Bluetooth biofeedback sensor game system for stress reduction

The device is called a PIP, or personal input pod. You hold it in your fingers (see picture), and it measures galvanic skin response (electrical resistance of the skin, an indication of stress levels).

Since this is a bluetooth enabled biofeedback device, it is compatible with any platform that supports bluetooth, though their initial offering of 3 games is only for cell phones and PDAs.

I'm definitely looking forward to this becoming available. If it's effective, it could open up the door to the masses learning to self soothe and calm in many more activities of life.

Controlling brain messengers to someday rewire the brain?

From physorg:

Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have found that tiny, spontaneous releases of the brain's primary chemical messengers can be regulated, potentially giving scientists unprecedented control over how the brain is wired...
J. Troy Littleton, Fred and Carole Middleton Associate Professor of Biology at MIT, and colleagues found that the miniscule events that follow a burst of electrical and chemical activity among neurons are far more important that previously thought. A breakdown in this molecular mechanism could be the culprit in schizophrenia and other neurological diseases, the authors reported.

Apparently, complexins play a key part in controlling the release of the brain's chemical messengers. To study this, the team genetically modified fruit flies who make no complexins whatsoever. They determined that complexins are the gatekeepers that prevent the neurotransmitters from releasing prematurely. Complexins prevent unchecked cell growth.

This spontaneous release in the brain is not only important for signaling, it can trigger synaptic growth," Littleton said. "What's really exciting is that complexin's activity may be regulated. If we can regulate this machinery, we may be able to promote synaptic growth and potentially allow targeted rewiring in areas of the brain affected in various neurological diseases."

Balance enhancing ear implant

Pic: Della Santina holding multichannel vestibular prosthesis.

Scientists at the Vestibular Neuroengineering Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University are developing a vestibular prosthesis.

They have tested the concept on chincillas with some success. Usable human versions may still be years away, but the proof of concept is promising.

More from the John Hopkins University Gazette:

In its report in the June edition of the journal I.E.E.E. Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, the Johns Hopkins team showed that a matchbox-size prototype device, weighing less than three ounces, effectively mimics the workings of the inner ear's three semicircular canals by sensing head rotation and transmitting that information to the brain.
Adapting the design of cochlear implants...researchers constructed a circuit that could measure and transmit 3-D balance information to the brain through multiple electrodes connected to the vestibular nerve.
The device...consists of a head- mounted battery-operated box containing the sensors, which are positioned outside the head so that the sensors are parallel to the animal's actual semicircular canals, where head rotation is normally sensed. The sensors are connected to a microprocessor and up to eight electrodes surgically implanted in the inner ear and separately connected to nerve endings. Each electrode can act as one information channel.
Della Santina says that people disabled by loss of vestibular sensation often feel chronically off balance and lose the ability to keep the eyes steadily pointed at an object when they move their head, "seeing the world like the wobbly image on a shaky handheld video camera."
... this is the first implantable device made with multiple sensors and channels of processing that can measure and encode head rotation in all directions.
Each of the three sensors... can measure the speed of head rotation about one of three axes, or directional planes.

Drug testing whole cities from a teaspoon of sewage waste water

From the AP, via physorg:

The test wouldn't be used to finger any single person as a drug user. But it would help federal law enforcement and other agencies track the spread of dangerous drugs, like methamphetamines, across the country...In the study presented Tuesday, one teaspoon of untreated sewage water from each of the cities was tested for 15 different drugs. Field said researchers can't calculate how many people in a town are using drugs...
Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are taking...

Some other entertaining tidbits:

One urban area with a gambling industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities. Yet methamphetamine levels were virtually nonexistent in some smaller Midwestern locales, said Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental toxicology at Oregon State...
She said that one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week.

And the winner is?

The ingredient Americans consume and excrete the most was caffeine, Field said.

Fascinating to have such sensitive data while an individual's anonymity is protected. As long as they don't start collecting this information from people's toilets, homes, or workplaces, this could be a very useful public health tool. Makes me wonder what other information they can track from our waste water, and how all these chemicals are impacting our rivers, streams, and even oceans?

Brain anatomy correlated to ease of learning a second language

In particular, the size of the left Heschl's Gyrus (HG), a finger-shaped structure in both the right and left side of the brain which contains the auditory cortex, was highly accurate in predicting ease of second language learning.

More details of the studies as explained from Science Daily:

The three studies have identified behavioral, neurophysiologic and, with the current study, neuroanatomic factors which, when combined, can better predict second language learning success than can each single factor alone.
In a behavioral study, Wong's group found that musical training started at an early age contributed to more successful spoken foreign language learning. The study participants with musical experience also were found to be better at identifying
pitch patterns before training.
In a neurophysiologic study -- again with the same participants -- Wong's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe what parts of brain were activated when participants listened to different pitch tones. They found that the more successful second language learners were those who showed activation in the auditory cortex (where HG resides).
The participants all were native American English speakers with no knowledge of tone languages. In tone languages (spoken by half the world's population), the meaning of a word can change when delivered in a different pitch tone. In Mandarin, for example, the word "mi" in a level tone means "to squint," in a rising tone means "to bewilder" and in a falling and then rising tone means "rice."

Results:

As a group - and sometimes in fewer than two or three sessions -- the nine participants predicted on the basis of left HG size to be "more successful learners" achieved an average of 97 percent accuracy in identifying the pseudo words. The "less successful" participants averaged 63 percent accuracy and sometimes required as many as 18 training sessions to correctly identify the words.

I wonder when the HG stops growing, and/or how predictive this is in children or infants?

Artificial 'skin' that heals itself

Science Daily — The next generation of self-healing materials, invented by researchers at the University of Illinois, mimics human skin by healing itself time after time. The new materials rely upon embedded, three-dimensional microvascular networks that emulate biological circulatory systems

Their model is the circulatory and vascular system found in nature.
From that, they developed the following:

"To create their self-healing materials, the researchers begin by building a scaffold using a robotic deposition process called direct-write assembly. The process employs a concentrated polymeric ink, dispensed as a continuous filament, to fabricate a three-dimensional structure, layer by layer.
Once the scaffold has been produced, it is surrounded with an epoxy resin. After curing, the resin is heated and the ink -- which liquefies -- is extracted, leaving behind a substrate with a network of interlocking microchannels. In the final steps, the researchers deposit a brittle epoxy coating on top of the substrate, and fill the network with a liquid healing agent."

Brings us one step closer to self sustained robots.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070611125842.htm

First patent on man made life form, and it's already being challenged

From world-science.net:

The ar­ti­fi­cial or­gan­ism, a mere mi­crobe, is the brain­child of re­search­ers at the Rock­ville, Md.-based J. Craig Ven­ter In­sti­tute. The or­gan­iz­a­tion is named for its found­er and CEO, the ge­net­icist who led the pri­vate sec­tor race to map the hu­man ge­nome in the late 1990s. The re­search­ers filed their pat­ent claim on the ar­ti­fi­cial or­gan­ism and on its ge­nome.
Ge­net­i­cally mo­di­fied life forms have been pa­tented be­fore; but this is the first pa­tent claim for a crea­ture whose genome might be created chem­i­cally from scratch, Mooney said.

Sounds reasonable so far. Their goal was to design a bare bones organism, a "bac­te­ri­um to have a “min­i­mal ge­nome”—the small­est set of genes any or­gan­ism can live on. ".

Unfortunately, the group that is challenging the patent has this to say about it:

The idea of own­ing a spe­cies breaches “a so­ci­e­tal bound­ary,” said Pat Mooney of the Ot­ta­wa, Canada-based ETC Group, which is asking the pat­ent ap­pli­cants to drop their claim. Creat­ing and own­ing an or­gan­ism, he added, means that “for the first time, God has com­pe­ti­tion.”

That's just creepy.
However, here are some better reasons for challenging this:

By cre­at­ing a man-made or­gan­ism as a plat­form for oth­er genes to be added at will, like soft­ware on a com­put­er, “Ven­ter’s en­ter­prises are po­si­tion­ing them­selves to be the Mi­crosoft of syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy,” ETC said in a state­ment.The or­gan­iz­a­tion claimed there could be draw­backs to al­low­ing one company to mo­nop­o­lize this in­forma­t­ion. For in­stance, the mi­crobe could be har­nessed to build a vir­u­lent path­o­gen, Thom­as
said. It could be a b­low for “o­pen source” bi­ol­o­gy – the idea that re­search­ers should have free ac­cess to the fun­da­men­tal tools and com­po­nents of syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy, the new and grow­ing sci­ence of re-de­signing and re-building nat­u­ral bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems from the ground up for var­i­ous pur­poses.

All quotes taken from here.

Hopefully (I know, this is totally unrealistic, but....) this will force us to redefine how patents are used in society. If Venter can successfully exclude competitors from using this technique for 20 years (standard patent law), it could significantly slow down advances in research, or at least limit it to only those who can pay for the right. Unfortunately, the priorities will most likely be set by whoever has the most money.

Nanowires connecting cells to machines

Closer to the borg every day...

"Science Daily — Scientists in California are reporting an advance toward one of the futuristic goals nanobiology and nanomedicine -- developing technology for "wiring" together individual cells and connecting cells via nanowires to external sensors and other devices."

Apparently, the cells grow in culture around the silicon nanowires, which then can be connected up to any inorganic devices on the other end.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070605055716.htm

Electronically 'sniff' out asthma, or even explosives

The electronic nose is being developed for a number of uses, from food and perfumes, to toxic chemicals and explosives, and now possibly even for detecting asthma.

"The device contains chemical vapor sensors that react to the presence of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, in a person's exhaled breath. "A person's breath contains a mixture of thousands of VOCs that may be used as markers of lung disease," says researcher Silvano Dragonieri, M.D., of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. "

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070521171646.htm

Listening to protein sequences

Proteins are created by sequences of amino acids. Molecular biologists at UCLA have assigned each of the 20 amino acids a different musical chord.

"We assigned a chord to each amino acid," said Rie Takahashi, a UCLA research assistant and an award-winning, classically trained piano player. "We want to see if we can hear patterns within the music, as opposed to looking at the letters of an amino acid or protein sequence. We can listen to a protein, as opposed to just looking at it."

http://www.physorg.com/news98538520.html

Check out the researchers' website to listen to sequences, or even submit your own to be converted into a musical format.

http://www.mimg.ucla.edu/faculty/miller_jh/gene2music/examples.html

Scientists Have Created Sperm Cells From Human Bone Marrow

Pic: How Prof Nayernia and his team cultured from human bone marrow. (Credit: Newcastle University, England)

"Science Daily — Human bone marrow has been used to create early-stage sperm cells for the first time, a scientific step forward that will help researchers understand more about how sperm cells are created. "

Wow! Just think of the possibilities. Male infertility could potentially be circumvented, if they ever navigate the morass of ethical and moral issues involved.

This team has already created sperm cells from mouse embryonic stem cells that were used to fertilizie mice eggs, with seven live births in July of 2006.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070412211409.htm

Coffee and Cigarettes associated with lower incidence of Parkinson's Disease

It was bound to happen eventually. Someone has finally found neuroprotective effects of two of the most common vices. They don't know why this is the case yet though.

"Science Daily — In families affected by Parkinson's disease, the people who smoked cigarettes and drank a lot of coffee were less likely to develop the disease, say researchers at Duke University Medical Center. "

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070409164849.htm

The Sniff Magnitude Test, and what it might detect for you!

Pic: Psychology major Skyler Shollenbarger demonstrates the Sniff Magnitude Test. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Cincinnati)

"Science Daily — A new medical device in development by University of Cincinnati researchers may sniff out olfactory disorders that could be an early warning of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other problems outside the typical sensory loss associated with aging."

"In humans, Frank says the sense of smell is one of our less robust senses. He says it’s more susceptible to harm because there is less neurological machinery in the brain devoted to processing the sense of smell. “So, that’s the reason it might be acting a little bit like the canary in the mineshaft. Because it’s more fragile, when you have insult to the brain, it may be sensitive to loss earlier in the disease process.”

This actually sounds pretty well thought out. It's a matter of detecting the smells, not necessarily recognizing or naming it. For the young, it's a method of detecting olfactory disorders or deficiencies. For the old, the hope is that it will also detect brain damage earlier. To determine whether you have really smelled the odor, it measures the size of your 'sniff'.

“For someone with normal sense of smell, the size of the sniff when detecting an odor is cut in half. For someone who cannot detect odor, the size of the sniff for just air and the size of the sniff for an odor are the same.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070402153233.htm

Calorie restriction, longevity, and other benefits

"Science Daily — Much research has shown that reduced calorie intake can increase health and longevity. Professor Stephen Spindler (University of California) and his collaborators have discovered that reducing calorie intake later in life can still induce many of the health and longevity benefits of life-long calorie reduction. Importantly, this also includes anti-cancer effects. "

They note with decreased caloric intake, the body does a better job of destroying cancerous and damaged cells, which keeps one healthier longer. They hypothesize that the body is using the damaged cells for energy, then replacing the cell once food is consumed.

"Previous research has show that mice can live up to 40% longer if they simply consume fewer calories, but a highly nutritious diet."

The hope is to figure out how this works, and someday create a pill to do this.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070402102012.htm

Even more reasons to get a good night's sleep

2 articles from WebMD that cite additional disadvantages of insufficient sleep.

Less sleep may mean less testosterone.
The study looked at older men, ages 64 to 74. Too bad they had such a small sample size (n=12), but they did manage to get published in the journal Sleep. The less they slept, the lower the concentration of testosterone in their systems.

Sleep disturbances heighten pain.
This study, also published in the journal Sleep, studied sleep patterns of 32 healthy women. Their findings:

"Our research shows that disrupted sleep, marked by multiple prolonged awakenings, impairs natural pain control mechanisms that are thought to play a key role in the development, maintenance, and exacerbation of chronic pain," says Smith."

In particular, new parents, shift workers, and especially insomniacs are at risk for lower pain thresholds, chronic pain, and less pain inhibition.
Makes me wonder if there are many studies on the relationship between pain and fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome.

Anti-inflammatory effects of carbon monoxide

Makes me awfully nervous, since we know that carbon monoxide is a toxic poison.

"Specifically, mitochondria react to low levels of carbon monoxide by releasing chemical signals that reduce or shut down the body's inflammatory response, raising the possibility for the development of new anti-inflammatory therapies, one of which may be low levels of inhaled carbon monoxide."

Researchers seem to be having a good response, though.

"...inhaled medical grade carbon monoxide has been shown to be useful in animal models for organ transplantation, vascular injury, inflammatory bowel disease, organ injury resulting from severe blood loss, as well as experimental hepatitis and experimental pulmonary hypertension."

As long as they can find an effective antidote for overdose, this could be really useful in the future.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070330092813.htm

Body clock disruption associated with bipolar mania

Mice were mutated to have a flawed 'Clock' gene, "which helps control the body's circadian rhythms: waking, sleeping and eating times as well as the maintenance of proper body temperature, heart and blood functions, and hormone levels."

This created manic mice:
"...the flawed Clock gene induced a manic state in mice that had a profile similar to that of humans suffering from bipolar disorder or manic depression, a condition during which a person cycles from deep depression to manic behavior.
The mutant mice showed increased response to reward stimuli in several hedonic scenarios. When trained that depressing a pedal would trigger an enjoyable electrical stimulation to the forebrain, the mice pressed it more frequently than their wild (unaltered) counterparts. They acted the same way when the reward was a sugar solution. In the presence of cocaine the mutant mice needed smaller doses than the normal mice to activate their reward circuits, indicating that they were hyperactive. McClung notes that manic people, who are prone to drug abuse, shopping sprees, compulsive gambling and other high-impulse behaviors, "tend to find rewarding things more rewarding" than others do. "

To prove it, they gave the mice lithium, which is still our gold standard for treating mania. After 10 days on lithium, the mice were already starting to revert to more normal behavior.

The hope is that someday we will be able to actually 'cure' bipolar disorder by fixing the flawed brain regions.

Here's how it worked for the mice: "...the scientists used a targeted virus to return a proper copy of Clock to cells in the ventral tegmental area, a midbrain region critical in the reward pathway involved in production of the pleasure system neurotransmitter dopamine. After the virus was introduced, the mutant mice began to act more like the control animals but were still a bit more hyper, McClung notes. "

How cool would that be? My job would be SO much easier.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=708AAAE6-E7F2-99DF-35D643E46E5A831D&ref=rss

Growing irises from stem cell transplants

Apparently they've been using this technique to regrow irises in patients with chemical accidents since 2000, but the new twist is that they are now using it for aniridia.

"Aniridia results in near blindness since the limbal cells that keep the surface of the cornea clear and healthy are missing or few in number. Mr Daya takes a donor's limbal cells then grows them on in a laboratory. A sheet of the cells is placed over the patient's cornea, held by an amniotic membrane from donated placentas. After two or three weeks, the membrane dissolves but the stem cells remain and restore the epithelium, or top layer of the cornea. The donor stem cells themselves disappear over a few months, so immuno-suppressant drugs can be stopped."

Makes me think of the eyeball scene in Blade Runner.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2035069,00.html

Eye candy: The Inner Life of a Cell

Beautifully created by XVIVO, originally designed for biology students.