Nobel Winner’s Stem Cells to Be Tested in Eye Malady in 2013

Stem cells derived from a mouse’s skin won Shinya Yamanaka the Nobel Prize. Now researchers in Japan are seeking to use his pioneering technology for an even greater prize: restoring sight.

Scientists at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe plan to use so-called induced pluripotent stem cells in a trial among patients with macular degeneration, a disease in which the retina becomes damaged, resulting in loss of vision, Yamanaka told reporters in San Francisco.

Companies including Pfizer Inc. (PFE) are already planning trials of stem cells derived from human embryos. The Japanese study will be the first to use a technology that mimics the power of embryonic cells while avoiding the ethical controversy that accompanies them.

“The work in that area looks very encouraging,” John B. Gurdon, 79, a professor at the University of Cambridge who shared the Nobel with Yamanaka, said in an interview in London.

Yamanaka and Gurdon shared the 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million) award for experiments 50 years apart that showed that mature cells retain in latent form all the DNA they had as immature stem cells, and that they can be returned to that potent state, offering the potential for a new generation of therapies against hard-to-treat diseases such as macular degeneration.

Infants show greater unease towards computer-morphed faces when shown ‘half-mother’ images

When interacting with robots or animations with unnatural-looking faces, many people report a sense of unease. The face seems familiar yet alien, leaving the brain uncertain whether it is definitely human. To make robots more acceptable, it is necessary to understand the roots of these emotional reactions. Research from Japan has now shown that these reactions may begin in early infancy.

Yoshi-Taka Matsuda and colleagues at the Japan Science and Technology Agency, Saitama, and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, together with scientists from The University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, studied the reactions of infants to computer-morphed photographs of faces. They showed that this unease, known as the uncanny valley effect, may begin as young as nine months, but only when the morphed image is partly developed from photographs of a familiar person—in this case, their mother. “Infants like both familiarity and novelty in objects,” explains Matsuda. “We wondered how their preference might change when they encountered objects that are intermediate between familiarity and novelty.”

The researchers used an eye-tracking system to record where and for how long the infants viewed the images. They found that the infants preferred looking at the photos of their mothers than the ‘half-mother’ morphed faces, but there was no significant difference between the times they spent looking at real and morphed photos of strangers.

Study finds that like human children, vervet monkeys learn by copying others

The new study, by Professor Andrew Whiten and Dr Erica van de Waal, shows that vervet monkeys learn by copying others in their group, as human children do.

The research found that monkeys were able to discover new techniques for obtaining food by mimicking the behaviour of others within their group. Not only that, but the same techniques then spread to other group members in the same way.

In four different groups, three different techniques spread, supporting the theory that these methods were passed on rather than learned individually.

The researchers believe vervet monkeys, like human children, are shaped by copying others and in this way come to be members of their cultural group.

Professor Whiten, Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, commented, “Our research is revealing that primates other than humans share some of our own reliance on doing as others do in our group.”

More than Just ‘Zoning Out’ – Psychological Science Examines the Cognitive Processes Underlying Mind Wandering

It happens innocently enough: One minute you’re sitting at your desk, working on a report, and the next minute you’re thinking about how you probably need to do laundry and that you want to try the new restaurant down the street. Mind wandering is a frequent and common occurrence. And while mind wandering in certain situations – in class, for example – can be counterproductive, some research suggests that mind wandering isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

New research published in the journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores mind wandering in various contexts, examining how mind wandering is related to cognitive processes involved in working memory and executive control.

Reducing visual clutter may help Alzheimer’s patients

It’s a finding that could help Alzheimer’s patients better cope with their condition.

Psychologists at the University of Toronto and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have shown that the inability to recognize once-familiar faces and objects may have as much to do with difficulty perceiving their distinct features as it does with the capacity to recall from memory.

A study published in the October issue of Hippocampus suggests that memory impairments for people diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease may in part be due to problems with determining the differences between similar objects.

The research contributes to growing evidence that a part of the brain once believed to support memory exclusively – the medial temporal lobe – also plays a role in object perception.

Could Stem Cells Treat Autism? Newly Approved Study May Tell

Autism researchers have been given the go-ahead by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to launch a small study in children with autism that evaluates whether a child’s own umbilical cord blood may be an effective treatment.

Thirty children with the disorder, aged 2 to 7, will receive injections of their own stem cells from umbilical cord blood banked by their parents after their births. All of the cord blood comes from the Cord Blood Registry, the world’s largest stem cell bank.

Scientists at Sutter Neuroscience Institute, in Sacramento, Calif., said the placebo-controlled study will evaluate whether the stem cell therapy helps improve language and behavior in the youngsters.

There is anecdotal evidence that stem cell infusions may have a benefit in other conditions such as cerebral palsy, said lead study investigator Dr. Michael Chez, director of pediatric neurology at the institute.

"We’re hoping we’ll see in the autism population a group of patients that also responds," Chez said. Other autism and stem cell research is going on abroad, but this study is the first to use a child’s own cord blood stem cells.

Chez said the study will involve only patients whose autism is not linked to a genetic syndrome or brain injury, and all of the children will eventually receive the stem cells.

Study links hippocampus with unconscious bias

The hippocampus is an area of the brain known to be one in which links between memories are formed, but until now it was not known that this brain region is involved in steering the brain towards making particular choices over others when faced with new decisions for which we have no previous experiences to draw on.

In a paper published in the journal Science, research psychologists G. Elliott Wimmer and Daphna Shohamy of Columbia University in New York report on their study, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of regions of the brain. In the study, they asked 31 volunteers to complete a three-part task while in the machine. Throughout the task their brain activity was determined by the fMRI.

The results suggest that several areas of the brain are involved in evaluating new stimuli and associating them with previous memories, but the process is strongly associated with the hippocampus.

The findings could have application, for example, in the design of new products, which could incorporate aspects of earlier products (such as color, logo or font) to stimulate the association and produce an unconscious bias towards those products over other equally new products.

The findings also suggest that misguided biases such as racism could stem from unconscious associations. (Guilt by association is a commonly known bias.) These biases have long been known, but the current study clearly shows their association with the hippocampus.

Purkinje neurons (yellow) generated from embryonic stem cells integrate into the cerebellum (red) when transplanted into the fetal mouse brain.

© 2010 K. Muguruma et al.