Artificial Cornea Offers Long-Term Vision - Technology Review

Artificial Cornea Offers Long-Term Vision

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Penn researchers create a universal map of vision in the human brain

New technology confirms 'timeless' diagram drafted by WW1 neurologist

Senior author Geoffrey Aguirre, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Neurology said:

By measuring brain anatomy and applying an algorithm, we can now accurately predict how the visual world for an individual should be arranged on the surface of the brain. We are already using this advance to study how vision loss changes the organization of the brain.

The modern map of the representation of vision in the brain is compared to the 1918 original. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine)

The researchers combined traditional fMRI measures of brain activity from 25 people with normal vision. They then identified a precise statistical relationship between the structure of the folds of the brain and the representation of the visual world.

Chewing ability linked to reduced dementia risk

Chewing ability linked to reduced dementia risk

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The Smell of Mom: Scientists Find Elusive Trigger of First Suckling in Mice

A team led by biologists at The Scripps Research Institute has solved the long-standing scientific mystery of how mice first know to nurse or suckle.
This basic mammalian instinct, which could be a key to understanding instinctive behavior more generally, was thought to be triggered by a specific odor (pheromone) that all mouse mothers emit. But, as described online ahead of print by the journal Current Biology on October 4, 2012, the trigger in mice turns out to be a more complicated blend of nature and nurture: a signature mix of odors, unique for each mother, which her offspring learn.

“We set out to find a pheromone trigger, but were excited to find this alternative mechanism,” said team leader Lisa Stowers, an associate professor at Scripps Research “Compared to a pheromonal system, this mechanism would have been easier for animals to evolve.”

Looking for the ‘On Switch’

Suckling is the defining behavior in mammals, whose very name refers to the milk-making mammary glands of the breast. Most mammals are born knowing how to find their mother’s nipples and drink, and would quickly perish if they didn’t—making suckling an example of an instinctive or “innate” behavior hard-wired into the brain. “So far, little is known about how innate behaviors are coded in the brain, what triggers them and what represses them,” said Stowers.
A first step in studying an innate behavior is to look for its initial trigger or “on switch,” yet that can be like searching for a proverbial needle in a haystack. Even a very young animal is exposed to a vast complexity of sights, sounds, smells and other factors. Many of these may seem to be triggers for an innate behavior, but that may be only because the animal has learned to associate them with the behavior. Finding the essential trigger for the very first instance of an innate behavior—before it has ever been experienced or taught—is a painstaking process of elimination requiring an array of sophisticated laboratory methods.

Scientists had found evidence that the trigger for initial suckling in mice is mediated by the main olfactory epithelium (MOE)—the principal smell organ, located within the nasal passages. Without the MOE, newborn mice fail to suckle and die of dehydration. In the new study, Stowers and her colleagues, including postdoctoral researcher Darren W. Logan, who performed most of the experiments, set out to find the special MOE-sensed odor that triggers initial suckling.

Process of Elimination

Stowers’s initial hypothesis was that the trigger was a pheromone, a chemical that is emitted by one animal and straightforwardly triggers a behavior or other response in another. In separate research, her laboratory had found several pheromones that activate other innate behaviors in mice. Moreover, an independent group of scientists had found that a specific, MOE-sensed pheromone in mother’s milk serves as the trigger for initial suckling in the European Rabbit. Stowers and her colleagues expected to confirm that a similar chemical does the trick in mice.

The researchers began by subtracting certain maternal fluids from the environment of newborn mice, hoping thereby to see a delay or elimination of their first suckling, which would indicate that the subtracted fluid had contained the pheromonal trigger. The scientists eliminated maternal milk and saliva from the newborns’ environment and still observed suckling behavior. That left the amniotic fluid of the womb as the source of the suckling trigger. Next the scientists fractionated the amniotic fluid, separating its chemicals into different molecular weight ranges, with the expectation that they would find the trigger in one of these smaller mixes and eventually isolate a single pheromone.

“It soon became clear that the trigger is not a classic pheromone,” Stowers said. No single fractionated part of the amniotic fluid could trigger suckling on its own. Even more strikingly, when the researchers added other chemicals such as vanillin to samples of amniotic fluid, the altered amniotic fluid no longer triggered suckling in newborns—whereas a typical pheromone would still have worked under such circumstances. After further tests, Stowers and her colleagues were forced to conclude that there is no single chemical trigger that works for all newborn mice.

Surprising Results

Instead, the results indicated that the trigger for the first suckling in newborn mice is a blend of chemicals that is specific for each mouse mother. The brain of a mouse does not recognize this maternal “signature blend” automatically with neural circuits that are fully programmed by the mouse genome. It must learn the signature blend before it is able to suckle. In a narrow time window after birth, a re-exposure to this maternal odor mix triggers suckling. Thus, a behavior that appears completely innate is triggered by a mechanism that is partly learned.

The results suggest to Stowers and her colleagues that other seemingly innate behaviors in mammals may have learned triggers that make use of the versatile MOE. “This mechanism that we found is really just a twist on what the main olfactory system already does, which is to learn to recognize odors to guide an animal’s behavior,” Stowers said.

Stowers and her colleagues now hope to characterize the special, just-after-birth window of time within which the odor mix of a mother mouse triggers suckling in her newborns. “When we have a full understanding of the trigger mechanism, we’ll use it to stimulate the relevant MOE sensory neurons in the lab,” Stowers said. “We’ll explore the connections those neurons make in the brain, and thus we’ll be able to study how these circuits bring about this fundamental behavior.”

The other contributors to the paper, “Learned recognition of maternal signature odors mediates the first suckling episode in mice,” were Lisa J. Brunet and John Ngai from the University of California, Berkeley, William R. Webb of the Center for Mass Spectrometry at Scripps Research, and Tyler Cutforth of the University of California, Irvine. Darren W. Logan is now a Group Leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, UK.

The research was supported by NIH-NIDCD, the Skaggs Foundation at Scripps Research, and a grant from the Wellcome Trust.

About The Scripps Research Institute

The Scripps Research Institute is one of the world's largest independent, not-for-profit organizations focusing on research in the biomedical sciences. Over the past decades, Scripps Research has developed a lengthy track record of major contributions to science and health, including laying the foundation for new treatments for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia, and other diseases. The institute employs about 3,000 people on its campuses in La Jolla, CA, and Jupiter, FL, where its renowned scientists—including three Nobel laureates—work toward their next discoveries. The institute's graduate program, which awards Ph.D. degrees in biology and chemistry, ranks among the top ten of its kind in the nation. For more information, see www.scripps.edu.

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Study Reveals How Bicultural Consumers Respond to Marketing Cues

Consider a Indian-American woman strolling through a mall. If she passes by a desi clothes store, is she more likely to opt for biriyani than a hamburger when she reaches the food court? Would this cue of Indian culture draw out her Indian side? The answer, according to new research from Columbia Business School's Michael Morris, depends on the degree to which she has integrated her cultural identities.

Prior research found that bicultural individuals switch between their two sets of cultural habits in response to cues in their current setting. Morris and Mok show that these responses differ between two kinds of bicultural individuals: "integrated-self" individuals exhibit chameleon-like behavior, expressing Asian tastes after exposure to Asian symbols, while "divided-self" individuals behave like cultural contrarians, expressing American tastes after exposure to Asian symbols. This holds true even when cues are presented subliminally, suggesting that unconscious motives are at work.

Unconscious, automatic responses can be hard to measure scientifically. The researchers devised a subliminal priming technique in which participants were repeatedly flashed with the word "Asian" or "American" while reading other words in an initial word recognition test. These cue words appeared long enough to register subconsciously but not long enough to be consciously seen. Cultural tastes were subsequently measured with a consumer task: Internet ads that participants could click to get more information about a product. The product appealed to either collective ideals (representing Asian cultural norms) or individualistic ideals (representing American cultural norms). Through individual assessments, the researchers also evaluated the participants' degree of bicultural integration. The results showed that individual differences in self-concepts or identity configurations determined how participants' ad choices responded to "Asian" or "American" priming.

Further research by the authors showed that the key mechanism at play is one of self-defense: a fear of losing or neglecting part of oneself. This threat is felt to a greater degree by "divided-self" individuals, who perceive situations that call upon one of their cultures as excluding the other culture. "Integrated-self" individuals, who feel that their Asian and American sides do not conflict, do not have this perception and the associated defensive response.

With globalization, more and more consumers identify with multiple cultures. This new research shows that persuading bicultural consumers through identity-based marketing is not a straightforward, one-size-fits-all process.

This research began with Mok's dissertation under Morris's supervision. It has been recognized by awards from the American Psychological Association (APA) as well as the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP).

About Columbia Business School

Led by Dean Glenn Hubbard, the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School is at the forefront of management education for a rapidly changing world. The school's cutting-edge curriculum bridges academic theory and practice, equipping students with an entrepreneurial mindset to recognize and capture opportunity in a competitive business environment. Beyond academic rigor and teaching excellence, the school offers programs that are designed to give students practical experience making decisions in real-world environments. The school offers MBA and Executive MBA (EMBA) degrees, as well as non-degree Executive Education programs. For more information, visit www.gsb.columbia.edu.

SOURCE Columbia Business School

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Your Brain Can Fool You Into Hating Something You Actually Like

Dr. Peter Noel Murray, writing for Psychology Today, explains:

A customer could have a great experience with a product or service, but only have bad memories when thinking about it later. Here's how. Let's say you are on vacation and have dinner at the best restaurant recommended to you. Perfect table. Food is exquisitely prepared. Wonderful wine. The experience is fantastic. However, when clearing the table the waiter spills coffee into your lap. Odds are that the coffee spill will degrade your memory of the food and wine, no matter how exceptional you otherwise would have remembered them. And if the hot coffee burned a leg or damaged an expensive dress or suit, the wonderful dining experience may not be remembered at all.

Basically, when something bad happens it overwrites the good portions of your memory. So the best plan of action in such situations is to focus on the positive aspects of the experience. Optimist have it easy here! :)

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Whether you like someone can affect how your brain processes their actions

Whether you like someone can affect how your brain processes their actions, according to new research from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

But a study by USC researchers appearing today in PLOS ONE shows that whether you like the person you’re watching can actually have an effect on brain activity related to motor actions and lead to “differential processing” — for example, thinking the person you dislike is moving more slowly than they actually are.
“We address the basic question of whether social factors influence our perception of simple actions,” said Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, assistant professor with the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Division of Occupational Science. “These results indicate that an abstract sense of group membership, and not only differences in physical appearance, can affect basic sensory-motor processing.”
Past research has shown that race or physical similarity can influence brain processes, and we tend to have more empathy for people who look more like us. 


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Methadone reduces the risk of HIV transmission, study suggests

Study suggests Methadone reduces the risk of HIV transmission.

Methadone reduces the risk of HIV transmission in people who inject drugs (PWID), as reported by an international team of researchers in a paper published October 5 in the online edition of the British Medical Journal. 

"There is good evidence to suggest that opiate substitution therapies (OST) reduce drug-related mortality, morbidity and some of the injection risk behaviors among PWID. However, to date there has been no quantitative estimate of the effect of OST in relation to HIV transmission. This new study provides solid evidence demonstrating the link between these treatments and a reduced risk of HIV transmission," notes Dr. Bruneau, one of the six investigators who worked with Dr. Matthew Hickman, the study's principal investigator and Professor in Public Health and Epidemiology at the University of Bristol (UK).
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How to Flip Food in a Pan Like a Chef!

Mount Sinai researchers find mechanism of opiate addiction is completely different from other drugs | Science Codex

Mount Sinai researchers find mechanism of opiate addiction is completely different from other drugs

Chronic morphine exposure has the opposite effect on the brain compared to cocaine in mice according to Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers. 
They found that a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is increased in cocaine addiction, but is inhibited in opioid addiction. 

"Our study shows that BDNF responds completely differently with opioid administration compared to cocaine," said Ja Wook Koo, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "Morphine creates reward by inhibiting BDNF, whereas cocaine acts by enhancing BDNF activity."

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Testing Can Promote Long-Term Learning

Testing Can Be Useful for Students and Teachers, Promoting Long-Term Learning

Tests are good for: 

1. Assessing what you’ve learned;
2. Learning new information;
3. 1 and 2;
4. None of the above.

The correct answer?

According to research from psychological science, it’s (3) – while testing can be useful as an assessment tool, the actual process of taking a test can also help us to learn and retain new information over the long term and apply it across different contexts.

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How ketamine defeats chronic depression

How ketamine defeats chronic depression

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What number is halfway between 1 and 9? Is it 5 — or 3?

What number is halfway between 1 and 9? Is it 5 — or 3?

Most will say 5. But pose the same question to small children, or people living in some traditional societies, and they're likely to answer 3.Cognitive scientists theorize that that's because it's actually more natural for humans to think logarithmically than linearly!!

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Probability of having a baby depends on age of the woman

This mathematical analysis can predict the woman's chances, and give a percentage estimate of pregnancy in the next cycle.

Trauma switch

The mechanism that protects our brains from turning stress and trauma into post-traumatic stress disorder has been identified.

Breakthrough study identifies trauma switch
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How to get kicked out of med school !

Craziness + Stupidity = Med student asking to be kicked out of med school !!