Clipmarks | Silkweaver's clips

Cloned Puppies: Sure, They're Cute, But at What Cost?

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:36:13 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Yet defenders of the industry say that it's wrong to apply analogies taken from other species' clones: Despite the difficulties, they insist, cloned dogs tend to be healthy, not least because scientists have spent the last decade figuring out how to do it.

"Clone enough dogs, and occasionally you have offspring that aren't perfect," said Lou Hawthorne, CEO of both BioArts and the late Genetic Savings and Clone. "But it's comparable to what you have through conventional breeding."

Clip Source: www.wired.com

When skin cells from a dead pit bull named Booger gave rise to five healthy-looking puppies with a $50,000 price tag, it marked the formal beginning of a commercial dog-cloning industry.

But for all the attention given to these and other clones, little was paid to the behind-the-scenes science. For every successfully cloned animal thrust into the spotlight, how many failures were quietly ushered out of sight?

"What we're seeing with the clones they present are the ones that look good," said Jaydee Hanson, an animal-cloning analyst at the Center for Food Safety, a Washington, D.C.-based liberal nonprofit.

In March, the U.S. Humane Society and American Anti-Vivisection Society released a report castigating pet cloning for "serious animal suffering and disreputable activities." Critics point to the general tendency of animal embryos to fail before they're born, and for survivors to develop debilitating diseases. And dogs, it's widely agreed, are among the hardest of all animals to clone.

Tags: gnetics, cloning, animals

Future Drugs Will Make Troops Want to Fight

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:29:15 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Their report, “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies,” was released today. It charts a range of cognitive technologies that are potentially powerful — and, perhaps, powerfully troubling.

Here are the report’s main areas of focus:

Mind reading. The development of psychological models and neurological imaging has made it possible to see what people are thinking and whether they’re lying.

Cognitive enhancement. Arguably the most developed area of cognitive neuroscience, with drugs already allowing soldiers to stay awake and alert for days at a time,

Mind control. Largely pharmaceutical, for the moment, and a natural outgrowth of cognitive enhancement approaches and mind-reading insight: If we can alter the brain, why not control it?

Mind control. Largely pharmaceutical, for the moment, and a natural outgrowth of cognitive enhancement approaches and mind-reading insight: If we can alter the brain, why not control it?

Clip Source: noworldsystem.com

Drugs that make soldiers want to fight. Robots linked directly to their controllers’ brains. Lie-detecting scans administered to terrorist suspects as they cross U.S. borders.

These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science — and if it’s not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously.

“It’s way too early to know which — if any — of these technologies is going to be practical,” said Jonathan Moreno, a Center for American Progress bioethicist and author of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. “But it’s important for us to get ahead of the curve. Soldiers are always on the cutting edge of new technologies.”

Moreno is part of a National Research Council committee convened by the Department of Defense to evaluate the military potential of brain science.

Tags: neuroscience, war

Potential Alzheimer's, Parkinson's Cure Found In Century-old Drug

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:19:16 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Also impressed is one of Dr. Atamna's co-authors, Bruce Ames, PhD, a senior scientist at Children's and world-renowned expert in nutrition and aging. "What we potentially have is a wonder drug." said Dr. Ames. "To find that such a common and inexpensive drug can be used to increase and prolong the quality of life by treating such serious diseases is truly exciting."

Dr. Atamna's research is the first to show that low concentrations of the drug have the ability to slow cellular aging in cultured cells in the laboratory and in live mice. He believes methylene blue has the potential to become another commonplace low-cost treatment like aspirin, prescribed as a blood thinner for people with heart disorders.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

A new study conducted by researchers at Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland shows that a century-old drug, methylene blue, may be able to slow or even cure Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Used at a very low concentration – about the equivalent of a few raindrops in four Olympic-sized swimming pools of water – the drug slows cellular aging and enhances mitochondrial function, potentially allowing those with the diseases to live longer, healthier lives.

Dr. Atamna's research found that methylene blue can prevent or slow the decline of mitochondrial function, specifically an important enzyme called complex IV. Because mitochondria are the principal suppliers of energy to all animal and human cells, their healthy function is critical.

"The results are very encouraging," said Dr. Atamna. "We'd eventually like to try to prevent the physical and cognitive decline associated with aging, with a focus on people with Alzheimer's disease.

Tags: medicine, aging, alzheimer

Minding Mistakes: How the Brain Monitors Errors and Learns from Goofs

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:03:20 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Where in the brain does the ERN originate? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, among other imaging methods, researchers have repeatedly found that error recognition takes place in the medial frontal cortex, a region on the surface of the brain in the middle of the frontal lobe, including the anterior cingulate. Such studies implicate this brain region as a monitor of negative feedback, action errors and decision uncertainty—and thus as an overall supervisor of human performance.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The brain contains neural machinery for recognizing errors, correcting them, and optimizing behavior.

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a major role in our ability to learn from our mistakes.

Genetic variants that affect dopamine signaling may partly explain differences between people in the extent to which they learn from errors or negative consequences.

Certain patterns of cerebral activity often foreshadow errors, opening up the possibility of preventing blunders with portable devices that can detect error-prone brain states.

Although people understandably would like to avoid serious errors, most goofs have a good side: they give the brain information about how to improve or fine-tune behavior. In fact, learning from mistakes is likely essential to the survival of our species.

Hints of the brain’s error-detection apparatus emerged serendipitously in the early 1990s.

error-related negativity, or ERN

ERN may appear after various types of errors, unfavorable outcomes or conflict situations

Tags: brain, neuroscience, behavior

A New State Of Mind

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:25:05 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: But that view of the neurotransmitter was vastly oversimplified. What wasn’t yet clear was that dopamine is also a profoundly important source of information. It doesn’t merely let us take pleasure in the world; it allows us to understand the world.

Clip Source: www.seedmagazine.com

Montague discovered the powers of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain. His research on the singular chemical has drawn tantalizing connections between the peculiar habits of our neurons and the peculiar habits of real people, so that the various levels of psychological description — the macro and the micro, the behavioral and the cellular — no longer seem so distinct.

What began as an investigation into a single neurotransmitter has morphed into an exploration of the social brain

“We are profoundly social animals,” he says. “You can’t really understand the brain until you understand how these social behaviors happen, or what happens when they go haywire.”

even as Montague attempts to answer these incredibly complex questions, his work remains rooted in the molecular details of dopamine.

The importance of dopamine was discovered by accident

Tags: neuroscience, dopamine, brain

Scientists Say We Can See Sound

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:08:33 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Recordings from 49 neurons responsible for the earliest stages of visual processing, researchers found activation that mirrored the behavior.

That is, when the sound was played, the neurons reacted as if there had been a stronger light, at a speed that can only be explained by a direct connection between the ear and eye brain regions, said researcher Ye Wang of the University of Texas in Houston.

The study presents the first evidence that a sensory cell can process an alternative sensation, said head researcher Pascal Barone of the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, who discovered a contender for the anatomical connection in 2002.

Clip Source: www.foxnews.com

Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see.

Here's the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet.

Instead, a "higher cognitive" producer, like the brain's superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences.

The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear.

Researchers trained monkeys to locate a light flashed on a screen. When the light was very bright, they easily found it; when it was dim, it took a long time.

But if a dim light made a brief sound, the monkeys found it in no time — too quickly, in fact, than can be explained by the old theories.

Tags: brain, neuroscience, cognition

Switching it up: How memory deals with a change in plans

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:12:13 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: The answer is "both," according to researchers at The Johns Hopkins University, who have learned that two different areas of the brain are responsible for the way human beings handle complex sets of "if-then" rules.

"This discovery may eventually lead to enhanced understanding of psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit disorder, all conditions in which a person's ability to remember and change such rules is impaired,"

"This indicates that different parts of our brains store different kinds of memories and information," Courtney said. That, she said, "provides clues about how the human brain accomplishes complex, goal-directed behaviors that require remembering and changing abstract rules, an ability that is disrupted in many mental illnesses."

Clip Source: dericbownds.net

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

You're about to leave work at the end of the day when your cell phone rings: it's your spouse, asking that you pick up a gallon of milk on the way home. Before you head out the door, though, your spouse calls again and asks you to stop by the hardware store too. Based on your knowledge of the area and rush-hour traffic, you decide to get the milk first and the toilet plunger second. But whoops! The phone rings again. This time, it's your boss, asking you to work late. That means another change of plans.

Adjusting our behavior to such changing circumstances enables us to achieve our goals.

But how, exactly, do our brains switch so elegantly and quickly from one well-entrenched plan to a newer one in reaction to a sudden change in circumstances?

do we simply remember a list of streets and turns, or do we remember a more abstract set of "rules" governing the web of relationships between the items

Tags: brain, complex behavior, decision making

Confidence game - The science of Trustworthiness

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:35:39 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.

Clip Source: www.boston.com

Lots of people trusted Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter. At least two women married him - though they each knew him by a different name.

A series of investment firms offered him jobs as a stockbroker and bond salesman, even a vice president, despite his lack of credentials, experience, and, as quickly became clear, his at best rudimentary knowledge of finance.

How could the people he befriended - and, in at least two cases, married - believe his fantastical stories?

The answer is that you probably would, too. Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others.

Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.

But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust.

Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape

our sense of someone's reliability.

Tags: behavior, social relations, trust

Researchers discover technology that silences genes

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:01:29 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: A safe and reliable gene silencing technology might be a component of a larger arsenal of gene therapies. It is a ground breaking research.

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Mount Sinai researchers have developed a new gene silencing technology that could be used to target genes that can lead to the development of certain diseases.

This technology could pave the way for preventing diseases where gene dysfunction plays a role.

By being able to silence certain genes, we may be able to suppress genes that can cause diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, inflammation and diseases of the central and peripheral nervous systems.

In the study

discovered that Paramecium bursaria chlorella virus uses a viral protein to modify host DNA packing chromatin and switch host transcription machinery for viral replication.

Based on this finding, researchers were able to develop a new gene targeting technology that effectively suppresses transcriptional expression of targeted genes in human cells, including genes that are linked to the onset of a number of diseases.

Tags: gnetics, medicine, molecular biology

Commanding Firefox makes complex tasks easier

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:52:52 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Sounds useful

Clip Source: www.technologyreview.com

The beauty of today's search engines is their simplicity. Type a few keywords into an empty box, and see the 10 most relevant results.

This week, Mozilla Labs expects to launch a similar interface for its Firefox Web browser. The new interface, called Ubiquity, lets users carry out all sorts of complex tasks simply by typing instructions, in the form of ordinary sentences, into a box in the browser.

For example, to e-mail a paragraph or picture from a Technology Review article to a friend using Ubiquity, simply select the text or image, press a keyboard shortcut to reveal an input box, and type "e-mail to Max."

The idea, says Beard, is to make it easier to find and share information on the Web while avoiding cumbersome copy-and-paste instructions.

Ubiquity aims to eliminate both tiresome mouse movements and the need for multiple browser plug-ins.

The project is being released in an early form--version 0.1--so it's not expected to work perfectly straightaway.

Tags: firefox, browser productivity

Physicists Seek Answers to Quantum Correlations

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:44:51 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: The physicists ruled out several possible classical explanations for the instantaneous communication. For one thing, they showed that the photons did not share information before leaving Geneva, and so they didn´t travel knowing about each other´s properties.

In another test, the scientists showed that no communication could have occurred through a different reference frame, as might happen because of the photons´ high speeds. According to Einstein´s theory of relativity, observers moving at high speeds can get different measurements of the same event because they have different reference frames. But, by performing tests over a complete rotation of the Earth, the researchers ruled out this possibility.

"We think space and time are important because that´s the kind of monkeys we are,"

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

After performing multiple tests on two entangled photons, physicists have yet again found that the photons seem to be communicating faster than the speed of light - at least 100,000 times faster.

The researchers hope that their results might encourage theorists to come up with new explanations for the strange quantum mechanical effect.

The physicists, led by Nicolas Gisin from the University of Geneva, arranged their experiment by sending two photons down fiber optic cables to detectors in two Swiss villages located 18 km apart. Both photons started in Geneva, with one heading toward Satigny and the other toward Jussy.

When the researchers measured several properties of each photon at its destination, they found that the particles could instantly sense the other´s behavior without any known communication.

Although this correlation obeys the laws of quantum mechanics, it seems to defy the nature of space and time, at least from humans´ everyday perspectives.

Tags: physics, quantum physics, entaglement

A Robot Controlled by Self Organizing Biological Neural Net

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:08:56 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: "Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity" similar to what happens in a normal rat -- or human -- brain, he added.

But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within a couple of months.

"Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways," explained Warwick.

To some extent, Gordon learns by itself. When it hits a wall, for example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot's sensors. As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit.

Clip Source: www.engadget.com

It looks like a group of researchers from the University of Reading are making a solid run at the title of mad scientists of the year (in the best sense, of course), with them now boasting that they've developed a robot that's controlled by a "biological brain."

That's not quite the sci-fi sight you may be imagining, however (though it's close), with it instead made up of some 300,000 neurons taken from the neural cortex of a rat fetus, which are contained in multi electrode array that packs 60 electrodes to pick up the signals generated by the cells and, in turn, control the robot.

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit -- it communicates with its "body" via a Bluetooth radio link.

The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.

From the very start, the neurons get busy. "Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections,"

Tags: robotics, neural inteface

Big-brained Animals Evolve Faster

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:35:22 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that animals with larger brains, relative to their body size, have more developed skills for changing their behavior through learning and innovation, facilitating the invasion of novel environments and the use of novel resources. Despite the progress, the role of the brain in the adaptive diversification of animals has remained controversial, mostly due to the difficulties to demonstrate that big-brained animals evolve faster.

Now, ecologist Daniel Sol of CREAF-Autonomous University of Barcelona and evolutionary biologist Trevor Price of the University of Chicago, provide evidence for such a role in birds in an article in The American Naturalist. Analyzing body size measures of 7,209 species (representing 75% of all avian species), they found that avian families that have experienced the greatest diversification in body size tend to be those with brains larger than expected for their body size.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have wondered why some lineages have diversified more than others.

A classical explanation is that a higher rate of diversification reflects increased ecological opportunities that led to a rapid adaptive radiation of a clade.

This and other examples have led some to think that the progenitors of the major evolutionary radiations are those that happened to be in the right place and at the right time to take advantage of ecological opportunities.

However, is it possible that biological diversification not only depends on the properties of the environment an ancestral species finds itself in, but also on the features of the species itself?

Now a study supports this possibility, suggesting that possessing a large brain might have facilitated the evolutionary diversification of some avian lineages.

Tags: animal life, evolution, diversity, brain

Scientists stop the ageing process

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 01:09:53 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Interesting results that may one day become the basis of 'age therapies'.

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Scientists have stopped the ageing process in an entire organ for the first time, a study released today says.

Published in today's online edition of Nature Medicine, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City also say the older organs function as well as they did when the host animal was younger.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the ageing process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful proteins inside the organ's cells.

The researchers say the findings suggest that therapies for boosting protein clearance might help stave off some of the declines in function that accompanies old age.

In experiments, livers in genetically modified mice 22 to 26 months old, the equivalent of octogenarians in human years, cleaned blood as efficiently as those in animals a quarter their age.

Our findings are particularly relevant for neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's," she says.

Tags: medicine, aging, molecular biology

27 Aquatic lifeforms you never caught while fishing

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:14:21 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Fascinating.

Clip Source: sasthamcotta.wordpress.com

Robot Fish

Deep-sea glass squid

Snaggletooth

Axolotl

Mudskipper

Slander Lanternfish

Deep-sea stargazer

Giant Hatchetfish

Dumbo Octopus

Eelpout

Black-lip Rattail

Humpback Anglerfish

Coelacanth

Northern Seahorse

Longhorn Cowfish

Leafy Sea Dragon

Lumpfish

Atlantic Wolffish

Lionfish

Deep-Sea Lizardfish

Fangtooth Fish

Black Chimaera

Clown Triggerfish

Longlure Frogfish

Prehistoric Frilled Shark

Black Swallowe

Mantis Shrimp

Tags: marine life