California
Nearly 40 years ago scientists were startled to discover that the eye, far from being a still camera, actually has cells that respond to movement. Moreover, these cells are specialized to respond to movement in one direction only, such as left to right or right to left. Now, in a paper in this week's issue of the journal Nature, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, have finally detailed the cellular circuit responsible for motion detection in the eye's retina.
UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute researchers have identified 10 key factors to recovery from schizophrenia. The findings open opportunities to develop new treatment and rehabilitation programs and to reshape the negative expectations of many doctors, patients and their families. Based on analyses of the professional literature and the cases of 23 schizophrenia patients who successfully returned to work or school with their symptoms under control, the findings appear in the November 2002 edition of the International Review of Psychiatry.
A substantially higher death rate and inability to recover from kidney failure was documented in a study of 552 critically ill, hospitalized patients who were given diuretics, the most commonly used therapy for kidney failure. Published in the November 27, 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the study suggests that physicians treating patients in acute kidney failure should reassess the use of diuretics, particularly when there is a limited response in terms of increased urine output.
NASA has awarded the California Institute of Technology a new five-year contract to manage the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is estimated the contract will cover more than $8 billion worth of work. The contract extends for five years the JPL agreement between Caltech and NASA for management of JPL beyond its current expiration date of Sept. 30, 2003. The NASA contract includes a new provision that, based on performance reviews, may extend the contract period of performance for up to an additional five years.
Another menopausal myth is challenged: Women with existing coronary disease do not realize improvement in their cognitive function as a result of taking the most common form of hormone replacement therapy, a UCSF study has found. Investigators followed more than 1000 women from ten US test sites for four years. Half took a placebo; the other half took hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Although other, smaller studies have shown an improvement, in the UCSF study the women who received HRT performed no better on standard tests of cognitive function than those who received placebo.
When the human brain is presented with conflicting information about an object from different senses, it finds a remarkably efficient way to sort out the discrepancies, according to new research conducted at the University of California, Berkeley. The researchers found that when sensory cues from the hands and eyes differ from one another, the brain effectively splits the difference to produce a single mental image. The researchers describe the middle ground as a "weighted average" because in any given individual, one sense may have more influence than the other. When the discrepancy is too large, however, the brain reverts to information from a single cue - from the eyes, for instance - to make a judgment about what is true.
Scientists have discovered that infants possessing a cell protein called Rhesus (Rh) factor that their mothers lack are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia in young adulthood. Reported in the December issue of the peer-reviewed American Journal of Human Genetics, the study suggests that the gene that codes for Rh factor is to blame for the higher risk. "Previous studies reported a link between mothers and infants who are Rh-incompatible and a higher rate of schizophrenia in the children later in life," said Dr. Christina Palmer, a research scientist at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. "Our research is the first to take a genetic approach to examining this increased risk."
Previously secret documents show that tobacco companies provided money, cultivated social and political ties, and aggressively offered free cigarettes to African American leadership groups ?even as the evidence grew that African Americans bear a disproportionate share of the tobacco-related disease burden, researchers at the University of California say.
Researchers have found that selective COX-2 inhibitors ? a class of medications widely prescribed for painful inflammatory conditions such as osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis - interfere with the healing process after a bone fracture or cementless joint implant surgery. Their findings suggest that patients who regularly take COX-2 inhibitors should switch to a different medication, such as acetaminophen or codeine derivatives, following a bone fracture or cementless implant.
For more than a decade, researchers have been trying to create accurate computer models of Escherichia coli (E. coli), a bacterium that makes headlines for its varied roles in food poisoning, drug manufacture and biological research. By combining laboratory data with recently completed genetic databases, researchers can craft digital colonies of organisms that mimic, and even predict, some behaviors of living cells to an accuracy of about 75 percent. Now, NSF-supported researchers at the University of California at San Diego have created a computer model that accurately predicts how E. coli metabolic systems adapt and evolve when the bacteria are placed under environmental constraints.
Researchers at Stanford University have tracked the path of bone marrow stem cells as they transform into an adult tissue. This work, published in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Cell, marks the first time scientists have seen the individual steps of the progress. In previous work, researchers have seen injected bone marrow cells integrate into the muscles, livers and brains of mice. But until now, they have not witnessed the sequence of events that leads to this transformation. In their Cell paper, the researchers describe how they saw transplanted bone marrow cells first locate to the muscle as a muscle-specific stem cell called a satellite cell. These former bone marrow cells lurked in the muscle until exercise-induced muscle damage signaled them to help repair the injury by fusing with existing muscle cells.
A neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco says stroke in neonates and children is severely under-recognized, with about 1 case per 4,000 live births. About 6 percent of those children will die, 20 to 35 percent will go on to have another stroke, and more than two-thirds of survivors will have neurological deficits or seizures.
Self-esteem across a life span can be like riding a roller coaster, starting with an inflated sense of self-approval in late childhood, dropping precipitously in adolescence and then rising steadily through adulthood only to plummet to the lowest point in late old age, according to a new study in the journal Psychology and Aging.
Researchers for the first time have identified and ranked which diseases contribute most to the life-expectancy gap between races and between education levels. The top four contributors to the life-expectancy disparity between blacks and whites are hypertension, HIV, homicide and diabetes. The top six contributors of mortality differences between education levels are all smoking-related diseases.
Second-hand tobacco smoke threatens the health of 21 million American children ? 35 percent of everyone age 17 and younger ? who live in homes where residents or visitors smoke once a week or more, according to a study published Nov. 13 by researchers from RAND and UCLA. The study is the most thorough ever conducted of youths' exposure to environmental second-hand tobacco smoke at home. It found that 19 million American children ? 28 percent of everyone in the United States 17 and younger ? are exposed to tobacco smoke at home on a daily basis.
