#gaba-a

The mystery behind idiopathic hypersomnia

Idiopathic hypersomnia (IH) is a rare neurological disorder. Treatment can help, but there is no cure. You can snooze for more than 9 hours a night without feeling refreshed. You may fight to wake up in the morning. Your sleepiness may persist or get worse even if you take long naps during the day. If you’re living with IH, you probably want to know what’s causing your symptoms. Unfortunately,…

Researchers found a particular chemical, or neurotransmitter, known as Gaba, held the key.

Gaba is the brain's main "inhibitory" neurotransmitter. That means, when it's released by one nerve cell it suppresses the activities of other cells to which it is connected.

They found people who had the highest concentrations of Gaba in their brain's hippocampus (or memory hub) were best at blocking unwanted thoughts or memories.

"What's exciting about this is that now we're getting very specific," said Prof Anderson.

"Before, we could only say 'this part of the brain acts on that part', but now we can say which neurotransmitters are likely to be important."

Image from: wormworks.org

Drunk starving worms are living twice as long as sober starving worms but I assume they're slurring their speech. Researchers from UCLA were experimenting with cholesterol in Caenorhabditis elegans, under 'stress' (starvation) conditions. They were using ethanol as a solvent when they discovered that the cholesterol did nothing for the worms but the ethanol was extending their lives from 15 days to 20-40 days. When they increased the level of ethanol given to the worms it had detrimental effects such as death. Now before you go hitting the martinis for breakfast (breakfast of champions), the ethanol the worms received was very very diluted - like a tablespoon of ethanol in a bathtub of water diluted.

University of California - Los Angeles

And there go the fish. Researchers from James Cook University have shown that increased CO2 concentrations in sea water affect fishes central nervous system, causing them to lose their sense of hearing, smell and the ability to move left and right, which obviously makes it vulnerable to attack and only able to swim forward and backwards (?) Higher environmental CO2 levels effect the fish's GABA-A receptors which become over excited and you do not want an over excited receptor. They believe fish and other sea life are particular vulnerable because water has much lower CO2 concentrations compared to air making it difficult for the GABA-A receptors to cope with the rapid increase of CO2 concentration in the ocean.

http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/braindamage.html

The journal Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association has reported that "sexual activity is safe for most heart, stroke patients" - i'll note that one down for hopefully not my future reference.

American Heart Association

And out goes culpability - criminologist Dr Barnes claims that genes factor more greatly in criminal behaviour than environment and social factors. The analysis of 400 adolescents revealed that for "life course offenders" genes are the dominating motivator for their criminal behaviour. The article does not identify what genes cause this criminality or even how but they suggest that there are hundreds of genes that can effect criminal behaviour and the more one has the more likely they are to commit a crime.