The mechanism of action of cocaine

Cocaine modifies the action of dopamine in the brain. The dopamine rich areas of the brain are the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens and the caudate nucleus – these areas are collectively known as the brain’s ‘reward pathway’. Cocaine binds to dopamine re-uptake transporters on the pre-synaptic membranes of dopaminergic neurones. This binding inhibits the removal of dopamine from the synaptic cleft and its subsequent degradation by monoamine oxidase in the nerve terminal. Dopamine remains in the synaptic cleft and is free to bind to its receptors on the post synaptic membrane, producing further nerve impulses. This increased activation of the dopaminergic reward pathway leads to the feelings of euphoria and the ‘high’ associated with cocaine use.

New Model Synapse Could Shed Light on Disorders Such as Epilepsy and Anxiety

A new way to study the role of a critical neurotransmitter in disorders such as epilepsy, anxiety, insomnia, depression, schizophrenia, and alcohol addiction has been developed by a group of scientists led by Gong Chen, an associate professor of biology at Penn State University.

The new method involves molecularly engineering a model synapse — a structure through which a nerve cell send signals to another cell. This model synapse can precisely control a variety of receptors for the neurotransmitter called GABA, which is important in brain chemistry. The research, which will be published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry on 10 August 2012, opens the door to the possibility of creating safer and more-efficient drugs that target GABA receptors and that cause fewer side effects.

UC San Diego Team Aims to Broaden Researcher Access to Protein Simulation

Using just an upgraded desktop computer equipped with a relatively inexpensive graphics processing card, a team of computer scientists and biochemists at the University of California, San Diego, has developed advanced GPU accelerated software and demonstrated for the first time that this approach can sample biological events that occur on the millisecond timescale.

These results have the potential to bring millisecond scale sampling, now available only on a multi-million dollar supercomputer, to all researchers, and could significantly impact the study of protein dynamics with key implications for improved drug and biocatalyst development.

Soon, space robots like Curiosity may evolve even greater intelligence

After more than eight years of planning and a 254-day journey through the cold emptiness of space, NASA’s Curiosity rover has finally landed on Mars.  Curiosity is the most advanced mobile robotic science lab to ever explore another planet and thus this is an exciting moment for NASA and the world.

But robotics and artificial intelligence continue to advance at an exponential rate. As we look towards the future of space exploration in the next decade and beyond, we can expect the next generation of space robots to be orders of magnitude more powerful and intelligent, while at the same time costing a fraction of Curiosity’s $2.5 billion price tag.

The Algorithm That Finds Connections Scientists Never See

Here’s a thought experiment for you: 
If someone told you you had to drink just one kind of alcoholic beverage for the rest of your life, and you wanted that life to be long and healthy, what would you pick? Wine, right? After all, you’ve probably heard about the scientific studies showing that drinking wine is associated with better health in general, and a longer life span in particular. Give jocks their beer and lushes their hard liquor; the drink of robust, long-lived people is wine.

But you have probably not heard about another study, released during the media dead zone just after Christmas last year, that questioned wine’s reputed health effects. Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin examined a group of Americans aged 55 to 65 and compared their drinking habits with how they fared over the course of 20 years. The scientists found that moderate drinkers lived longer than abstainers, and that wine drinkers did indeed live longer on average than people who consumed other kinds of alcohol. But they also found that wine drinkers were less likely to smoke, to be male, and to be sedentary; all of these are factors associated with dying earlier.

The Stanford-Texas team concluded that drinking wine might be an indicator of a healthy lifestyle rather than the cause of that good health. If so, wine is the drink of the healthy, all right—the already healthy.

That finding highlights what is arguably science’s greatest enemy, the confounder. Science is at heart a reductionist process: Take a complicated system, identify various factors that affect the system, and measure the effect of each factor one at a time. Confounders are devilish hidden connections that make it more difficult to isolate the factors you want to measure, like the fact that wine drinkers tend also to be nonsmokers…

Epileptic Fits Are Like Raging Thunderstorms: Astrocytes Help Reduce Long-Term Damage, Surprising New Research Shows

In the journal Experimental Neurology, the scientists report the beneficial effects of so-called astrocytes, a certain type of glial cells. They get their name from the Greek word for glue, as it was long thought that these cells simply hold the nerve cells together and provided them with nutrients. In the case of epilepsy, the prevalent opinion was that their reaction to a seizure would actually damage the brain. The researchers from Freiburg disagree. In fact, they say, astrocytes help to reduce long-term damage brought upon by epileptic fits.

The team discovered the positive effects of astrocytes in mice, in which epileptic states can be selectively triggered. If the scientists injected mice with a specific protein to activate the astrocytes prior to an epilepsy-inducing insult, fewer nerve cells died in the wake of the seizure. Other pathological changes that would usually occur in the brain were likewise significantly reduced. The astrocytes’ protective effect lasted for many days after their activation. When the researchers measured the rodents’ brain activity, they likewise found fewer signs that are typical for a brain suffering from epilepsy. However, the authors report that the astrocytes had to be already activated before seizures were elicited. Activating them afterwards, on the other hand, did not lead to a protective effect.

Further studies will have to demonstrate that astrocytes have this protective influence all over the brain. According to Haas, who is also a member of Freiburg’s new cluster of excellence BrainLinks-BrainTools, their findings suggest that a timely activation of astrocytes could offer an effective protection from long-term damage to the brain.

Having an operation?

Don’t be surprised if the surgeon performs it from the room next door.

Indeed, he could even operate from halfway across the world — because these doctors are increasingly using robots to treat disease and injury.

‘These are incredibly exciting times,’ says Brian Davies, emeritus professor of medical robotics at Imperial College London and inventor of the surgical robot, which in April 1991 became the first in the world to remove tissue from a living human.

‘Robots can work much more accurately than human hands, which is fantastic now that we are seeking minimally invasive surgery through a tiny incision where precision is key,’ says Professor Davies.

Of course, the surgeon still performs the operation, but uses the robot to see inside the body, or operates it using a joystick or console so it’s like a spare arm — but without the human hand’s natural shake.

‘Medical robots are not like the sci-fi images of autonomous humanoids; they are sophisticated computer-assisted instruments that remain always under the surgeon’s control,’ says Dr Patrick Finlay, founder of medical robotics firm MediMaton.

Read more: The rise of Robodoc: They can operate on everything from your heart to creaky knees - but would you put your life into the hands of a robot surgeon?

Social Network Size Linked to Brain Size

As humans, we aren’t born with formidable armaments or defenses, nor are we the strongest, fastest, or biggest species, yet despite this we are amazingly successful. For a long time it was thought that this success was because our enlarged brains allows each of us to be smarter than our competitors: better at abstract thinking, better with tools and better at adapting our behavior to those of our prey and predators. But are these really the most significant skills our brains provide us with?

Another possibility is that we are successful because we can form long-lasting relationships with many others in diverse and flexible ways, and that this, combined with our native intelligence, explains why homo sapiens came to dominate the planet. In every way from teaching our young to the industrial division of labour we are a massively co-operative species that relies on larger and more diverse networks of relationships than any other species.

How digital culture is rewiring our brains

Our brains are superlatively evolved to adapt to our environment: a process known as neuroplasticity. The connections between our brain cells will be shaped, strengthened and refined by our individual experiences. It is this personalisation of the physical brain, driven by unique interactions with the external world, that arguably constitutes the biological basis of each mind, so what will happen to that mind if the external world changes in unprecedented ways, for example, with an all-pervasive digital technology?

A recent survey in the US showed that more than half of teenagers aged 13 to 17 spend more than 30 hours a week, outside school, using computers and other web-connected devices. If their environment is being transformed for so much of the time into a fast-paced and highly interactive two-dimensional space, the brain will adapt, for good or ill. Professor Michael Merzenich, of the University of California, San Francisco, gives a typical neuroscientific perspective.

”There is a massive and unprecedented difference in how [digital natives’] brains are plastically engaged in life compared with those of average individuals from earlier generations and there is little question that the operational characteristics of the average modern brain substantially differ,” he says.