| Brainteaser: Scientists dissect mystery of genius | | Posted Monday, September 25, 2006 2:56:06 PM by Blog57 Team | | A young man in a white physician's coat and a bow tie is walking toward us down the sidewalk, a plastic five-gallon bucket swinging from his hand. "That must be our brain," I say to my producer. We're at the Mental Illness and Neurodiscovery, or MIND, Institute, where they literally look inside the brain to try to spot creativity and genius. (Watch: Brain scans look for the secrets of genius -- 2:05) The MIND Institute, an independent research site funded mostly with federal dollars, has perhaps the largest collection of sophisticated brain imaging devices in the world. As a neurosurgeon, I don't normally slice brains open, right down the middle, so this will give me a different perspective. With pathologist Robert Reichard and Rex Jung, a psychologist at the MIND Institute who studies creativity, we head to the dissection room.... | |
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| | | Velvet worm brains reveal secret sisterhood with spiders | | Posted Tuesday, August 15, 2006 12:56:56 AM by Blog57 Team | | Velvet worms, living fossils that look like a child's rendition of caterpillars, are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to butterflies, according to new research. Known to scientists as onychophorans, velvet worms have been thought to be similar to the ancestors of modern arthropods, the jointed-legged creatures that includes insects. Fossils that look very much like today's onychophorans can be found in rocks 540 million years old. "When I looked at their brains, I was shocked because I didn't expect to see what I saw," said Nicholas J. Strausfeld of The University of Arizona in Tucson. "I just felt from their organization that these looked like spider brains, that they had more in common with spider brains than with other arthropod brains." Strausfeld, a UA Regents' Professor of neurobiology and the director of UA's Center for Insect Science, is a pioneer in using the architectures of cell arrangements within brains to tease out evolutionary relationships among arthropods, the animal phylum that includes all kinds of creepy crawlies, including insects, crustaceans such as lobsters and crabs, and spiders and scorpions.... | |
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| | | New Tests Identify, Predict Heart-Attack Patients | | Posted Sunday, July 16, 2006 11:02:09 PM by Blog57 Team | | AKRON, Ohio _ The pain was "unnatural," unlike anything she had felt before. It spread across her back, from one shoulder to the other, then evaporated after several intense minutes. Over a span of about four days, the pain returned three more times until Helen Chevraux decided it was time to visit the emergency room at Mercy Medical Center in Canton, Ohio. This time, the pain radiated from shoulder to shoulder, across her back and across her chest. Still, an EKG (electrocardiogram) showed no unusual heart activity. So a heart attack didn't seem to be the likely cause of her pain _ until about 15 minutes later, when a blood test showed elevated levels of troponin, a protein found in heart muscle. With that, a second EKG was ordered, this time detecting an abnormal heart rhythm.... | |
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