http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us PhysOrg Team Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. (Medical Xpress)—Optical illusions abound in human visual perception, as demonstrated by the following well-known examples. Although many are static illusions, motion illusions also occur. Recently, scientists at Université Paris Descartes and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, University of Reading, United Kingdom, and Kyushu University, Japan discovered and investigated a new illusory motion effect, termed high phi by the authors, in which we perceive conspicuous large illusory jumps when presentation of motion signals are followed by brief visual stimuli free of detectable motion signals. The researchers found that the size of the illusory jump does not depend on the speed of the motion signals presented, but rather on spatial frequency and transient duration while jump duration depends on motion signal duration. The study's authors conclude that their findings demonstrate that existing explanations for this illusion – namely, the loss of coherent motion perception above an upper limit and the preference for minimal motion – are incomplete at best. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-motion-perception-revisited-high-phi.html Neuroscience 2013-04-23T15:20:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—The existential psychologist Rollo May wrote that "depression is the inability to construct a future"1 while Lionel Tiger stated that "optimism has been central to the process of human evolution"2. These deceptively simple phrases are remarkable in their depth and the connections they form between philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Both capture the essence of human nature by articulating their insight that our ability to imagine and plan for the future is not only one of the most striking aspects of our species, but also that the inability to exercise this faculty is profoundly damaging to our happiness and sense of self. Two concepts related to these observations are depressive realism – the assertion that people with depression actually have a more accurate perception of reality, and moreover are less affected by its counterpoint, the superiority illusion. The superiority illusion is a cognitive bias by which individuals, relative to others, overestimate their positive qualities and abilities (such as intelligence, cognitive ability, and desirable traits) and underestimate their negative qualities. (Other cognitive biases include optimism bias and illusion of control.) While mathematically flawed – given a normal population distribution, most people are not above average – the superiority illusion is a positive belief that promotes mental health. Recently, scientists at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (Chiba, Japan), the Japan Science and Technology Agency (Saitama), and Stanford University School of Medicine used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) to study the default states of neural and molecular systems that generate the superiority illusion. They showed that resting-state functional connectivity between the frontal cortex and striatum regulated by inhibitory dopaminergic neurotransmission determines individual levels of the superiority illusion. The scientists state that their findings help clarify how the superiority illusion is biologically determined and identify potential molecular and neural targets for treating depressive realism. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-neuromolecular-foundations-superiority-illusion.html Neuroscience 2013-04-02T09:49:17-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—It has long been held that in a new environment, visual adaptation should improve visual performance. However, evidence has contradicted this expectation: Adaptation sometimes not only decreases sensitivity for the adapting stimuli, but can also change sensitivity for stimuli very different from the adapting ones. Recently, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Schepens Eye Research Institute formulated and tested the hypothesis that these results can be explained by a process that optimizes sensitivity for many stimuli, rather than changing sensitivity only for those stimuli whose statistics have changed. By manipulating stimulus statistics – that is, measuring visual sensitivity across a wide range of spatiotemporal luminance modulations while varying the distribution of stimulus speeds – the researchers demonstrated a large-scale reorganization of visual sensitivity. This reorganization formed an orderly pattern of sensitivity gains and losses predicted by a theory describing how visual systems can optimize the distribution of receptive field characteristics across stimuli. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-visual-economist-neural-resource-allocation.html Neuroscience 2013-03-30T12:38:40-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—Replicative aging (also known as replicative senescence) causes mammalian cells to undergo a process of growth arrest dependent on telomeres (the shortening of repeated sequences at the ends of chromosomes). Neurons, on the other hand, are exempt from aging, and so the question of their actual lifespan has remained unanswered. Recently, however, scientists at the University of Pavia and the University of Turin demonstrated that neuronal lifespan is not limited by the organism's maximum lifespan but, remarkably, continues when transplanted in a longer-living host. The researchers accomplished this by transplanting embryonic mouse cerebellar precursors into the developing brain of longer-living rats, in which the grafted mouse neurons survived for up to three years – twice the average lifespan of the donor mice. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-neuronal-organismal-lifespans-decoupled.html Neuroscience 2013-03-27T16:30:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—Visual perception is far more complex and powerful than our experience suggests. Moreover, in attempting to both understand vision and implement it in a computational device, the fact that a species' senses developed in concert with the ecological niche in which that species evolved. In our case, that means an evolutionary visual context consisting of natural objects, including mountains, rivers, trees, and other animals. Noting that neural representations of visual inputs are related to their statistical structure, and natural structures display an inseparable size hierarchy indicative of scale invariance, and scale invariance also occurs near a critical point in wide range of physical systems including ferromagnetic), researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California-San Diego recently demonstrated what their paper describes as "a unique approach to studying natural images by decomposing images into a hierarchy of layers at different logarithmic intensity scales and mapping them to a quasi-2D magnet." http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-sizing-evolutionary-neurobiology-scale-invariance.html Neuroscience 2013-02-28T09:00:06-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—The ease and immediacy with which we recognize familiar objects escapes our notice. However, a novel, ambiguous, or highly complex object requires practice to achieve such perceptual facility. Past perceptual learning research found a wide range of rates at which these object recognition skills are acquired. Recently, however, scientists at Harvard University and New York University have devised a way to distinguish feature detection and feature combination, and moreover have determined the rate at which these two steps improve during perceptual learning. The researchers found that while detection is inefficient and learned slowly, combination is learned at a rate four to seven times greater. In addition, they show how this clarifies the diverse results obtained in previous perceptual learning studies. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-feature-combination-perceptual-identification.html Neuroscience 2013-01-11T12:29:03-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—The apparent ease and immediacy of human perception is deceptive, requiring highly complex neural operations to determine the category of objects in a visual scene. Nevertheless, the human brain is able to complete operations such as face category tuning (the ability differentiate faces from other similar objects) completely outside of conscious awareness. Apparently, such complex processes are not sufficient for us to consciously perceive faces. Now, scientists from the University of Amsterdam used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to show that while visible and invisible faces produce similar category-selective responses in the brain's ventral visual cortex, only visible faces caused widespread response enhancements and changes in neural oscillatory synchronization. The team concluded that sustained neural information integration is a key factor in conscious face perception. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-facts-neural-unconscious-conscious-perception.html Neuroscience 2012-12-31T08:50:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—The classic theory of the brain is one of connections, in which the brain consists of a network of neurons that interact with each other to allow us to think, see, interpret, and understand the world around us. In this model, called distributed representation, an individual neuron by itself has no inherent meaning, but only contributes to a pattern of neuronal activity that has meaning. For example, a certain pattern of many neurons fires when you think "dog" and another pattern for "cat." http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-brain-cells.html Neuroscience 2012-12-04T08:30:07-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—The brain's two hippocampal formations – one in each hemisphere's temporal lobe, medial to the inferior horn of the lateral ventricle and typically referring to the dentate gyrus, the hippocampus proper (the cornu ammonis), and the subicular cortex – are known to play essential roles in both representing an animal's location and in updating those representations by detecting novelty in the environment. While location representation processes are understood, however, those by which these representations are created and updated have remained elusive. Recently, scientists at University College London have shown that environmental novelty causes the spatial firing patterns of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex of freely-moving rodents to expand in scale and reduce in regularity, reverting to their usual scale as the environment again becomes familiar. The researchers conclude that grid expansion provides a potential mechanism for novelty signaling and may enhance the formation of new hippocampal representations, and that the subsequent slow reduction in scale provides a potential familiarity signal. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-grid-environmental-novelty-hippocampal-patterns.html Neuroscience 2012-11-07T10:50:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—In the battle against aging and age-related neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, a key factor has long appeared to be the toxicity of proteins which tend to aggregate. Recently, scientists at University of Groningen, The Netherlands identified the protein-coding gene TDO2 that encodes for tryptophan 2,3-dioxygenase – the enzyme that degrades tryptophan and thereby reduces its levels – as a metabolic regulator of age-related protein toxicity and lifespan in the eukaryotic nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The researchers also showed that the regulation of lifespan occurred through evolutionarily conserved genetic pathways. The study demonstrated that TDO2 depletion increases tryptophan levels, while feeding C. elegans with extra L-tryptophan also suppresses toxicity. The researchers conclude that their findings suggest that TDO2 regulates proteotoxicity through tryptophan. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-enzymes-aging-tryptophan-metabolism-key.html Medical research 2012-10-05T11:00:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress)—Scientists have historically relied on neuroimaging – but not electrophysiological – data when studying the human default mode network (DMN), a group of brain regions with lower activity during externally-directed tasks and higher activity if tasks require internal focus. Recently, however, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine recorded electrical activity directly from a core DMN component known as the posteromedial cortex (PMC) during both internally- and externally-directed waking states – specifically, autobiographical memory and arithmetic calculation, respectively. The data they recorded showed an inverse relationship – namely, the degree activation during memory retrieval predicted the degree of suppression during arithmetic calculation – which they say provides important anatomical and temporal details about DMN function at the neural population level. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-09-memory-math-brain-areas-inverse.html Neuroscience 2012-09-17T09:09:03-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- That the brain is evolution at its finest is perhaps best demonstrated by the beauty, complexity and diversity of dendrites – tree-like structures that form neural circuits by connecting a neuron to its synaptic inputs. Recently, neuroscientists studying the tree-like branching of these diverse structures at Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, and the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology, at University College London, have derived a surprisingly simple and general equation that directly relates dendrite length with the number of branch points, dendrite spanning volume, and number of synapses. More specifically, they’ve shown that optimal dendritic wiring successfully predicts a 2/3 power law between these three factors. (A power law is a mathematical relationship between two quantities – found throughout the natural world – in which one quantity varies as a power of the other, often identifying simple rules underlying complex structures.) Their theory is both consistent with data gleaned from many types of neurons from a wide range of species yet specific to dendritic trees, leading them to conclude that their findings suggest that there are distinct design principles for dendritic arbors compared with vascular, bronchial, and botanical trees. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-mathematical-law-dendritic.html Neuroscience 2012-06-28T10:30:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Regardless of an organism’s biological complexity, every encephalized animal continuously makes under-informed behavioral choices that can have serious consequences. Despite its ubiquity, however, there’s a long-standing question about its neurological basis – namely, whether these choices are made through probabilistic world models constructed by the brain, or by reinforcement of learned associations. Recently, however, scientists in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University found that reinforcement cannot account for the rapidity with which mice modify their behavior when the chance of a given phenomenon changes. The researchers say this indicates that mice may have primordially-evolved neural capabilities to represent likelihood and perform calculations that optimize their resulting behavior – and therefore that such genetic mechanisms can be investigated and manipulated by genetic and other procedures. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-mice-mental-neuroscientific-implications-risk-optimized.html Neuroscience 2012-05-25T08:50:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- On the complex road to eradicating cancer, controlling or preventing metastatic growth initiated by primary tumors is high on the to-do list. A key area of such research is the development of therapies based on identifying markers of metastasis associated with altered choline metabolism in breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers. Recently, scientists at the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors (IfADO), University of Dortmund, Germany, studying the tumor metabolome – the characteristic metabolic phenotype of tumor cells fundamental to the tumor’s metastatic capacity – identified EDI3 (endometrial differential 3) as the enzyme responsible for a decreased glycerophosphocholine (GPC) to phosphocholine (PC) ratio by cleaving GPC to produce choline. The scientists concluded that since inhibiting EDI3 activity corrects the GPC/PC ratio and thereby decreases tumor cell migration capacity, it represents a possible therapeutic modality. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-limits-growth-scientists-key-metastasis-enabling.html Medical research 2012-05-22T09:00:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Remarkably, cortical maps show that neurons in the primary visual cortex have specific preferences for the location and orientation of a given visual field stimulus – but how these maps develop and what function they play in visual processing remains a mystery. Evidence suggests that the retinotopic map is established by molecular gradients, but little is known about how orientation maps are wired. One hypothesis: at their inception, these orientation maps are seeded by the spatial interference of ON- and OFF-center retinal receptive field mosaics. Recently, scientists in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles have shown that this proposed mechanism predicts a link between the layout of orientation preferences around singularities of different signs and the cardinal axes of the retinotopic map, and have confirmed this prediction in the tree shrew primary visual cortex. The researchers say their findings support the idea that spatially structured retinal input may provide a blueprint of sorts for the early development of cortical maps and receptive fields – and that the same may hold true for other senses as well. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-spatially-structured-retinal-early-cortical.html Neuroscience 2012-04-26T10:11:46-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- The link between dreaming and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep are well understood – but the fact that consciousness is reduced during nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep is not. Recently, scientists in the Cyclotron Research Centre at the University of Liège, in Liège, Belgium, and the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, and the Functional Neuroimaging Unit at the Montreal Geriatrics Institute, investigated NREM sleep with the hypothesis that this phenomenon is associated with increased modularity of the brain’s functional activity during these periods. Using functional clustering – which estimates how integration is hierarchically organized within and across the constituent parts of a system they found that while in NREM sleep, hierarchically-organized large-scale neural networks were disaggregated into smaller independent modules. The researchers concluded that this difference could reduce the ability of the brain to integrate information, thereby accounting for the decreased consciousness experienced during NREM sleep. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-dreamless-nights-brain-nonrapid-eye.html Neuroscience 2012-04-09T10:00:02-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- College and cramming – often where’s there’s one, the other is not far behind. That said, however, it has been recognized since the late 1800s that repeated periodic exposure to the same material leads to better retention than does a single en masse session. Nevertheless, the phenomenon’s neurobiological processes have remained poorly understood, although activity-dependent synaptic plasticity – notably long-term potentiation (LTP) of glutamatergic transmission – is believed to enable rapid storage of new information. Recently, researchers at the University of California in Irvine and the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida determined that hippocampal activity can enhance LTP through theta burst stimulation (TBS) – but only when the affected synapses receive, after a long delay, a secondary TBS. The researchers describe mechanisms that maximize synaptic changes that optimally encode new memory by requiring long delays learning-related TBS activity. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-neurobiology-superiority-spaced-massed.html Neuroscience 2012-03-28T09:30:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Psychedelic substances have long been used for healing, ceremonial, or mind-altering subjective experiences due to compounds that, when ingested or inhaled, generate hallucinations, perceptual distortions, or altered states of awareness. Of these, the psychedelic substance psilocybin, the prodrug (a precursor of a drug that must in vivo chemical conversion by metabolic processes before becoming an active pharmacological agent) of psilocin (4-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine) and the key hallucinogen found in so-called magic mushrooms, is widely used not only in healing ceremonies, but, more recently, in psychotherapy as well – but little has been known about its specific activity in the brain. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-brain-shrooms-fmri-elucidates-neural.html Neuroscience 2012-02-29T09:50:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Optically monitoring the brain’s neuronal activity can be accomplished in several ways, including electrochromic dyes, hydrophobic anions, calcium imaging, or voltage-sensitive ion channels. Fluorescence imaging is an attractive method due to its ability to map the electrical activity and communication of multiple spatially resolved neurons. While this complements traditional electrophysiological measurements, historically fluorescent voltage imaging has been limited by the difficulty of developing sensors that give both large and fast responses to voltage changes. Recently, however, scientists in the Department of Pharmacology and other areas in the University of California at San Diego’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute have designed, synthesized, and implemented fluorescent sensors in the form of photo-induced electron transfer (PeT)-based molecular wire probes for voltage imaging in neurons. Moreover, they have used these so-called VoltageFluor sensors to perform single-trial detection of synaptic and action potentials in cultured hippocampal neurons and intact leech ganglia. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-brain-dye-imaging-neuronal-voltage.html Neuroscience 2012-02-24T12:20:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Rather than being a passive state, perception is an active process fueled by predictions and expectations about our environment. In the latter case, memory must be a fundamental component in the way our brain generates these precursors to the perceptual experience – but how the brain integrates long-term memory with perception has not been determined. Recently, however, researchers in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, by devising a method for integrating memory and attention, showed how LTM optimizes perception by varying brain states associated with anticipation of spatial localization in the visual field. The scientists also used fMRI to articulate a neural network involving a number of cortical areas likely to be active in the predictive use of memory in the visual cortex. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-remembrance-future-long-term-memory-stage.html Neuroscience 2011-12-28T08:30:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Neuroanatomy and neurophysiology are inherently three-dimensional domains. Neuronal cell body projections – axons and dendrites – can interconnect large numbers of neurons distributed over large cortical distances. Since the brain processes sensory, somatic, conceptual, and other classes of information in this 3D structural space, the need to (1) image neural structures and (2) stimulate and record neural signals are essential to understanding the relationship between brain structure and function. While 3D imaging and 3D photostimulation using scanning or parallel excitation methods have been used, they have not previously been combined into an optical system that can successfully decouple the corresponding optical planes when using a single lens – a shortcoming that has limited investigators to small neural areas. Recently, however, scientists at Université Paris Descartes have combined digital single photon holographic stimulation with remote-focusing-based epifluorescent functional imaging to overcome these limitations. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-brain-scanning-simultaneous-high-resolution-3d.html Neuroscience 2011-11-28T16:00:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- A key phenomenon studied by neuroscientists is the brain’s ability to recognize errors when they occur, link them to the associated behavior, and apply those errors in a way that modifies the behavior - the overall goal being to optimize the intended result of engaging in that behavior. Two neural measurements – the error-related negativity (ERN) and error-related functional MRI (fMRI) activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC, sometimes referred to as the medial frontal cortex) – have historically been seen as reflecting the same underlying neural process. Recently, however, findings by scientists at Harvard Medical School-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital have suggested that the ERN is differentially localized to the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-error-correcting-brain-insights-neurobiology-behavior.html Neuroscience 2011-10-27T10:15:18-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Morphine's analgesic properties are as potent as its addictive potential are problematic. The neural pathway for that addiction is typically associated with dopamine (DA) neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA), despite the fact that the specific neuronal mechanisms involved are not well articulated. Recently, however, research conducted at the Université de Bordeaux and Université de Strasbourg in France found that morphine increases the firing of dopamine neurons by activating μ opioid receptor (μOR) receptors on the rostromedial tegmental nucleus (the VTA's GABAergic tail) – and that there is no morphine-induced activation of dopamine neurons in the absence of tonic VTA glutamatergic modulation. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-brain-drugs-neural-anatomy-physiology.html Neuroscience 2011-10-04T12:00:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- One of the many potential consequences of ischemic stroke – a lesion, or localized pathological change in the brain, in which blood flow insufficient to meet metabolic demand leads to poor oxygen supply (cerebral hypoxia) – is compromise to two different visual plasticity paradigms: sensory learning (the enhancement of visual acuity and contrast sensitivity of the open eye after monocular deprivation, or MD, in which vision in one eye is blocked) and ocular dominance, or OD, plasticity (a shift in the ocular dominance of neurons in the binocular part of the visual cortex toward the open eye after MD). A standard view holds that changes in the activity of the major thalamocortical afferents to the visual cortex (the afferents from the left and right eye) are sufficient to induce OD-plasticity. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-09-anti-inflammatory-treatment-reverses-stroke-induced-compromise.html Inflammatory disorders 2011-09-22T07:31:07-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Historically, perceptual and response rates when multitasking have been interpreted as being limited by independent bottlenecks. While a more recent view suggests that a common bottleneck might be the cause, experimental evidence for its existence have not been determinative. Recently, however, researchers at Vanderbilt University used time-resolved functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – where both the topography and temporal sequence of cortical activation across brain regions is examined – to identify a unified attentional bottleneck – a network of regions that apparently limits the speeds at which perceptual encoding and decision-making can occur. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-08-fast-thought-perception-limited-neocortical.html Neuroscience 2011-08-24T08:59:42-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- The real world is, in a word, cluttered – but thanks to evolution, we (and other mammals) have no trouble detecting objects in visually complex natural environments. Determining precisely how this occurs is a deceptively complex task, since the retinal and neural mechanisms responsible for simpler percepts – lines, edges and the like –do not account for this survival skill – in fact, they actually interfere with it. Recently, however, scientists have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to elucidate the top-down processes by which high-level cortical areas that deal not with simple percepts, but rather abstract perceptual categories, actually prepare lower-level visual brain centers to perceive detail amidst disorder. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-categories-high-order-brain-centers-pave.html Neuroscience 2011-07-11T08:02:38-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- Of the world’s leading causes of death, stroke ranks second – and occurring 8 out of 10 times is ischemic stroke: reduced blood supply to the brain creates a shortage of oxygen, glucose and other nutrients and an increase in metabolic waste, leading to neuronal damage that results in physiological impairment or death. At the molecular level, the genetic activation of the nucleic acid protein Caspase-3 – a member of the cysteine-aspartic acid protease (caspase) family – is a major factor in loss of neuronal tissue and associated apoptosis (programmed cell death). Post-stroke treatments known to be effective at reducing or reversing damage involve preventing Caspase-3 activation, either by genetic or pharmacological intervention. Recently, however, a group of European researchers combined these modalities by using functionalized carbon nanotubes (f-CNT) – nanotubes made soluble by attaching certain molecules to their sidewalls – to deliver siRNA (silencing RNA) to ischemically-impacted neuronal tissue in vivo. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-softly-tiny-recovery-nanotube-delivered-sirna.html Medical research 2011-07-05T09:30:01-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- We experience an interesting phenomenon when the contrast of an image flickers as it moves across our visual field – namely, an illusory reversal in the direction of motion. Moreover, this reverse-phi illusion occurs in a surprisingly wide range of species, indicating that this is a common evolutionary adaptation. Recently, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus demonstrated that motion-sensitive neurons in the brain of the ubiquitous fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster respond to the reverse-phi illusion and generate a change in its flight behavior. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-ghosts-machine-neural-basis-visual.html Neuroscience 2011-06-22T08:00:02-07:00 (Medical Xpress) -- One of cancer's greatest and most insidious threats is metastasis – the three-dimensional migratory invasion of cancer cells from primary tumors to a distant part of the body. The challenge of defeating cancer lies not only in the fact that the area where the new colony appears is unpredictable, but also that different types of cancer metastasize at different rates and with varying degrees of growth. While standard therapeutic intervention modalities focus on destroying the cancer cells, a new generation of scientists – physicists, oncologists, molecular pharmacologists, materials scientists, computational biologists, and engineers working collaboratively – has taken a different tack: viewing cancer metastasis as intelligent, cooperative genetically-expressed adaptive behavior that can be decoded and, through emerging techniques in synthetic biology, reprogrammed. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-04-decoding-metastasis.html Cancer 2011-04-29T10:39:21-07:00