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Seventeen out of 18 institutions passed Federal Reserve stress tests, with only Ally Financial failing to meet minimum capital levels in the hypothetical scenario of a deep global recession

Aljazeera: John Brennan confirmed as CIA head

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 07:40 PM PST

US Senate votes 63-34 to approve appointment of "targeted killing" policy architect after 13-hour filibuster.

Aljazeera: Former investigator in Pistorius case resigns

Posted: 08 Mar 2013 04:46 AM PST

Former lead detective in murder case against South African sprinter resigns from the police force following criticism.

Aljazeera: S African police officers charged with murder

Posted: 08 Mar 2013 05:08 AM PST

Policemen charged for death of Mozambican taxi driver who was dragged from police vehicle and later found dead.

Financial Times: Stock market shares bound to record highs

Posted: 08 Mar 2013 05:21 AM PST

Case that equities look reasonably priced is compelling, but the clock is ticking on whether central bank support will succeed in reviving growth

Financial Times: Norway’s oil fund jettisons Gilts

Posted: 08 Mar 2013 06:19 AM PST

World's largest sovereign wealth fund cuts exposure to UK and French government debt, reporting its second best year of returns on buoyant equities

Huffington Post: Kansas Legislature Votes Down Strip Club And Lap Dance Regulation

Posted: 08 Mar 2013 11:10 AM PST

A Kansas legislative committee voted Friday morning to kill legislation that could have effectively banned strip clubs and lap dances in the state.

The state House Federal and State Affairs Committee used a voice vote to kill the measure, referred to as a ban by state legislators and designed to place zoning restrictions on where strip clubs could set up shop. The zoning restrictions included prohibiting strip clubs from within 1,000 feet of schools, playgrounds, day care centers, libraries and churches.

The Friday vote to kill the bill came shortly after the same committee had amended the legislation, removing provisions that would have strictly regulated what happened inside strip clubs, effectively banning them from the state, according to legislators. The provisions also would have prohibited lap dances and semi-nude wrestling and tumbling. Committee members argued that even with the amendment that removed the provisions and preserved only the zoning restrictions, if the bill had passed, the full House of Representatives would likely have sought to reinstate the broader bans.

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Huffington Post: Mouse-Human Brain Mashup Makes Mice Smarter, May Help Explain How We Evolved

Posted: 08 Mar 2013 11:15 AM PST

By Moheb Costandi

Mice transplanted with a once-discounted class of human brain cells have better memories and learning abilities than normal counterparts, according to a new study. Far from a way to engineer smarter rodents, the work suggests that human brain evolution involved a major upgrade to cells called astrocytes.

Astrocytes are one of several types of glia, the other cells found alongside neurons in the nervous system. Although long thought to merely provide support and nourishment for neurons, it's now clear that astrocytes are vital for proper brain function. They are produced during development from stem cells called glial progenitors.

In 2009, Steven Goldman of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York and his colleagues reported that human astrocytes are bigger, and have about 10 times as many fingerlike projections that contact other brain cells and blood vessels, than those of mice. To further investigate these differences, they have more recently grafted fluorescently labeled human glial progenitors into the brains of newborn mice and examined the animals when they reached adulthood.

Most of the grafted cells remained as progenitors, but some matured into typical human-looking astrocytes. They connected to their mouse counterparts to form astrocyte networks that transmitted electrical signals. Furthermore, they propagated internal signals about three times faster than the mouse astrocytes and improved the strengthening of connections between neurons in the hippocampus, a process thought to be critical for learning and memory.

These human astrocytes apparently did so, the scientists suggest, by secreting a protein called tumor necrosis factor-α, which mouse astrocytes produce at much lower levels. This increased the number of receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate in the membranes of mouse neurons, making the signaling between them far more efficient than mouse astrocytes alone.

Those differences translated into improvements on behavioral tests. Mice with human astrocytes performed better on memory experiments than those that had received mouse cell grafts, the team reports today in Cell Stem Cell. The human astrocyte-endowed rodents learned to fear a particular sound or part of their environment after associating them just once with an electric shock. This learning persisted for 3 days, during which time typical mice did not learn at all, despite being treated in exactly the same way. The mice with transplanted human cells also learned to find their way through a maze in about half the time and were better able to recognize familiar objects in new locations.

The results support the view that human brain evolution involved cellular specializations, including the elaboration of astrocyte structure and a boost in their ability to regulate communication between neurons at synapses, the researchers say.

These are "very interesting findings [that] strongly suggest that human astrocytes have an enhanced ability to control synapses," says neurobiologist Ben Barres of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. But he adds that the study does not show that human astrocytes are genetically normal when engrafted into the mouse brain, and it does not rule out the idea that the improved learning and memory "could be due to the persisting progenitor cells."

"It would be interesting to see if they get the same effects by engrafting chimpanzee or macaque glia," adds evolutionary neuroanatomist Todd Preuss of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. This could determine whether the observed effects are due to properties that are unique to human cells or common to those of all primates.

Goldman acknowledges these limitations, but he believes that the work will lead to a new way of investigating neurological and psychiatric disorders. "We can generate glial progenitors from reprogrammed human skin cells," he says, "and have already created mice with glia from schizophrenic patients." Such animals would be better than existing animal models for testing potential new treatments, he suggests.

Chimeric mice could also provide more clues about brain evolution by helping researchers identify astrocyte specializations that are unique to humans. "Many neuroscientists are uncomfortable with open discussion of human specializations for fear that the adequacy of their animal model will be called into question," Preuss says, "so more research of this type would be informative."

ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

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venerdì 8 marzo 2013

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