news 2009

Office of News and Information Johns Hopkins University 901 South Bond Street, Suite 540 Baltimore, Maryland 21231 Phone: 443-287-9960 | Fax: 443-287-9920 To the casual observer, the student seemed absolutely normal. Though she often made mistakes in spelling and math, those were usually ascribed to carelessness.

A team led by Jonathan Roiser (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) has today published research which shows that our genes affect the decisions we make, and that these decisions are influenced by the positive or negative framing of the options on offer. This phenomenon is known as the 'framing effect'.

PA115/09 University researchers have discovered a new way to tackle the problem of addictions like alcoholism, drug abuse and even over-eating.. after a discovery about the psychology of addictive behaviour. The research has revealed that addictive behaviour is determined by rapid conscious decision processes, rather than by the automatic attention grabbing power of addictive substance, as previously thought.

University of Nottingham News Press releases 2009 April Now where did I leave my car - and how do I get back there? How the brain translates memory into action. PA 104/09 When we emerge from a supermarket laden down with bags and faced with a sea of vehicles, how do we remember where we've parked our car and translate the memory into the correct action to get back there?

Research led by Professor Mark Pepys FRS (Director of the UCL Centre for Amyloidosis and Acute Phase Proteins) has identified a protein known as serum amyloid P component (SAP) as a possible therapeutic target in Alzheimer's disease. In collaboration with pharmaceutical group Roche, Professor Pepys developed a new small molecule drug, CPHPC, which specifically targets SAP and removes it from the blood.

Many diseases derive from problems with cellular respiration, the process through which cells extract energy from nutrients. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now discovered a new function for a protein in the mitochondrion - popularly called the cell's power station - that plays a key part in cell respiration.

Young adults with a genetic variant that raises their risk of developing Alzheimer's disease show changes in their brain activity decades before any symptoms might arise, according to a new brain imaging study by scientists from the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. The results may support the idea that the brain's memory function may gradually wear itself out in those who go on to develop Alzheimer's.

Office of News and Information Johns Hopkins University 901 South Bond Street, Suite 540 Baltimore, Maryland 21231 Phone: 443-287-9960 | Fax: 443-287-9920 As we look at the world around us, images flicker into our brains like so many disparate pixels on a computer screen that change every time our eyes move, which is several times a second.

By adjusting nine parameters in a single equation, a computer model can generate patterned shells (right example in each pair above) that closely resemble real mollusk shells. (Alistair Boettiger/UC Berkeley) BERKELEY — University of California, Berkeley, graduate student Alistair Boettiger has amassed a beautiful collection of seashells, but not by combing the beach.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet (KI) have constructed a mathematical activity model of the brainŽs frontal and parietal parts, to increase the understanding of the capacity of the working memory and of how the billions of neurons in the brain interact. One of the findings they have made with this "model brain" is a mechanism in the brainŽs neuronal network that restricts the number of items we can normally store in our working memories at any one time to around two to seven.

Cambridge, Mass. March 31, 2009 - Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University. The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed individuals in other studies.

A study led by UCL's Tali Sharot published today in the Journal of Neuroscience has found that your brain may know what you prefer before you do. Sharot, a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, has showed that when people rate options similarly, they will choose the one that causes more activation in the caudate nucleus, a brain region involved in anticipating reward.The study also demonstrated that after a decision is made, caudate nucleus activity increases for the selected option and decreases for the rejected one.

PA 81/09 Researchers from The University of Nottingham will be in Westminster today to talk to MPs about how innovative scientific advances could reduce the need for animal experimentation in the quest to find new treatments for the painful degenerative joint condition osteoarthritis.

BTZ043 is a new therapeutic agent to fight tuberculosis. Its target is an enzyme which produces the cell wall of the pathogenic bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

BERKELEY — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have identified a gene that plays a critical regulatory role in the process of converting dietary carbohydrates to fat. In a new study, they disabled this gene in mice, which consequently had lower levels of body fat than their normal counterparts, despite being fed the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat pasta buffet.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have discovered vital information about how bacteria manage to survive in an enormous range of habitats, including human beings. The team of scientists, led by Professor Jeff Green from the University of Sheffield´s Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, has shown that a protein found in the bacterium E. coli, can sense the presence of oxygen.

PA 73/09 Scientists at The University of Nottingham have uncovered a vital new biological clue that could lead to more effective treatments for a children's brain tumour that currently kills more than 60 per cent of young sufferers.

University of Birmingham scientists have revealed how a dormant virus triggers a type of cancer found in young people, according to research published in PLoS Pathogens* today (Friday). Burkitt's lymphoma** - a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma - affects around 200 young adults aged between 13 and 24 each year in the UK and is more common in children living in equatorial Africa.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have hit on a promising new molecule as a target for the development of better medicines to prevent blood clots, which could reduce lives lost from heart attacks and strokes. Yotis Senis - British Heart Foundation (BHF) Intermediate Research Fellow - and colleagues have discovered a vital new component of the trigger for blood clot formation, involving a protein called CD148.

PA 59/09 Effective stem cell treatment for strokes has taken a significant step forward as scientists reveal how they have replaced stroke-damaged brain tissue in rats. Researchers at The University of Nottingham are among a team of scientists who have shown that by inserting tiny scaffolding with stem cells attached, it is possible to fill a hole left by stroke damage with brand new brain tissue within seven days.