The mere mention of a stressful word like “wheeze“ can activate two brain regions in asthmatics during an attack, and this brain activity may be associated with more severe asthma symptoms, according to a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and collaborators, according to Eurekalert.
The study reveals a functional link between emotion processing centers in the brain and certain physiological processes relevant to disease.
UW-Madison psychology professor Richard Davidson, an expert on emotions; and UW-Madison medicine professor William Busse, an expert on asthma; are senior co-authors on the study.
Melissa Rosenkranz, a graduate student at the UW-Madison Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, is the lead author.
“While this study was small, it shows how important specific brain circuits can be in modulating inflammation,“ says Davidson, director of the affective neuroscience laboratory and the Waisman Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior.
Previous studies and clinical evidence have shown that stress and emotional turmoil adversely affect people with inflammatory diseases like asthma. And signs of inflammation have been shown to affect the brain.
But until now, nobody knew exactly what brain circuits were involved in these seemingly intertwined emotional and immune events or how the circuits might influence the severity of an acute asthma response.
Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of six mildly asthmatic people who were asked to inhale ragweed or dust-mite extracts.
Subjects were then shown three types of words: asthma-related (such as “wheeze“), non-asthma negative (such as “loneliness“) and neutral (such as “curtains“). Shortly after, researchers measured lung function in the subjects as well as molecular signs of inflammation in their sputum.
The fMRI scans revealed that the asthma-related terms stimulated robust responses in two brain regions--the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula--that were strongly correlated with measures of lung function and inflammation.
The two brain structures are involved in transmitting information about the physiological condition of the body, such as shortness of breath and pain levels, says Davidson, and they have strong connections with other brain structures essential in processing emotional information.
The researchers suspect that other brain regions may also be involved in the asthma-stress interaction.

A computer simulation of the Earth’s climate 250 million years ago suggests that global warming triggered the so-called “great dying“.
According BBC News website, a dramatic rise in carbon dioxide caused temperatures to soar to 10 to 30 degrees Celsius higher than today, say US researchers.
The warming had a profound impact on the oceans, cutting off oxygen to the lower depths and extinguishing most life forms, they write in the latest issue of Geology.
The research adds to the growing body of evidence that higher temperatures, rather than a giant space rock hitting the planet, led to the greatest mass extinction in history.
The extinction, at the end of the Permian Period and the beginning of the Triassic, has puzzled scientists for many years.
Some 95% of lifeforms in the oceans became extinct, along with about three-quarters of land species.
Many possible reasons for this catastrophic event have been proposed--including impacts, volcanism, climate change and glaciation. Hard evidence, however, has been difficult to find.
The latest data from scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, supports the view that extensive volcanic activity over the course of hundreds of thousands of years released large amounts of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide into the air, gradually warming up the planet.

The droplet switch shown here toggles between a big droplet positioned above and below the plate using applied voltage.

Imagine this: A tiny, fast switch that uses water droplets to create adhesive bonds almost as strong as aluminum by borrowing a mechanism found in palm beetles, Science Daily reported.
The new beetle-inspired switch, designed by Cornell University engineers, can work by itself on the scale of a micron--a millionth of a meter. The switches can be combined in arrays for larger applications like powerful adhesive bonding.
Like the transistor, whose varied uses became apparent only following its invention, the uses of the new switch are not yet understood. But the switch’s simplicity, smallness and speed have enormous potential, according to the researchers.
“Almost all the greatest technological advances have depended on switches, and this is a switch that is fast and can be scaled down,“ said Paul Steen, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell.
Steen dreamed up the idea of the switch after listening to Cornell entomologist Tom Eisner lecture on palm beetles, which are native to the southeastern United States.
Like the beetle, which clings to a palm leaf at adhesive strengths equal to a hundred times its own body weight--the human equivalent of carrying seven cars--the switch in its most basic form uses surface tension created by water droplets in contact with a surface, in much the same way as two pieces of wet paper cling together.
When attacked, the palm beetle attaches itself to a leaf until the attacker leaves. It adheres with 120,000 droplets of secreted oil, each making a bridgelike contact between the beetle’s feet and the leaf. Each droplet is just a few microns wide. Whereas the beetle controls the oil contacts mechanically, Steen’s switch uses water and electricity.
For the switch to make or release a bond created by surface tension, a water droplet moves to the top or bottom of a flat plate surface using electricity from electrodes.
The electricity moves positively charged atoms, called ions, in the water through the minute capillaries of a thin disk of porous glass embedded in the plate. The water moves and wells up into a micrometer-sized droplet on the plate surface. The exposed droplet can then stick to another surface. To break the bond, electricity pulls the exposed water back through the capillary pores.
With millimeter-sized water droplets and micron-sized pores, 5 volts can turn the switch on in one second. At the same time, the researchers predict that smaller droplets will require less energy to move and have faster switching times. Steen and his colleagues believe that a switch as small as hundreds of nanometers, close to a billionth of a meter and one-tenth the size of the beetle droplets, is within reach.

MIT scientists have developed a new dye that could offer noninvasive early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, a discovery that could aid in monitoring the progression of the disease and in studying the efficacy of new treatments to stop it, Science Daily reported.
Today, doctors can only make a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s-currently the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States-through a postmortem autopsy of the brain.
“Before you can cure Alzheimer’s, you have to be able to diagnose it and monitor its progress very precisely,“ said Timothy Swager, leader of the work and a professor in MIT’s Department of Chemistry.
To that end, Swager and postdoctoral associate Evgueni Nesterov, also from the MIT Department of Chemistry, worked with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh to develop a contrast agent that would first bind to the protein deposits, or plaques, in the brain that cause Alzheimer’s, and then fluoresce when exposed to radiation in the near-infrared range. The new dye could allow direct imaging of Alzheimer’s plaques through a patient’s skull.
Some of the first noninvasive techniques for diagnosing Alzheimer’s involved agents labeled with radioactive elements that could enter the brain and target disease plaque for imaging with positron emission tomography (PET).
However, these methods were expensive and limited by the short working lifetime of the labeled agents.
Swager and colleagues developed the new dye, called NIAD-4, through a targeted design process based on a set of specific requirements, including the ability to enter the brain rapidly upon injection, bind to amyloid plaques, absorb and fluoresce radiation in the right spectral range, and provide sharp contrast between the plaques and the surrounding tissue. The compound provided clear visual images of amyloid brain plaques in living mice with specially prepared cranial windows.
To make the technique truly noninvasive, scientists must further refine the dye so it fluoresces at a slightly longer wavelength, closer to the infrared region. Light in the near-IR range can penetrate living tissue well enough to make brain structures visible. Swager likens the effect to the translucence produced when one holds a red laser pointer against the side of a finger.
The new dye was developed as part of a broader effort in sensing technology at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. In addition to its applications as a medical diagnostic, Swager says fluorescing dyes like NIAD-4 could work as signals in a wide variety of sensing schemes.

Droplets of liquid have been moved uphill by molecular motors designed to manipulate Brownian motion, according to New Scienctist.
While other researchers have found ways to make drops of liquids move before, what is new here, says David Leigh at the University of Edinburgh, is the use of molecular motors to achieve it: “This is the first time you can use molecular-level motion to move a macroscopic object. OK, so it’s only a tiny droplet--but it’s a start.“
“You could pump liquids around a silicon chip,“ says Leigh. With very small quantities of liquid, and with traditional pumps, this can be difficult as the liquid becomes very viscose at that scale.
The so-called “nano-shuttles“ could also create a range of different types of smart surfaces, such as adhesive surfaces that can be switched on and off, or surfaces that can be switched from one color to another.
Molecular motors are employed in living organisms in a wide range of tasks--from making muscles move to translating light signals into nerve impulses in the retina.
Leigh and his colleagues created light-sensitive nano-shuttles. These are long hydrocarbon-based molecules each with a ring of organic molecules strung--but not chemically bonded--around them.
Brownian motion--the random motion of tiny particles--would normally cause these rings to move backwards and forwards along the hydrocarbon molecules. But they also added hydrogen bonding groups at each end, one group being light sensitive and the other group being Teflon based.
Under normal lighting the ring sticks to the light-sensitive bonding station leaving the Teflon end exposed. But exposure to ultraviolet light causes a reaction that frees the ring, allowing it to move to the other end where it gets stuck again, this time to the Teflon bonding station.
The effect means that coating a gold surface with a nano-shuttle layer just one molecule thick means the surface can be switched from being Teflon-covered or Teflon-free by switching the light on and off.
Then, by controlling where the UV light hits the surface, it is possible to manipulate an oily drop of liquid, says Leigh, and even push it up an incline of 12¡. View a movie of the drop moving uphill, here (avi format). Leigh thinks it is unlikely they could get much steeper than this.

Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory report the predicted brightening of SN 1987A’s ring has begun.
According to Astronomy, they observed a ring of hot gas glowing in X rays at the same location as the ultraviolet ring and optical hotspots imaged previously by the Hubble Space Telescope.
SN 1987A, prior to its 1987 explosion, was a blue giant star 20 times the Sun’s mass. The star, Sanduleak Ð69¡ 202 (SKÐ69) is roughly 160,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Because of its massive size, SK Ð69 lived only about 10 million years. In SK Ð69’s final million years, it slowly shed its outer layers as a gas cloud.
A high-speed wind followed, creating a cavity in the gas. Where they interacted, dense pillars of gas formed, protruding into the cavity.
When the star exploded as a supernova--bright enough to be visible to the naked eye--it sent out a flash of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which collided with the gas-cloud debris.
A ring glowing in UV surrounds SK Ð69. After the star went supernova, it sent a shock wave barreling through space.
Astronomers have waited for the shock wave to collide violently with the edge of the cavity.
The first optical hotspots appeared in 1995, and the number has gradually increased. Now, overlapping the UV ring is what looks like a string of pearls. These hotspots occur where the shock wave has collided with the dense pillars of cool gas.
The shock-wave collision has produced an increase in X rays. The multimillion-degree gas glows brightly where the fronts meet.
Astronomers expect the gas will continue to brighten as the shock wave pounds into the gas.