Genes for Learning, Remembering and Forgetting

Genes for Learning, Remembering and Forgetting http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329124505.htm University of Utah biologists have discovered certain genes and proteins that promote growth and development of embryos also play a surprising role in sending chemical signals that help adults learn, remember, forget and perhaps even become addicted. The genes are called back to action to change the properties of the nervous system in response to experience in adults. The researchers studies worms that have shown to have similar nerve functions to several vertebrates, including humans, and have found a possible new solution to addictions and some mental diseases like schizophrenia. This could affect everyone with addictions if it works as well as people suffering from things like schizophrenia.

'Housekeeping' Mechanism for Brain Stem Cells Discovered

'Housekeeping' Mechanism for Brain Stem Cells Discovered http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120422134800.htm Reaserchers from Columbia University Medical Center have identified a molecular pathway that controls the retention and release of the brain’s stem cells. It is their hope that this can eventually lead to regenerative therapy for several stem cell diseases. The research is based on several other recent studies that show that stem cells reside in specific niches that support and maintain them. "From this research, we knew that when stem cells detach from their niche, they lose their identity as stem cells and begin to differentiate into specific cell types," stem cells in the brain are carefully regulated and with careful study and experiments on mice they theorize that they may eventually be able to manipulate the stem cells to help heal deficiencies in the brain. This could affect everyone with brain problems as well as people who study brains and stem cells.

Video games help fight depression

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/04/20/video-game-helps-teenagers-battling-depression/

A group of researchers from the university of Auckland, New Zealand created a novel computerized cognitive behavioral therapy call SPARX. This puts the users in a number of undergoing series, which challenges them to complete certain tasks to get rid of GNATS or Gloomy Negative Automatic Thoughts. They did this on a group of adolescents between the ages of 12 to 19 with mild to moderate depression. This showed that SPARX was just as effective at reducing depression symptoms in the teenagers as therapy sessions.

Single-Neuron Observations Mark Steps in Alzheimer's Disease

Studying a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, neuroscientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen have observed correlations between increases in both soluble and plaque-forming beta-amyloid -- a protein implicated in the disease process -- and dysfunctional developments on several levels: individual cortical neurons, neuronal circuits, sensory cognition, and behavior. Their results, published in Nature Communications, show that these changes progress in parallel and that, together, they reveal distinct stages in Alzheimer's disease with a specific order in time.

Interesting

Reference: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120420105831.htm

Menthol smokers have more strokes

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/04/13/study-menthol-smokers-have-more-strokes/

Surveys were conducted from 2001 through 2008. Of the menthol smokers, 3.4 percent said on the surveys they'd had a stroke. That compared to 2.7 percent of the non-menthol smokers. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking any type of cigarettes increases a person's risk of heart disease two- to four-fold compared to non-smokers.

Sparrows Change Their Tune to be Heard in Noisy Cities

Sparrows Change Their Tune to be Heard in Noisy Cities

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120402162710.htm

Researchers studied the songs sung by male white-crowned sparrows in the Presidio district of San Francisco from 1969 to today. In 1969 the sparrows sang three different songs at different pitches, as San Francisco got louder the birds lower pitch song disappeared and it seemed that only the loudest song would remain. But the birds came up with new songs to be heard over the noises of the busy city. The researchers also tested the sparrow’s reactions to recordings of the old and new songs being played. The Sparrows didn’t think anything of the old songs and basically ignored them, but the new songs were taken as threats and treated as such.
This could affect bird researchers and watchers as well as all the people who enjoy hearing birds sing.

Emotional Abuse

Resource: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/200808/effects-emotional-abuse-it-hurts-when-i-love

First of all, what is emotional abuse? It is in the most basic definition is anything that hurts the feeling of another person. We definitely have as human beings hurt someone's feelings on purpose, but there is a difference between this and an emotionally abusive relationship. In an emotionally abusive relationship, the other controls you by undermining your confidence, making you feel crazy, and manipulating you with fear or shame. There are many ways in which emotional abuse can be more effective in messing you up than physical abuse. There are some reasons to this. One of the reasons emotional abuse kicks your butt more is it can happen every single day of your life. The more it happens, the more you can feel the pain. Emotional abuse can also dig deeper than the normal punches. First of all, punches or kicks can obviously be seen that it is their fault for hurting you. Emotional abuse makes you blame yourself! Implying or saying you some kind of problems suggests there is something wrong with you. It makes you question something unnecessary and makes you think your at fault. It takes abuse to whole new level of damage.

This article was very interesting! I recommend reading the whole thing. I thought is was very informative and gave many details and examples on the subject. The realization that emotional abuse can be a bigger impact truly is interesting. It makes us as humans if we love the other person question ourselves for the wrong purpose. The truth is that this can happen anywhere, and it happens too often. Knowing what to do or knowing when to break a relationship like this is important. I find information like this important.

Shooter Kills 7

In a small university locate in California, a gunman shot a total often people seven of which didn’t make it. Some of the people thatwere injured were immediately rushed to the hospital while theless injured were taken care of on site. Many people who saw thesuspect described him has an 40 year old Asian that used to attenda nursing class offered at the university.Impact: This is a very sad thing to hear about. There are betterways to deal with personal issues than kill innocent people. Ihope they find him because its not good to have a killer out on thestreets.

Meditation Improves Emotional Behaviors in Teachers

Summary: Schoolteachers who underwent a short but intensive program of meditation were less depressed, anxious or stressed -- and more compassionate and aware of others' feelings, according to a UCSF-led study that blended ancient meditation practices with the most current scientific methods for regulating emotions.

Citric: Interesting

Impact: This will help teachers

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120328142852.htm

Benefits of Taking Your Dog to Work May Not Be Far-Fetched

Benefits of Taking Your Dog to Work May Not Be Far-Fetched

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120330081235.htm

A research study was conducted to find out if taking man’s best friend to work reduced stress and made the job more satisfying for other employees. Stress is one of the major factors that cause employee’s to miss work, lower moral and cause them to burnout, resulting in significant losses of resources and productivity. Researchers from VCU compared employees who bring their dogs to work, employees who do not bring their dogs to work and employees without pets in the areas of stress, organizational commitment, support, and job satisfaction. The study showed that Dogs bring more positive emotions to a workplace than one without a dog.

This could cause an increase in Dogs that are brought to work and a decrease of places that don’t allow pets.

Crying Make People Happy?

Research has shown that those who would watch a sad movie relate the sorrows of the story into their own lives and relationships, and this would increase their overall life happiness. This is caused by making people realize the good aspects of their lives, something that many people often do not do. The thing is, it's not when people think "My life is better than the character's in the movie" that makes them happier, it's when they have sympathy with the fictional characters and then realize that they are glad they do not have the tragedy portrayed in the movie in their own lives.

Dead bodies creating electricity?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45526347/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.Ttx09GMr2nA

In Durham, England they will soon be using corpses to generate electricity. By installing turbines in the burners of a crematorium, will convert wast heat from the combustion of the bodies into as much as 150 kilowatt hours of juice. Which is enough to power 1,500 televisions for an hour. Which could make the crematoriums more green, but the costs for the turbines anywhere between $250,000 to $500,000. This could happen to a lot more crematoriums in the near future.

This is just another way to help use our electricity. I don't see anything wrong with it. The bodies are being burned anyway, might as well get more out of it. Some might find it creepy that their deceased loved ones are help powering their electronics, but could be used a lot more in the future.

No Evidence for Existence of Psychic Ability Found

No Evidence for Existence of Psychic Ability Found

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120315094737.html

A study by Social psychologist Daryl Bem tried to prove the existence of precognition. Professor Chris French, Stuart Ritchie, and Professor Richard Wiseman all tried to accurately recreate the final experiment of Bem and his group. The three’s separate works all failed to show that precognition exists and have also been published. Bem had the people in his experiment complete a memory test on a list of words before being shown a random selection of half the words from the original list. Bem claimed that since they were better at remembering the words they were about to be shown that they had “reached forward in time to ‘practice’ those words in the future.” But even trying to be as close to replicating Bem’s experiment as humanly possible three times each the three different researchers failed to produce the same results Bem’s experiment seems to be a failure.
This effects people who believe in precognition and except scientific research studies but if people choose to disregard these findings and want to believe in precognition that is their right.

Is your memory weaker then you think?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44010877/ns/health-mental_health/#.TtxpPmMr2nB

Most people think that your memory works like a video camera. But in fact doesn't do that at all. It remembers the events and information as a sort of data. Also your memories can change over time as well. Which can eventually lead people the recall events that never happened. Also that hypnosis can be helpful when jogging ones memory, but is no more accurate than their initial memory.

So your mind can play tricks on you, which can be hard to tell whats real from wrong. It's scary to think how some people can remember something completely wrong from what happened. I hope that people can be more attentive then most people are.

Right-handed typing more favorable

Right-handed typing more favorable

http://www.livescience.com/18901-qwerty-keyboard-hand.html

Researchers from University College London and New School for Social
Research in New York have studied how people respond to words based
on having letters on the right or left hand side of the qwerty keyboard.
Volunteers rated their feelings on English, Dutch, and Spanish words.
They found no matter what the language or if the volunteer was right
or left handed, people had more positive feelings about words that
mainly involved the right side of the keyboard, even with made up words.

Researchers thought this may be due to the left hand having to work
harder on the qwerty keyboard because it’s responsible for 15 letters
while the right only has 11. They stated this research is helpful for
people responsible for naming new products, brands and companies to
choose the ‘right’ name.

This doesn’t seem like a very important topic for scientists to spend their
time investigating, but merchandising is a multimillion dollar business.
Taking advantage of every tool for your product is a smart idea. My name has
only 2 letters out of 8 on the left side so people should respond positively
to my name.

Music and the Brain: 1 Way Music Affects the Body

Probably the most important thing music can do for you is, believe it or not, restore lost senses and abilities that were inhibited by a stroke or brain damage. People who have had brain damage and are unable to talk are strangely able to sing. This eventually restores their ability to talk normally.

Fear alters perception

Fear alters perception
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120222204241.html
In this report, researchers from Ohio State University found that
the more afraid a person is of a spider, the more the perceived
size of the spider is enlarged. The researchers exposed 57
people who self-identified as having a spider phobia to a live
tarantula on 5 different occasions over a period of 8 weeks.
The tarantulas varied in size from 1 to 6 inches and the person
was asked to approach the tank and guide the spider around
with an 8 inch probe. The participants were asked to rate how
afraid they were feeling on a scale of 0-100 as an index of
subjective units of distress. They also rated their specific fear
of spiders, any panic symptoms, and thoughts about fear reduction
on future spider encounters. Then they estimated the size of the
spiders by drawing a single line on an index card without being
able to see the spider. An analysis showed that the higher ratings
of distress were associated with higher over-estimates on
tarantula size. The study was published in the Journal of
Anxiety Disorders.
The researchers are trying to study why phorias persist
and to identify predictors of relapse to better judge when
treatment is completed. It seems like gradually confronting
your fear is a good way to treat a phobia. If you avoid your
fear, you don't get a chance to learn that it really isn't as
bad as you thought.

How Marijuana Impairs Memory

Summary: A major downside of the medical use of marijuana is the drug's ill effects on working memory, the ability to transiently hold and process information for reasoning, comprehension and learning. Researchers reporting in the March 2 print issue of the Cell Press journal Cell provide new insight into the source of those memory lapses. The answer comes as quite a surprise: Marijuana's major psychoactive ingredient (THC) impairs memory independently of its direct effects on neurons. The side effects stem instead from the drug's action on astroglia, passive support cells long believed to play second fiddle to active neurons.

Critic: Interesting

Impact: This will impact your memory.

Reference: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120301143424.htm

World of Warcraft Boosts Cognitive Functioning in Adults

World of Warcraft Boosts Cognitive Functioning in Adults

Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that playing World of Warcraft (WoW) actually boosts cognitive functioning in older adults, especially those who had poor cognitive ability before playing. The researchers choose WoW because it is a “cognitively challenging game in a socially interactive environment that presents users with novel situations.” They also found that the overall improvement of someone’s cognitive abilities depended on their “baseline cognitive functioning level.” In the study two groups of participants ages 60-77 had their cognitive abilities tested and then where sent home for two weeks, one group played around fourteen hours of WoW each and the other group did not. The group that played WoW showed a much greater increase in cognitive ability compared to the group that did not. Also “those people who needed it most – those who performed the worst on the initial testing – saw the most improvement.”

HA!!! I have been saying that playing WoW is good for you but I meant emotionally not cognitively but I was still right. This means that all those nerds who play WoW now, like me, will be able to think better when we get old, or maybe even right now, which would be nice. This could lead to more people playing WoW and similar games.

Bird Brains Follow the Beat

Summary: By training birds to 'get rhythm', scientists uncover evidence that our capacity to move in time with music may be connected with our ability to learn speech.

Critic: Intersting

Impact: Something to talk about.

Reference: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120224152753.htm