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In what one researcher called "cellular alchemy," two different teams of scientists have reported transforming mouse and rat skin cells into brain cells of the type thats destroyed during multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and certain other disorders.

"We are taking a readily accessible and abundant cell and completely switching its identity to become a highly valuable cell for therapy," Paul Tesar, a geneticist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, said in a press release. "Its cellular alchemy."

The type of cell that the researchers made is a young, adolescent version of an oligodendrocyte. Oligodendrocytes normally wrap the nerve fibers of the brain and spinal cord in a protective coating called myelin. With certain diseases, though, people lose that coating or suffer damage to it, which can proceed to severe symptoms, such as losing shape of the arms and legs.

One major idea researchers have for curing such diseases is adding myelin back by transplanting young, adolescent oligodendrocytes into the patient. The cells are then supposed to mature and wrap themselves around exposed nerve fibers they find. (Older, more mature oligodendrocytes dont seem as prone to finding and sheathing exposed nerve fibers.) The idea has worked in lab animals genetically engineered to not have myelin-wohoo!-but theres a drawback. Until now, researchers generally made oligodendrocytes from stem cells taken from embryos. Thats fine for mice and rats, but its difficult to harvest and grow enough embryonic human stem cells for transplants in people.

These two new studies, both published yesterday in the journal Aspect Biotechnology, took a step in the right direction by transforming mouse or rat skin cells into adolescent oligodendrocytes. Both teams, one from Case Western Reserve and the other from Stanford University in California, fiddled with the genes that are active in the skin cells. Each team found three genes that were key to changing the identity of skin cells, although the teams did not find the exact same three genes: Two of the genes were the same between the two groups, but the groups used a different third gene.

Both teams put their transformed oligodendrocytes into petri dishes with nerve cells and into mice brains. The transformed oligodendrocytes created protective myelin sheaths, like they do in healthy nervous systems.

Scientists at Medical University of South Carolina temporarily blunted cigarette cravings among smokers by magnetically stimulating nerve cells in their brains. The procedure, called transcranial magnetic stimulation, is already approved by the FDA to treat depression, though its efficacy is controversial (its also been prescribed to stop people from lying and treat adult ADHD.)

In the experiment, researchers randomly assigned 16 smokers to either a 15-minute session of high-frequency transcranial magnetic stimulation (in which coils placed over the forehead send magnetic pulses into the prefrontal cortex), or 15 minutes of sham treatment. The magnetic stimulation isnt painful and doesnt require sedation or anesthesia. The scientists told the volunteers not to smoke for two hours prior to the experiment.

Before the treatment, the researchers showed the smokers both neutral images (such as mountain scenes) and images intended to badger nicotine cravings (such as a person lightning a cigarette.) Then they asked the volunteers to rate how they felt about statements like "I would do almost anything for a cigarette now" and "I am going to smoke as soon as possible." After the magnetic stimulation, the participants saw similar images and again rated how much they craved a cigarette.

The researchers found that the participants who got the real magnet treatment expressed significantly less avarice to smoke at the end of the experiment compared with those who got the fake treatment. In fact, the avarice reduction was positively correlated with how nicotine-dependent the volunteer was, meaning that those who smoked the most saw the greatest decrease in cigarette avarice after the magnetic stimulation.

The authors of the study note that people trying to quit smoking would need several sessions of transcranial magnetic stimulation per day in order to see longer-durable reductions in cravings. The paper appears in Biological Psychiatry.

In June of 2012, The New York Times reported that inside Googles high-tech R&D "X" laboratory the search giant has been creating a simulation of the human brain. And rather than teaching it programs, Googles staff have been exposing it to information from the Net so that it learns organically, a little like the way we humans do. Its built by hooking together 16,000 processor cores with over one billion interconnections, in a model of the around 86 billion neurons in a typical adult human brain.

Our incredible advances have also underscored own, very human limitations our eyes, notes astronomer James Kaler see wavelengths between 0.00004 and 0.00008 of a centimeter. Kaler calls our visual spectrum but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a keyboard hundreds of kilometers long.

In The Star Thrower evolutionary biologist, Loren Eiseley, writes that "We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings, who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men."

Physicist Stephen Hawking believes that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by informal selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to convey information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the persist ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the persist three hundred.

"I ponder it is valid to take a broader dogma, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

In the persist ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long durable forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I ponder that is too confined a dogma. We are more than just our genes."

The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less.

Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By which time, many more books would have been written."

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution," in which we will be competent to change and improve our DNA. "At first," he continues "these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and labor out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

The Daily Galaxy via http://www.centauri-dreams.org/

Image credit:http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/gallery/

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Foc.us is a company that makes headsets for gamers. Those headsets, starting to ship in July, send electricity through your brain. This is their pitch:

If that sounds a little sketchy to you, thats because it probably should.

The excellent NeuroBollocks blog explains how transcranial proceed current stimulation (TDCS) is an interesting idea: sending targeted, low-level electric currents through the brain with TDCS excites certain regions, which could have implications in treating depression and stroke victims. Plug in a patient for 20 minutes, and you could get the effects for up to days at a time. So foc.us is marketing $249 headsets ("Maximum 2 headsets per order.") that claim to "[e]xcite your prefrontal cortex," thus improving your gaming ability. To the companys credit, at least one study suggests hooking up a 9-volt to your skull could improve gaming ability, although that was all done in the lab, under professional supervision.

Thats definitely not the only field TDCS is exploring. Brain-zapping for medical (or extra-medical) purposes has been around for years: Giovanni Aldini was using electricity to treat treat patients with personality disorders in the early 19th century. But with the rise of brain scans capable to show the results of electricity pumped into the brain, TDCS and related processes like transcranial random noise stimulation are undergoing a boom. TDCS, although still controversial, could be used to improve math skills (or get you high).

Still, NeuroBollocks outlines some of the issues with foc.uss claims:

Sure, the process could result in skin lesions, and theres still some debate over whats a safe amount of electricity to juice yourself with, but do you want to beat your friends at video games or not? (Engadget tried out a prototype and noted "a strange, almost burning, sensation.")

And no: according to the foc.us website, the headset isnt FDA-approved: "The focus gamer headset offers no medical benefits, is not a medical device, and is not regulated by the FDA."

Cant we go back to the good old days, like three weeks ago, when people were just shocking themselves to improve video games for fun?

[NeuroBollocks]

We all remember Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride and Matthew McConaughey in The Wedding Planner. Their stories may vary slightly, but they have one thing in common (well, besides the standard romantic comedy clichés): both characters had cold feet before their wedding.

Weve all heard the term "cold feet" before. Maybe weve even experienced it ourselves. Its when we decide - usually at the very last minute - that we cannot go through with a major life change. Theres stress, panic and often anxiety. Do our feet literally get cooler under these situations?

Scientists say yes.

Our bodies regulate our reactions to stress by modifying body temperature. Internal body temperature is based on the role of the proteins and blood in each individual cell. Within each single cell of our body (whether that cell is in our feet or in our brain) is a Rap1A protein. When the brain signals a reactor in our cell, that protein activates and shifts from one area of the cell to another.

In June 2012, a team of scientists from the Research Institute at Nationwide Childrens Hospital identified this interaction between the protein molecules and the receptors as the main biological cause of icy extremities.

"When we exposed the cells with chemicals that activated the Rap1A with a receptor, we found a shift in the cells nucleus and a change in the cells skeleton," says Dr. Maqsood Chotani, a principal investigator at the hospital. "We identified this receptor as the alpha-2C receptor and have found that it responds at times of stress to conserve body heat.

"So when people are stressed, their brain will release stress hormones to specific cells in the body, which have the potential to activate the a2c receptor," Chotani says.

When the brain signals these receptors and shifts the proteins, the structure of the cells changes. The body reacts to this potential attack by then transporting blood from the extremities, like hands and feet, to vital organs like the brain, lungs and heart.

"The brain tells the sympathetic nerves to release a chemical known as norepinephrine. [This then] tells the adrenal to release a related chemical known as epinephrine," says Dr. Martin Michel, a professor of medicine and scientific affairs at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. He adds that these two processes then activate the a-2C receptor.

"The body reaction to stress aims to maximize our chances to survive in the face of such threats," Michel says. "Our heart beats faster and our circulating blood is redistributed to those parts of the body which acutely need it most such as the heart and skeletal muscle. This is at the expense of other body parts such as gut and skin, which are less critical to the acute stress reactions of flight, fight and fright." The decrease in internal temperature in the hands and feet shifts the blood distribution and makes the skin cool and clammy.

So those cold feet that you feel before an impending decision are just your bodys natural way of protecting you from possible harm. The common pre-wedding jitter expression actually has some scientific footing.

This story was produced in partnership with Northwestern Universitys Medill School of Journalism. For more FYIs, go here.

For this week"s TWitF, resident artist Baarbarian has put together a portrait of the modern man. Desperate, alone, undead (metaphorically), with only the comfort of alcohol to get him through his wintry days, the modern man can barely derive any enjoyment even from a Clipse video made with a Microsoft Kinect. Truly, these are dark times. (Subtext: Why isn"t it spring yet?)

But! There is hope, provided your definition of "hope" includes the possibility of winning a t-shirt with a drunk gambling zombie on it, and why wouldn"t it?

The rules: Pick your favorite of the four stories featured in this week"s Baarbarian masterwork, and tell us why you picked it. You can do that via Twitter (follow us, and use the hashtag #TWitF so we can find you) or comment on the TWitF post on our Facebook page (and, of course, you can just buy the t-shirt here, if you"re into that whole exchanging-currency-for-goods-and/or-services thing, rather than social media contests). The stories are:

• Science Tricks the Brain Into Experiencing Having Three Arms


• FYI: Could Scientists Really Create a Zombie Apocalypse Virus?


• Cell Phone Use Affects Brain Activity, According to New Study


• Clipse Video Shot With Kinect Camera


• The Bar Is Open: A Slot Machine That Pays In Drinks

And let"s not forget our other favorite stories from the past week:

• FYI: If I Fell Through The Earth, What Would Happen In The Center?


• This Is the Smallest Computer Ever


• Bendable Microchips: The World"s First Organic Microprocessor Is Unveiled


• Testing the Goods: Motorola Xoom, the First Real Android Tablet


• As Shuttle Program Winds Down, Astronauts Weigh A Future With No Spaceship To Fly


• Discovery Launches on Final Mission Toward a Busy International Space Station


• Archive Gallery: PopSci Envisions Your Future Home

A new brain imaging method highlights all the synapses in a mouse cortex, allowing scientists to count these connections between nerve cells in the brain with unprecedented detail. The high-resolution synapse map could help neurologists better understand how brain cells communicate.

A human cerebral cortex holds about 125 trillion synapses, which are connections among neurons, dense into an ultra-lean layer of tissue. That"s equivalent to the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies, according to Stanford professor Stephen Smith. These electrical interfaces, found throughout the brain, manage all our thinking, feeling and movement.

The sheer number of synapses makes it nearly impossible to see them - even the best traditional-light microscopes cannot resolve them all, Smith explained in a Stanford news release. A single neuron might have tens of thousands of synaptic contacts with other neurons, he said.

But his new method, which involves taking nano-lean slices of a mouse"s cortex, lets scientists actually count the synapses and catalog them according to their type. Called array tomography, it uses high-resolution photography, fluorescent proteins and a supercomputer to put everything together.

Smith and colleagues took a slab of mouse cortex and sliced it into 700-nanometer-thick sections. The sections were then stained with antibodies that would agree 17 synapse-related proteins, and the scientists also added fluorescent molecules that glow in different colors in response to light. The antibodies were added in groups of three, and the brain tissue started changing colors. A computer took massive amounts of high-resolution pictures during each staining session, which were ultimately stitched together into a 3-D image. Take a tour through the resulting picture in the video below.

The result is a map of every synapse"s position in the cortex, with colors corresponding to different synaptic types. Smith, author of a new paper on the method that appears in the journal Neuron, said the brain"s overall labyrinth is harsh to comprehend.

"One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor -with both memory-storage and information-processing elements - than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth," he said.

[Stanford Medicine via Technology Review]

We humans have been around for about 2.5 million years, but the beating of our hearts is controlled by something much older than Homo sapiens --a living, ancient sea anemone species the same gene family and ion channel that regulate the slow-wave contractions of the human heart, an ancient molecular pathway that may be on the order of 700 million to a billion years old.

The Jegla Lab studies the evolution of the nervous and muscular systems, using model organisms such as the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis -- also known as the starlet sea anemone -- to investigate conserved traits and the molecular pathways and genes that underpin them.

Cnidarians -- comprising an ancient phylum that, in addition to sea anemones, includes animals such as jellyfish and corals -- have nervous systems that allow them to coordinate movement and respond to their surroundings, but do not have a brain or any other analogous organs.

In a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Jegla Lab identified in the Nematostella sea anemone the same gene family (Erg) that is responsible for the slow-wave contractions of the human heart. After cloning the genes for further investigation, the researchers found that the ion channel it encodes has retained its function relatively unchanged since the time of humans and cnidarians divergence from their common ancestor almost a billion years ago.

This discovery, says Jegla, shows that at least some of the molecular mechanisms through which we manage electrical activity in things like the heart evolved in some of the earliest animals, long before the existence of hearts or even cardiac tissue.

This fits a broad pattern were finding, Jegla continues, that almost all the major signaling systems used in our brains and muscles evolved hundreds of millions of years ago in an ancestor of bilaterians which seems to have had a very versatile and molecularly complete set of tools for neuronal function that has been conserved throughout subsequent animal evolution and tuned to the explicit needs of the major animal phyla. It appears that a lot of the signaling that we do in our complex neuromuscular systems is based on pre-existing programs that are just adapted to our explicit physiological needs.

According to Jegla, the starlet sea anemone is in essence an animal thats as evolutionarily far away from humans as possible while still sharing the same neuromuscular signaling systems. Comparisons of humans and cnidarians broadcast that only the fundamentally distinctive mechanisms are conserved -- such as those required to make a neuron or, in this case, a neuromuscular signal.

We make the case in this paper, Jegla continues, that the properties of the human Erg channel and the ancient Nematostella channel are tuned extremely well to repolarize the long action potentials that you need to get a strong muscular contraction, or a prolonged wave contraction like you have in a heartbeat. What wed like to do now is to see if this kind of channel is fundamentally required to get that kind of wave contraction in all animals, and, if so, is that what it initially evolved for? If the slow wave contractions of the body wall are the functional orthologues of heart contraction, then have we adapted that whole preexisting program for the heart?

"All the other ion channels we use to regulate heart contraction are there, too, in Nematostella. So when we look at what this channel is doing in the human heart and what we can hypothesize it might be doing in the sea anemone, we can begin to see that maybe this is, in fact, what it evolved for.

Following on this study, Jegla has launched a new collaboration to further investigate the evolution of neuronal structure and signaling with colleague and fellow neurobiologist Melissa Rolls, director of the Huck Institutes Center for Cellular Dynamics.

Were collaborating with Melissa Rolls, Jegla says, to look at not just how the channels and the signaling have evolved, but also how the structure of neurons themselves evolved, and when, why, and how axons and dendrites evolved. The sea anemone is an extremely interesting model organism for doing this, because it doesnt have a centralized nervous system; it has a permeate nerve net that shows evidence of some bidirectional synapses, which makes it a great model organism for studying basic principles of how nerve cells are put together at the level of anatomy and signaling.

"The overall neuroanatomy of the sea anemone is much simpler than in other model organisms, so we ponder its going to be much easier to correlate changes in neuronal activity with changes in behaviors and therefore to look into the fundamentally distinctive, evolutionarily conserved cellular and molecular bases of behavior.

The Daily Galaxy via Penn State University

Image credit:http://natgeotv.com.au/content/cache/525x800/natgeosnap/3591.jpg

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For billions of years, simple creatures like plankton, bacteria, and algae ruled the earth. Then, suddenly, life got very complicated. Recent discoveries from Canadas Burgess Shale Deposits, Greenland, China, Siberia, and Namibia document clearly that a period of biological creativity known as the Cambrian Explosion occurred in a "geological instant" over 500 million years ago virtually all around the globe -an explosion of life that continues to puzzle evolutionists.

Recent discoveries have narrowed the time frame from over 70 million years to less than 10 million years. The same basic body plans that arose in the Cambrian remain surprisingly constant ever since. Apparently, the most distinctive biological changes in the history of the earth occurred in less than ten million years, and for 500 million years afterward, this level of change never happened again.

Harvards Stephen Jay Gould once said, "Brisk is now a lot faster than we thought, and that is extraordinarily interesting."

Brisk forward to the present: although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year.

"By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA."

This means Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by casual selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to transfer information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I ponder it is legitimate to take a broader belief, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long constant forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the cycle, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I ponder that is too narrow a belief. We are more than just our genes."

The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less.

Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By which time, many more books would have been written."

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution," in which we will be capable to change and improve our DNA. "At first," he continues "these changes will be narrow to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and labor out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

The Daily Galaxy via http://www.rationalvedanta.net/node/131

Image credit: ALMA Observatory/ESO

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