Bliss.

Bliss.

Friday, December 10, 2010

EVE FTW?

24 chaps and I'm done with some. 
I'm feeling progressively sleepier with each chappu! (I make  it sound Cute. Not)
Kala is hated by none other than the CalmOne. And that makes it ironic.
It is essential that one understands that everybody else is only human after all.( I mean Everybody else)
It is rather wrong to put somebody (rather anybody) on a pedestal and expect them to play God. We  all are  homo sapiens and have flaws. Accepting People as they are is the key to peace of mind I think.

Read this:

Scientists recreate the Brain

BIRMINGHAM: Researchers have developed an artificial bit of human brain to help them study Alzheimer's and other diseases, a huge improvement over animal models.
Mike Coleman and his team from Aston University, Birmingham, have developed artificial brain tissue that responds to some chemicals like human brains do. Their findings were presented at the British Festival of Science in Birmingham.
According to Coleman, the new tissue is better than using dead brain cells from taken humans or lab rats. "One is dead and the other is different," he explained. "It's better to have a human-sourced platform that's alive."
How to make a brain
Earlier studies had only used one type of human brain cells - neurons. But neurons are just one component of a brain. For every one neuron, there are approximately seven 'astrocytes' - star like cells that provide nutrients to brain tissue.
Coleman's brain tissue is a culture of both neurons and astrocytes.
"Testing neurons on their own is like testing the performance of a Formula One driver without his support team," he said.
The cells, originally from a tumour, were 'reprogrammed' to stop multiplying. They then turned into neurons and astrocytes, which clump into balls of cells that can process information on a basic level.
Animal models do not mimic humans
"It forms networks where it communicates within itself and it also responds to chemical, mechanical and electrical 'questions'."
"This is what human brain tissue does," he added, making them an ideal platform to perform experiments that can't be done on real living human brains.
Kuldip Sidhu, director of the Stem Cell Lab at the University of New South Wales who was not involved in the research, agrees that co-cultures are the way forwards. "Animal models used to study human diseases do not mimic the true human physiology."
Being used to study Alzheimer's
Coleman hopes that their new model will help further research into many neurodegenerative diseases. Eric Hill, a member of the University's School of Life & Health Sciences has already started using the culture to look at the effects of Alzheimer's.
"Because the cells grow for such a long time we can see how the cells age and whether they naturally degenerate," Hill said.
"We can vary the conditions cells grow up in to see if this has an effect. Ultimately, we plan to insert genes we know are involved in Alzheimer's into the cells and see how the cells develop and communicate with each other," he said.


 Wow! And astrocytes are Glial Cells if I'm not wrong. 
"How to Make a Brain" sounds like a recipe (Ex. How to make Sweet corn Veg Soup!)
Apparently most researches in neurology concentrate on Autism or Alzheimer or some such disease (I can't blame them, it has become a common problem I suppose....)



Common cold erodes memory

Central nervous system infections such as the common cold could be linked to memory loss late in life, according to a new study.
"Our study suggests that virus-induced memory loss could accumulate over the lifetime of an individual and eventually lead to clinical cognitive memory deficits," said Charles Howe, a Mayo Clinic neuroscientist and an author of the study, which is published in the international journal Neurobiology of Disease.
The family of viruses known as picornaviruses are the most common infectious agents in humans, infecting more than one billion people worldwide each year.
Most people have two to three infections a year caused by enteroviruses (associated with respiratory and gastro-intestinal ailments) or rhinoviruses (associated with the common cold). Picornaviruses also cause encephalitis, meningitis, polio and hepatitis A.
Scientists at the Mayo Clinic studied the link between picornaviruses and memory loss by infecting mice and observing their spatial memory as they navigated a maze.
"The degree of memory impairment, which ranged from no discernible damage to complete devastation, was directly correlated to the number of dead brain cells in the hippocampus of the mouse's brain," according to the researchers.
"The degree of brain damage in humans infected with a picornavirus infection is not known, but the evidence from the mouse study suggests this is an area of research that should be explored further," they said.
Among children infected with enterovirus 71 in Asia, the virus has been seen to attack the brain, leading to conditions from lethargy to coma, said the researchers.
"Our findings suggest that picornavirus infections throughout the lifetime of an individual may chip away at the cognitive reserve, increasing the likelihood of detectable cognitive impairment as the individual ages," the authors wrote.
"We hypothesize that mild memory and cognitive impairments of unknown etiology may, in fact, be due to accumulative loss of hippocampus function caused by repeated infection with common and widespread neurovirulent picornaviruses."



Omg! Who knew? Btw I found something even better, I'll put it up next time....
I guess I gotto go back to EVE.

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