Brilliant Blue G (BBG), the food additive that gives M&Ms and Gatorade their blue hue, offers promise for preventing the additional serious secondary damage immediately after a traumatic injury to the spinal cord.

An article¹ published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that the compound halts the chain of molecular events that cause the secondary damage. In the hours following a spinal cord injury, this secondary injury can enlarge the injured area of the spinal cord, permanently worsening paralysis in patients.

Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) researchers have now pinpointed where and how the brain processes 3-D motion. Surprisingly, findings published in Nature Neuroscience online July 7, 2009¹, reveal that 3-D motion processing occurs in an area in the brain, located just behind the left and right ears, long thought to only be responsible for processing two-dimensional motion (up, down, left and right).

The area, known as MT+ (for Middle Temporal area), and its underlying neuron circuitry are so well studied that until now, most scientists had concluded that 3-D motion must be processed elsewhere. This is the first study that clearly links the area to 3D motion perception.

Critical Survival Mechanism

Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have uncovered something that may help explain how people not genetically predisposed to epilepsy develop the disorder.
Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the study⁽¹⁾ reports that a gene known to predispose people who inherit an active form of it to certain forms of epilepsy, can be "switched on" in mice that do not appear to have inherited the active form, and thus a genetic predisposition, to the condition.

A new study from MIT in the March 4 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience explains some of the neural mechanism involved in the brain remapping seen in macular degeneration. Macular degeneration affects just 1.75 million people in the United States.

Macular degeneration is the most prevalent form of adult blindness. Patients lose vision progressively in the center of their visual field, thus depriving the equivalent part in the visual cortex of input. Previous research has shown that the deprived neurons start responding to visual input from another spot on the retina; this is evidence of plasticity in the adult cortex Until now it was unknown just how such plasticity occurred.

Gradual, chronic starvation of the brain as it ages seems to be a trigger of Alzheimer's, according to a new study from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

In fact, starvation of the brain as we age appears to be one of the major triggers of a biochemical process that causes some forms of Alzheimer's disease.

The study, in the December 26 issue of Neuron, found that when the brain does not receive enough glucose, such as might happen when a cardiovascular disease restricts blood flow in arteries to the brain, then a particular process is begun that eventually produces the sticky lumps of protein known as amyloid plaques that are a suspected cause of Alzheimer's disease.