What’s the News: When prions or amyloids make the news, it’s usually because they cause mad cow disease or Alzheimer’s—prions, after all, cause any proteins they touch to become as misfolded as they are, and amyloids, which are large clumps of wadded-together proteins, can jam the workings of cells.

But a new study in Cell suggests that a prion-like protein that forms amyloids has a normal, vital function in the brain. Far from being a memory destroyer, this protein, called CPEB, is necessary for long-term memory in fruit flies.

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A protein tangle in an Alzheimer’s-afflicted neuron

Exactly how Alzheimer’s disease proliferates through the brain, overtaking one region after another, has eluded scientists. As the disease progresses, tau—a malformed protein that forms snarls and tangles inside neurons—shows up in more and more brain areas. Researchers have wondered whether tau, and the disease, are working their way out from a single area of origin or mounting numerous, distinct attacks on vulnerable parts of the brain. Two new studies in mice provide strong support for the first idea: Tau seems to pass from affected cells to their neighbors, spreading much the same way a virus or bacteria infection would.

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The strangest thing about this Chinese boy’s light blue eyes is not their color. It’s the purported fact that he can see in the dark. His eyes are just like cat eyes, glowing blue-green when you shine a light in them, says this clip from China’s state-run English TV channel. The boy can catch crickets in the dark without a flashlight and even completes a writing test in a pitch-black stairwell. True, or too good to be?

Natalie Wolchover at Life’s Little Mysteries has rounded up some experts and their collective reaction seems to be, “Hmm…” (It doesn’t help that this video has been posted on YouTube under the name, “Alien Hybrid or Starchild Discovered in China? 2012.”) One possibility they consider is whether the boy has a mutation that produced something like a tapetum lucidum, an extra layer of tissue that helps cats see in the dark. James Reynolds, a pediatric ophthalmologist at State University of New York in Buffalo, puts a stop to that idea:

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Artist’s rendering of a mitochondrian, the energy-producing
cellular structure affected by ARSACS

Scientists have pinpointed the cause of a rare, fatal neurodegenerative disorder called ARSACS, or autosomal recessive spastic ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay. The disease is due to defects in neuron’s mitochondria, the bit of biological machinery that generates energy for the cell—a structure known to be affected in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological diseases, as well.

ARSACS was first observed in the descendants of a small group of 17th century French settlers who made their homes near the Charlevoix and Saguenay rivers in what is now Quebec, and has since been seen worldwide. But its incidence remains unusually high in that particular French Canadian community, with 1 in 1,500 to 2,000 people developing ARSACS and 1 in 23 people unaffected genetic carriers of the disease.

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What’s the News: Rarely has a humble little sound aroused such interest as in the last few days, as a paper about a phenomenon called vocal fry, a creak in someone’s voice as they speak, has been propelled to web prominence. Though many outlets got some basic facts wrong—the new study doesn’t actually show that fry has become more common among young women, just that it was common in the small group surveyed—all recognized the opportunity to launch into something we wish we knew more about: why we make funny sounds when we talk.

How the Heck:

• Vocal fry is a low, rumbling creak that, in English speakers, seems to appear mostly at the ends of sentences and has been captured in voice recordings going back to the early part of last century. Below is a clip (start watching at 34 seconds) with Mae West showing vocal fry on the “me” in “Why don’t you come up sometime, see me,” identified by the linguistics wonks at Language Log. Basically, it’s the opposite end of the spectrum from falsetto.

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Doctors long believed that patients who remained in a coma weeks or more after a brain injury would never regain consciousness. But recent research has shown that consciousness isn’t a binary, awake-or-not state; it’s a spectrum. While some brain injury patients are in a vegetative state, without any conscious awareness, others are in what’s called a minimally conscious state, still partially aware of—and at times even able to respond to—their surroundings. From the outside, it can be difficult to tell the two apart, though new methods, such as EEGs that pick up on subtle differences in brain waves, are starting to help clinicians gauge a patient’s level of consciousness.

From these hinterlands of consciousness comes another astounding—and mysterious—discovery: Ambien, the prescription sleep medication, and zolpidem, the drug’s generic form, can help some minimally conscious patients wake up. Jeneen Interlandi delves deep into this seemingly paradoxical treatment in the New York Times magazine:

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An image analyzed by the researchers, before retouching, after retouching, with an overlay that shows the strongest retouching in red, and with two facial overlays showing other measures of retouching.

What’s the News: It’s not news that in the age of Photoshop, celebrities and models in magazines have started to look like perfect aliens crash-landed among we ugly Earthlings. But though sometimes it’s obvious when a photo editor has gone too far (witness the Ralph Lauren her-head’s-bigger-than-her-pelvis debacle), the gap between what real people look like and what magazines and other media regularly show has grown distressingly wide without most people consciously noticing it, creating a sea of misinformation that may contribute to body-image disorders.

An analytical tool developed by Dartmouth scientists, though, picks up and quantifies those alterations, potentially providing a useful metric for policymakers looking to set boundaries on how much limb-stretching, torso-trimming, face-smoothing alteration is appropriate.

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New research suggests the mere act of walking through a doorway helps people forget, which could explain many millions of confusing moments that happen each day around the world. A study published recently in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that participants who walked through doorways in a virtual reality environment were significantly more likely to forget memories formed in another room, compared with those who traveled the same distance but crossed no thresholds.

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The colors that letters and numbers appear to a synesthete

What’s the News: For most of us, our senses stay relatively separate: that is, we hear what we hear and see what we see. People with synesthesia, however, actually see words as colors, taste a particular flavor when they hear a familiar song, or experience other strong, automatic linkages between senses. The neurological underpinnings of the condition—how the brain connects two usually distinct senses—have remained a mystery. But researchers have now found a possible cause, they reported yesterday: neurons in the area responsible for the second sensation, such as the color that goes with the word, may be unusually excitable.

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What’s The News: Three 16-year-old  teenage boys in Texas had heart attacks shortly after smoking a product called k2, or Spice, according to a study published this month in the journal Pediatrics. The report highlights a growing public health problem: the increased availability and use of synthetic cannabinoids, which when smoked mimic the effects of marijuana but typically can’t be detected in drug tests. While the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency secured an emergency, one-year ban of five synthetic cannabinoids in March of this year, most of the hundreds of such chemicals remain basically legal, widely available, little understood, and potentially harmful.

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A 68-year-old concert cellist suffering from severe amnesia can still learn new music, researchers reported [pdf] at the Society for Neuroscience conference this weekend. In 2005, the cellist suffered a bout of herpes encephalitis, a dangerous infection that causes inflammation in the brain. His medial temporal lobes, brain structures important in remembering facts and events—what scientists call explicit memory—were destroyed. As a result, the cellist, referred to by the initials PM, was left with both retrograde amnesia (meaning he couldn’t remember events from his past) and anterograde amnesia (meaning he couldn’t form new memories).

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Two days ago, Penn State students rioted in support of the university’s longtime football coach, Joe Paterno, who had just been fired. The reason? When he learned in 2002 that his then-assistant Jerry Sandusky had been seen sexually assaulting a child in the football team’s showers, according to the grand jury indictment of Sandusky [pdf], he directed the witness to go to the athletic director, and the police were never contacted. Sandusky has now been charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year span, and Paterno, who has won more games than any other coach in college football, has lost his job.

And yet, to the shock of many around the country who found the grand jury’s report extremely disturbing, students still stood up for him. Karen Schrock at Scientific American delves into the social science of group-think and explains why, when you’re part of a group, especially one defined by a charismatic individual, it changes the way you think:

According to psychological theory, every person has a social identity, which depends on being a member of various groups. “The social groups you belong to become a part of the very essence of who you feel you are,” explains psychologist Adam Galinsky, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. These groups can include our families and circles of friends; the clubs, churches and schools we attend; our race, ethnicity and nationality; and the list goes on. The more strongly we identify with a particular group, the more vehemently we defend its members and ideals—a trait that experts think evolved along with early human society. Banding together and protecting one another allowed our ancestors to survive, and so to this day we are quick to cheer on our comrades and feel animosity toward rival groups. Many scientists think this in-group psychology explains prejudice, racism and even sports fandom.

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Neurons damaged by Parkinson’s disease

What’s the News: Scientists have reversed Parkinson’s disease-like brain damage and motor problems in mice and rats using neurons grown from human embryonic stem cells. The new technique, described online in Nature earlier this week, brings scientists closer to similar treatments for people with Parkinson’s.

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A study published this week in the journal Pediatrics found a link between levels of bisphenol-A in pregnant moms and behavioral problems such as anxiety and hyperactivity in their daughters at age 3. No such effects were seen in boys. BPA has estrogen-like activity and can lead to developmental and behavioral problems in animals—but whether or not it does the same in humans, and at what dosages, is a subject of considerable debate. This study won’t settle the debate but highlights the need to answer some basic questions about BPA that remain surprisingly unclear.

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What’s the News: Recurring nightmares can cast a pall over anyone’s waking life, and for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, they can also contribute to panic attacks, flashbacks, and violent behavior. Can soothing, dream-like experiences in a virtual world, entered immediately after a nightmare runs its course, tame those bad dreams? It seems like a kind of real-life inception, but it’s not as far fetched as you’d think: the Army is investigating just such a treatment, Dawn Lim at Wired’s Danger Room reports.

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