Brains of Blind People Reading in Braille Show Activity in Same Area That Lights Up When Sighted Readers Read

ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2011) — The portion of the brain responsible for visual reading doesn't require vision at all, according to a new study published online on Feb. 17 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Brain imaging studies of blind people as they read words in Braille show activity in precisely the same part of the brain that lights up when sighted readers read. The findings challenge the textbook notion that the brain is divided up into regions that are specialized for processing information coming in via one sense or another, the researchers say.

"The brain is not a sensory machine, although it often looks like one; it is a task machine," said Amir Amedi of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "A brain area can fulfill a unique function, in this case reading, regardless of what form the sensory input takes."

Tequila!

via Placebo Journal blog

Painful Shingles Can Strike More Than Once

Having shingles can be a miserable experience. Now, to make matters worse, the long-held notion that people can only get shingles once in their lives appears to be false, according to a study in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings this month. Link (WSJ)
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The CDC has urged all Americans age 60 and older to get the shingles vaccine—whether they've had shingles or not. But supplies of the vaccine are on back order in some areas. Merck & Co., the only company that makes it, has encountered frequent supply problems since the vaccine was approved in 2006.

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In rare cases, shingles has other serious consequences. Blisters can become infected. A rash on the face can spread shingles into eyes, which can lead to loss of vision, sometimes permanent. A rash around the ear can cause a complication known as Ramsey Hunt syndrome, which can include deafness and weakness of the facial muscles.

A big unknown is whether people who got the chicken-pox vaccine as children will be susceptible to shingles in later years or protected from it—or even vulnerable to full-blown chicken pox if their immunity has weakened. Since the chicken-pox vaccine was only approved in 1996, it will be several decades before the first generation of Americans to be widely vaccinated reaches the typical shingles years.

Grand Rounds is up at "The Covert Rationing Blog"

Lot's of good medical blogging at Grand Rounds hosted at the Covert Rationing Blog here
Uvealblues

Some of the highlights for me:

the pay for performance fiasco (and the impact on further erosion of the on going patient-physician relationship)

pay for performance and patient harm

bureaucrats and bioethicists

The reductive monotony of electronic medical records worsening patient notes

Snooky the Cat and the Metronome

A little humor to start your morning
uvealblues


via Dr. Mercola

How Bill Gates' Favorite Teacher Wants to Disrupt Education

Gates- and Google-funded Sal Khan seeks to make his popular YouTube lessons universally accessible, and change the nature of education in the process.

Why There's No Turning Back in the Middle East

Will history fail to turn in the Middle East? Will these protests in Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and beyond peter out, and in a few years, will we look back at 2011 and realize that very little actually changed? It's certainly possible, but there are two fundamental reasons the tensions that have been let loose in the Middle East over the past few weeks are unlikely to disappear, and they encompass two of the most powerful forces changing the world today: youth and technology

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2049804,00.html#ixzz1EDZ8seDu

Ecuadorean Villagers May Hold Secret to Longevity

People living in remote villages in Ecuador have a mutation that some biologists say may throw light on human longevity and ways to increase it.


The villagers are very small, generally less than three and a half feet tall, and have a rare condition known as Laron syndrome or Laron-type dwarfism. They are probably the descendants of conversos, Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal who were forced to convert to Christianity in the 1490s but were nonetheless persecuted in the Inquisition. They are also almost completely free of two age-related diseases, cancer anddiabetes.
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The Laron patients’ mutation means that their growth hormone receptor lacks the last eight units of its exterior region, so it cannot react to growth hormone. In normal children, growth hormone makes the cells of the liver churn out another hormone, called insulinlike growth factor, or IGF-1, and this hormone makes the children grow. If the Laron patients are given doses of IGF-1 before puberty, they can grow to fairly normal height.

This is where the physiology of the Laron patients links up with the longevity studies that researchers have been pursuing with laboratory animals. IGF-1 is part of an ancient signaling pathway that exists in the laboratory roundworm as well as in people. The gene that makes the receptor for IGF-1 in the roundworm is called DAF-2. And worms in which this gene is knocked out live twice as long as normal.

The Laron patients have the equivalent defect — their cells make very little IGF-1, so very little IGF-1 signaling takes place, just as in the DAF-2-ablated worms. So the Laron patients might be expected to live much longer.

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Dr. Longo said that some level of IGF-1 was necessary to protect against heart disease, but that lowering the level might be beneficial. A drug that does this is already on the market for treatment of acromegaly, a thickening of the bones caused by excessive growth hormone. “Our underlying hypothesis is that this drug would prolong life span,” Dr. Longo said. He said he was not taking the drug, called pegvisomant or Somavert, which is very hard to obtain.

A strain of mice bred by John Kopchick of Ohio University has a defect in the growth hormone receptor gene, just as do the Laron patients, and lives 40 percent longer than usual.

For Cold Virus, Zinc May Edge Out Even Chicken Soup

Scientists still haven’t discovered a cure for the common cold, but researchers now say zinc may be the next best thing.

Molecular discovery could lead to prevention of geographic atrophy

Lexington, KY—A team of researchers has discovered a molecular mechanism implicated in geographic atrophy that may lead to the development of ways to prevent the condition.
The investigators’ article, “DICER1 deficit induces Alu RNA toxicity in age-related macular degeneration,” was published online by the journal Nature on Feb. 6. The study also elaborates, for the first time, a disease-causing role for a large section of the human genome once regarded as non-coding “junk DNA.”
The team, led by University of Kentucky (UK) ophthalmologist Jayakrishna Ambati, MD, discovered that an accumulation of a toxic type of RNA, called Alu RNA, causes retinal cells to die in patients with geographic atrophy. In a healthy eye, a “DICER” enzyme degrades the Alu RNA particles.

What Is Synesthesia Like? Watch These Videos for a Taste

Fantastic videos in which artist Michel Levy, recreates what she sees when she listens to music.. link
(via Amy Capellazzo)

One from Michal Levy on Vimeo.

Pete Eckert – seeing without sight

A photographer with Retinitis Pigmentosa who takes amazing images...

Nice video at this link

Wired Science News for Your Neurons Previous post Next post Video: Uncontacted Tribe in Brazilian Jungle

Video of an uncontacted tribe spotted in the Brazilian jungle has been released, bringing them to life in ways that photographs alone cannot.
The tribe, believed to be Panoa Indians, have been monitored from a distance by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, a government agency charged with handling the nation’s indigenous communities. Many of the world’s 100 or so uncontacted tribes live in the Amazon.

A Loose Grip Provides Better Chemotherapy

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2011) — Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed a little bomb that promises a big bang for cancer patients.
Preliminary tests show an anti-cancer drug loosely attached to gold nanoparticles starts accumulating deep inside tumors within minutes of injection and can be activated for an effective treatment within two hours. The same drug injected alone takes two days to gather and attacks the tumor from the surface -- a far less effective route.

Water flea’s 31,000 genes top humans

The animal with the most genes—about 31,000—is the water flea, a near-microscopic freshwater crustacean. By comparison, humans have about 23,000 genes.
Water vision
“We were surprised to find the incredibly high level of complexity of the set of Daphnia vision genes,” says co-author Todd Oakley, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Oakley’s team focused on vision genes in the tiny creature.

“While humans have four light-sensing proteins (opsins), the Daphnia genome has 46 opsins,” says Oakley. “A possible explanation for this complexity is that Daphnia use these genes to understand the complex light regime of their aquatic environment.”

Appendix: Apps for Free Calls to Regular Phones

I reviewed a bunch of apps (Google Voice, Skype, Line2 and so on) in the column. But in the hours since the column was posted online, readers have flooded my in-box to let me know about some other options. In some cases, these additional apps disprove my thesis that “there’s still no app that offers all three of these elements: free calls, to regular phone numbers, from your cellphone.”
Here, then, is an appendix to today’s column.

Forget Bombs, Dogs Can Now Smell Cancer

Labrador retrievers in Japan have been trained to sniff out early signs of cancer.

One Donor Cornea, Two Patients Helped: New Surgical Approach May Help Meet Demand for Donor Corneas

German researcher Claus Cursiefen, MD, also affiliated with Harvard School of Medicine, reports good results with a new surgical strategy that uses a single donor cornea to help two patients with differing corneal diseases. In the United States keeping pace with demand for donated corneal tissue for use in transplant surgery is a cause for concern, while in Europe and Asia shortages lead to treatment delays.

Taxi Driver Imitates Michael Jackson, Delights the Internet [VIDEO]

A Sharper Future for Retinal Implants

Researchers grow neurons on a photosensitive polymer hybrid.
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A retinal implant restores vision by sending a signal from a video camera attached to a pair of glasses to electrodes implanted on the back of a person's retina. But the silicon or platinum components typically used to for the electrodes tend to produce images of limited quality, and can leave the retina scarred.
Organic semiconducting polymers are softer and more flexible than silicon, and they have useful mechanical and electrical properties, making them ideal for biomedical applications. In fact, they are already used in some medical devices such as glucose sensors and the electrodes that record neural activity in the brain. Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology have now shown how organic polymer could be used to make better electrodes for retinal implants.
One of the first possible applications for a polymer-neuron interface could be in optogenics, says Guglielmo Lanzani, a professor at IIT who led the research, which is published in the January 18 issue of Nature Communications. "Our short-term goal was to establish communication between an [organic] semiconductor and a neuron," says Lanzani.