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New Piece Found In Colorectal Cancer Puzzle
Prostasin, a relatively unknown protease enzyme expressed in most epithelial cells, may play a role in the genesis of colorectal cancer. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Cancer have associated a reduction in the expression of inhibitors of the enzyme with malignant cellular behavior.

Protesters Disrupt Democrats' Best-Laid Plans For Health Reform 'Conversations'
Over the weekend, a series of protests at Democratic events meant to promote health reform "organized by loose-knit coalition of conservative voters and advocacy groups, were a raucous start to what is expected to be weeks of political and ideological clashes over the health care overhaul," the New York Times reports. "Republicans said that the protests were just the beginning of spontaneous opposition to the health care proposals and that they would only gain momentum as Americans learn more about the legislation." But Democrats said they were only an effort to block discourse, and were anything but a grass-roots campaign. "This is a very coordinated effort," said one Democratic Congressman who was confronted by protestors at a grocery store (Herszenhorn and Stolberg, 8/3).
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National Institutes Of Health Chooses Web Of Science(R) To Power Electronic Scientific Portfolio Assistant (eSPA)
Thomson Reuters with Discovery Logic, Inc. announced that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has chosen Web of Science((R)) data to power the NIH electronic Scientific Portfolio Assistant (eSPA). eSPA is an information technology system designed to assist NIH grants management officials in creating grant portfolios and tracking research outputs and outcomes, including publications and citations.
Public Health

Brain's Object Recognition System Activated By Touch Alone

Portions of the brain that activate when people view pictures of objects compared to scrambled images can also be activated by touch alone, confirms a new report published online on May 28th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. "That"s the nub of the paper," said Harriet Allen of the University of Birmingham. "Part of the brain is for object processing irrespective of the sensory input coming in." The discovery was made by studying a man, known as HJA, with a condition called visual agnosia after suffering a stroke that left a large bilateral lesion in part of the brain important for object recognition, specifically in the lateral occipital cortex (LO). As a result, although HJA was not blind, he could not process visual input normally; objects appeared to him as unrecognizable jumbles. "It"s difficult to imagine," Allen said. "If he looked at a pen, he might see lines, but he couldn"t say which were the pen and which weren"t." However, HJA could still recognize everyday objects by grasping them, they show. In the study, the researchers had HJA and control participants observe pictures of objects and scrambled images while they were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, which measures brain activity based on changes in blood flow). Participants were also scanned while they touched objects with one hand. Within a subset of the regions found in control participants, HJA showed activity only for tactile objects, they report, suggesting that these regions are specifically involved in successful multi-modal recognition. The results show that activation of dorsal LO by tactile input is not secondary to visual recognition. Rather, it can operate directly through the sense of touch. "Our data indicate, for the first time, that at least some regions in the LO can be activated normally from touch, even when input from ventral LO is lesioned and visual recognition is prevented," the researchers wrote. "This is consistent with estimates of effective connectivity from fMRI that have implied that there are direct connections between somatosensory cortex and LO." When asked to recognize objects based on touch, early blind participants also show activation in similar brain regions, earlier studies have shown. However, they said, in those who are blind the LO may be recruited to process information differently than it does in sighted people. "Here we provide evidence for dorsal LO activation being driven, in part, directly from touch in a normally developed brain." The researchers include Harriet A. Allen and Glyn W. Humphreys, of the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. Cathleen Genova Cell Press


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