A key riddle surrounding the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors but a study appearing in the Journal of Biological Chemistry says researchers in Italy have reconstructed one of the earliest evolutionary steps yet; generating long chains of RNA from individual subunits using nothing but warm water.
Many researchers believe that RNA was one of the first biological molecules present, before DNA and proteins, but there has been little success in recreating the formation on RNA from simple "prebiotic" molecules that likely were present on primordial earth billions of years ago.
Ernesto Di Mauro and colleagues found that ancient molecules called cyclic nucleotides can merge together in water and form polymers over 100 nucleotides long in water ranging from 40-90 °C –similar to water temperatures on ancient Earth.
Cyclic nucleotides like cyclic-AMP are very similar to the nucleotides that make up individual pieces of DNA or RNA (A, T, G and C), except that they form an extra chemical bond and assume a ring-shaped structure. That extra bond makes cyclic nucleotides more reactive, though, and thus they were able to join together into long chains at a decent rate (about 200 hours to reach 100 nucleotides long).
This finding is exciting as cyclic nucleotides themselves can be easily formed from simple chemicals like formamide, thus making them plausible prebiotic compounds present during primordial times. Thus, this study may be revealing how the first bits of genetic information were created.A key riddle surrounding the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how... more
A new delicacy in China is being criticized: A part-fried fish is served alive on a plate for diners. In order to keep the carp alive chefs cook its body but wrap its head in a wet cloth to keep it breathing, before covering it in sauce and serving in on a plate. http://www.tabloidprodigy.com/?p=8016A new delicacy in China is being criticized: A part-fried fish is served alive on a... more
A Pennsylvania man faces charges after police say he beat his girlfriend with a cheesesteak.
The 33-year-old man, who wasn’t identified by police, allegedly argued with his 23-year-old girlfriend after midnight on Tuesday. He then struck the victim in the face with the cheesesteak. Harassment charges were filed with the police department.
President Barack Obama prodded China about Internet censorship and free speech, but the message was not widely heard in China where his words were blocked online and shown on only one regional television channel.
China has more than 250 million Internet users and employs some of the world's tightest controls over what they see. The country is often criticized for its so-called "Great Firewall of China" — technology designed to prevent unwanted traffic from entering or leaving a network.
During his town hall meeting in Shanghai on Monday, Obama responded at length to a question about the firewall — remarks that were later played down in the Chinese media and scrubbed from some Chinese Web sites.
"I'm a big supporter of non-censorship," Obama said. "I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged."
Obama may have been hoping to set a personal example for China's leaders when he said he believes that free discussion, including criticism that may be annoying to him, makes him "a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear."
One prolific blogger who goes by the name of Hecaitou said that a transcript of the exchange posted on the portal Netease was taken down by censors after just 27 minutes. A full Chinese-language transcript of the event was later posted on the official Xinhua News Agency Web site but required four clicks to locate the relevant section.
Only local Shanghai TV carried the event live. It was streamed on two popular Internet portals and on the White House's Web site, which is not censored, though both the video and audio feeds were choppy and delayed inside China.
The People's Daily online briefly summarized Obama as telling the crowd that the Internet has "enormous power in assisting information dissemination," but made no mention of his comments on censorship.
China has the world's most extensive system of Web monitoring and censorship and has issued numerous regulations in response to the rise of blogging and other trends. But the Web remains far more open than the country's tightly controlled print and television media, which is the only source of news for the vast majority of Chinese.
Yang Hengjun, 45, a blogger and novelist based in the southern city of Guangzhou, said he was impressed by Obama's frank admission that some free speech irks him, and by U.S. laws that are intended to keep the government from censoring criticism.
"You see, freedom of speech in America is not given to the people by the president but is something that the people use to supervise their government and president, to protect themselves," Yang wrote in an essay titled "Why do I Blog? Obama has answered that question." Posted online late Monday, links to the essay were spread via Twitter.
Because Twitter is blocked in China, Yang and others use proxy servers to get around the controls.
There have been some amazing, life-affirming occurrences over the past ten years. But you don’t want to hear about those, do you? Thought not. Here’s the most crushing letdowns of the decade…
It is the machine that scientists hope will recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time. But scientists at the £3.6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) found their plans to emulate the big bang postponed this week when a passing bird dropped a "bit of baguette" into the machine, causing it to overheat.
Cern, the European particle physics laboratory, launched the LHC with much fanfare on 10 September last year. Physicists hope to use the collider to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or God particle, which gives matter in the universe its mass.
But the collider, which when running will collide protons travelling at 99.9% of the speed of light, has been out of action for over a year after a helium leak caused it to be shut down on 19 September 2008, nine days after its start-up.
The particle accelerator, which is buried 100m underground near Geneva, is currently undergoing tests ahead of its proposed restart date later this month, but the testing process was stopped on Monday after the power supply to the collider was cut.
A Cern spokeswoman, Christine Sutton, said scientists had headed above ground to investigate when they made their discovery.
"The problem related to the high voltage supply," Sutton said. "We get mains voltage from the grid, and there was an interruption in the power supply, just like you might have a power cut at home. The person who went to investigate discovered bread and a bird eating the bread."
Sutton said the bird and its bread were discovered at a compensating capacitor – one of the points where the mains electricity supply enters the collider from above ground.
The incident cut power to one of the collider's cooling plants, causing temperatures to rise by more than 3C in part of the tunnel.
Superconducting magnets within the LHC require a temperature of 1.9C above absolute zero (-273.15C) to steer, and ultimately collide, particles around the 16.8 mile (27km) circuit.
This latest incident, although far less severe, appears to bear some similarities to the fault that caused the LHC to shut for more than a year after its launch. On that occasion faulty wiring led to an electrical failure, causing a rise in temperature which led to helium, cooled to minus 271C, being released into the machine.
The 2008 fault damaged a 400 meter stretch of the collider and cost Cern £23m. Scientists had to redesign safety systems to prevent a repeat, a process which has taken over a year.
However in this latest incident the magnets were only stopped for three days, while the LHC could be recooled, and Sutton said the power cut did not pose a risk to either life or the future of the project.
"The beams [of protons] would have been dumped, we have very safe mechanisms that come instantly into play," she said.
"They deposit beams into a huge block of graphite which is cooled to take up the energy of the beam. This is something Cern has a lot of experience of, perhaps power cuts will usually be caused by a more obvious kind of interruption than a bird eating a baguette – particularly by lightning, for example, but these incidents will happen."
One of the most celebrated functions of the Internet is an unprecedented ability for people to connect. This has led to social networks, online dating, and, it turns out, a lot of people connecting over really strange things. Here are some of the more interesting clubs that the internet has helped give life to.One of the most celebrated functions of the Internet is an unprecedented ability for... more
Type in "why is" on Google and check out the bizarre list of predicted searches... Can anyone top the disturbing and absurd predicted text in the title of this post?Type in "why is" on Google and check out the bizarre list of predicted searches... Can... more
Want to dress up your favorite dog in Halloween costume to match your Halloween yard decorations? Get some ideas from this photos to make your feline friend or man’s best friend join you in the holiday celebration. Get ready for little Halloween costumes at your doorway on October 31st!Want to dress up your favorite dog in Halloween costume to match your Halloween yard... more
The possibility that climate change might simply be a natural variation like others that have occurred throughout geologic time is dimming, according to evidence in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published October 19.
The research reveals that sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo geologists from a remote Arctic lake are unlike those seen during previous warming episodes.
The UB researchers and their international colleagues were able to pinpoint that dramatic changes began occurring in unprecedented ways after the midpoint of the twentieth century.
"The sediments from the mid-20th century were not all that different from previous warming intervals," said Jason P. Briner, PhD, assistant professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "But after that things really changed. And the change is unprecedented."
The sediments are considered unique because they contain rare paleoclimate information about the past 200,000 years, providing a far longer record than most other sediments in the glaciated portion of the Arctic, which only reveals clues to the past 10,000 years.
"Since much of the Arctic was covered by big ice sheets during the Ice Age, with the most recent glaciations ending around 10,000 years ago, the lake sediment cores people get there only cover the past 10,000 years," said Briner.
"What is unique about these sediment cores is that even though glaciers covered this lake, for various reasons they did not erode it," said Briner, who discovered the lake in the Canadian Arctic while working on his doctoral dissertation. "The result is that we have a really long sequence or archive of sediment that has survived arctic glaciations, and the data it contains is exceptional."
Working with Briner and colleagues at UB who retrieved and analyzed the sediments, the paper's co-authors at the University of Colorado and Queens University, experts in analyzing fossils of bugs and algae, have pooled their expertise to develop the most comprehensive picture to date of how warming variations throughout the past 200,000 years have altered the lake's ecology.
"There are periods of time reflected in this sediment core that demonstrate that the climate was as warm as today," said Briner, "but that was due to natural causes, having to do with well-understood patterns of the Earth's orbit around the sun. The whole ecosystem has now shifted and the ecosystem we see during just the last few decades is different from those seen during any of the past warm intervals."
Yarrow Axford, a research associate at the University of Colorado, and the paper's lead author, noted: "The 20th century is the only period during the past 200 millennia in which aquatic indicators reflect increased warming, despite the declining effect of slow changes in the tilt of the Earth's axis which, under natural conditions, would lead to climatic cooling."
Co-authors with Briner and Axford are Colin A. Cooke and Alexander P. Wolfe of the University of Alberta; Donna R. Francis of the University of Massachusetts; John P. Smol, Cheryl R. Wilson and Neal Michelutti at Queens University; Gifford H. Miller of the University of Colorado and Elizabeth K. Thomas, who did this work at UB for her master's degree in geology.The possibility that climate change might simply be a natural variation like others... more
A brilliant young physicist João Magueijo asks the heretical question: What if the speed of light—now accepted as one of the unchanging foundations of modern physics—were not constant?
Magueijo, a 40-year old native of Portugal, puts forth the heretical idea that in the very early days of the universe light traveled faster—an idea that if proven could dethrone Einstein and forever change our understanding of the universe. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology -an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation- which proposes that the speed of light in the early universe was of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value.
Solving the most intractable problems of cosmology in one brilliant leap, Magueijo’s varying-speed-of-light theory (VSL) would have stunning implications for space travel, black holes, time dilation, and string theory—and could help uncover the grand unified theory that ultimately eluded Einstein.
Joao Magueijo's radical ideas intend to turn that Einsteinian dogma on its head. Marueijo is trying to pick apart one of Einstein’s most impenetrable tenets, the constancy of the speed of light. This idea of a constant speed (about 3×106 meters/second) -is known as the universal speed limit. Nothing can, has, or ever will travel faster than light.
Magueijo -who received his doctorate from Cambridge, has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College, London- says: not so. His VSL theory presupposes a speed of light that can be energy or time-space dependent.
In his fist book, Faster than the Speed of Light, Magueijo leads laymen readers into the abstract realm of theoretical physics, based on several well known, as well as obscure, thinkers. The VSL model was first proposed by John Moffat, a Canadian scientist, in 1992. Magueijo carefully builds the foundations for a discussion of Big Bang cosmology, and then segues into the second half of the book, which is devoted to VSL theory.
Like most radical, potentially seminal thinkers, Magueijo shakes the foundations of the physics community, while irritating off many of his fellow scientists. VSL purposes to solve the problems at which all cosmologists are forever scratching: those inscrutable conceptual puzzles that surround the Big Bang. Currently many of these problems have no widely accepted solutions.
Could Einstein be wrong and Magueijo right? Is he a gadfly or a true, seminal genius? Time will tell.A brilliant young physicist João Magueijo asks the heretical question: What if the... more
Is sex a state of mind? A recent study from the University of British Columbia finds that while most men can regulate their physical and mental sexual arousal to some degree, the men most able to do so are able to control their other emotions as well.
“We suspect that if an individual is good at regulating one type of emotional response, he/she is probably good at regulating other emotional responses,” says Jason Winters, the study’s research head. “This has never been shown before.”
The study employed 16 randomly ordered video clips. Eight were erotic, and eight were funny (specifically, the funny video clips featured the least sexy comedian the researchers could find: Mitch Hedberg). Participants were instructed to control their response to certain videos, and simply to watch the others. They then rated their arousal following each clip, and were hooked up to machines that measured their erections.
Researchers wanted to know: Could men control sexual arousal, fooling both themselves and others?
“I’m trained in forensic psychology, and the original plan was to do this study with sexual offenders,” Winters tells LiveScience. “However, I needed to first establish that there is range of sexual arousal regulation abilities in the general male population.”
Indeed, participants were, on average, able to regulate their physiological sexual arousal when told to do so; in fact, they showed a 25 percent reduction in erectile response. “This is consistent with success rates from previous, well-controlled [measuring-device] faking studies in which success rates range from 26 to 38 percent,” Winters writes in his study.
The range of regulation abilities had nothing to do with age, sexual experience, or sexual compulsivity. However, sexual excitation, inhibition, and desire were related to regulation success: Men who were more easily excited were, unsurprisingly, less able to regulate; guys who tended to be sexually inhibited because of performance issues were better able to stave off an erection.
Furthermore, the study found that the men who were best able to control their response to the pornographic videos were also able to control their response to Mitch Hedberg. But for those who had difficulty regulating, reverse psychology could be to blame.
“The finding that was most surprising was that some men became more sexually aroused when they tried to regulate their sexual arousal,” Winters says. “In other words, they responded more strongly (both physiologically and self-reported) during trials in which they attempted to regulate their arousal than trials during which they merely watched the stimuli. We attributed this increased response to anxiety — in this case, demand anxiety. It’s sort of like when you tell someone not to think of a white elephant; those [who] are most anxious during the task have the most trouble not thinking about the white elephant.”
The study’s findings could have significant implications.
“The next step is to do a similar study with sexual offenders,” Winters says. “I suspect that sexual offenders will generally be very poor regulators, and that poor regulation is one of the factors that contributes to their offending.”Is sex a state of mind? A recent study from the University of British Columbia finds... more
Researchers have found a pharmaceutical way to clear some of the cognitive fog that results from a sleepless night. In a new study using lab mice, researchers corrected the memory problems in sleep-deprived mice through a drug that suppressed levels of a certain enzyme in a brain region called the hippocampus, which plays an important role in memory and learning.
The study, published in Nature, helps tease out the specific effects of sleep deprivation on the brain. Says lead researcher Christopher Vecsey: “One of the main problems is that sleep deprivation does a lot of things to the brain, and it’s easy to get caught in a mish-mash of different effects” [Nature News].
In the experiment, two groups of mice were either allowed to rest over a five-hour period or were constantly disturbed by handling. The sleep-deprived group demonstrated particular problems when it came to performing a basic retrieval test, which they had learned before [BBC News]. When the researchers examined the brains of the sleep-deprived mice, they found that these mice made more of an enzyme called phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4). In turn, the surplus of PDE4 caused a shortfall of a compound called cAMP, which is involved in forming new memories in a brain area called the hippocampus [WebMD]. When the researchers gave sleep-deprived mice a drug that stops PDE4 from working, the mice aced their memory tests.
While the study appears to point the way toward drugs that could help out sleep-deprived humans, overworked and overstressed people shouldn’t be clamoring for a prescription, says sleep specialist Neil Stanley, who wasn’t involved in the research. “We are always going to need drugs for people with serious disorders, but we don’t want to end up medicalising lifestyles. We need to go back to basics and think about the way we as a society lead our lives, and the impact this has on our sleep, rather than looking for a cure” [BBC News].Researchers have found a pharmaceutical way to clear some of the cognitive fog that... more
Captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and combined with data from infrared and optical telescopes, this image shows the farthest galaxy cluster ever detected. Designated JKCS041, the cluster is located 10.2 billion light-years from Earth, beating the previous distance record by a billion light-years.
Astronomers think JKCS041 formed just about as early as was feasible.
“This object is close to the distance limit expected for a galaxy cluster,” said Stefano Andreon of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Milan, Italy, in a press release. “We don’t think gravity can work fast enough to make galaxy clusters much earlier.”
This cluster was first spotted by the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in 2006, and then by optical telescopes such as the Very Large Telescope in Chile. But until Chandra took a look, it wasn’t clear if it was a full-blown legitimate galaxy cluster rather than one still in the process of forming or a line of galaxies viewed head on. The image above is a composite of all three types of data.
Because JKCS041 is so old, it will help scientists understand what was happening at this critical time in the formation of the universe, when it was only about a fourth as old as it is today. But if more super-old clusters can be found, scientists can begin testing cosmological theories.
“This discovery is exciting because it is like finding a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that is much older than any other known,” said Ben Maughan of the University of Bristol in Britain, co-author of a paper describing the cluster in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “One fossil might just fit in with our understanding of dinosaurs, but if you found many more, you would have to start rethinking how dinosaurs evolved. The same is true for galaxy clusters and our understanding of cosmology.”Captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and combined with data from infrared... more
It sounds like a scene from an insect version of Total Recall: Using genetically engineered fruit flies and laser beams, researchers have found a way to embed false, fearful memories in the flies.
Researchers first tested normal flies in a chamber where a jets of air on either side brought two different odors into the container. The researchers delivered an electric shock each time a fly strayed into a particular odour stream, which taught the flies to prefer the other one: the flies learned to move in the direction of the shock-related odour 30 per cent less often [New Scientist].
Next, the researchers created a strain of genetically engineered flies with certain neurons that would be activated by a laser blast. Lead researcher Gero Miesenböck explains that with this technique, called optogenetics, researchers can use light to activate particular cell types that have been genetically engineered to express a light-responsive protein. When laser pulses hit the brain, cells expressing the light-sensitive protein activate. “It’s like sending a radio signal to a city but only those houses with a radios set to the right frequency will get the signal,” says Miesenböck [Nature News].
The flies were then put back in the chamber with the two jets of air, and every time they wandered into one of the odor streams, the laser was fired. Many of the flies were unaffected, but a select group quickly learned to avoid the odor stream associated with the laser pulse. Miesenböck says these flies feared that smell as if they had been conditioned to associate an electric shock with it. “Stimulating just these neurons gives the flies a memory of an unpleasant event that never happened,” he says [New Scientist].
In the genetic engineering process, the scientists had tweaked different neurons in different groups of flies. The contingent that did react to the laser all had 12 particular light-sensitive neurons, according to the study published in the journal Cell. Those 12 brain cells may be the root of associative learning, researchers say–at least in flies.It sounds like a scene from an insect version of Total Recall: Using genetically... more
Two researchers say they have built a cylinder that acts as an ersatz electromagnetic black hole, soaking up radiation in the microwave regime like the astrophysical version sucks up matter and light.
Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui of the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, detailed their creation in a paper posted to the online physics preprint Web site arXiv.org last week. Cheng and Cui report engineering a thin cylinder 21.6 centimeters in diameter comprising 60 concentric rings of so-called metamaterials—composite structures specifically crafted to possess unique light-bending capabilities.
Unlike ordinary magnifying glasses, lenses made from metamaterials can have a negative index of refraction, meaning that refracted light bends to the same side of the "normal," the imaginary line perpendicular to the surface of the lens, as does the incident light. In the past few years, research groups around the world have harnessed metamaterials to create "superlenses" as well as for so-called invisibility cloaking, in which light is bent around an object as if it were not there.
The laboratory black hole is based on a similar approach—establishing a graded index of refraction to bend electromagnetic radiation inward to the cylinder's core. The core, in turn, is an efficient absorber of electromagnetic radiation. In one possible application, the core would be replaced with a "payload" such as a solar cell, with the outer layers funneling light inward. But Cui cautions that such an implementation is a long way off, requiring both that the device be modified to work at visible wavelengths and that the two-dimensional ring be extended to three dimensions.
Cheng and Cui's work represents the preliminary realization of a theoretical proposal put forth just this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alex Kildishev of Purdue University for a metamaterial structure that could absorb incident light from all directions.
Narimanov, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, says that in the wake of his work with Kildishev, as well as the many studies into extreme light manipulation with metamaterials, he is not surprised to see the theoretical made real. "It's impressive, though, how quickly they have done it," he says.
John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College London who was among the first to harness the unusual properties of metamaterials, says the new research "constitutes an entirely novel way of constructing an absorber, but at the same time keeping control of the absorbed radiation."
Nevertheless, Pendry notes, the analogy to black holes is imperfect. "Black holes absorb incident radiation and other objects, but the key point about real black holes is the prediction of Hawking radiation emitted by the black hole," he says, referring to physicist Stephen Hawking's hypothesis that is rooted both in general relativity and quantum mechanics. Were it observed, Hawking radiation would provide critical insight into the complicated boundary of the two theories. "A real black hole powers the radiation through its gravitational energy," Pendry says, "but the device reported in this paper has no internal source of energy and therefore cannot emit Hawking radiation."
Besides, the metamaterial black hole is not as ruthlessly voracious as the gravitational kind. Cui estimates that the demonstration black hole only absorbs 80 percent of the microwaves that hit it but that increasing the frequency of the incident light—to visible wavelengths, for instance—will increase absorption. Such an artificial black hole for optical light is in the works and might even be developed by the end of the year, Cui says—a prediction that may raise a few eyebrows in the field. "I think that the authors are rather optimistic in projecting into the visible region," Pendry says. "But I would be very happy to be proved wrong."Two researchers say they have built a cylinder that acts as an ersatz electromagnetic... more
Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic rat was able to remember novel objects, such as a toy she played with, three times longer than the average Long Evans female rat, which is considered the smartest rat strain. Hobbie-J was much better at more complex tasks as well, such as remembering which path she last traveled to find a chocolate treat.
The report comes about a decade after the scientists first reported in the journal Nature that they had developed "Doogie," a smart mouse that over-expresses the NR2B gene in the hippocampus, a learning and memory center affected in diseases such as Alzheimer's. Memory improvements they found in the new genetically modified Long Evans rat were very similar to Doogie's. Subsequent testing has shown that Doogie maintained superior memory as he aged.
"This adds to the notion that NR2B is a universal switch for memory formation," says Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, co-director of the MCG Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute and co-corresponding author on the paper published Oct. 19 in PLoS One.
The finding also further validates NR2B as a drug target for improving memory in healthy individuals as well as those struggling with Alzheimer's or mild dementia, the scientists says.
NR2B is a subunit of NMBA receptors, which are like small pores on brain cells that let in electrically-charged ions that increase the activity and communication of neurons. Dr. Tsien refers to NR2B as the "juvenile" form of the receptor because its levels decline after puberty and the adult counterpart, NR2A, becomes more prevalent.
While the juvenile form keeps communication between brain cells open maybe just a hundred milliseconds longer, that's enough to significantly enhance learning and memory and why young people tend to do both better, says Dr. Tsien, the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cognitive and Systems Neurobiology. This trap door configuration that determines not just how much but how fast information flows is unique to NMBA receptors.
Scientists found that Hobbie-J consistently outperformed the normal Long Evans rat even in more complex situations that require association, such as working their way through a water maze after most of the designated directional cues and the landing point were removed. "It's like taking Michael Jordan and making him a super Michael Jordan," Deheng Wang, MCG graduate student and the paper's first author, says of the large black and white rats already recognized for their superior intellect.
But even a super rat has its limits. For example with one test, the rats had to learn to alternate between right and left paths to get a chocolate reward. Both did well when they only had to wait a minute to repeat the task, after three minutes only Hobbie-J could remember and after five minutes, they both forgot. "We can never turn it into a mathematician. They are rats, after all," Dr. Tsien says, noting that when it comes to truly complex thinking and memory, the size of the brain really does matter.
That's one of the reasons scientists pursue this type of research: to see if increased production of NR2B in more complex creatures, such as dogs and perhaps eventually humans, gets the same results. He also is beginning studies to explore whether magnesium – a mineral found in nuts, legumes and green vegetables such as spinach – can more naturally replicate the results researchers have obtained through genetic manipulation. Magnesium ion blocks entry to the NMDA receptor so more magnesium forces the brain cell to increase expression levels of the more efficient NR2B to compensate. This is similar to how statin drugs help reduce cholesterol levels in the blood by inhibiting its synthesis in the liver.
Scientists created Hobbie-J and Doogie by making them over-express CaMKII, an abundant protein that works as a promoter and signaling molecule for the NMDA receptor, something that likely could not be replicated in humans.Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic... more
