Science Innovations

1 Dose of Antidepressant Changes Brain Connections? Researchers eventually hope to predict who will respond to a drug and who won't By Deepak Kumar THURSDAY, Sept. 18, 2014 Just a single dose of a common antidepressant can quickly alter the way brain cells communicate with one another, early research suggests. The findings, reported online Sept. 18 in Current Biology , are a step toward better understanding the brain's response to widely prescribed antidepressants. Experts said the hope is to eventually be able to predict which people with depression are likely to benefit from a drug -- and which people would fare better with a different option. In a small study of healthy volunteers, researchers found that a single dose of the antidepressant escitalopram (Lexapro) seemed to temporarily reduce "connectivity" among clusters of brain cells in most regions of the brain. The exceptions were two brain areas -- the cerebellum and thalamus -- where t...

It was the daytime soap opera of particle physics. But the final episode of the first season ends in an anticlimax. The Higgs boson's decay into pairs of photons – the strongest yet most confusing clue to the particle's existence – is looking utterly normal after all. Experiments don't detect the Higgs boson directly – instead, its existence is inferred by looking at the particles left behind when it decays. One way it made itself known at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, two years ago was by decaying into pairs of photons. Right at the start, there were so many photons that physicists considered it a "deviant decay" – and a possible window into new laws of physics, which could help explain the mysteries of dark energy and the like. Even as other kinks in the data got ironed out, the excess of photons remained . At the time, physicists speculated that it could be due to a mysterious second Higgs boson being created, ...

Interesting facts Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature is less than 86 degrees. Neurons multiply at a rate 250,000 neurons per minute during early pregnancy. Elephants have the longest pregnancy in the animal kingdom at 22 months. The longest human pregnancy on record is 17 months, 11 days. A female oyster produces 100 million young in her lifetime, the typical hen lays 19 dozen eggs a year, and it is possible for one female cat to be responsible for the birth of 20,736 kittens in four years. Michelle Druggar holds the record for largest human family, having given birth to 17 children. 750ml of blood pumps through your brain every minute which is 15-20% of blood flow from the heart. The human brain is about 75% water. Dragonflies are capable of flying sixty miles per hour, making them one of the fastest insects. This is good since they are in a big hurry, as they only live about twenty-four hours. Flies jump backwards during takeoff. A housefly w...

A study comparing secondhand emissions from e-cigarettes and conventional tobacco ones reveals that although e-cigarettes release much lower levels of most harmful compounds, they actually discharge more nickel and silver than tobacco cigarettes. E-cigarettes are electronic devices that aerosolise nicotine-containing liquids, called e-liquids, for users to inhale. They have been widely marketed as safer alternatives to traditional cigarettes as they do not contain tobacco, and their use has rapidly risen over the last decade. However, little research exists on what effects e-cigarettes have on users or those in the vicinity. Various adverse health effects have been suggested and the proposed benefits of helping smokers to quit are unconfirmed, with available research also highlighting large inconsistencies between different brands. This has left regulators behind and led to confusion for users. E-cigarette use is starting to be restricted in some public areas such as the London Un...

You too can create thousands of new compounds and screen them for a desired activity. That is the promise of a novel approach to building chemical libraries, which only requires simple building blocks in water, without any additional reagents or sample preparation.1 Jeffrey Bode from ETH Zurich and his co-worker Yi-Lin Huang took inspiration both from nature’s non-ribosomal peptide synthesis and from click chemistry. Nature uses specialised non-ribosomal enzymes to create a number of unusual peptides outside the normal paths of protein biosynthesis including, for instance, pharmaceutically relevant peptides like the antibiotic vancomycin. Bode and Huang have now produced these sorts of compounds without cells or enzymes, simply relying on the right chemistry. In 2006, Bode’s group developed a new type of reagentless coupling reaction that produces amide bonds from a reaction between an α-ketoacid and a hydroxylamine.2 In this reaction, carbon dioxide is eliminated as an amine ni...

Cardiac Stem Cell Therapy and the Promise of Heart Regeneration By: - Deepak Kumar & Tarun Kumar Stem cell therapy for cardiac disease is an exciting but highly controversial research area. Strategies such as cell transplantation and reprogramming have demonstrated both intriguing and sobering results. Yet as clinical trials proceed, our incomplete understanding of stem cell behavior is made evident by numerous unresolved matters, such as the mechanisms of cardiomyocyte turnover or the optimal therapeutic strategies to achieve clinical efficacy. In this Perspective, we consider how cardiac stem cell biology has led us into clinical trials, and we suggest that achieving true cardiac regeneration in patients may ultimately require resolution of critical controversies in experimental cardiac regeneration. Introduction The race is on: throughout the world, basic and clinical investigators want to be the first to identify new approaches to regenerate cardiac tissue and ...