- Biosingularity

Sea urchins are small and spiny, they have no eyes and they eat kelp and algae. Still, the sea creature’s genome is remarkably similar to humans’ and may hold the key to preventing and curing several human diseases, according to a University of Central Florida researcher and several colleagues.

UCF Professor Cristina Calestani was part of the Sea Urchin Genome Sequencing Group, which recently completed sequencing of the sea urchin genome and published its findings in the November issue of Science. The National Institutes of Health funded most of the nine-month project.

The genome of the purple sea urchin is composed by 814 “letters” coding for 23,300 genes.

- Science Daily

Cocaine’s boost derives from reward-prompting receptors actively blocking their signaling counterpart, according to new research.

- Scientific American

Neuroethics is a new field. It concerns the ethics of the science of the mind and the ethical questions that arise out of our growing knowledge of the way in which the mind works. Before the year 2000 there was little need for the term but rapid advances in the sciences of mind, and the rise of pressing ethical issues surrounding them, mean that we cannot any longer remain without the term or the field to which it refers.

- ABC Radio

CAMBIA is an international, independent non-profit research institute. For more than a decade, CAMBIA has been creating new enabling tools to foster innovation and a spirit of collaboration in the life sciences. In Spanish and Italian, CAMBIA means “change”. This meaning is at the very heart of CAMBIA’s mission.

CAMBIA’s BIOS Initiative™ (Biological Innovation for Open Society) is exploring new R&D paradigms, practices and policies to address neglected priorities of disadvantaged communities. How? By tapping the great potential of their own creativity. Our institutional ethos is built around an awareness of this need and opportunity: for local commitment to achieving lasting solutions to the challenges of food security, agricultural productivity, human and animal health and natural resource management.

- Cambia

This film shows surgeons from the Neuroscience Institute at Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center perform a hemispher- ectomy on a 6-year-old girl with epilepsy. This involves removing a large part of the girl’s left hemisphere; the corpus callosum, the bundle of approximately 100 million nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres, is then severed.

One of the surgeons in the film describes epilepsy as “an electrical storm” in the brain. The procedure is performed to remove the eye of this “storm”. The corpus callosum is then severed, just in case the tissue which is the source of the abnormal electrical activity has not been removed in its entirety. This would prevent any remaining abnormal activity spreading from its source, in the left hemisphere, to the right hemisphere.

Surgery is usually a last resort for epileptics who do not respond to drugs. Part of the procedure shown in the film is similar to that performed on Sperry and Gazzaniga’s so-called “split-brain” patients, in which the corpus callosum is severed. The corpus callosumectomy is also performed to prevent the spread of seizures from one hemisphere to the other.

- Neurophilosopher’s Weblog