Mysteries of the brain can be revealed using an MRS scan.

A technique to watch cells sprout within a living brain is unveiled on Nov. 11 that could aid the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of depression, Parkinson’s disease, tumours, dementia and a host of other disorders.
For the first time, scientists have identified a way to detect immature cells that go on to develop into neurons and other nervous system cells in the living human brain using a common type of scanner called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), which focuses on the chemistry rather than the structure of the brain, Telegraph.co.uk reported.
Earlier lab studies showed that, in select brain regions, these immature cells, called progenitor cells, persist into adulthood and how their development into new brain cells, called neurogenesis, is disrupted in disorders ranging from depression and schizophrenia to Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and cancer.
Until now, however, there has been no practical way to monitor neurogenesis in the living human brain, in a projected led by Dr Mirjana Maletic-Savatic of the State University of New York, SUNY, Stony Brook and her colleagues, notably Dr Grigori Enikolopov of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York state.
“The ability to track these cells in living people would be a major breakthrough in understanding brain development in children and continued maturation of the adult brain.
It could also be a very useful tool for research aimed at influencing progenitor cells to restore or maintain brain health,“ says Dr Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke which helped to fund the work.
Thanks to a method to identify a tell tale signal in the living brain, developed by Dr Petar Djuric of SUNY, they found they could use the scanner to distinguish the progenitor cells from embryonic mice from other brain cells, from nerve cells to other kinds called astrocyte and oligodendrocytes.
Next, they studied the immature cells during development, showing how the signal decreased over time, while the levels of other markers common in neurons and astrocytes rose.
The team then gave adult mice a form of electrical stimulation that increases the amount of nerve growth in the brain. They found that the marker they had identified increased significantly after the stimulation, suggesting new progenitor cells were forming.
The technique was used on healthy people. They found major differences in the concentration of the marker, and thus the immature cells, between the hippocampus, a structure involved with memory, and the cortex, which plays a key role in consciousness.
They also took images of the brains of children, adolescents, and adults and found that the marker decreased with age. Dr Enikolopov says the method may turn out to be important for medicine.
For example, researchers might study people with depression to see if neurogenesis correlates with alterations in depression or schizophrenia.
The technique might also be used to study changes that occur in traumatic brain injury, stroke, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s disease.

Stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients could have their memories repaired through stem cell therapy, scientists say.
Researchers believe their research opens up the possibility of new brain cells being grown to reverse memory loss in millions of people who suffer from dementia and brain injuries, Scotsman.com said.
Tests showed stem cells, the body’s basic building blocks used for repair and growth, can turn into new brain cells and produce a chemical that protects existing damaged ones.
Scientists at the University of California say their findings, highlighted in this week’s New Scientist, provide hope that new drugs could be developed to repair memory damage caused by disease and injury.
Prof Frank LaFerla, of the University of California, said: “Our research provides clear evidence that stem cells can reverse memory loss.
“This gives us hope that stem cells someday could help restore brain function in humans suffering from a wide range of diseases and injuries that impair memory function.“
The researchers genetically engineered mice with damaged cells in the hippocampus Ð a part of the brain which is vital to memory function.
They then injected nerve system stem cells from newborn mice into the brains of the damaged mice. Tests showed their memories recovered within three months.
By staining the stem cells the researchers were able to track them in the brains of the mice. A small proportion turned into brain cells while the rest appeared to be supporting injured cells by producing beneficial chemicals called neurotrophins.
Clive Ballard, the director of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “This study is a major advance which demonstrates the potential of stem cell therapies to improve memory function for people with stroke and Alzheimer’s disease.“

Using an existing technique in a novel way, Cornell physicist Keith Schwab and colleagues at Cornell and Boston University have made the scanning tunneling microscope (STM)--which can image individual atoms on a surface--at least 100 times faster.
The simple adaptation, based on a method of measurement currently used in nano-electronics, could also give STMs significant new capabilities--including the ability to sense temperatures in spots as small as a single atom, and to detect changes in position as tiny as 0.00000000000001 meters: a distance 30,000 times smaller than the diameter of an atom, ScienceDaily reported.
The STM uses quantum tunneling, or the ability of electrons to “tunnel“ across a barrier, to detect changes in the distance between a needlelike probe and a conducting surface. Researchers apply a tiny voltage to the sample and move the probe--a simple platinum-iridium wire snipped to end in a point just one atom wide--just a few angstroms (10ths of a nanometer) over the sample’s surface. By measuring changes in current as electrons tunnel between the sample and the probe, they can reconstruct a map of the surface topology down to the atomic level.
Since its invention in the 1980s, the STM has enabled major discoveries in fields from semiconductor technology to nano-electronics.
But while current can change in a nanosecond, measurements with the STM are painfully slow. And the limiting factor is not in the signal itself: It’s in the basic electronics involved in analyzing it. A theoretical STM could collect data as fast as electrons can tunnel--at a rate of one gigahertz, or 1 billion cycles per second of bandwidth. But a typical STM is slowed down by the capacitance, or energy storage, in the cables that make up its readout circuitry--to about one kilohertz (1,000 cycles per second) or less.
Researchers have tried a variety of complex remedies. But in the end, said Schwab, an associate professor of physics at Cornell, the solution was surprisingly simple. By adding an external source of radio frequency (RF) waves and sending a wave into the STM through a simple network, the researchers showed that it’s possible to detect the resistance at the tunneling junction--and hence the distance between the probe and sample surface--based on the characteristics of the wave that reflects back to the source.
The technique, called reflectometry, uses the standard cables as paths for high-frequency waves, which aren’t slowed down by the cables’ capacitance.
“There are six orders of magnitude between the fundamental limit in frequency and where people are operating,“ said Schwab. With the RF adaptation, speeds increase by a factor of between 100 and 1,000. “Our hope is that we can produce more or less video images, as opposed to a scan that takes forever.“

A tiny “electronic nose“ that MIT researchers have engineered with a novel inkjet printing method could be used to detect hazards including carbon monoxide, harmful industrial solvents and explosives.
Led by MIT professor Harry Tuller, the researchers have devised a way to print thin sensor films onto a microchip, a process that could eventually allow for mass production of highly sensitive gas detectors, ScienceDaily reported.
“Mass production would be an enormous breakthrough for this kind of gas sensing technology,“ said Tuller, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), who is presenting the research Oct. 30 at the Composites at Lake Louise Conference in Alberta, Canada.
The prototype sensor, created by Tuller, postdoctoral fellow Kathy Sahner and graduate student Woo Chul Jung, members of MIT’s Electroceramics Group in MSE, consists of thin layers of hollow spheres made of the ceramic material barium carbonate, which can detect a range of gases.
Using a specialized inkjet print head, tiny droplets of barium carbonate or other gas-sensitive materials can be rapidly deposited onto a surface, in any pattern the researchers design.
The miniature, low-cost detector could be used in a variety of settings, from an industrial workplace to an air-conditioning system to a car’s exhaust system, according to Tuller. For a sensor to be useful, it must be able to distinguish between gases. For example, a sensor at an airport would need to know the difference between a toxic chemical and perfume, Tuller said. To achieve this, sensors should have an array of films that each respond differently to different gases. This is similar to the way the human sense of smell works, Tuller explained.
“The way we distinguish between coffee’s and fish’s odor is not that we have one sensor designed to detect coffee and one designed to detect fish, but our nose contains arrays of sensors sensitive to various chemicals. Over time, we train ourselves to know that a certain distribution of vapors corresponds to coffee,“ he said.

Curvier women may have smart children because hip fat contains polyunsaturated fatty acids critical for the development of the fetus’s brain.
Using data from the US National Center for Health Statistics, William Lassek at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found a child’s performance in cognition tests was linked to their mother’s waist-hip ratio, a proxy for how much fat she stores on her hips, NewScientist.com said.
Children whose mothers had wide hips and a low waist-hip ratio scored highest, leading Lassek and Gaulin to suggest that fetuses benefit from a rich supply of useful fatty acids.

Caffeine could stop skin cancers spreading by stopping cells dividing, or by acting as an antioxidant.

Drinking coffee can cut the risk of skin cancer by more than a third, scientists say.
Researchers found that people who drank more than six cups of caffeinated coffee a day reduced their chances of developing the most common form of skin cancer by 35 percent, while those who drank two or three cups were 12 percent less likely to have the disease.
Scientists believe caffeine could stop skin cancers spreading by stopping cells dividing, or by acting as an antioxidant, Telegraph.co.uk reported.
Cases of skin cancer have quadrupled for men and tripled for women over the past 25 years in Britain, partly because of the increase in holidays in the sun.
Around 75,000 cases of non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC), the milder form of the disease, are diagnosed each year. Dr Ernest Abel, whose study was published in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, said: “The decreased prevalence in non-melanoma skin cancer associated with daily consumption of caffeinated coffee was dose-related and consistent with other studies.
“Among the possible explanations for caffeine’s protective effect on NMSC are an antioxidant effect and/or inhibition of DNA synthesis and cell division.“
Dr Abel, of Wayne State University, Detroit, and colleagues compared rates of NMSC among more than 77,300 white women aged 50 and over. They excluded women of other ethnic origins as they reported much lower rates of the disease.
The researchers said the findings should apply equally to men and women of all ages. Drinking decaffeinated coffee had no effect on participants’ chances of developing skin cancer.

Among successful weight losers, those who report emotional eating are more likely to regain.

Emotional eaters--people who eat when they are lonely or blue--tend to lose the least amount of weight and have the hardest time keeping it off, US researchers said.
According to Reuters, they said the study may explain why so many people who lose weight gain it all back.
“We found that the more people report eating in response to thoughts and feelings, the less weight they lost,“ Heather Niemeier, an obesity researcher at The Miriam Hospital and The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, said in a statement.
“Amongst successful weight losers, those who report emotional eating are more likely to regain,“ said Niemeier, whose study appears in the journal Obesity.
The study included 286 overweight men and women who were participating in a behavioral weight loss program.
A second group consisted of more than 3,300 adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least one year.
Niemeier and her team analyzed responses to an eating inventory questionnaire.
They focused on people who ate because of external influences, such as people who eat too much at parties, and people who ate because of internal influences, such as feeling lonely or as a reward.
What they found is that the more a person ate for internal reasons, the less weight they lost over time.
“Our results suggest that we need to pay more attention to eating triggered by emotions or thoughts as they clearly play a significant role in weight loss,“ Niemeier said.

Somewhere out there, astronomers knew the sun had another long-lost relative aimlessly drifting through the Milky Way. Now they’ve found it.
Although a happy reunion is unlikely, as the star HIP 56948 is about 200 light-years away, it is now considered to be the best “solar twin“ out of four known candidates.
The wayward star challenges the idea that our backyard star has a unique composition, as it has a similarly low quantity of the element lithium--a lightweight byproduct of the fusion reactions that power stars, Space.com said.
Astronomers Jorge Melendez of the Australian National University and Ivan Ramirez of the University of Texas at Austin discovered the new star with a telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. The mid-sized star is one of many in the Draco the dragon constellation and may be a billion years older than the sun, which is middle-aged at 4.6 billion years.
Three other solar twins were previously proposed: 18 Scorpius, HD 98618 and HIP 100963. While similar to the sun in many ways, spectrographic analysis revealed that their lithium contents are dramatically higher.
Because of those observations, astronomers wondered if the sun’s low amount of lithium was unique. The newfound twin now shows that it isn’t.
Searches for solar twins are important, the astronomers said, because the sun is used as a baseline for many other types of studies. But our own solar power plant is too close and too bright to study like distant stars.
The solar twins discovered at McDonald should help astronomers study the chemical compositions of stars and back theoretical models of our sun’s stellar insides and evolution with real observations.