Friday, January 29, 2010
When people imagine back to the past or look in the direction of the future, their body language reflects their intelligence of time travel, a new study suggests. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen fixed subjects with motion sensors and asked them to imagine events in the hope or the past. The bodies of those who idea about the future actually moved forward. Those who thought about the past swayed backward.
The findings emerge online in the journal Psychological Science.
The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation.
Friday, January 8, 2010
New research in rats suggests that some drugs used to treat high blood pressure may help prevent and treat a disorder that causes people with diabetes to mislay their vision.
The researchers tested candesartan (Atacand), a drug known as an angiotensin receptor blocker, on rats to see what would happen to 65 proteins in the retina that appear to be linked to diabetes. They found that the drug prevented over 70 % of the proteins from having abnormal changes.
The findings, which come in the largest study of its kind, can spell hope for people who suffer from diabetic retinopathy or are at jeopardy for it. The disorder damages blood vessels in the retina. Earlier research had suggested that high-blood pressure drugs -- also including ACE inhibitors -- may help.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
New tools that use dissimilar colors of light to silence brain activity can lead to new treatments for disorders like epilepsy, chronic pain, Parkinson's disease and brain injury, neuroscientists say.
These so-called "super-silencers" give precise control over the timing of the shutdown of overactive brain circuits, something that is impossible with existing drugs or other conventional treatments, as said by the research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The research is published in the January 7 issue of the journal Nature.
"Silencing different sets of neurons with different colors of light allows us to understand how they work together to implement brain functions," study senior author Mr. Ed Boyden, a professor in the MIT Media Lab also an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, said in a news release.
"Using these new tools, we can look at 2 neural pathways and study how they compute together. These tools will help us comprehend how to control neural circuits, leading to new understandings and treatments for brain disorders -- some of the biggest unmet medical needs in the world," Ed Boyden added.
He and his colleagues developed the super-silencers using 2 genes called Arch and Mac that are found in unlike organisms such as bacteria and fungi. The genes encode for light-activated proteins that help organisms make energy. The activity of neurons engineered to convey Arch and Mac can be inhibited by shining light on them. The light activates the proteins, ensuing in lower voltage in the neurons, which prevents them from firing effectively, Ed Boyden explained.
Yellow light silences Arch whereas blue light silences Mac.
"In this way, the brain can be programmed with different colors of light to identify and possibly correct the corrupted neural computations that lead to disease," study co-author Mr. Brian Chow, a postdoctoral associate in Boyden's lab, said in the news release.
