I can’t tear myself away from that story on awakening PVS patients with a sleeping pill… Before I finally pack my bags for the night let me direct you to https://blog.bioethics.net/. These guys blogged about that story back in May, when it was really news. They are getting it wrong when calling PVS patients “people who are basically dead” (a weird mistake for professional bioethicists to make!), but their piece together with the comments it elicited is still worth reading. Certainly the short paper in Neurorehabilitation needs to be followed up with a large-scale study.

(This is a peripatetic blog entry, but bear with me. It gets neuroscientific eventually!)

“Eeek – it’s Friday afternoon, and I haven’t managed to put up a real blog entry yet this week!” Thus I dug myself out of the manuscript pile and thought about typing up something about Nature’s open peer review trial. I had posted the links a couple of weeks ago, and last week I noticed they weren’t working anymore, so maybe that experiment had now ended (it was supposed to run for three months starting in mid-June), and maybe, just maybe, the Nature folks had already posted some evaluation or conclusions. However, those links work tonight, and manuscripts are still up for commenting, so obviously it isn’t over yet.

I clicked over to Timo Hannay’s Nascent blog (always good for cutting edge news about my employers!) to see whether he had anything enlightening to say about the open peer review trial. He hadn’t really (apart from this entry, blasting The Wall Street Journal and other outlets for having noticed the experiment only after more than two months, and getting it wrong, too…) Rummaging further around Nascent, I came across a link to ContentWise. ContentWise, as far as I can tell, is a blog by two publishing consultants who, again as far as I can tell, have no direct connection to Nature Publishing Group. But they are praising Nature.com as a transcendent website. TRANSCENDENT? Just what have these guys been smoking???

Now, I use Nature.com in the daily grind, so I might well be overlooking the diamond right under my nose. What exactly do ContentWise find so transcendent — I just can’t get over that word, folks! — about Nature.com? Turns out they praise the various interactive web initiatives, Connotea, the Nature Protocols Network, and Dissect Medicine, an example of a “niche-specific article recommendations network.”

Uh-huh. I work for this company and I have never heard so much as a whisper about Dissect Medicine.

So over I click to DM, and do some more rummaging. And there, finally, I find some neuroscience usable as blog fodder! Seems the idea behind DM is that users/readers are invited to post links to medicine-related news articles, and users can then vote for what they think are the most interesting articles, and those then rise to the top of the list, becoming literally “headlines.”

(Somebody who knows anything about DM please correct me if I’ve got this all wrong.)

Astonishingly this recent story from The Guardian is not at the top. It reports that seven years ago a physician in South Africa discovered by pure serendipity that the drug zolpidem could wake up patients who’ve suffered in persistent vegetative states (PVS) for years. Zolpidem is sold as “Ambien” in my part of the world — a common sleeping pill. These PVS patients are given an Ambien in the morning, and can function and communicate for several hours. Apparently it works day after day. The scientific report of these cases is here.

I am just floored at this fabulous news, and amazed that it has been so little publicized. (Maybe I am just sleepwalking…) The story is eerily reminiscent of Oliver Sacks’ “Awakenings”. I have no idea on what percentage of PVS patients this trick would work (and of course each patient is a unique case with unique lesions), nor does anyone understand how it works, but nevertheless. Anything that can help severely brain-damaged people is good news (unless it’s a hoax – I hope not!!)

In the hopeful vein, DM also gave me this story about an antiinflammatory medication reversing liver cirrhosis, from the BBC. Not neuroscience, you say? Maybe, but liver cirrhosis is almost always caused by chronic alcohol abuse, and alcoholism like all addictions is to a large extent a malfunction of the brain. We deal with plenty of papers on addiction mechanisms at Nature Neuroscience! And on the blog we consider anything with even a tenuous link to neuroscience fair game.

Great stories indeed are listed in DM, but the top headline tonight is “Madrid Fashion Show Bans 5 Thin Models” !!

Somebody explain this to me, please.

And let’s put an end to this embarrassment by casting our votes on Dissect Medicine for the Guardian story, “The ‘miracle’ treatment that’s bringing the brain-damaged back to life”.

These two went live online yesterday, September 24th.

Ben Mamou et al., NMDA receptors are critical for unleashing consolidated auditory fear memories

Sereno & Huang, A human parietal face area contains aligned head-centered visual and tactile maps

Enjoy.

All these papers will be printed in our upcoming October issue.

Published online September 17:

Smith et al., Kinase activity of mutant LRRK2 mediates neuronal toxicity

Williams et al., Local caspase activity directs engulfment of dendrites during pruning

Kim et al., NGL family PSD-95–interacting adhesion molecules regulate excitatory synapse formation

Leung et al., Asymmetrical -actin mRNA translation in growth cones mediates attractive turning to netrin-1

Yao et al., An essential role for -actin mRNA localization and translation in Ca2+-dependent growth cone guidance

Wang et al., Functional alignment of feedback effects from visual cortex to thalamus

Published online September 10:

Cano et al., Brain state and contrast sensitivity in the awake visual thalamus

Ling & Carrasco, When sustained attention impairs perception

Borrell & Marin, Meninges control tangential migration of hem-derived Cajal-Retzius cells via CXCL12/CXCR4 signaling

Farrow et al., Nonlinear, binocular interactions underlying flow field selectivity of a motion-sensitive neuron

Paz et al., Emotional enhancement of memory via amygdala-driven facilitation of rhinal interactions

Wu et al., Soluble adenylyl cyclase is required for netrin-1 signaling in nerve growth cones

Published online September 3:

Robles & Gomez, Focal adhesion kinase signaling at sites of integrin-mediated adhesion controls axon pathfinding

Published online August 27:

Custer et al., Bergmann glia expression of polyglutamine-expanded ataxin-7 produces neurodegeneration by impairing glutamate transport

Next, I’ll be putting up the links to the papers we published over the summer. These will be posted with fake dates to fit their publication months, so readers of the blog will have an easier time finding them. Thanks for your understanding.

I couldn’t make much sense of the term “neuro-economics” until I bumped into Ernst Fehr at the FENS Forum this past July. This week The New Yorker features a fine piece on the subject, and they’re even making it available online for free.

As you all have noticed, this blog has taken a rather prolonged ‘summer break’. Reasons are many. I apologize for the long silence. We are now relaunching ‘Action Potential’. Welcome back.

In case anyone is still subscribing to the RSS feed, let me warn you that I will over the next few days upload the links to all the fine papers we published in the past six months. This is necessary because the prime motivation for this blog was and is to offer a way for our readers to comment on our papers. This catch-up will make for a series of not-so-exciting blog entries…

But before I embark on this chore, here are a few bits of neuroscience and publishing news that caught my eye this spring and summer:

March: Columbia University receives a $200 million gift from an alumnus’ estate to build a new neuroscience center. Coming from Europe, I continue to be amazed at the fundraising prowess of American universties, and the philanthropic generosity. And I’m a wee bit worried that some fancy new buildings may stand half-empty as NIH funding contracts…

April: PLoS Biology drops the double-blind peer review option. Click here and scroll all the way down. But WHY did they stop it?

June: Nature starts an experiment with online open peer review. Select manuscripts that were submitted to Nature are made available for public comment here, while at the same time undergoing conventional confidential peer review. The experiment is ongoing, and is accompanied by a web discussion.

July: The European “FENS Forum” attracts over 5000 neuroscientists to Vienna. Great science and some fine entertainment. The sulky horse race of neuroscience societies presidents was unique fun. If I remember correctly, Maja Bresjanac of the Slovenian Neuroscience Association won. I’d wagered my money on the Russian, who came in ninth… The same night, Italy beat France in the soccer/football world cup on penalty shootouts. Two Nature Neuroscience papers were featured in a special “Late Breaking News” session: the identification of oncomodulin as a regeneration factor for optic nerve fibers by Yin et al., and the description of a new neuron population in the very early human fetus by Bystron et al.

August: UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach quits his life’s work on visual processing in macaques after months of harrassment and terror by “animal rights” groups. Inside Higher Ed has a good writeup of this sad story here.

That’s it for today – stay tuned…

For your commenting pleasure. All links are to abstracts. Posted on September 21, 2006.

Volynski et al., Presynaptic fluctuations and release-independent depression

Kozorovitskiy et al., Fatherhood affects dendritic spines and vasopressin V1a receptors in the primate prefrontal cortex

Thompson et al., Representation of interaural time delay in the human auditory midbrain

Cappello et al., The Rho-GTPase cdc42 regulates neural progenitor fate at the apical surface

Singh et al., C-terminal modulator controls Ca2+-dependent gating of Cav1.4 L-type Ca2+ channels

Knott et al., Spine growth precedes synapse formation in the adult neocortex in vivo

Komai et al., Postsynaptic excitability is necessary for strengthening of cortical sensory responses during experience-dependent development

Heurteaux et al., Deletion of the background potassium channel TREK-1 results in a depression-resistant phenotype

Yu et al., Reduced sodium current in GABAergic interneurons in a mouse model of severe myoclonic epilepsy in infancy

Armstead et al., Neutralizing the neurotoxic effects of exogenous and endogenous tPA

Womelsdorf et al., Dynamic shifts of visual receptive fields in cortical area MT by spatial attention

Rudebeck et al., Separate neural pathways process different decision costs

Huber et al., Arm immobilization causes cortical plastic changes and locally decreases sleep slow wave activity

Grill-Spector et al., High-resolution imaging reveals highly selective nonface clusters in the fusiform face area

Neri et al., Meaningful interactions can enhance visual discrimination of human agents