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Brain disease 'resistance gene' evolves in Papua New Guinea community; could offer insights into CJD

How to save time

Here’s a great tool: Sue Shellenbarger, over at the Wall Street Journal, has test drove three time management tools for us, so we don’t have to try them ourselves. Talk about time saving. The three tested methods are:

• Getting things done.

• The Pomodoro Technique.

• Franklin Convey’s Focus.

Read the article to see what she found. We’ve got lots more ways to get things done and hack your life, too.

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How to re-imagine the color of your room with no paint

Want to see what your room would look like with different paint? Check out colorjive.com, a really cool site that takes your pictures and changes the colors of the walls in just a few easy steps. It's fun! And it could save a lot of fails.

More cool design sites.

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Common mistakes in social media and other insights on impact

Over on SmartBlog, Mary Ellen Slayter interviews Olivier Blanchard (above), a seasoned brand strategist at BrandBuilder Marketing. Blanchard delves into his perspective on how businesses can maximize their return on social media. He shares, for instance, three common mistakes companies make when trying to measure the value of social media:

Focusing too much on digital measurement.

Not understanding the difference between nonfinancial impact and financial impact.

Not establishing clear goals and objectives when launching a social media program.

How can you avoid this fate, and what other wisdom can Blanchard share? Check out the SmartBlog piece.

More tips, tricks, and news in social media.

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A geography of BBQ

As a newcomer to DC, people keep telling me that my BBQ education is about to begin. Though complete strangers and close roommates have preached the glories of BBQ, this article is the clearest introduction to the sauce I’ve seen yet. Did you know there are at least four kinds of sauce?

Kansas City Style Sauce
Texas Style Sauce
North Carolina Style Sauce
South Carolina Style Sauce

Check out the article to see just how each of them differ.

Hungry for more? There’s much more about food and recipes.

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Eager students ready to learn

Local businesses are looking for more than a few good thinkers. On Friday, they got a glimpse of their upcoming workforce during the third annual Berkshire STEM Career Fair at Berkshire Community College.

Hey baby, what's your blood type? - Regina Leader-Post

Japan is a delightful country for bizarre medical crazes. First, they have a legally recognized disease called karoshi, the mainly male phenomenon of death from overwork. Then there's hikkikomori, in which young Japanese guys lock themselves behind ...

Memory Loss Screening Encouraged by Maker of Brain Nutrition ... - PR-USA.net

to find a memory screening location and take the free test,” says neuroscience researcher Mark Underwood, president of the Madison, Wisconsin-based biotech company, Quincy Bioscience, maker of Prevagen. “This is also a wonderful opportunity for ...

Success factory

Is Northern Virginia's Thomas Jefferson High, a science-and-tech magnet, too successful , asks The Washingtonian.

Scientists hail Hobbie-J as 'cleverest rat' - Daily Telegraph

The rat, when it was an embryo, was injected with genetic material to boost the NR2B gene which controls memory. Photo: GETTY Hobbie-J, named after a Chinese cartoon character, can remember objects for three times longer than other rats and is better ...

Child abuse marks genes, affects ability to cope: Study - StarPhoenix

Child abuse can indelibly mark and alter genes in its young victims leaving them less able to cope with stress later in life, according to new Canadian research. A Montreal team has discovered large numbers of "chemical marks," which inhibit a key ...

Rachael Ray promotes 400 Calorie per day diet- Does diet soda count? - Examiner

The above said, a more important piece of nutrition research is emerging regarding the consumption of diet sodas and how such consumption may actually cause you to gain weight. Folks following the 400 calorie diet may think drinking diet sodas won't ...

Sounds Can Penetrate Deep Sleep And Enhance Associated Memories Upon Waking

Main Category: Neurology / Neuroscience Also Included In: Sleep / Sleep Disorders / Insomnia Article Date: 21 Nov 2009 They were in a deep sleep, yet sounds, such as a teakettle whistle and a cat's meow, somehow penetrated their slumber.

Schizophrenia gene's role may be broader, more potent, than thought

Scientists studying nerve cells in fruit flies have uncovered a new function for a gene whose human equivalent may play a critical role in schizophrenia.

Prognostic significance of DAPK and RASSF1A promoter hypermethylation ...

Recent advances in EMCCD technology have solved the problem of non-standardized measurement units by using the photoelectron to standardize imaging experiments.

Schizophrenia Gene's Role May Be Broader, More Potent, Than Thought

UCSF scientists studying nerve cells in fruit flies have uncovered a new function for a gene whose human equivalent may play a critical role in schizophrenia. Scientists have known that the mutated form of the human gene - one of three consistently associated with schizophrenia - mildly disrupts the transmission of chemical signals between nerve cells in the brain.

Drug Studied As Possible Treatment For Spinal Injuries

Main Category: Neurology / Neuroscience Also Included In: Multiple Sclerosis Article Date: 21 Nov 2009 - 0:00 PST Researchers have shown how an experimental drug might restore the function of nerves damaged in spinal cord injuries by preventing short circuits caused when tiny "potassium channels" in the fibers are exposed.

Sounds Can Penetrate Deep Sleep And Enhance Associated Memories Upon Waking

They were in a deep sleep, yet sounds, such as a teakettle whistle and a cat's meow, somehow penetrated their slumber. The 25 sounds presented during the nap were reminders of earlier spatial learning, though the Northwestern University research participants were unaware of the sounds as they slept. Yet, upon waking, memory tests showed that spatial memories had changed.

France vs. Ireland controversial goal video

In case you haven’t seen the controversial goal in the France versus Ireland game, here you go.

Total coverage of soccer.

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On your last nerve: Researchers advance understanding of stem cells

Researchers have identified a gene that tells embryonic stem cells in the brain when to stop producing nerve cells called neurons. The research is a significant advance in understanding the development of the nervous system, which is essential to addressing conditions such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders.

Sounds can penetrate deep sleep and enhance associated memories upon waking

They were in a deep sleep, yet sounds, such as a teakettle whistle, somehow penetrated their slumber. The 25 sounds were reminders of earlier spatial learning, though the research participants were unaware of the sounds as they slept. Yet, upon waking, memory tests showed that spatial memories had changed. Deep sleep, then, is actually is a key time for memory processing, the study suggests.

Examining mathematical abilities in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

Children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) have a number of cognitive deficits. Mathematical ability seems particularly damaged in children with FASD. A new study supports the importance of the left parietal area for mathematical abilities in children with FASD.

Brain Disease "Resistance Gene" Could Offer Insights Into CJD

A community in Papua New Guinea that suffered a major epidemic of a CJD-like fatal brain disease called kuru has developed strong genetic resistance to the disease, according to new research by Medical Research Council (MRC) scientists. Kuru is a fatal prion disease, similar to CJD in humans and BSE in animals, and is geographically unique to an area in Papua New Guinea.

Economics, Neuroscience And Hormones Workshop

A workshop on "Neuroeconomics and Endocrinological Economics," being held Nov. 20 and 21 at UC Davis, will be the first to bring together experts in neuroscience, economics and hormone physiology in one event, according to organizers. Neuroeconomics has emerged as a new field in recent years, as both economists and neuroscientists have used brain scanning technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how people make decisions.

"The Power of Basic Science Applied to Medical Progress"

In this MIT School of Science Dean’s Colloquium, Ed Scolnick details research milestones from a remarkably varied career, revealing how scientific insight and collaborative effort translate into life-saving solutions for millions.

"I’ve always been excited by the inherent beauty of molecular and biochemical insights into how biology works. It’s even more motivating to see how such insights are translated into benefits for patients."
– Ed Scolnick

(From MIT World)

Back to (brain) basics

In his own words, MIT neuroscientist Mark Bear admits he did not “wake up one day and say ‘Hey, I’m going to cure autism.’” But, after decades of painstaking basic research on how the brain rewires itself in response to external cues, Bear has discovered a way to reverse the symptoms of Fragile X Syndrome, a disorder that can cause autism, mental retardation and epilepsy.

“It was a classic payoff of basic research,” says Bear, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience.

And Bear is not the only MIT neuroscientist discovering this payoff. Several basic research projects have recently yielded drugs now in clinical trials to treat a variety of brain disorders. Helped by advances in lab technology, neuroscientists have learned enough about how the brain works that they can start coming up with ways to treat problems that arise when something goes wrong, says Mriganka Sur, head of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

“A lot of basic science is abstract, and necessarily so, but I foresee that as neuroscientists, we can have as much impact on brain disorders as biologists have had on cancer,” says Sur, whose own research has led to potential treatments for Rett Syndrome, a specific type of autism.

Making connections

One of neuroscience’s major goals is unraveling the mechanisms of human learning and memory — a daunting task. One way that brain scientists narrow their approach is to target the connections between individual neurons, known as synapses.

At these synapses, neurotransmitters such as glutamate, dopamine or serotonin carry messages from one brain cell to another. Those chemicals set off a variety of responses in the receiving cell, such as electrical signals or producing another signaling molecule.

Sometimes the messages enact changes to the synapses themselves, usually a strengthening or weakening of the connection — a phenomenon known as synaptic plasticity. This plasticity forms the basis of learning and memory.

In the late 1980s, Bear’s research suggested that a cell receptor — called a metabotropic glutamate receptor — plays a critical role in synaptic plasticity. He was intrigued by its role in a phenomenon known as long-term depression, a suppression of synapses that helps shape brain connections during development. However, he had no inkling that it would lead him to a potential way to reverse autism symptoms.

“I had no idea what Fragile X was. None,” he says.

Many years later, after the Human Genome Project was completed, researchers linked Fragile X Syndrome to a gene that codes for a protein produced when synaptic metabotropic glutamate receptors are activated. After several years of experimentation, Bear realized that Fragile X protein actually inhibits the response to metabotropic glutamate receptors. When the fragile X protein is missing, overactivity of these glutamate receptors leads to excessive synaptic connectivity, protein synthesis, growth and excitability — all symptoms of Fragile X.

To prove his theory, Bear and his students crossed mice with Fragile X symptoms with mice that were genetically engineered to have fewer metabotropic glutamate receptors. The offspring were normal, showing that knocking out the glutamate receptor could reverse the symptoms of Fragile X.

“It was unbelievable,” Bear recalls. “It is absurd to think you could correct a disorder as varied as Fragile X by this one mechanism.”

This kind of result shows the value of the National Institute of Health’s approach to funding basic research, Bear says. In effect, the NIH is saying “keep working under the hood and I’m sure you’re going to find something important someday,” says Bear.

Four drug companies, including one co-founded by Bear, are now testing drugs that inhibit glutamate receptors in Fragile X patients.

Successes like these prove the value of basic research, says Constantine Stratakis, director of scientific programs for the NIH’s National Institute of Childhood Health and Human Development. In fact, the lines between basic and clinical research are becoming increasingly blurred, he says. “There is no question that everything we do in clinical science is based on basic science,” says Stratakis.

‘Holy Grail’

Research in Sur’s lab has followed a similar arc. Clinical trials will start later this year for drugs based on Sur’s research on Rett Syndrome, which began as an effort to understand plasticity in neurons that process vision.

That work led naturally to studying brain disorders such as autism, because “disorders of development are disorders of how the brain is wired,” says Sur. “That’s why autism is so fascinating to me, because it maps so directly onto plasticity.”

So far, this approach of linking specific molecules to disease treatment has been most successful for specific types of autism caused by mutation of a single gene, such as Rett Syndrome and Fragile X Syndrome. However, Sur and Bear hope their work could also extend to other forms of autism someday.

“You need the basic science background to pursue treatments for these disorders, which has always been the Holy Grail for most if not all health sciences research,” says Sur.

In the laboratory of Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, recent advances have led to promising potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Using a unique mouse model developed in her lab, she has shown that inhibiting a specific enzyme involved in brain plasticity can dramatically improve cognitive performance. A company called In Vivo, in Waltham, Mass., is now conducting phase I clinical trials of one such inhibitor.

Tsai is optimistic about those trials, and also believes there are many other brain disorders — such as post traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder — that could be treated with similar drugs. “Nothing can be more rewarding than knowing that what you do may one day benefit people who suffer from these devastating diseases,” she says.

A head of time

Keeping track of time is one of the brain's most important tasks. As the brain processes the flood of sights and sounds it encounters, it must also remember when each event occurred. But how does that happen? How does your brain recall that you brushed your teeth before you took a shower, and not the other way around?

For decades, neuroscientists have theorized that the brain "time stamps" events as they happen, allowing us to keep track of where we are in time and when past events occurred. However, they couldn't find any evidence that such time stamps really existed — until now.

An MIT team led by Institute Professor Ann Graybiel has found groups of neurons in the primate brain that code time with extreme precision. "All you do is time stamp everything, and then recalling events is easy: you go back and look through your time stamps until you see which ones are correlated with the event," she says.

That kind of precise timing control is critical for everyday tasks such as driving a car or playing the piano, as well as keeping track of past events. The discovery, reported in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's disease, where the ability to control the timing of movements is impaired.

Construction of time

The research team trained two macaque monkeys to perform a simple eye-movement task. After receiving the "go" signal, the monkeys were free to perform the task at their own speed. The researchers found neurons that consistently fired at specific times — 100 milliseconds, 110 milliseconds, 150 milliseconds and so on — after the "go" signal.

"Soon enough we realized we had cells keeping time, which everyone has wanted to find, but nobody has found them before," says Graybiel, who is also an investigator in MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The neurons are located in the prefrontal cortex and the striatum, both of which play important roles in learning, movement and thought control.

The new work is an elegant demonstration of how the brain represents time, says Peter Strick, professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. "We have sensory receptors for light, sound, touch, hot and cold, and smell, but we don't have sensory receptors for time. This is a sense constructed by the brain," he says.

Key to the team's success was a new technique that allows researchers to record electrical signals from hundreds of neurons in the brain simultaneously, and a mathematical way to analyze the brain signals, spearheaded by team members Naotaka Fujii of the RIKEN Brain Institute in Japan and Dezhe Jin of Penn State. Though this study focused on the prefrontal cortex and striatum, Graybiel says she expects other regions of the brain may also have neurons that keep time.

Graybiel suggests that the new research could help patients with Parkinson's disease, who often behave as if their brains' timekeeping functions are impaired: they have trouble performing tasks that require accurate rhythm, such as dancing, and time appears to pass more slowly for them. Rhythmic stimuli such as tapping can help them to speak more clearly.

Targeting the timekeeping neurons with neural prosthetic devices or drugs — possibly including the natural brain chemicals dopamine and serotonin — may help treat those Parkinson's symptoms, she says.

Future studies in this area could shed light on how the brain produces these time stamps and how this function can control behavior and learning. The work also raises questions regarding how the brain interprets the passage of time differently under different circumstances.

"Sometimes time moves quickly, and in some situations time seems to slow down. All of this ultimately has a neural representation," says Strick.

In Profile: Matt Wilson

It was just another day in the lab in 1991 when Matt Wilson first heard something that no one had ever heard before: brain waves from a dreaming rat.

Wilson, now a professor at MIT and a researcher at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, had set up an experiment where he recorded neural signals from rats' brains as they ran a maze in the lab. One day, he left the rats hooked up to the recording equipment after they finished running the maze, while he sat at his bench working on some data analysis.

Soon enough, he started to recognize some of the patterns he was hearing from the resting rats' brains. "Suddenly I realized I could hear brain activity that sounded like the animal was running through the maze, but the animal was asleep," he recalls.

Wilson's groundbreaking discovery that the sleeping rat brain replays the rat's recent activities has added to a growing body of evidence that during sleep, the brain reinforces skills learned during the day by repeating and consolidating memories. While that theory is now generally accepted, it has taken several decades for scientists to start figuring out exactly what's happening in the mysterious sleeping brain.

'Initial excitement'

Scientists have been poking around the sleeping brain since the 1950s, when Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered REM sleep by observing the eyelids of sleeping children. Soon thereafter, researchers identified other stages of sleep, ranging from the light sleep of Stage 1 to the deep slumber of Stage 4. Most dreaming takes place during REM sleep, which occurs in short bursts throughout the night, alternating with the dreamless sleep of stages 1 through 4.

After those initial findings, sleep research produced few significant results as researchers struggled to make sense of the vivid, nonsensical sequences most dreams consist of. "In the 1960s, there was a lot of initial excitement about the possibilities, but it burnt out. Everyone wandered away from it," says Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

The tide turned in the 1990s, when sleep researchers including Stickgold made a flurry of discoveries showing that the sleeping brain appears to sift through information absorbed during waking hours, keeping the most important things and casting aside the irrelevant.

Furthermore, different types of sleep appear to be specialized for specific tasks. For example, useless memories, up to 95 percent of the day's experiences, are thrown out during the slow wave sleep of stages 1 and 2. During REM sleep, the important memories are transferred to long-term memory. That's also when most dreaming occurs, as the brain sorts through new information and connects it to older scraps of memory.

"The brain is trying to make sense of all this nonsense. It pulls information together and makes a story of it," says Subimal Datta, a sleep researcher and professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School.

Wilson's work in rats has been critical to these discoveries on the role of sleep in learning and memory, according to sleep researchers. "He provided the physiological evidence that neural reactivation is occurring during slow wave sleep and REM sleep," says Datta.

That reactivation occurs primarily in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in converting short-term memories to long-term storage. Wilson's early rat studies showed that the firing patterns seen in the sleeping and awake rats overlapped so closely that the research team could identify the sleeping rat's location in the maze.

While those maze-running dreams involve simple replay of daily events, Wilson now hopes to provoke more complicated dreams in rats to reveal how those dreams impact learning. To that end, he is now running new experiments in which rats are given richer experiences to draw from in their dreams: Instead of running one maze over and over, they run multiple mazes and perform other complex tasks.

Wilson is also collaborating with MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, also a member of the Picower Institute, in genetic studies to look for the molecular basis of memory formation during sleep.

'Many neurons at a time'

Key to Wilson's research is a recording device that can monitor brain activity in large collections of neurons. Wilson, who started his graduate studies as an electrical engineer, built the device along with fellow Caltech graduate student Upinder Bhalla in the late 1980s.

Electrodes that can record from individual neurons must be thinner than a human hair, which makes them difficult to maneuver inside a rat's skull. In Wilson and Bhalla's device, the electrodes are wrapped around each other to add strength, a structure inspired by the design of a multi-pipe oil-drilling rig that Wilson read about in graduate school.

Without that device, large-scale study of rat brain activity would not be possible, says James Bower, Wilson's PhD advisor at Caltech, now professor of neurocomputation at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"The nervous system does not work one neuron at a time, it works many neurons at a time," says Bower. "If you try to understand a TV show by looking at a single pixel, you'll never understand anything, and that's almost certainly true for the nervous system as well."

Bower and Wilson first met at the University of Wisconsin, where Wilson earned his master's degree. Bower hired Wilson to write software to help model the olfactory system, and was impressed enough that when Bower took an appointment at Caltech, he encouraged Wilson to apply to a first-of-its-kind program there in computational neuroscience, which involves modeling the brain's processing functions.

After finishing his PhD at Caltech and postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Arizona, where he first heard the brainwaves of sleeping rats, Wilson came to MIT in 1994 as the first member of what was then called the Center for Learning and Memory.

Like most of his neuroscientist colleagues, Wilson wants to figure out how the brain does what it does. But true to his roots as an electrical engineer, he also wants to use his scientific discoveries to build artificial intelligence systems that learn the same way animals do.

"As engineers, we take principles and build things," he says. "The things we're doing are not just an effort to understand how the biology works. We also want to use our understanding of biological processes to develop devices capable of intelligent behavior."

Rats' mental 'instant replay' drives next moves

Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have found that rats use a mental instant replay of their actions to help them decide what to do next, shedding new light on how animals and humans learn and remember.

The work will appear in the Aug. 27 issue of the journal Neuron.

"By understanding how thoughts and memories are structured, we can gain insight into how they might be disrupted in diseases and disorders of memory and thought such as Alzheimer's and schizophrenia," said study author Matthew A. Wilson, the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute. "This understanding may lead to new methods of diagnosis and treatment."

Wilson's laboratory explores how rats form and recall memories by recording - with an unprecedented level of accuracy - the activity of single neurons in the hippocampus while the animal is performing tasks, pausing between actions and sleeping. The hippocampus is the seahorse-shaped brain region researchers believe to be critical for learning and memory.

Wilson's previous work has shown that after the animals run a maze, their brains "replay" during sleep the sequence of events they experienced while awake. Researchers believe this process is key to sleep-reinforced memory consolidation in both animals and humans.

The latest study shows that these sequences also occur when the animals are awake and may help them decide what to do next.

Not-so-instant replay

When a rat moves through a maze, certain neurons called "place cells," which respond to the animal's physical environment, fire in patterns and sequences unique to different locations. By looking at the patterns of firing cells, researchers can tell which part of the maze the animal is running.

While the rat is awake but standing still in the maze, its neurons fire in the same pattern of activity that occurred while it was running. The mental replay of sequences of the animals' experience occurs in both forward and reverse time order.

"This may be the rat equivalent of 'thinking,'" Wilson said. "This thinking process looks very much like the reactivation of memory that we see during non-REM dream states, consisting of bursts of time-compressed memory sequences lasting a fraction of a second.

"So, thinking and dreaming may share the same memory reactivation mechanisms," he said.

Memory's building blocks

"This study brings together concepts related to thought, memory and dreams that all potentially arise from a unified mechanism rooted in the hippocampus," said co-author Fabian Kloosterman, senior postdoctoral associate.

The team's results show that long experiences, which in reality could have taken tens of seconds or minutes, are replayed in only a fraction of a second. To do this, the brain links together smaller pieces to construct the memory of the long experience.

The researchers speculated that this strategy could help different areas of the brain share information - and deal with multiple memories that may share content - in a flexible and efficient way. "These results suggest that extended replay is composed of chains of shorter subsequences, which may reflect a strategy for the storage and flexible expression of memories of prolonged experience," Wilson said.

Moreover, by comparing the content of the replay with the rat's physical location on the track and his actual behavior immediately before and after the replay event the researchers could tell the rat was not just thinking about his most recent experience but also about other options, such as: "What if I turned around and went back the way I came?" or "How would I get here if my starting point is at a distant location?"

This suggests that the same brain mechanisms come into play to remember the past and consider future actions, reinforcing recent work by neuroscientists outside of MIT who determined that in humans, cognitive processes related to episodic recall and evaluation of future events overlap to a high degree.

Memory formation and future planning are among the cognitive functions ravaged by diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and psychosis.

"A better understanding of how we use memories, not only to learn from past experiences but also to explore our future options, can give us insights into how the system fails under these disease conditions," Kloosterman said.

The MIT researchers plan to further explore the link between awake replay and cognition in animals engaged in more cognitively demanding tasks such as those involving multiple choices, where the rat has to make a decision ("do I go left or right?") based on a prior learned rule.

In addition to Wilson, the study was led jointly by Kloosterman and MIT brain and cognitive sciences graduate student Thomas J. Davidson.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Animal model in schizophrenia research identifies a novel approach for treating cognitive impairments

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Memory deficient mouse created by eliminating kinase activity of CaMKIIalpha

Knock-in mouse created that shows memory deficits by eliminating kinase activity of CaMKIIalpha. Brain and memory research shows the memory deficient mouse exhibited impaired tetanus-induced long term potentiation (LTP) and sustained postsynaptic spine enlargement. These impairments are believed to be related to the mutant mouse deficit in inhibitory avoidance learning.

Neural stem cells may give rise to most common type of brain cancer

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Coffee an Nighttime Jobs Don't Mix Study Finds

A new study has found the main byproduct of coffee, caffeine, interferes with sleep and this side-effect worsens as people age.