Brain | Page 1615 | Science Codex

Companies: Beware hazards of rapid growth

New research on companies that sprint to rapidly gain market share is revealing the danger of pursuing sudden massive growth, according to the Management Insights feature in the April issue of Management Science.

"Getting Big Too Fast: Strategic Dynamics with Increasing Returns and Bounded Rationality" is by John D. Sterman and Rebecca Henderson of MIT's Sloan School of Management; Eric D. Beinhocker, McKinsey Global Institute; and Lee I. Newman, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan.

PCB95 causes developmental abnormalities in rats

Scientists have determined that a specific class of PCB causes significant developmental abnormalities in rat pups whose mothers were exposed to the toxicant in their food during pregnancy and during the early weeks when the pups were nursing.

Schizophrenia: genetics, white matter defects and dopamine

New research helps bridge an important gap in understanding schizophrenia, providing the best evidence to date that defects in the brain's white matter are a key contributor to the disease, which affects about 1 percent of people worldwide.

Damaged motor neurons in ALS contribute to their own death

When motor neurons damaged by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, inappropriately send the wrong signal, immune cells react by killing the messenger. Their surprising finding provides new direction for therapies to treat ALS.

The study was conducted in the laboratory of Don Cleveland, Ph.D., UCSD Professor of Medicine, Neurosciences and Cellular and Molecular Medicine and member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and will be published online April 27 in advance of publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Deactivating protein may protect nerve fibers in MS

Oregon Health & Science University neuroscientists are eyeing a protein as a potential therapeutic target for multiple sclerosis because de-activating it protects nerve fibers from damage.

Female alcoholics develop cognitive problems more rapidly than males

Researchers and clinicians already know that alcohol abuse and/or dependence can lead to severe and potentially irreversible brain damage. It is also known that women, when compared to men, seem to become more "damaged" by chronic alcohol abuse within a shorter period of drinking and with less overall consumption. A new study shows that female alcoholics may also sustain greater cognitive damage than male alcoholics.

Alcoholics should avoid excessive physical and psychological stress during early abstinence

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is a hormonal system that defends against stress, starvation and illnesses. New findings of alterations in adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and cortisol secretion in alcoholic patients, which reflect changes in the HPA axis, prompt recommendations that alcoholics avoid excessive stress – both physical and psychological – during early abstinence.

Results are published in the May issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Nanotechnology to make organs self-healing

Imagine a world where damaged organs in your body—kidneys, liver, heart—can be stimulated to heal themselves. Envision people tragically paralyzed whose injured spinal cords can be repaired. Think about individuals suffering from the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s relieved of their symptoms – completely and permanently.

Baby food that will keep your kids forever thin

Want to keep kids thin? Clore Laboratory at the University of Buckingham is supplementing infant formula and other baby foods with leptin,the hunger hormone. Researchers say it could provide permanent protection from obesity and diabetes into adulthood and could be on shop shelves soon.

Those who take the foods early in life should remain permanently slim. 'Like those people who are lean by nature even though they overeat ? like we all do – they will tend to be inefficient in terms of using energy,' says Mike Cawthorne, who heads the Metabolic Research group at Clore.

Lose your temper? So do fruit flies

Serotonin is a major signaling chemical in the brain, and it has long been thought to be involved in aggressive behavior in a wide variety of animals as well as in humans. Another brain chemical signal, neuropeptide Y (known as neuropeptide F in invertebrates), is also known to affect an array of behaviors in many species, including territoriality in mice. A new study by Drs. Herman Dierick and Ralph Greenspan of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego shows that these two chemicals also regulate aggression in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Study links faulty DNA repair to Huntington's disease onset

Huntington’s disease, an inherited neurodegenerative disorder that affects roughly 30,000 Americans, is incurable and fatal. But a new discovery about how cells repair their DNA points to a possible way to stop or slow the onset of the disease. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

How monkey cognition can help determine infant abilities

New research from Columbia's Primate Cognition Laboratory has demonstrated for the first time that monkeys could acquire meta-cognitive skills: the ability to reflect about their thoughts and to assess their performance.

Family turmoil can cause physical changes

Adolescents who are chronically exposed to family turmoil, violence, noise, poor housing or other chronic risk factors show more stress-induced physiological strain on their organs and tissues than other young people.

However, when they have responsive, supportive mothers, they do not experience these negative physiological changes, reports a new study from Cornell.

But the research group also found that the cardiovascular systems of youths who are exposed to chronic and multiple risk factors are compromised, regardless of their mothers' responsiveness.

Brain networks strengthened by closing ion channels

Yale School of Medicine and University of Crete School of Medicine researchers report in Cell April 20 the first evidence of a molecular mechanism that dynamically alters the strength of higher brain network connections.

This discovery may help the development of drug therapies for the cognitive deficits of normal aging, and for cognitive changes in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Do heart defects cause migraines?

Researchers of the heart and headaches at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital are combining efforts to determine if a common heart defect may be the cause of some forms of migraine headaches.