Here is what I am reading today:

“Senior author Elizabeth Buffalo was a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and an associate professor of neurology at Emory University School of Medicine and is currently associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Universpity of Washington in Seattle. The first author of the paper is postdoctoral fellow Michael Jutras,, who is now an instructor at the University of Washington.”

“As many as 20 percent of infertile couples in the United States have unexplained reasons for their infertility. Now, new research led by Catherine Racowsky, PhD, director of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), shows that exposure to BPA (Bisphenol-A) could be a contributing factor as to why some infertile couples are having difficulty conceiving. The study will be published online on July 31, 2013 in the journal Human Reproduction.”

“Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, the researchers, led by fertility pioneer Professor Jacques Cohen, say that this ‘is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children’.

Some experts severely criticised the experiments. Lord Winston, of the Hammersmith Hospital in West London, told the BBC yesterday: ‘Regarding the treat-ment of the infertile, there is no evidence that this technique is worth doing . . . I am very surprised that it was even carried out at this stage. It would certainly not be allowed in Britain.’”

“The study, led by Dr. J. Carson Smith, assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology, provides new hope for those diagnosed with MCI. It is the first to show that an exercise intervention with older adults with mild cognitive impairment(average age 78) improved not onlymemory recall, but also brain function, as measured by functional neuroimaging (via fMRI). The findings are published in the August issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.”

““Anything that circulates in the blood will eventually end up in the hair”—including signs that an individual consumed drugs like alcohol and coca, the plant processed to make cocaine, explains Angelique Corthals, a forensic anthropologist at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, who was not involved in the study. When scientists measured the levels of a few key metabolites along strands of the Maiden’s hair, they saw that her consumption of coca and alcohol began to increase around the same time that her diet changed, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her coca use peaked about 6 months before she died, while her alcohol consumption skyrocketed in her final weeks. The boy and the girl, both of whom were 4 to 5 years old and had shorter, less kempt hair, also ingested the two drugs but in much smaller amounts than the Maiden.”

“”We were interested in how disrupting this balance could influence emotional behaviours a long time after being born, as an adult,” he added.

In order to explore how a mismatch between supply and demand of certain nutrients might affect humans, Professor Wilkinson and his colleagues Dr Trevor Humby, Mikael Mikaelsson — both also from Cardiff University — and Dr Miguel Constancia of Cambridge University, examined the behaviour of adult mice with a malfunctioned supply of a vital hormone.”

“”These results shed light on how the brain becomes impaired by sleep deprivation, leading to the selection of more unhealthy foods and, ultimately, higher rates of obesity,” said Stephanie Greer, a doctoral student in Walker’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory and lead author of the paper. Another co-author of the study is Andrea Goldstein, also a doctoral student in Walker’s lab.”

“Florian Schmiedek, Martin Lövdén, and Ulman Lindenberger examined these questions using data from the COGITO Study, an investigation conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Their results are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The new findings reveal that while variability in cognitive performance does indeed exist, our personal impression that a whole day is either good or bad is often wrong. Rather, most performance fluctuations occur within shorter periods of time.”