Brendan Maher will be blogging from this conference in DC from Sunday 2 December. Check out his diary reports here on In the Field.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 11:25 AM | Permalink

With apologies, some of the bold-face text and references on our Nature News website are causing glitches, including temporarily deleting some text from a small percentage of our pages. This will be fixed as soon as possible, and all text will be restored.

Sincerely,
Nicola Jones.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Researchers have found a drug that can reduce aggressive behaviour in feral rats that have been trained to be violent. Check out the news story on Nature News.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Amid the dazzling high-tech displays of new-generation brain-machine interfaces (including brain implants with which monkeys can operate robotic arms) was a less glamorous but elegantly simple study which promises to improve quality of life for stroke victims, or victims of traumatic brain injury, whose ability to balance has been obliterated.

Monica Metea of the company Wicab in Wisconsin displayed her company’s new balancing device BrainPort which has been through a pilot study of 17 patients, allowing them to stand, walk, dance without falling over.

It works on the principle of brain plasticity. It’s a slim 2 cm square grid of 100 electrodes connected to a head position-detecting sensor which sits directly above them. The patients sticks the device in their mouths, and quickly learns from the pattern of the pinprick sensations delivered by the electrodes which way is up and which way is down. The brain also learns this in a physical sense. Somehow certain circuits get reconfigured such that even after the device is removed – after 20 minutes or so – the patient maintains his or her sense of balance, for hours, sometimes for days. No need to open up the skull and implant the device directly into delicate brain tissue like the more dramatic stories which will eventually help the paralysed. But applicable to probably millions of people who can’t stand up without falling over.

Another rather astonishing glimmer of hope for stroke victims was the report from neurosurgeon Eric Leuthard from the Washington University School of Medicine. One hemisphere of the brain controls arm and leg movement on the other side – but Leutard’s team has shown that the apparently embryonic signals in a ‘same side’ hemisphere are small but unique. They could theoretically be tapped to replace signals from the ‘opposite side’, if that opposite side has been disabled by the stroke. There’s more to come from this direction.

Leuthard did his work on six epilepsy patients whose skulls he had opened to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy. He took the opportunity (with their permission and cooperation) to do the tests recording on the surface of the brain – not in the service of epilepsy but in the service of stroke patients. He told me he thought that there was almost a moral obligation to do research on human brains in this way while you have the opportunity. I couldn’t agree more.

Posted by Alison Abbott at 03:04 AM | Permalink

I’m sure you’ll consider it an entirely selfless act on my part to put in an appearance at various social events in order to give those of you who couldn’t make it to SfN an idea of how well neuroscientists like to party. So here’s a rundown of just a few of them. Let me assure you that my attendance was definitely not related to the copious amounts of free food. Ahem.

If I had been looking for no-cost nosh, however, I would have headed straight to the Ingestive Behaviour Social, Although the subheading ran: ‘Brain, appetite, obesity and diabetes, so on second thoughts perhaps there would only have been plumpness-preventing low fat snacks. Other intriguing options included the Pavlovian Social – where maybe instead of food they just ring a bell, and everyone starts to salivate in any case – and the Music Social, which is where I chose to head. Since I’m also putting together a special SfN episode of NeuroPod, our neuroscience podcast, I’m always on the lookout for good audio-gathering opportunities. I wasn’t disappointed – a succession of neuroscientists-by-day became musicians-by-night; among them Yale’s Tom Morse playing a keyboard piece of his own composition, Mary Ann Asson-Batres from Tennessee State University on the Dulcimer (I hadn't met one of these before) and the vocal talents of Manisha Shahane accompanied by Gal Bitan of UCLA.

After that I scuttled off to Datablitz, an event organised by a group of scientists studying sleep and circadian rhythms. The idea is very simple. Twenty speakers; one minute and one slide each. And then a plenary presentation of a lengthy two minutes’ duration. Go!

A selection of the researchers behind the most interesting posters from the conference floor were asked to participate – and the format took no prisoners. After a precisely-timed minute, your slide disappears and – no matter if you’re halfway through your sentence – you’re off the stage. Let’s roll this quickfire format out more widely, I say! Listen out for the edited highlights in NeuroPod.

All in the name of podcasting duty, tonight I’m looking forward to the Alzheimer’s Disease Karaoke Idol night – "present your favourite Alzheimer theme tunes", encourages the blurb. In poor taste? I’ll find out later…

Posted by Kerri Smith at 06:47 PM | Permalink

It seems like everyone has discovered circadian biology. Pharmacologists (disclosure – I am a pharmacologist) have always known the power of the time of day. But experimenters in other disciplines rarely take circadian rhythms into serious account. At best they may decide to test human subjects ‘in the morning’ as a sort of lip service. But morning to an early chronotype who rises to go jogging at 5 am is not the same as morning to a late chronotype who prefers to get up at 11 am.

The new awareness is thankfully permeating loads of areas in neuroscience, though I wonder if the balance has not tipped towards exaggeration. Yesterday we heard that sleep deprivation in today’s society may be the root cause of the epidemic of obesity in western countries, particularly the US. There’s fantastic new work showing disturbances of the clocks that are present and ticking in every individual cell including those in tissues involved in metabolism. Upset that rhythm in relevant tissues, and metabolism will be disturbed. But isn’t that a long way from insisting on a causal link with obesity?

Today we heard that sleep and circadian rhythms may be an integral part of the disease process of addiction. Whether it will turn out to be fundamental remains to be seen. But it’s intriguing to learn that drugs like cocaine affect clock genes which also regulate dopamine, the key neurotransmitter in reward.

Posted by Alison Abbott at 01:15 AM | Permalink

With some trepidation, because equations and their ilk usually make me feel distinctly unwell, I ventured (along with several hundred others) to the featured lecture yesterday evening on neural networks, and what computers can offer neuroscience. And with relief, I’m happy to report it was really rather inspiring.

Maybe it was the palpable and infectious enthusiasm of the speaker, MIT’s Sebastian Seung. Accustomed to hearing about how computer scientists are being inspired to create ever faster machines based on how the brain crunches data, the nub of his own talk, as he phrased it in the Kennedy-esque finale – was: “ask not what the brain can do for computers – ask what computers can do for the brain.”

The ‘star of the show’ was a video that one of his students had put together, and when he first saw it, he said, it blew him away. The vid uses loads of data from a high-res scanning technique that gives 2D images of brain tissue, and then pieces them all together into a 3D reconstruction. You could see the pleasure on his face as he pressed play, and we were treated to a geeky rollercoaster ride, following the path of one neuron as it snaked through a piece of brain tissue – all the while accompanied by a dramatic movie soundtrack (which Nature Neuroscience editor Charvy Narain reliably informs me was the music from Blade Runner). The audience responded with enthusiastic applause.

Being able to do this kind of ‘connectomics’ - mapping each and every connection between each neuron - for the entire brain is Seung’s lofty ambition. But who knows, perhaps his call for support from others in the same line of work, not to mention his dramatic movie soundtracks, will have enthused the assembled scientists (as it did your equation-phobic correspondent) to help him achieve it.

Posted by Kerri Smith at 06:34 PM | Permalink

The circus of the Society of Neuroscience meeting is upon us. San Diego, with no residual smell of burning in the air. I’m milling around the cavernous conference centre – actually one of the more attractive ones of this size – with over 30,000 other delegates, wondering how to choose between the parallel sessions. But there’s a feeling of famine rather than plenty – the awareness of just how much you are missing by going to one particular session.

One of the coolest things I heard today was about the non-uniformity of responsiveness of serotonergic neurons in the raphe nucleus, which is in the brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain.

Nearly all serotonin-releasing neurons in the brain emerge from this nucleus. These neurons have been implicated in all sorts of pathological behaviours – depression, aggression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders.

You wonder how serotonin is able to control so many diverse behaviours, but you don’t really expect to find the answer in the brains stem, Zachary Mainen from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory told me. So when he started to do single cell recordings from individual neurons in the raphe nucleus in mice performing a complex behaviour test, he expected to see each of them firing in the same, signature way - no matter whether the mouse was making a decision, searching for a reward, drinking, or just moving. But it wasn;t the case. He found different neurons responded quite independently to the different behaviours.

So cells right down deep in the unsophisticated brain stem, from where it is difficult to record, are possibly tuned for a limited range of tasks. Cool.

Posted by Alison Abbott at 12:37 AM | Permalink

A lot of people have come a lot of miles to attend this year’s SfN in San Diego. So perhaps I had travel in mind when I started off with a couple of posters loosely related to going places – admittedly on rather different scales…

Firstly: getting around London by taxi. Eleanor Maguire and her student Katherine Woollett of University College London have been following up on Maguire’s previous – and rather well-publicised - study (Nature’s story at the time is here) on the brains of London cabbies. Back in 2000, they found that the size of a region called the hippocampus, which is involved in navigation and memory, is larger in London’s black cab drivers (who have to pass a foreboding test of the capital’s 25,000 streets, suitably titled The Knowledge) than in other people. Unfortunately for them, however, this expertise comes at a price to new learning and memory.

A different part of the hippocampus actually decreases in size as a result of the enlargement of the rest of it. “It’s a story of loss and gain if you’re a taxi driver,” Maguire says. She wouldn’t be surprised, she told me, if this ‘give-and-take’ mechanism was being employed elsewhere in the brain too.

Second travel titbit: getting humans to Mars. For completely different reasons, this form of transit might also impair your memory, as Bernard Rabin’s work on the effect of cosmic rays on rat’s brains suggests.

I have to admit, I was drawn to this poster mainly because it had the words ‘cosmic rays’ in the title. For a moment I wondered if I’d got the wrong conference. But when I looked a bit more closely, it turned out that the team had been monitoring the effects in rats of the kind of cosmic rays that humans might encounter on a mission to Mars.

It turns out that not only will the individuals who sign up to be sent to the red planet have to deal with a lengthy spell of isolation and unenviable dried food supplies – they’re also likely to encounter memory problems. Given the preference, rats crave novelty and usually spend time with unfamiliar objects in their cages rather than ones they’re used to. But Rabin’s rats spent just as long with both types – implying, he thinks, that they could no longer recognise the differences between the objects.

Posted by Kerri Smith at 11:11 PM | Permalink

Alison Abbott and Kerri Smith will be sending back diary reports from this meeting in San Diego from Sunday 4 November. Check back here for updates.

Meanwhile, you may be interested to read what the society has to say on the effect of wildfires on the region:

"When Neuroscience 2007 kicks off on Saturday in San Diego, attendees can expect another highly rewarding, and safe, meeting. The convention center, downtown, and airport remain open and fully active, while our presence will provide business revenue that helps the region rebuild. Crews continue to make progress on the few fires remaining in outlying areas, and air quality, which remained in the "good" category downtown during the worst of the fires, has continued to improve in other areas as well."

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:54 PM | Permalink