It’s Deja Vu All Over Again!
Jan 30 at 11:11pm by Aileen
Deep Brain Stimulation in Hypothalamus Triggers Deja Vu in Patient
A Neuroscience team in Canada tried an experimental treatment for a patient with morbid obesity a variety of treatments failed to control. They were stimulating potential appetite suppressing sites in his brain’s hypothalamus via implanted electrodes when he suddenly had a strong feeling of deja vu.
The ‘live’ memory recurred under double-blind restimulation. An arched bundle of fibers in the hypothalamus called the fornix was shown to drive temporal lobe and hippocampus activity, important parts of the brain’s memory circuitry.
This is a fascinating article, a sure eye-catcher for any of us who have ever experienced a strong sense of deja vu. Yet what it describes doesn’t sound much like deja vu to me, per my own experience and the general understanding of the phenomenon among most people I know.
Deja vu isn’t a dim memory that suddenly presents itself “as if” we’re there right now. It’s the sudden realization that what’s happening right now is something we’ve experienced before. I’ve had it so strongly that I knew what people were going to say and do before they said and did it!
So I have to wonder if perhaps the neuroscientists don’t have a clear understanding of the phenomenon, or the patient didn’t know the difference between reliving an old memory and remembering the present, or the writer of the press release didn’t know what the term refers to. I’m leaning toward the last possibility, since the actual quotations of the researchers speak of memory, not deja vu. Yet another terminology confusion in the science press, but definitely an interesting finding!
Uneven Ecological and Economic Impacts of Rich vs. Poor
Jan 25 at 4:04pm by Aileen
Where ecological footprints fall. The environmental impacts of high- (red), middle- (blue) and low- (yellow) income nations fall on other income tiers, as indicated by the footprints. The numbers are in trillions of 2005 international dollars. (Credit: Thara Srinivasan/UC Berkeley)
Rich Nations’ Environmental Footprints Tread Heavily on Poor Countries offers a study led by former UC-Berkeley Thara Srinivasan that examined the impacts of intensive agricultural expansion, deforestation, overfishing. loss of mangrove swamps and forests, ozone depletion and climate change between 1961 and 2000.
For the 3-year project Srinivasan teamed up with Richard B. Norgaard, an ecological economist and professor of energy and resources at UC-Berkeley. This allowed the team to evaluate economic impacts as well as ecological footprints.
Not surprisingly, the team noticed that poor nations are much more adversely impacted than rich nations. The calculation of “ecological footprints” of low, middle and high income nations demonstrated graphically that the large ecological footprints of rich nations unfairly impact poor nations whose footprints are small.
Economically speaking, the impact on poor nations is greater than the entire debt of those nations, about which Srinivasan said, “The ecological debt could more than offset the financial debt of low-income nations.” And middle-income nations had impacts on poor nations equivalent to the rich nations.
Science Press: Confusing the Issues and Frames?
Jan 21 at 3:03pm by Aileen
I have discussed previously some of the issues with science press reporting that often seem designed to confuse the science laity (non-specialists in a given field) as well as the general public (non-scientists). Not that there aren’t many topics under the ‘Science’ header that are difficult to present in an easily understood format, or that there aren’t topics that harbor a good deal of conflicting ideas within science itself.
But since this blog is an attempt to present science news in an understandable way to the general public, now is a good time to revisit the issue of confusing science reporting, because a seriously confusing science news article has hit the reporting sources and engendered some confused arguments on both sides of an in-house controversy about evolution.
Genes and Not-Genes: Human Genome Shrinks Again
Jan 16 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Human Genome loses nearly 5,000 genes
Back before the human genome had been sequenced biologists estimated that we might have up to 150,000 genes to work with. Genes are those stretches of DNA code sequences between “start” and “stop” codons that are transcribed and used to create functional proteins from amino acids. High initial estimates of how many genes it takes to be a human were the natural result of a “gene-centric” point of view in biology, which assumed that all the particular traits of any organism would be determined by specific genes for those traits. We now know that things are more complicated than that.
When the first draft of the human genome was published in 2001 the approximate number of genes had been pared down - somewhat surprisingly to many - to a mere ~35,000 genes. That number has been whittled down even further over the next few years, and now has been reduced yet again by nearly 5,000. Current estimate: a mere 20,500 genes in the entire human genome.
New Heart Created on Old Heart Scaffolding!
Jan 14 at 4:04pm by Aileen
The exciting science news this week leads with a real shocker - researchers at the University of Minnesota have created a beating heart in the laboratory! This landmark achievement represents a stunning advance toward the dream of growing new organs for transplant from the patient’s own marrow stem cells.
Using a process called “whole organ decellularization,” new hearts were grown from dead rat and pig hearts from which all cells are removed, leaving only the extracellular matrix - the framework between the cells that gives form to the organ. Dr. Doris A. Taylor, head of the team that created the beating rat heart, described the guiding principle for the project -
“…give nature the tools, and get out of the way.”
Eating Dirt: Research Finally Discovers A Reason!
Jan 11 at 6:06pm by Aileen
They call it “geophagy,” but we all know it as just plain dirt-eating. Dogs do it, horses do it, children do it regularly too. Now a study of chimpanzee dirt-eating by a research team from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris has demonstrated actual health benefits of the practice.
Down to Earth Remedies for Chimps: Eat Mud reports that the research team collected samples of soil eaten by chimpanzees, along with samples of the plants they were eating at the same time and analyzed the material for bioactive properties. Moreover, they found that by ingesting a certain type of dirt along with the leaves of T. rubescens trees, anti-malarial properties in the leaves became active when they did not become active when ingested by themselves.
BERT and ERNI Play Important Roles in CNS Development
Jan 10 at 10:10pm by Aileen
…and you thought those silly Muppets were just silly!
With the melodic strains of Ernie’s Greatest Hit “Rubber Ducky” echoing my head, fans will be delighted to know that the dynamic duo created by Jim Henson and Frank Oz in 1969 as stars of the famous Sesame Street educational program have even more to do with brain development that originally thought!
Research published in the January 10 online issue of PLoS Biology reports A Mechanism Regulating the Onset of Sox2 Expression in the Embryonic Neural Plate has been discovered.
Big Pharma’s Big Lie Refuted
Jan 8 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Two York University researchers have published a study in the January 3rd issue of PLoS Medicine [Public Library of Science] demonstrating that U.S. pharmaceutical companies spend nearly twice as much money promoting their drugs to doctors and the public than on research and development of new drugs.
Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising than Research and Development puts the lie to the pharmaceutical industry’s self-serving mantra that the cost of drugs in the U.S. has to be higher than anywhere else in the world so that newer, better drugs - and drugs designed to treat relatively rare but deadly diseases - can be developed. High prices for prescription drugs offset this massive expenditure, they tell us, and the U.S. government has tended to accept the lie without challenge.
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