London, UK, 24 November 2010 – Research from the Laboratory of Psychiatry and Experimental Alzheimers Research (http://www2.i-med.ac.at/psychlab/) at the Medical University Innsbruck (Austria) demonstrated that chronic high fat cholesterol diet in rats exhibited pathologies similar to Alzheimer's disease. The results were published in Molecular Cellular Neuroscience (45(4):408-417, 2010) with lead author Dr. Christian Humpel.
Brain
You may think of your love for your mate as the noble emotion of a pure heart, but some primitive parts of your brain are taking a decidedly more pragmatic approach to the subject, according to Stanford biologists.
BOSTON, Mass. (Nov. 23, 2010) — Pity the female fruit fly. Being a looker is simply not enough. To get a date, much less a proposal, you have to act like a girl, even smell like one. Otherwise, you might just have a fight on your hands.
Like most animals, fruit flies must distinguish between a potential mate and a potential competitor. When a male fruit fly suspects he's encountered a female, he'll court; when he senses the other is a male, he'll fight. What triggers these sex-specific responses?
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have found evidence that an environmental pollutant may play an important role in causing multiple sclerosis and that a hypertension drug might be used to treat the disease.
TORONTO, ON – Many people say they wouldn't cheat on a test, lie on a job application or refuse to help a person in need.
But what if the test answers fell into your lap and cheating didn't require any work on your part? If you didn't have to face the person who needed your help and refuse them? Would that change your behaviour?
Montreal, November 23, 2010 – Pathological gamblers are risking more than their money, they are also three times more likely to commit suicide than non-betters. A new Montreal inter-university study has shown these gamblers are also plagued by personality disorders. These findings, published in a recent issue of the Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, may have implications for developing improved targeted suicide prevention programs.
Boston, Mass. – Medulloblastomas are the most common malignant brain tumors of childhood, with 40 to 50 percent overall mortality. One of the greatest challenges in treating them is that they vary substantially from patient to patient. In the largest genomic study of human medulloblastomas to date, researchers from Children's Hospital Boston, together with collaborators, have identified six subtypes with distinct molecular "fingerprints" that will improve doctors' ability to direct and individualize treatment.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — More than half of all combat-related injuries sustained by U.S. troops are the result of explosions, and many of those involve injuries to the head. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, about 130,000 U.S. service members deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have sustained traumatic brain injuries — ranging from concussion to long-term brain damage and death — as a result of an explosion. A recent analysis by a team of researchers led by MIT reveals one possible way to prevent those injuries — adding a face shield to the helmet worn by military personnel.
MADISON — Like musical compression saves space on your mp3 player, the human brain has ways of recoding sounds to save precious processing power.
To whittle a recording of your favorite song down to a manageable pile of megabytes, computers take advantage of reliable qualities of sounds to reduce the amount of information needed. Collections of neurons have their own ways to efficiently encode sound properties that are predictable.
ATLANTA, GA – 22 November, 2010 – The College of Direct Support (CDS), an internet-based curriculum for Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) and managed in partnership by Elsevier/MC Strategies and the University of Minnesota's Research and Training Center, has introduced its latest offering in the form of a new genre of its online learning content. The new Learning Session is called "R&R Arcade: Direct Support Professionalism: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)."
Insomnia is bad news for software engineers' quality of life and deserves greater recognition and attention, according to new research by Sara Sarrafi Zadeh and Khyrunnisa Begum from the University of Mysore in India. Their work shows that poor sleep has a bearing on quality of life - affecting physical and mental health in particular - in this group with high levels of job-related stress. Their paper is published online in Springer's journal Applied Research in Quality of Life.
In a study that sheds new light on the causes of Parkinson's disease, researchers report that brain cells in Parkinson's patients abandon their energy-producing machinery, the mitochondria. A shutdown in fuel can have devastating effects on brain cells, which consume roughly 20 percent of the body's energy despite making up only 2 percent of body weight.
Most patients who take anti-depressants give up their treatment in less than six months, the minimum period recommended for treating severe depression and other derived pathologies. This is the conclusion of a new study carried out by Catalan researchers, which reveals that only 25% continue their treatment for more than 11 months.
Johns Hopkins Children's Center scientists have discovered that high blood levels of a protein commonly found in the central nervous system can predict brain injury and death in critically ill children on a form of life support called extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation or ECMO.
ECMO, used to temporarily oxygenate the blood of patients whose heart and lungs are too weak or damaged to do so on their own, is most often used as a last resort because it can increase the risk for brain bleeding, brain swelling, stroke and death in some patients.