Brain

BATON ROUGE – LSU's Saundra McGuire, assistant vice chancellor for learning and teaching in LSU's Division of Student Life and Enrollment Services, recently co-authored an American Scientist article with Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Roald Hoffmann. The article, "Learning and Teaching Strategies," describes six learning and six teaching strategies using the authors' collective experiences as well as advances in cognitive psychology.

In Alzheimer's disease, the problem is beta-amyloid, a protein that accumulates in the brain and causes nerve cells to weaken and die. Drugs designed to eliminate plaques made of beta-amyloid have a fatal problem: they need to enter the brain and remove the plaques without attacking healthy brain cells. New research from the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Paul Greengard, however, suggests that treatments modeled on the blockbuster cancer drug Gleevec could be the solution. The findings are reported in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Nature.

'Mindfulness', the process of learning to become more aware of our ongoing experiences, increases well-being in adolescent boys, a new study reports.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge analyzed 155 boys from two independent UK schools, Tonbridge and Hampton, before and after a four-week crash course in mindfulness. After the trial period, the 14 and 15 year-old boys were found to have increased well-being, defined as the combination of feeling good (including positive emotions such as happiness, contentment, interest and affection) and functioning well.

• Prior research had found an association between DNA sequence variations in a gene that encodes parts of the brain's gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA)-A receptors (the GABRA2 gene) and alcohol dependence.
• New research has found that the GABRA2 genotype can also affect the brain's reward responses to cues such as alcohol odors.

It now appears that the malaria mosquito relies on a battery of different types of odor sensors to mediate its most critical behaviors, including how to choose and locate their blood-meal hosts. In an article to be published next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, researchers at Vanderbilt University have characterized two families of molecular odorant sensors in Anopheles gambiae, the mosquito responsible for the majority of human malaria transmission.

As anyone who has ever struggled to keep his or her eyes open after a big meal knows, eating can induce sleepiness. New research in fruit flies suggests that, conversely, being hungry may provide a way to stay awake without feeling groggy or mentally challenged.

Gamblers who think they have a "hot hand," only to end up walking away with a loss, may nonetheless be making "rational" decisions, according to new research from University of Minnesota psychologists. The study finds that because humans are making decisions based on how we think the world works, if erroneous beliefs are held, it can result in behavior that looks distinctly irrational.