sections of the brain were doing and thinking of what kind of information would be found in the part of the photo to which the brain was responding. When tested with increasing numbers of images, the accuracy of the algorithm naturally decreased; however, remaining above 10%, it goes far beyond the efficiency of random guesswork. This process of course does not have the capacity to determine our innermost thoughts, but it still has the potential to be able to do many things, such as translate dreams.

Response:
Wow. Even seeing the title of the article put me in shock because this shows us how far technology has come. The fact that scientists can actually come up with a method of telling a person what he or she is thinking is truly astounding. I wonder what this kind of development can assist in studying aside from dreams, attention, and perception. It will be amazing to see what kind of future developments come from this. Perhaps someday science will be able to tell us our innermost thoughts and secrets.

Bugs Are Crawling In My Skin!!

2008-03-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

Summary: Dr. Claire Panosian Dunavan, a tropical medicine specialist, dealt with a puzzling medical condition called Morgellons disease. This disease consists of the victim adamantly believing that they are infested with parasites that they feel crawling under their skin, but the truth of the disease is that there are no parasites involved, just a horrible skin infection. Dr. Dunavan met with a woman named Margo Riley, who had spent many months volunteering in Mexican orphanages. After her most recent trip she had begun to develop oozing pustules and sores that left her skin blotched and damaged. She defiantly stated to Dunavan that she was sure she had Morgellons, but Dunavan was not going to diagnose her without investigating. Riley told Dunavan that on her last trip to the Yucatan Peninsula everyone with her got bug bites, but her own bites spread rather than healed. She had been put on an antibiotic but to no avail. When Dunavan examined her skin she found that some of the large sores looked as though they had been picked at and de-scabbed repeatedly during healing. Dunavan confronted Riley about the picked-at sores and Riley responded by saying that she picked at herself because there were moving things beneath her skin. She even showed Dunavan pictures in a futile attempt to prove her point. Dunavan, being a doctor looking in at the situation as opposed to a desperate patient, realized that what Riley believed to be parasites were not parasites at all, just Morgellons disease. When her nose was swabbed and tested, Dunavan diagnosed her and was overjoyed to find an antibiotic to suit her needs. When Dunavan called Riley’s referring doctor, however, the doctor said that Riley had left and was trying to find an expert who would invest more time in her case because she was so convinced that she had a new species of parasite. She had let her assumptions drive her away from help for her condition.

Reaction: It’s so interesting that Morgellons disease has both physical and psychological effects. Victims of this disease have a horrible skin condition as well as an adamant belief that they have bugs in their skin. It is also quite interesting that Margo Riley came into the clinic believing she had Morgellons disease but at the same time believing that she had bugs beneath her skin. In other words, she believed she had a disorder that made her falsely believe she was infested with parasites but then also continued to believe that she had parasites beneath her skin despite the fact that she knew her condition had that psychological effect. Also, it is a very sad situation when your psychological disorder leads you away from adequate help for your condition.

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/vital-signs-sore-mystery

How Plastic We’ve Become

2008-03-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20080223/food.asp

Our Bodies Carry Residues of Kitchen Plastics

Today there is an abundant amount of items made with plastic, and we can find residues of plastic everywhere- even in our bodies. A new study shows that BPA (bisphenol A)- a building block of the most widely used plastics- laces the bodies of the vast majority of U.S. residents’ young and old.

To make (polycarbonate) plastic, BPA is linked into long chains called polymers. This clear and brittle plastic is used in things like baby bottles and food ware. When polycarbonates are used and heated, they break down and the BPA gets released into the materials they come in contact with.

In studies, where they used rodents, it shows that BPA can produce many harmful changes in things such as: problems with reproduction, bad blood sugar control, and obesity. In a new study, the urine of 2,500 people was analyzed and roughly 92% of these people hosted measurable amounts of BPA.

Typically, only small traces of BPA turned up, concentrations of a few parts per billion in urine. However, there are agents that mimic hormones, such as BPA, even a tiny bit of it can have a big impact.

In some of these studies, the concentrations were substantially higher than those that have triggered disease and birth defects. But there is a breakdown product by which BPA is excreted, which means that BPA itself may not be present in the body, although few people actually are exposed to the breakdown product. A group of scientists have estimated that the daily BPA intake to create urine concentrations that were reported should be about 50 nanograms per kilogram of body weight. But another group of scientists figured that the total is actually closer to 100 micrograms per kilogram of bodyweight. Clearly, there is a huge difference of opinion and interpretations.

Globally, manufacturers produce about 2.8 million tons of BPA every year. Many of the products made from it are used in and around the home, but it is also used in dental sealants.

A Japanese research team showed that BPA was leaked out into baby bottles and plastic food ware, so two years later manufacturers found BPA substitutes for food cans. Then, two years after that a different group of Japanese scientists found BPA residues in the urine of college students. Half came from before the switch and half came after the BPA substitute replaced it. By comparing the two values, it showed that the BPA residues were much lower (down by at least fifty percent) after the BPA was eliminated.

Kids Appear Most Exposed

Research shows that statistically, men have lower concentrations of BPA than women. But the biggest difference is in age. Children have the highest concentrations, more than teens and adults. Some scientists think this could mean that children have higher exposures or that they can’t break it down quite as efficiently. Research has also shown that urine residues of BPA decreased with increasing household income and varied somewhat with ethnicity. There was also a difference with the time of day. It would be highest in the evening, lowest in the afternoon, and midway in between those in the morning. This would comply with the fact that BPA lives only in the body for six hours and that would be consistent with food being the major source of exposure.
BPA excretion also increased in women during their pregnancy. If this is because food exposure is increased than the baby could be in danger and blood values were much higher because the enzyme that breaks BPA down only a tenth a active in babies.

This article is interesting because when you use plastics to store food you normally use it to protect it from chemicals in the air to keep it from spoiling or making you sick, but this article tells us that it, ironically, could make you sick.

2008-03-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

How Does Consciousness Happen?

In this article to leading scientist had a debate about the actual reasons that consciousness happens and now respond to the debate that happened, in 2006. The first of scientist to comment is Christof Koch of California his main theory is that the pyramidal neurons affect long distance from lobe to lobe of the brain, and that few of these neurons are needed. The other scientist is Susan Greenfield, her theory is that a mass of neurons are sent at the same time to discern between consciosness and when you are unconscious.

Koch suggests that when you see somebody that you recognize you may have a visual neuron sent throughout the brain, but when somebody calls out your name a different stronger auditory neuron may be sent out that causes the thought of the other person to fade away. His main focus is on things that happen while you are conscious and how you get different levels of conscious ness.

Greenfield suggest that you have large assemblies of neurons that are sent throughout your brain from when you are conscious and when you are unconscious. She suggest that the reason that dreams feel more real and can happen is because these assemblies of neurons are less than when you are awake yet you are still conscious. She also supports her theory by saying that strokes my jam the process that restrain the assemblies therefore you have multiple continuous actions.

In my opinion they both have great theories and may both be right they just focused on different parts of the argument. Greenfield talked about being conscious and being unconscious while Koch discussed different levels of consciousness. I believe that you may have assemblies that communicate from lobe to lobe in the brain and you send more depending on how urgent or familiar the stimuli are. The further we come along in technology the further we can go in this search for what causes consciousness.

Mrs. Forgrave i couldn't get the article of the internet because u have to have a user name on sciam and my scanner isn't working so ill try and get it on at school on tuesday. I hope you understand thanx.

"How does Consciousness happen" by: Christof Koch and Susan Greenfield, Scientific American October, 2007

The "Methuselah" Gene?

2008-03-09T17:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=methuselah-mutation-linked-to-long-life

Researchers have known of a gene mutation in worms, flies, and mice which can extend life for quite some time now. However, they are now studying Ashkenazi Jews to attempt to find similar mutations in them. It has been discovered that the Ashkenazi Jews who lived to age 95 or older are much more likely to have similiar mutations in the gene for insulinlike growth factor 1 receptor than those who did not live to age 95.

The gene mutation makes cells less responsive to insulinlike growth factor 1 (IGF1), which is a growth hormone secreted by the liver. In mice, the decreased response to the hormone increased life span by up to 40 percent and also delayed age-related diseases. This hormone has been studied in dogs as well. In a study where dogs were fed a restricted calorie diet, the dogs lived longer and had lower levels of IGF1. When, in another study, the dogs were engineered to produce less IGF1, they lived up to 50 percent longer than normal dogs.

The studies done on humans have been much more ambiguous. Researchers have been studying a group of 384 Ashkenazi Jews who are all between the age of 95 and 108 and have a family history of longevity. These people were compared to a control of 312 living and dead people, also Ashkenazi Jews, who had no history of longevity. However, because many of the control group had died 30 years ago, they could not be directly compared with those who had lived to 95 or older. Therefore, researchers have been looking for inherited mutations in the offspring of each group. They were able to find insulinlike growth factor 1 receptor mutations in 9 of the older group, while only finding it in one of the control. They also found that IGF1 blood levels are actually higher in the centenarians, which may be attributed to the body releasing more IGF1 to compensate for the mutated receptors. They have found that males have other genes which increase their sensitivity to IGF1, so this mutation may not have much of an effect upon their aging.

The hormone somatostatin has been found to reduce IGF1 production in humans, but Professor Pinchas Cohen warns that IGF1 may still not be the "anti-aging miracle" that has been searched for ever since the mythical fountain of youth. Cohen states that "it's likely that centenarians have not just one lucky gene, but several." Cohen continues to research other huamn genes, searching for some combination which may actually be able to slow aging in humans.

RESPONSE:
This article gives a glimpse into how much genetic research and engineering is advancing. The concern I have about research like this is the ethics of it. How are we to know how far is too far in changing the genetic makkeup of a person? However, if, like the study with the mice, researchers can find a way to offset age-related diseases in humans, this study could be a huge breakthrough and could save many lives.

Plastic (Not) Fantastic

2008-03-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=plastic-not-fantastic-with-bisphenol-a

Who couldn't love the shatterless, colorful, cheap, washable plastic bottles and other products available on the market today. 'Plastics make it possible' as we're heard from hospitals and other organizations which daily rely on the affordable and durability which plastic products provide. But is the bond we have formed to plastic products actually killing us? Recent studies show that a common chemical found in most plastics called Bisphenol A (BPA), can promote human breast cancer cell growth. BPA is a compound which mimics estrogen, the natural female hormones. These studies have brought up many questions about the safety of plastics.

Traces of BPA were found in nearly all urin samples taken by the U.S. Centers for disease Control (CDC) these samples showed levels ranging from 33 to 80 per kilogram of body weight in any given day, levels 1,000 times lower than the 50 micrograms per kilogram of bodyweight per day considered safe by the EPA, E.U. and the EFSA. Children and teenagers have higher levels of BPA in their systems than adults. The chemicals does not stay more than a few days in a persons system but may have long term effects if exposed on a regular basis. Animals which have become ill due to the levels of BPA are lower than levels in humans. This is concerning to many scientists because most baby bottles and cans which contain baby formula are made with BPA. The fear is that children and infants could be at risk and not yet show signs of illness. Rats with traces of BPA have been linked to increased breast and prostate cancer, altered menstral cycles and diabetes in rats which were still developing.

In spite of all these shocking laboratory conclusions the proof is not frightening enough to stop the manufacture of plastics made with BPA. Due to their low price, appealing looks, and convenient maintenance no one wants to give up plastics unless it is absolutely necessary.

Opinion:

This article, although hard to follow at times, gets me thinking about the world we live in. Will the children being born suffer in later years because they drank their baby formula from a contaminated bottle. The BPA is releases much faster when the temperature is warm which means babies that drink warm formula are at a higher risk. I'm not sure if this has any truth to it but it seems that in the past few years it is much more difficult for women to conceive a baby. Could this be a result of the excessive use of plastics in the U.S.? Breast cancer is also shockingly common these days, could BPA be a link? There are so many wonderful advanced in technology that have saved our culture from countless diseases and epidemics, yet are we also creating health issues because of all the new technology? TV, processed food, plastics, computers, vaccines, "safe sex", and abortion are all things which were not around (or this advanced) 200 hundred years ago. How beneficial are they to our physical and mental health? How much further will we go? And what price are we willing to pay for our "new and improved developments"? SO, my fellow classmates, PLEASE take care of yourselves and don't put your plastics in the microwave. Thanks for reading. Sorry for being in a dramatic mood.