In the late 1980s, researchers subjected rats to prolonged sleep deprivation by keeping them on never-stopping conveyor belts, recorded their fluctuating body temperatures, noted a drastic drop in weight, then watched them fall over dead. We've written previously about the health consequences that can accompany sleep loss. And despite controversy regarding how essential sleep is, few will dispute that the sleep urge, the feeling that the eyelids are obliged to close, is a strong desire. New research, a collaboration between laboratories at Tufts University School of Medicine and the ... Read More
When the Immune System Tolls
February 12, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Yale University (studying mice) pinpoint the first line of defense the immune system uses to eliminate the virus that causes North America's most prevalent source of epidemic viral encephalitis. Delivered from the tip of a mosquito's proboscis, West Nile virus binds and ekes its way into cells. Once it is inside a transformation is triggered freeing the virus to usurp host equipment. It sets up shop, replicates, slides through the cell's processing facilities, then hitches a ride with the transportation system -- out and on to the next. The ... Read More
Mice in the Ivory Tower
February 4, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Focusing on 10 years of research carried out in mice, Yong-Seok Lee and Alcino Silva in a Nature Reviews Neuroscience article discuss how some mutations (and there are a surprising number of them) heighten cognitive function. Lee and Silva, from the Departments of Neurobiology, Psychology, Psychiatry and the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, call it "the beginning of a fundamental new approach in the study of enhanced cognition." The way the paradigm generally works: scientists mutate, delete or add to the mouse genomic milieu, then note the affect. The results, much of the time, are ... Read More
Puzzling Together Muscle Structure
January 29, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
As you lift your coffee cup to your mouth, you might not think about the order in which the proteins within and between the membranes of your muscles are organized. Or how some particular proteins like to hang in a spot designated for such clustering. But without an intricate linking pattern-a literal sidling up or binding into a cluster forming complex, the protein in your muscles would be ... I want to say, jelly-like. Not the jelly that's on your thighs (that's fat), but a soft mush that you won't find in a tough game meat. Yes, much of the toughness in meat (muscles), we can ... Read More
Nuts with Allergies
January 27, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
For most mice the only thing deadly about the peanut is when peanut butter is smeared at the base of a spring trap. But mice in the laboratory of the innovative Paul Bryce, at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, experience a different kind of discontent after nibbling the tasty extract. Nose scratching, mouth swelling, shaking and death are some symptoms that mice with a peanut allergy display. While these fuzzy omnivores generally don't develop food allergies, the Chicago-based research team was able to induce an allergic reaction by using a toxin derived from a ... Read More