Dormivigilia

Over the next two months, Kent State University’s Departments of Biological Sciences and Psychology are hiring tenure-track faculty to establish and in some cases, expand the presence of behavioral neuroscientists and psychopathologists in the classrooms and research wings. For graduate students, we not only have the opportunity to network and discuss really sexy, groundbreaking science, but also don’t have to shop at the grocery store for two months, or at least minimally. Though I imagine a daily diet of pizza, cookies, coffee, some fruit and vegetables here and there, more pizza, and pop does not improve, but probably deteriorates prime mental functioning comparable to what these neuroscientists and psychopathologists are investigating through brain slices, rodent models, and/or case studies.

Today, I heard two excellent job candidates lectures, but I will only comment on the Biological Sciences prospective hire in the interest of the thousands of other blogs you have to read tonight. Dr. Jilla Sabeti of the Scripps Research Institute discussed the deleterious effects of alcohol abuse (acute, binge drinking) and alcoholism (chronic binge-drinking necessary for “normal” functioning) on memory and more specifically, kinetics of sigma-receptors. Dr. Sabeti investigates this through the utility of electrophysiology; after exposing adolescent and adult mice to chronic vaporous alcohol challenges that elicit repeated withdrawal, she characterizes long-term potentiation (LTP), a phenomenon highly indicative of learning and memory, in areas of the brain controlling memory, both declarative and emotional. Not surprisingly, there are reciprocal connections between memory  and reward centers of the brain. Perhaps this explains why every time you revisit your college alma mater and/or the local brewery that was the site of your 21st birthday celebration that you have a craving to drink. In alcoholics, this contextual-dependent learning of associating a particular place, sound, smell etc with drinking is intensified and has certainly been shown to contribute to a vicious cycle of compulsive binge drinking. Interestingly enough, there is an additional ontological effect in which adult rats show persistent LTP with repeated alcohol exposure.

Here’s the representative paper of Dr. Sabeti’s seminar today. Emergence of NMDAR-Independent Long-Term Potentiation at Hippocampal CA1 Synapses Following Early Adolescent Exposure to Chronic Intermittent Ethanol: Role for Sigma-Receptors

Sabeti, J., & Gruol, D. (2008). Emergence of NMDAR-independent long-term potentiation at hippocampal CA1 synapses following early adolescent exposure to chronic intermittent ethanol: Role for sigma-receptors Hippocampus, 18 (2), 148-168 DOI: 10.1002/hipo.20379

Tomorrow she joins the graduate student for lunch (i.e. pizza from one of the five crappy pizza shops in Kent, Ohio…..oh how I miss East Coast pizza shops………….)

I suggest showing your class this video if you are reviewing neuroanatomy. Your students will never forget common brain structures because the song will be stuck in their heads for days….BRAINSTEM, BRAINSTEM!

What do Jennifer Lopez, Serena Williams, and Fergie have in common? Each has voluptuous curves that men salivate over. Nowadays, through the utility of fMRIs, science has been able to measure that men are more attractive to women who have voluptuous curves, more mathematically being a hip to waist ratio of about 0.7, and more modernly being known as a badonkadonk. Before I comment on the science, here’s a crash course on the etymology of the work badonkadonk of which I’m “modestly” familiar with (I’ve na a 10 minute speech about the etymology of the word on two separate occasions; the first oration was a mandatory public speak assignment, the second oration was an optional exercise but necessary during the graduate-school orientation to impress my incredibly attractive, geologically-enthused orientation leader…..and it worked).

The term badonkadonk increased in frequency of use following Missy Elliot’s millennium hit “Work It” in which she boasts, “Keep your eyes on this ba bump a bump bump, and see if you can handle this badonkadonk…donk.”Five years after Missy’s hit single, some crappy country singer and his even crappier song “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” popularized the use of the term. Interestingly enough, a pseudo-scientific British investigator (technically an observer) “evaluated” hundreds of women and used a subjective scaling system and an objective mathematical calculation to conclude that a ratio of 0.8 is equivocal to the most perfect badonkadonk. Unfortunately, I can no longer find this investigation since the Wikipedia entry of badonkadonk has considerably changed. Regardless of the lost of this coveted mathematical derivation, a balanced rating of bodacious butt curves, bouncability, and firmness is what make men incredibly attractive to JLo, Serena, and Fergie……and my ONTAP leader to me (I wonder if my derived formula is still hanging in his room and/or cellar, ask him for the formula).

As for science, this study is certainly more objective, through the use of actual body measurements and neuroimaging, and may catalyze the emergence of an entirely new subfield of human sexual behavior: What Men Want. I imagine S ’s hairdo isn’t one of them (but I know S ’s “hot, juiced, muscle guidos” are what women want. This reciprocal attraction is mentioned within the opening lines of the paper:

“Variations in men’s facial (e.g., symmetry, masculinity) and body (e.g., shoulder-to-hip ratio) morphology are related to women’s ratings of attractiveness. Specifically, women tend to rate more symmetrical and masculine faces , and higher SHR[1] as attractive during fertile phases of their menstrual cycle and for short-term mating partners[2,3,4,5,6,7,8]”

Work It!

Steven M. Platek, Devendra Singh (2010). Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural
Reward Centers in Men PLOS One, 5 (2)

Today, we had our first Neuroscience Journal Club of the semester. Though no science was discussed, we did begin brainstorming for Brain Awareness Week 2010; it’s an international program promoting neuroscience and the field’s pursuit to eradicate neurodegenerative diseases  and substance abuse and psychiatric disorders. Through this brainstorming, we’ve decided to have a movie night in the department (mainly to use the department’s new Blue Ray) and show the recent documentary on the pioneer of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of learning and memory: Dr. Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel Prize Laureate. The movie, appropriately named “In Search of Memory” is a Hollywood version of his eloquently written book also titled In Search of Memory. Dr. Kandel’s narratives of  his childhood in Nazi-occupied Austria are utilized as  a backbone to explain the molecular/cellular mechanisms of remembering and  forgetting. He also provides a  time line of the ground-breaking neuroscience researchers/experiments from the early 20th century, most of whom became his colleagues. Besides the information presented in the book, most of which was novel to me, the most salient advice from his autobiography regards the importance of collaboration.

A few months ago, the science community received fabulous news; The Obama Administration has approved use several stem cell lines and hundreds of others are in the pipeline. In this week’s Journal of Neuroscience, Canadian scientists are utilizing neural stem/progenitor cells to regenerate damaged nerve tissue following a severe spinal cord injury. Typically, chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs) are present within the central nervous system following a nervous system injury and are somewhat indicative of damage. In this study, the scientists infused an enzyme called chondroitinase ABC (ChABC) to target CSPGs, which not only perturbed CSPG activity, but markedly increased the survival and migration of the neural stem/progenitor cells co-grafted with growth factors into the injured area. Someday, this new neurotechnology, in addition to using light and channelrhodopsin receptors, to stimulate nerve tissue growth will not only help those retired football players and elderly individuals with debilitating spinal cord injuries, but hopefully will be utilized to eradicate neurodegenerative disorders that leave individuals paralyzed.

Soheila Karimi-Abdolrezaee, Eftekhar Eftekharpour, Jian Wang, Desiree Schut, and Michael G. Fehlings (2010). Synergistic Effects of Transplanted Adult Neural Stem/Progenitor Cells, Chondroitinase, and Growth Factors Promote Functional Repair and Plasticity of the Chronically Injured Spinal Cord Journal of Neuroscience : 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3111-09.2010

Tonight, I realized I almost made a grave and irreparable mistake: deleting all my pictures from 2003-2007 (the albums were sitting in the trash!). I had previously lost these pictures when my hard drive crashed circa 2006, but luckily had found a CD upload. Many of these pictures include my 10-day visit to Hawaii Summer 2004. Below are some of the pictures from the National Volcano Park on the Big Island. While many of the volcanoes are extinct, one is continuously erupting. Though you can walk  4-5 miles on it’s inactive parts, a helicopter ride (for a handsome fee I imagine) will fly you towards the active part where you will see great amounts of lava pouring into the Pacific 1000 feet below and creating this aesthetic hue of blues. I also include waterfall cascade from the Road to Hana, the Hawaiian Jungle, in Maui, where we had the bittersweet opportunity of finding a red sand beach that was additionally a nude beach…..for older….much older men.

Today, I did some microscopy work. Below are photomicrographs showing anterior and posterior portions of the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN), the structure in the hypothalamus that regulates sleep/wake and circadian physiology. The nuclei are the dark purplish bulbs at the base above the smiley-face-esque optic chiasm (OC) which transmits photic information. The anatomical locationS of the OC and SCN are purposeful given that the SCN integrates photic information to control sleep/wake and circadian physiology. I also include a staining of the dentate gyrus; an integral structure of learning and memory. These stainings are from a mouse.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you’ll know that the Syrian hamster “can drink you under the table” (per the Manswers episode featuring my lab).  This isn’t shocking given that the Syrian hamster, a desert-dwelling creature in its natural environment, eats fermented fruit. After burying fruit in the ground, these animals let the fruit ferment, recover it (I imagine it tastes like the passion fruit in sangria), and get drunk. Actually, these animals have an extremely high tolerance for alcohol, which means overt behavioral impairments following ad libitum alcohol consumption is rare. Giving Syrian hamsters an acute, systemic injection of a high alcohol dose is a different story…….

Which animal can drink you under the table?

It appears that Syrian hamsters aren’t the only mammals that can drink humans, even members of Greek life and athletic teams, under the table. Frugivorous fruit bats show high tolerance to alcohol in that marked alcohol consumption doesn’t impair flying and/or echolocation. Oxfordian researchers fed various frugivorous bat species 1.5% alcohol and attempted to determine any deleterious effects .There were none, though there was variability in the clearance rate of alcohol from the blood. Below is a histogram adopted from the paper which shows that roughly 20% of these bats achieved BAC near 0.3%! To quote my advisor during his 15 minutes of fame on Manswers, “I would never want to have a shooters contest with one of these!”

Dara N. Orbach, Nina Veselka, Yvonne Dzal, Louis Lazure, M. Brock Fenton (2010). Drinking and Flying: Does Alcohol Consumption Affect
the Flight and Echolocation Performance of Phyllostomid
Bats?
PLOS One, 5 (2) : 10.1371/journal.pone.0008993

This short film of which won a Sundance Film Festival Award addresses the issue of organ donation shortages which can be partially alleviated by allowing death row inmates to donate organs. I imagine national resistance to uplift the banning of organ donations by the convicted partially manifests from the fact that the organs of people who murdered, raped, maimed, etc others are being transplanted into other human beings. The additional subsequent concern, of course, is that this will psychologically alter the organ donee and he/she may develop sociopathic, antisocial thoughts and actions. This of course is not true, though there are several documentations of a donee upon receiving an organ(s) from a known donor personifying this donor and sometimes, developing another ego or “split” personality.

When I was a teenager, I had a paper route. Given that most of my customers (i.e. my neighbors) were born before or during the Great Depression let’s just say I didn’t have a very lucrative business. Many of my customers not only gave me 25 cents, half-dollars, or Susan B. Anthony dollars as tips (and would sometimes run upstairs to retrieve the coins from a tin can) but many distrusted banks. This one woman in her late seventies actually admitted that she did not have a bank account, had never written a check in her lifetime, and stored all her money, including life savings in her bedroom! Wow. If one additionally considers where I was raised and worked as a papergirl in the early millennium, Youngstown, OH, which at the time was ranked as the most dangerous city in America determined from the number of homicides per population (1 for every 800 Youngstownians), this woman’s decision to stow her life savings under her mattress is even more preposterous!

Perplexed by this odd, illogical behavior for years, a scientifically plausible justification for this behavior has been revealed in this week’s Journal of Neuroscience. Stanfordian scientists have discovered that financial risks increase with age. Neurobiologically, these risks manifest from differential activity within the nucleus accumbens which is characteristically known as the pleasure/reward center of the brain (food, sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, money, fame, and even tickle fetishes!). In all seriousness, this research is yet another suggestion that age-related decline in brain functioning, including depressions in synaptic plasticity, connectivity, and neuronal firing) has deleterious effects on cognitive functioning, particularly that involved with risks, decision making, and memory. South Park addressed this issue years ago, by publicizing (in most cases over-dramatizing) the erratic driving behavior of seniors.

How can we limit elderly individiuals’ risk taking behaviors without jeopardizing basic human rights?

It also begs the question of whether the bigwigs of Wall Street are simply suffering from premature age-related dementia and/or have differential accumbal activity comparable to their elders.

Samanez-Larkin, G., Kuhnen, C., Yoo, D., & Knutson, B. (2010). Variability in Nucleus Accumbens Activity Mediates Age-Related Suboptimal Financial Risk Taking Journal of Neuroscience, 30 (4), 1426-1434 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4902-09.2010