News Articles

As Americans increasingly seek a “quick fix” to physical and mental ailments, psychoanalysts can be caught in the crossfire of a debate about the potential benefits and drawbacks of including medication in their treatment plans.
A panel discussion entitled “The Uses of Medications in Psychoanalysis: What We Know; What is Uncertain,” will be led by internationally renowned psychoanalyst Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 2008 Winter Meeting on Friday, January 18, 2008, from 2-5 p.m. at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.
Taking the position for a cautious approach to the inclusion of medications in analysis will be Stephen D. Purcell, M.D. Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D., is more optimistic about the inclusion of medications in treatment.

Even a few days into New Year’s resolutions to exercise more, people are finding reasons to skip workouts even though the benefits of a healthy lifestyle are well-known: In addition to weight loss, exercise has been linked to reducing symptoms of depression and also to lower risk of heart disease.
If the temptation to sit on the couch and watch TV instead of going for a short jog is just too great you’re not alone, but preferring to be sedentary is not an innate human trait. Most children are quite active and people generally stay active all the way through high school but many stop being active when they reach college.

Muscles usually contract when a neurotransmitter molecule is released from nerve cells onto muscle cells. But University of Utah scientists discovered that bare subatomic protons can act like larger, more complex neurotransmitters, making gut muscles contract in tiny round worms so the worms can poop.
“There are relatively few molecules that serve as neurotransmitters to trigger electrical changes in cells. Protons are the only new members of this group in nearly 20 years,” says biology Professor Erik Jorgensen, scientific director of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah and senior author of the study in the Jan.

You've read plenty of articles recently about visual invisibility but acoustic invisibility was considered beyond the reach of science.
Now Duke University engineers say a three-dimensional sound cloak is possible, at least in theory, by making sound waves travel distortion-free around an acousic veil the way microwaves do for a visual one.
"We've devised a recipe for an acoustic material that would essentially open up a hole in space and make something inside that hole disappear from sound waves," said Steven Cummer, Jeffrey N. Vinik Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering.

NASA will debut a new book for blind readers at a media event and reception Jan. 15. The agency will unveil "Touch the Invisible Sky," which gives blind readers the ability to experience cosmic images from the agency's space-based observatories and other telescopes on the ground.
The event begins at 10 a.m. EST at the National Federation of the Blind, 1800 Johnson Street, Baltimore. Media will have the opportunity to ask the authors questions and view science experiments related to NASA's Great Observatories.
"Touch the Invisible Sky" is accessible to both blind and sighted readers. The book presents celestial objects as they appear through visible-light telescopes and in different spectral regions that are invisible to the naked eye.

Stress, to put it bluntly, is bad for you. It can kill you, in fact. A study reveals that stress causes deterioration in everything from your gums to your heart and can make you more susceptible to everything from the common cold to cancer. Thanks to new research crossing the disciplines of psychology, medicine, neuroscience, and genetics, the mechanisms underlying the connection are rapidly becoming understood.
The first clues to the link between stress and health were provided in the 1930s by Hans Selye, the first scientist to apply the word “stress”— then simply an engineering term— to the strains experienced by living organisms in their struggles to adapt and cope with changing environments.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center are uncovering how brain cells are affected in Fragile X syndrome, the most common cause of inherited mental retardation and the most common genetic cause of autism.
“I think we’ve discovered a core mechanism underlying Fragile X syndrome," said Dr. Kimberly Huber, assistant professor of neuroscience and senior author of a study appearing in Wednesday’s edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Dr. Huber’s research with mice focuses on how Fragile X syndrome affects communication between cells in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is involved in learning and memory.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have developed a new “nanobiotechnology” that enables magnetic control of events at the cellular level. They describe the technology, which could lead to finely-tuned but noninvasive treatments for disease, in the January issue of Nature Nanotechnology.
Don Ingber, MD, PhD, and Robert Mannix, PhD, of Children’s program in Vascular Biology, in collaboration with Mara Prentiss, PhD, a physicist at Harvard University, devised a way to get tiny beads – 30 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in diameter – to bind to receptor molecules on the cell surface.
When exposed to a magnetic field, the beads themselves become magnets, and pull together through magnetic attraction.

The molecular machinery behind gene transcription -- the intricate transfer of information from a segment of DNA to a corresponding strand of messenger RNA -- isn't stationed in special "transcription factories" within a cell nucleus, according to Cornell researchers. Instead, the enzyme RNA polymerase II (Pol II) and other key molecules can assemble at the site of an activated gene, regardless of the gene's position.
The findings, published in the Dec. 28, 2007, issue of the journal Molecular Cell, are the result of an ongoing collaboration between the laboratories of John T. Lis, the Barbara McClintock Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and Watt W. Webb, professor of applied physics and the S.B. Eckert Professor in Engineering.

Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.
"This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice as far as the previous confirmed record holder," says John Graham of the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Md.

Donated, freeze-dried tendon grafts loaded with gene therapy may soon offer effective repair of injured tendons, a goal that has eluded surgeons to date.
According to study data published today in Molecular Therapy, a new graft technique may provide the first effective framework around which flexor tendon tissue can reorganize as it heals. Such tissue-engineering approaches could significantly improve repair of anterior cruciate ligaments and rotator cuffs as well, researchers said. The study was in a mouse model designed to resemble hard-to-repair flexor tendons in human hands, and the results should provide an impetus for future clinical trials.

Scientists at University College London have discovered how two proteins called BERT and ERNI interact in embryos to control when different organ systems in the body start to form, deepening our understanding of the development of the brain and nervous system and expanding our knowledge of stem cell behavior.
The new research published this week in PLoS Biology solves the puzzle of how vertebrates prioritize the order in which they begin to develop different sets of structures. During development, only a few signals instruct cells to form thousands of cell types, so the timing of how cells interpret these signals is critical.