Syndicated from Discover Magazine Mind and Brain News.

Discover Magazine Mind and Brain

1. In Flies, a Prion-Like Protein Helps Maintain Long-Term Memories | 80beats
   February 8, 2012, 1:08 pm
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   What’s the News: When prions or amyloids make the news, it’s usually because they cause mad cow disease or Alzheimer’s—prions, after all, cause any proteins they touch to become as misfolded as they are, and amyloids, which are large clumps of wadded-together proteins, can jam the workings of cells.

   But a new study in Cell suggests that a prion-like protein that forms amyloids has a normal, vital function in the brain. Far from being a memory destroyer, this protein, called CPEB, is necessary for long-term memory in fruit flies.

   How the Heck:

   To see where the protein resides in the brain, the researchers added a fluorescent tag to the fruit fly version of CPEB, which is called Orb2A. They observed that Orb2A formed amyloids at synapses, the junctions between neurons—a promising sign that it could be involved in memory. To see whether Orb2A was actually necessary for memory, the researchers created fly mutants with a defective version of Orb2A. A single amino acid was changed, but that was enough to prevent the formation of amyloids. It was also enough to disrupt the flies’ long-term memory, the team found. As a test of memory, flies had been ...

   
   

2. How Did LEGO Become More About Limits Than Possibilities? | DISCOVER
   February 3, 2012, 2:30 pm
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   No matter what you do with it, it'll still look like Hogwarts.

   Rip open that new LEGO set and your mind races at the possibilities! A simple repertoire of piece types, and yet you can build a ninja boat, a three-wheeled race car, a pineapple pizza, a spotted lion… The possibilities are limited only by your creativity and imagination. “Combine and create!”—that was the implicit war cry for LEGOs.

   So how, I wonder, did LEGO so severely lose its way? LEGO now fills the niche that model airplanes once did when I was a kid, an activity whose motto would be better described as “Follow the instructions!” The sets kids receive as gifts today are replete with made-to-order piece types special to each set, useful in one particular spot, and often useless elsewhere. And the sets are designed for constructing some particular thing (a Geonosian Starfighter, a Triceratops Trapper, etc.), and you—the parent—can look forward to spending hours helping them through the thorough yet thoroughly exhausting pages.

   LEGO appears to be doing very well for itself, and there’s no shame in helping to revolutionize model-building (and there’s an elegance to snapping together one’s models rather than gluing them together). But one has to wonder whether, at some deep philosophical level, the new LEGOs really are LEGOs at all, as they’re no longer the paragon of creative construction they once were and with which they’re still associated.

   In fact, as I was bemoaning my kids’ LEGOs with the Guardian's Roger Highfield (and later with WIRED's Samuel Arbesman), it struck me that I have such data on LEGOs...

   
   

3. Alzheimer’s Spreads Like a Virus From Neuron to Neuron, Studies Show | 80beats
   February 3, 2012, 1:30 pm
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   A protein tangle in an Alzheimer’s-afflicted neuron

   Exactly how Alzheimer’s disease proliferates through the brain, overtaking one region after another, has eluded scientists. As the disease progresses, tau—a malformed protein that forms snarls and tangles inside neurons—shows up in more and more brain areas. Researchers have wondered whether tau, and the disease, are working their way out from a single area of origin or mounting numerous, distinct attacks on vulnerable parts of the brain. Two new studies in mice provide strong support for the first idea: Tau seems to pass from affected cells to their neighbors, spreading much the same way a virus or bacteria infection would.

   The studies—one recently published in PLoS ONE, the other forthcoming in Neuron—used mice genetically engineered to produce abnormal human tau protein in the entorhinal cortex, the tiny bit of brain tissue where Alzheimer’s first appears in most patients. Since those cells, but not others, were equipped to produce human tau, any tau that showed up elsewhere in the brain could be traced back to the entorhinal cortex. The researchers watched and waited, and found that the tau proteins spread through neural circuits out ...

   
   

4. Does a Chinese Boy Really Have “Cat Eyes” That See in the Dark? | 80beats
   February 2, 2012, 11:23 pm
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   The strangest thing about this Chinese boy’s light blue eyes is not their color. It’s the purported fact that he can see in the dark. His eyes are just like cat eyes, glowing blue-green when you shine a light in them, says this clip from China’s state-run English TV channel. The boy can catch crickets in the dark without a flashlight and even completes a writing test in a pitch-black stairwell. True, or too good to be?

   Natalie Wolchover at Life’s Little Mysteries has rounded up some experts and their collective reaction seems to be, “Hmm…” (It doesn’t help that this video has been posted on YouTube under the name, “Alien Hybrid or Starchild Discovered in China? 2012.”) One possibility they consider is whether the boy has a mutation that produced something like a tapetum lucidum, an extra layer of tissue that helps cats see in the dark. James Reynolds, a pediatric ophthalmologist at State University of New York in Buffalo, puts a stop to that idea:

   [T]here is no single genetic mutation that could produce a fully formed and functioning tapetum lucidum, Reynolds explained; such an ability would require multiple mutations, which wouldn’t occur all at once. Evolution happens incrementally, ...

   
   

5. Abnormal brain structures hint at poor self-control and vulnerability to drug addiction | Not Exactly Rocket Science
   February 2, 2012, 7:00 pm
   - Our lives are full of instances where have to hold ourselves back. We stop ourselves from eating that tempting slice of cake to avoid putting on weight. We bite our tongues to avoid insulting our friends. We slam on the brakes to avoid killing a pedestrian.  To quote Yoda: “Control! Control! You must learn control.” [...]
6. The Strange German Disease Called “Kevinism”: Can a Lame Name Mess Up Your Life? | Discoblog
   February 1, 2012, 1:33 pm
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    Young German Kevins are a few decades behind the U.S. trend.

   Another day, another crazy German noun: Kevinismus, which basically means, “You’re named Kevin? Sucks to be you.” According to a study of interactions on the German dating site eDarling, online daters don’t even bother to click on the profiles of users with names that seem foreign and gauche to German ears, like Kevin. The authors suggest that this online neglect due to their unpopular names mirrors lifelong social neglect, which is also responsible for making Kevins smoke more, get less education, and have lower self-esteem.

   That all sounds quite dire, but we’re gonna have to bust out the “correlation does not imply causation” card here. While exotic baby names may seem like a disease that most commonly afflicts celebrities, in Germany it’s really about the other end of the economic spectrum. An article on Kevinism [note: this article contains a lot of German] in Die Welt quotes sociologist Jürgen Gerhards, who asserts that Anglo-American names (Mandy, Justin, Angelina to name a few more) are a lower-class phenomenon. It seems that no one has actually crunched the numbers to prove that, but jokes like “Only druggies and ...

   
   

7. Big Idea: Seeing Crime Before It Happens | DISCOVER
   January 23, 2012, 5:00 pm
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   This past summer, at an undisclosed location in a northeastern metropolis, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was trying to predict the future. There were no psychics or crystal balls, just a battery of sensors designed to determine human intention through the subtlest of changes in heart rate, gaze, and other physiological markers.

   Together, the sensors are called Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, a $20 million federal project that aims to highlight airport passengers whose bodies betray hostile intentions. In theory, fast has the potential to detect terrorists in the final minutes before they act, but critics warn that the system may have other consequences, such as flagging innocent travelers through false positives while letting some with ill intent sneak by through false negatives. The DHS, for its part, maintains that fast is merely improving on a far older and more fallible crime predictor: human judgment.

   About 3,000 DHS officers already roam the nation’s airports scanning for suspicious behavior and facial expressions in a program called Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques, or SPOT. The automated fast system is intended to supplement SPOT by catching signals that are undetectable to the naked eye. fast is not designed to replace the decision-making of human screeners, but government officials hope it will eventually be able to passively scan airport passengers and single out those worth pulling aside for additional screening...

   
   

8. Primed by expectations – why a classic psychology experiment isn’t what it seemed | Not Exactly Rocket Science
   January 18, 2012, 10:00 pm
   - In the early 20th century, the world was captivated by a mathematical horse called Clever Hans. He could apparently perform basic arithmetic, keep track of a calendar and tell the time. When his owner, Wilhelm von Osten, asked him a question, Hans would answer by tapping out the correct number with his hoof. Eventually, it [...]
9. Go Ahead and Gossip—Science Says It’s the Right Thing to Do | Discoblog
   January 18, 2012, 6:58 pm
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   He did what? Innnnteresting…

   Thorough scientific study has revealed that lots of supposed vices can have surprising upsides: alcohol, sex, caffeine. Thanks to UC Berkeley researchers, we can now add another so-bad-but-oh-so-good habit to the list: Gossip, their new study suggests, can be a selfless act of public service.

   Surreptitiously passing along the news that someone has behaved badly—what’s technically called “prosocial gossip”—can relieve stress, as well as warn others to regard the rule-breaker with a wary eye, the researchers say. (The study didn’t look directly at other forms of gossip—rumormongering, telling lies, anything said to a confessional cam on reality TV—so make of that what you will.)

   In one experiment, the scientists found that people’s heart rates spiked when they saw one of two people playing a game cheating, but calmed again when they had the chance to jot a note, middle school-style, to the next competitor about what they’d seen. “Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip,” one of the researchers said in a statement—scientific confirmation of that scratching-a-lingering-itch feeling of relief we get from clucking our tongues ...

   
   

10. Research on Quebec’s Rare Brain Disease Could Help Unravel the Common Ones | 80beats
    January 17, 2012, 7:56 pm
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    Artist’s rendering of a mitochondrian, the energy-producing
    cellular structure affected by ARSACS

    Scientists have pinpointed the cause of a rare, fatal neurodegenerative disorder called ARSACS, or autosomal recessive spastic ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay. The disease is due to defects in neuron’s mitochondria, the bit of biological machinery that generates energy for the cell—a structure known to be affected in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological diseases, as well.

    ARSACS was first observed in the descendants of a small group of 17th century French settlers who made their homes near the Charlevoix and Saguenay rivers in what is now Quebec, and has since been seen worldwide. But its incidence remains unusually high in that particular French Canadian community, with 1 in 1,500 to 2,000 people developing ARSACS and 1 in 23 people unaffected genetic carriers of the disease.

    The first symptoms of ARSACS appear in early childhood, often as a two- or three-year-old learns to walk, a skill that—because the disease primarily affects the cerebellum, the brain’s motor control center—those suffering from ARSACS never master. As the disease progresses, it leads to muscle weakness, slurred speech, and difficulty coordinating or controlling movement. People with ARSACS ...

    
    

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