Supposed psychic powers that enable people to see auras around others may simply be a quirk of the brain, according to a University College London (UCL) study of a rare form of synaesthesia where some people see colourful ‘auras’ around their loved ones.
The case study, reported in the October issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology, shows how some people can experience colours in response to people they know or words that evoke emotions – a condition known as emotion-colour synaesthe
Navarre researcher, Jaione Valle Turrillas, has identified two genes that could help as targets for pharmaceutical drugs that fight the Staphylococcus aureus “one of the bacteria which causes most infections in medical implants”. The results of her research have been published in her PhD thesis, “The role of the global regulators SarA and õB in Staphylococcus aureus biofilm formation”, defended at the Public University of Navarre.
Bacterias a thousand time more resistant
The Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) and Ghent University have started up a new biopharmaceutical company named Peakadilly nv. Peakadilly will develop and market a new generation of molecular diagnostics − so-called protein bio-markers − using innovative proteomics technology developed by the research group under the direction of Joël Vandekerckhove. The markers can be used in the development of medicines, making the process much more efficient, effective a
Breast cancer is the most frequent form of cancer in women around the world. The fact that this cancer is more frequent in the developed world suggests that life style and environmental factors may be involved. Nutritional factors are particularly important, given people’s continual exposure through dietary habits. Among them, dietary fats are the main element involved in breast cancer. Fats do not cause cancer, however some of them, such as animal fats or certain vegetable fats, accelerate th
Patients infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) are six times as likely to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) than individuals that are virus free, according to research presented today at the Third Annual Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research meeting. HCV infected patients have a seventeen fold higher risk for developing diffuse large B-Cell lymphoma, researchers from British Columbia documented. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is the most common variety of NHL, comprising approximate
A drug that reduces symptoms of systemic lupus in mice may turn out to be effective against hardening of the arteries and thus prevent heart attacks, according to two poster presentations today at the American College of Rheumatology meeting in San Antonio.
Nilamadhab Mishra, M.D., of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said the drug, called Trichostatin A or TSA, “may have a therapeutic benefit in atherosclerosis,” which causes coronary artery disease by blocking ke
Mice with kids’ muscle tumors raise hope for new treatments
In a pair of new studies, University of Utah scientists took early but significant steps to fight a particularly deadly childhood muscle cancer by identifying some of the genetic events that cause the disease and then engineering mice that develop the tumors. The genetic events might be targets for new drugs that could be tested on the mice.
The disease, named alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, “is a very mean childh
From language to literature, from music to mathematics, a single protein appears central to the formation of the long-term memories needed to learn these and all other disciplines, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health. Their findings appear in the October 15 issue of Science.
The protein is known as mBDNF, which stands for mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
Hans Larsson, a McGill University palaeontologist (located in Montreal, Canada), has found physical proof that Canada’s Arctic regions once had a Jurassic era. Scientists have suspected that dinosaurs lived in Canada’s great north eons ago, yet it remained an unproven theory, since no bones had ever been uncovered.
Not anymore. Larsson has discovered tyrannosaurus dinosaur bones, which until now, had only been located in Canada’s Prairie Provinces, as well as in
Certain genes are expressed differently in people with depression
Researchers have found altered gene activity in people who suffer from major depression, a discovery that may one day help doctors better diagnose and treat the condition. The research, conducted by a consortium of four universities, appears this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS). Scientists found that the fibroblast growth factor system, which is a family o
Scientists at the University of Virginia Health System have helped solve the mystery of how the human ear converts sound vibrations and balance stimuli into electrical impulses the brain can interpret. Their research is detailed in the October 13 advance online edition of the journal Nature, found at www.nature.com/nature .
Neuroscience researchers Jeffrey Holt and Gwenaëlle Géléoc, working in collaboration with scientists elsewhere, discovered a long-sought protein called TRP
Two groups of researchers have independently discovered the long sought dual body clocks in the brain of fruit flies that separately govern bursts of morning and evening activity.
Both research groups published their findings in the October 14, 2004, issue of the journal Nature. Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher Michael Rosbash at Brandeis University led one group; François Rouyer at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France led the second group. Grad
A drug that jams a key enzyme regulating cholesterol drastically reduces the levels of brain-clogging amyloid plaque in mice engineered to have a human form of the amyloid protein. According to Dora Kovacs and her colleagues, the findings suggest that such inhibiting drugs could be used to treat and prevent Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
CP-113,818 mimics a cholesterol molecule that the enzyme, called “acyl-coenzyme A: cholesterol acyltransferase” (ACAT), converts into a form of
Researchers have identified a molecule that can transform the mechanical stimulus of a sound wave into an electrical signal recognizable by the brain. The protein forms an ion channel that opens in response to sound, causing electrical impulses that communicate the pitch, volume, and duration of a sound to the brain.
Scientists have long suspected that such a molecule must exist in the tiny cilia extending from receptor cells in the inner ear. Now, researchers led by Howard Hughes M
Using a specially designed robotic microscope to study cultured cells, researchers have found evidence that abnormal protein clumps called inclusion bodies in neurons from people with Huntington’s disease (HD) prevent cell death. The finding helps to resolve a longstanding debate about the role of these inclusion bodies in HD and other disorders and may help investigators find effective treatments for these diseases. The study was funded primarily by the NIH’s National Institute of Ne
Researchers at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), in Portugal, have taken a major step forward in understanding one of the fundamental questions in the field of developmental biology today: how the organs are placed in their correct positions in the body. In a study published in the 1st October issue of the journal Genes and Development, the scientists describe, for the first time, the role of the gene Cerl-2 (Cerberus-like-2), in setting up the asymmetric distribution of organs in the
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