Scientists Find Molecular Trigger That Helps Prevent Aging and Disease

New research has unraveled a molecular puzzle to determine that within certain parameters, a lower-calorie diet slows the development of some age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the aging process. (Credit: iStockphoto)

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine set out to address a question that has been challenging scientists for years: How does dietary restriction produce protective effects against aging and disease? And the reverse: how does overconsumption accelerate age-related disease?

An answer lies in a two-part study led by Charles Mobbs, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience and of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, published in the November 17 edition of the journal PLoS Biology. The study examines how dietary restriction and a high-caloric diet influence biochemical responses.

Dr. Mobbs and his colleagues unraveled a molecular puzzle to determine that within certain parameters, a lower-calorie diet slows the development of some age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the aging process. How the diet is restricted — whether fats, proteins or carbohydrates are cut — does not appear to matter. “It may not be about counting calories or cutting out specific nutrients,” said Dr. Mobbs, “but how a reduction in dietary intake impacts the glucose metabolism, which contributes to oxidative stress.” Meanwhile, a high calorie diet may accelerate age-related disease by promoting oxidative stress.

Dietary restriction induces a transcription factor called CREB-binding protein (CBP), which controls the activity of genes that regulate cellular function. By developing drugs that mimic the protective effects of CBP — those usually caused by dietary restriction — scientists may be able to extend lifespan and reduce vulnerability to age-related illnesses.

“We discovered that CBP predicts lifespan and accounts for 80 percent of lifespan variation in mammals,” said Dr. Mobbs. “Finding the right balance is key; only a 10 percent restriction will produce a small increase in lifespan, whereas an 80 percent restriction will lead to a shorter life due to starvation.”

The team found an optimal dietary restriction, estimated to be equivalent to a 30 percent caloric reduction in mammals, increased lifespan over 50 percent while slowing the development of an age-related pathology similar to Alzheimer’s disease.

The first part of the study looked at C. elegans, a species of roundworm, that were genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s disease-like symptoms. Dr. Mobbs and his team reduced the roundworms’ dietary intake by diluting the bacteria the worms consume. In these types of roundworms, human beta amyloid peptide, which contributes to plaque buildup in Alzheimer’s disease, is expressed in muscle, which becomes paralyzed as age progresses. This model allowed researchers to readily measure how lifespan and disease burden were simultaneously improved through dietary restriction.

The researchers found that when dietary restriction was maintained throughout the worms’ adulthood, lifespan increased by 65 percent and the Alzheimer’s disease-related paralysis decreased by about 50 percent.

“We showed that dietary restriction activates CBP in a roundworm model, and when we blocked this activation, we blocked all the protective effects of dietary restriction,” said Dr. Mobbs. “It was the result of blocking CBP activation, which inhibited all the protective effects of dietary restriction, that confirmed to us that CBP plays a key role in mediating the protective effects of dietary restriction on lifespan and age-related disease.”

In the second part of study, Dr. Mobbs and his team looked at the other end of this process: What happens to CBP in a high-calorie diet that has led to diabetes, a disease in which glucose metabolism is impaired? Researchers examined mice and found that diabetes reduces activation of CBP, leading Dr. Mobbs to conclude that a high-calorie diet that leads to diabetes would have the opposite effect of dietary restriction and would accelerate aging.

Dr. Mobbs hypothesizes that dietary restriction induces CBP by blocking glucose metabolism, which produces oxidative stress, a cellular process that leads to tissue damage and also promotes cancer cell growth. Interestingly, dietary restriction triggers CBP for as long as the restriction is maintained, suggesting that the protective effects may wear off if higher dietary intake resumes. CBP responds to changes in glucose within hours, indicating genetic communications respond quickly to fluctuations in dietary intake.

“Our next step is to understand the exact interactions of CBP with other transcription factors that mediate its protective effects with age,” said Dr. Mobbs. “If we can map out these interactions, we could then begin to produce more targeted drugs that mimic the protective effects of CBP.”

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

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Journal Reference:

1. Zhang et al. Role of CBP and SATB-1 in Aging, Dietary Restriction, and Insulin-Like Signaling. PLoS Biology, 2009; 7 (11): e1000245 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000245

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091118143217.htm

Compound That Boosts Anti-Inflammatory Fat Levels Created

UC Irvine pharmacology researchers have discovered a way to boost levels of a natural body fat that helps decrease inflammation, pointing to possible new treatments for allergies, illnesses and injuries related to the immune system.

For decades, it has been known that this fat, called palmitoylethanolamide (PEA), is a potent anti-inflammatory substance that reduces both allergic symptoms and occurrences of rheumatic fever, but researchers understood little about how PEA works.

In a study appearing online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Daniele Piomelli, the Louise Turner Arnold Chair in Neurosciences at UCI, and colleagues found that levels of PEA are tightly regulated by immune system cells. In turn, PEA helps control the activity of these cells, which are called into action to fight infection, disease and injury in the body.

In addition, they found that PEA — also present in foods like eggs and peanuts — is deactivated by a protein called N-acylethanolamine-hydrolyzing acid amidase, which is an enzyme that breaks down molecules controlling cell inflammation.

Using a combination of molecular modeling and chemical library screening, the researchers created a novel compound that blocks the action of this protein.

When given to rodents, the compound increased the levels of PEA in their immune cells and reduced the amount of inflammation elicited by an inflammatory substance. Furthermore, when administered to the spinal cords of mice after spinal cord injury, the compound decreased inflammation associated with the trauma and improved the recovery of motor function.

“These findings are very exciting for the field of medicine because most drugs for inflammatory conditions are effective in only a portion of the population and have serious side effects,” Piomelli says. “This compound shows wide-scale promise.”

He adds that the PEA-boosting compound is a prime candidate for development into a range of immune-response drugs. This possibility will be explored through a research collaboration between UCI and the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by University of California – Irvine.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091116165645.htm

Adult Cell Self-Renewal Without Stem Cells?

Bacteria (in green) “eaten” by dividing macrophages. (Credit: Copyright M.Sieweke / CNRS)

Is the indefinite expansion of adult cells possible without recourse to stem cell intermediates? The team led by Michael Sieweke at the Centre d’immunologie de Marseille Luminy (Université Aix-Marseille 2 / CNRS / INSERM) has shown that this is the case by achieving the ex vivo regeneration of macrophages, specialized cells in the immune system, over several months.

Published in Science on November 6, 2009, this discovery could be applied to other cell types. This research enables a clearer understanding of the mechanisms underlying cell differentiation, but above all raises many hopes for potential therapeutic applications.

The regenerative medicine of the future will be based on replacing damaged cells and repairing deficient organs, notably through the use of stem cells. Indeed, these cells are able not only to proliferate indefinitely but, in theory, to supply all types of cells to the human body. However, the processes that allow the passage from adult (rather than embryonic) cells to stem cells (“reprogramming”) are complex and full of risk, as are the processes necessary for the “retransformation” of stem cells into adult cells. The question then arises: might it not be more simple to generate the cells required without passing through the stem cell stage?

Scientists at the Centre d’immunologie de Marseille Luminy (Université Aix-Marseille 2 / CNRS / INSERM) have studied a specific cell type: the macrophages⁽¹⁾. In most cases, when cells have acquired a specialized function (e.g. brain neurons, muscle cells, macrophages for the immune system, etc.) they cease to proliferate and normally remain “blocked” in this state until they die. Thus macrophages, which are key actors in the immune response, are usually incapable of proliferation. The team of CNRS and INSERM researchers led by Michael Sieweke has nonetheless been able to generate mouse macrophages in vitro thanks to a genetic modification that inactivates the transcription factors⁽²⁾ called MafB and c-Maf. Furthermore, once reinjected into the animal, these modified cells behave normally: they do not form a tumor, and they perfectly perform the tasks expected of an adult macrophage, such as ingesting bacteria and secreting the chemical agents capable of killing them.

This CNRS and INSERM team in Marseilles has thus found how to re-initiate the division of specialized cells. In addition, they discovered that MafB and cMaf inactivation led to the activation of two of the four transcription factors (c-Myc and KLF4) recently identified as being able to convert almost all adult cells in the body into stem cells. Although this study provides a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of cell differentiation, above all it provides hope in the application of this method for the amplification of specialized cells to other cell types. These findings suggest that a passage via stem cells may not be necessary to enable the regeneration of cells and the repair of damaged tissue.

Notes:

(1) Macrophages are large cells that intervene in immune processes by destroying cell debris and microorganisms by means of a process called phagocytosis, an immune defense mechanism that notably allows macrophages to “eat” foreign particles such as bacteria, cell debris, dust particles, etc.

(2) Transcription factors are proteins that regulate the expression of genes by activating or inhibiting them. During embryonic development, cells diversify and specialize into different cell types; this is the process of cell differentiation.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange).

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Journal Reference:

 

1. Aziz et al. MafB/c-Maf Deficiency Enables Self-Renewal of Differentiated Functional Macrophages. Science, 2009; 326 (5954): 867 DOI: 10.1126/science.1176056

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091116103838.htm

“Extinct” Crocodile Claws Its Way Back to Survival

PHNOM PENH – Siamese crocodiles (Crocodylus siamensis) once ranged far and wide across South-east Asia, from Indonesia to Vietnam, Laos to Thailand. But habitat loss and poaching virtually wiped out the 10 foot long reptiles. Twenty years ago they were classified as effectively extinct in the wild.

That seemingly terminal news was partially offset in 2000 when researchers discovered several dozen of them in the south-west Cambodia. Experts now believe there are 250 Siamese crocodiles living in the wild in the region.

Now, an encouraging find has sparked new hope for the fate of the Siamese crocodile. DNA test results announced this month revealed that 35 of 69 crocodiles at the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center outside Phnom Penh are purebred Siamese crocodiles, not hybrid animals as experts had feared.

This news means the species has a much better chance to claw its way back from the brink, says Adam Starr, who heads the crocodile program at Fauna & Flora International, a conservation organization. A proposed breeding and release program now stands a far greater chance of success.

Article continues: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49349

http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40735

Scientists zero in on reason for mammoths’ demise

Researchers found that the decline of large mammals started about 14,800 years ago — and was virtually complete a thousand years later. (Ethan Miller, Getty Images / September 30, 2009)

The sediment beneath an Indiana lake is providing clues. One thing is clear: A meteor didn’t kill off the mammoths, mastodons and other large plant-eaters, as previously theorized.

By John Johnson Jr.

About 15,000 years ago, North America was home to an astonishing number of large plant-eating mammals — giant sloths, mastodons, mammoths. A thousand years later, they were all gone, wiped from the face of the Earth with sudden finality.

Scientists have floated a variety of possible explanations for this mass die-off, from climate change to a cataclysmic asteroid impact. But now a team of American researchers may be closing in on the answer, hidden in the thousands-year-old muck of an Indiana lake.

To track the population of large herbivores, scientists analyzed the pollen, charcoal and fungus in ancient sediments beneath Appleman Lake, a 35-foot-deep body of water left behind when the last ice age ended 20,000 years ago. The research focused on the amounts of the fungus Sporormiella present in the sediments, according to Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a co-author of the paper appearing in today’s issue of the journal Science.

Because the fungus is commonly found in the dung of large plant-eaters, its prevalence in the fossil record should be a direct measure of population density, Gill said. The research team found that the decline of the large mammals started about 14,800 years ago — and was virtually complete a thousand years later.

“About 13.8 thousand years ago, the number of [fungus] spores drops dramatically,” Gill said.

In the end, a total of 34 types of large animal disappeared.

According to Gill and the other researchers, from the University of Wyoming and Fordham University in New York, these dates eliminate several possible reasons for the mass extinction that were put forward previously.

The first is habitat loss due to a changing climate. Around this time, tree species such as black ash, elm and ironwood began spreading across the landscape of North America. According to Gill, the die-off of the big mammals predated this change. In fact, the loss of the big herbivores may have helped precipitate it. Without the large plant-eaters around to keep them in check, the tree species were free to colonize the countryside.

Another theory suggested that a comet or meteor impact that occurred about 12,900 years ago could have wiped out the big mammals in the same way that a similar but larger impact is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs. The new timeline shows the extinction event was already over when that impact took place, Gill said.

A third theory held that the animals were wiped out by a so-called “blitzkrieg” of hunting by Clovis culture humans. The Clovis culture is distinguished by the fluted spear points used by hunters to bring down large animals. But according to Gill, the die-off was already underway before the Clovis hunters arrived. “This was already happening before humans adopted the Clovis tool kit,” Gill said.

The new evidence doesn’t mean humans didn’t play a central role in the decline of megafauna, said Christopher Johnson, a professor of biology at James Cook University in Australia who wrote an accompanying perspective article in Science.

Even if the Clovis hunters, with their advanced technology, did not start the decline, “they were certainly part of the story, and probably account for the final demise,” Johnson said.

“My view of all the evidence . . . is that human hunting was the sole cause of the megafaunal extinction, and that other factors such as climate change had nothing to do with it.”

Gill isn’t ready to go that far.

“What we’ve been able to do is start to eliminate some hypotheses” for the die-off, she said.

“We’re not ruling out humans so far,” she said, but she doesn’t feel she has enough evidence to point a finger at human hunters. She said that her research is continuing at the lake and that more discoveries may be coming.

john.johnson@latimes.com

// Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-sci-mammoths20-2009nov20,0,6006470.story

Creationists handing out modified “Species” on campuses

Students at 90 universities nationwide handed copies of Charles Darwin’s influential text–with a Creationist rebuttal

Jon Graef

On the publication’s 150th anniversary, Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin’s influential scientific text detailing his theory of evolution, “Origin of the Species,” has taken a new life on college campuses nationwide. On Thursday, in an effort spearheaded notable leaders in the Creationist community–including actor Kirk Cameron and Minister Ray Comfort–Christian activists handed out thousands of copies of Darwin’s book on college campus. But this latest edition of Species came with a catch.

According to MNDaily and the Associated Press, students at Purdue University and the University of Minnesota were handed some thousands of copies of “Species”with a new 50-page introduction, penned by Comfort, which set out to explain creationism as well as refute Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The AP reported that Comfort’s introduction, in the process of challenging Darwin’s theory, allegedly states that dictator Adolph Hitler took the theory of evolution to its logical conclusion while questioning his scientific methods in the process. The effort is part of a month-long campaign by Comfort’s Living Waters ministry to distribute the books to nearly 90 campuses nationwide

To read students’ reactions to the campaign, go here and here.

If the AP’s report about Comfort’s Hitler-referencing intro is true, then it looks like the minister isn’t all that familiar with Godwin’s Law, which states that, as a discussion grows longer, the likelihood of referencing Nazis to make a point grows larger. And that’s why I can’t really take Comfort’s efforts seriously. It’s certainly one thing to question scientific methods–indeed, no doubt Darwin’s methodology, thorough as it was (he spent 20 years researching his book, after all), can be questioned. The problem comes in when you play the Nazi card. Does Comfort–or Ben Stein before him–expect to be taken seriously? Also: how can be Creationism be considered a theory? A theory at least has a hypothesis that you can test. Creationism, on the other hand, relies on faith as its justification.

http://www.collegenews.com/index.php?/article/creationists_handing_out_modified_origin_of_the_species_1120200934887672/

‘Hobbits’ Are a New Human Species, According to Statistical Analysis of Fossils

New statistical analysis confirms that the recently discovered human-like “hobbit” — Homo floresiensis — is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease. (Credit: Image courtesy of Wiley-Blackwell)

Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York have confirmed that Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease. Using statistical analysis on skeletal remains of a well-preserved female specimen, researchers determined the “hobbit” to be a distinct species and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans.

Details of the study appear in the December issue of Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society, published by Wiley-Blackwell.

In 2003 Australian and Indonesian scientists discovered small-bodied, small-brained, hominin (human-like) fossils on the remote island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago. This discovery of a new human species called Homo floresiensis has spawned much debate with some researchers claiming that the small creatures are really modern humans whose tiny head and brain are the result of a medical condition called microcephaly.

Researchers William Jungers, Ph.D., and Karen Baab, Ph.D. studied the skeletal remains of a female (LB1), nicknamed “Little Lady of Flores” or “Flo” to confirm the evolutionary path of the hobbit species. The specimen was remarkably complete and included skull, jaw, arms, legs, hands, and feet that provided researchers with integrated information from an individual fossil.

The cranial capacity of LB1 was just over 400 cm, making it more similar to the brains of a chimpanzee or bipedal “ape-men” of East and South Africa. The skull and jawbone features are much more primitive looking than any normal modern human. Statistical analysis of skull shapes show modern humans cluster together in one group, microcephalic humans in another and the hobbit along with ancient hominins in a third.

Due to the relative completeness of fossil remains for LB1, the scientists were able to reconstruct a reliable body design that was unlike any modern human. The thigh bone and shin bone of LB1 are much shorter than modern humans including Central African pygmies, South African KhoeSan (formerly known as ‘bushmen”) and “negrito” pygmies from the Andaman Islands and the Philippines. Some researchers speculate this could represent an evolutionary reversal correlated with “island dwarfing.” “It is difficult to believe an evolutionary change would lead to less economical movement,” said Dr. Jungers. “It makes little sense that this species re-evolved shorter thighs and legs because long hind limbs improve bipedal walking. We suspect that these are primitive retentions instead.”

Further analysis of the remains using a regression equation developed by Dr. Jungers indicates that LB1 was approximately 106 cm tall (3 feet, 6 inches) — far smaller than the modern pygmies whose adults grow to less than 150 cm (4 feet, 11 inches). A scatterplot depicts LB1 far outside the range of Southeast Asian and African pygmies in both absolute height and body mass indices. “Attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis,” noted Dr. Baab.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Wiley-Blackwell, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Journal Reference:

1. William Jungers and Karen Baab. The geometry of hobbits: Homo floresiensis and human evolution. Significance, Published Online November 19, 2009; Print Issue Date: December 2009 DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2009.00389.x

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091119101034.htm

Extinct Moa Rewrites New Zealand’s History

A reconstructed image of the giant extinct moa. (Credit: Image courtesy of The University of Adelaide)

The evolutionary history of New Zealand’s many extinct flightless moa has been re-written in the first comprehensive study of more than 260 sub-fossil specimens to combine all known genetic, anatomical, geological and ecological information about the unique bird lineage.

That lineage ended only about 600 years ago after a journey through time that most likely began about 80 million years earlier on the prehistoric supercontinent of Gondwana, according to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by an international team of researchers.

Found on the south and north islands of New Zealand, the evolutionary history and relationships between the moa species has long been subject to scientific debate, with past studies suggesting that up to 64 species existed with as many as 20 generic groups.

The new study found that moas should be grouped into only three families, six genera and it reduced the number of species to nine. The most recent species were relatively modern, evolving in the South Island only after the uplift of the Southern Alps between 5 and 8.5 million years ago.

Periodical land bridges, created by geological events and sea-level changes, allowed some of these species to cross over to the North Island.

The many species of moa are thought to have descended from a common ancestor of other large living flightless birds that evolved on separate southern landmasses when Gondwana broke up: the ostrich in Africa; the emu and cassowary in Australia; the rhea in South America; and New Zealand’s kiwi. Another presumed relative was the extinct giant elephant bird in Madagascar.

New Zealand broke away from Gondwana at least 60 million years ago and a wide variety of moas subsequently evolved there, ranging in size from a large turkey to the three-metre tall Dinornis, which weighed up to 300 kg.

Maori people are known to have killed large numbers of birds for their meat, eggs and feathers — moa is a Polynesian word for chicken — after they arrived on the islands about 1,000 years ago. All the nine living species were gone within a few centuries.

The study also presents an important new geological/paleogeographical model, which suggests that land-dwelling animals on the North and South Island landmasses were isolated for most of the past 20-30 million years.

“The prolonged geographic isolation of New Zealand and the paucity of terrestrial mammals created a unique ecosystem dominated by an estimated 245 species of birds, providing an unparalleled opportunity to observe evolutionary processes,” says Dr Trevor Worthy, a palaeontologist from the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, who was one of the 11 members of study team.

“Our study reveals that the patterns of genetic diversity within and between different moa groups reflect a complex history following a major drowning of the New Zealand landmass in the Oligocene [23 to 34 million years ago]. Their history was then affected by a series of marine barriers, tectonic activity and glacial cycles.

“We were surprised to discover just how recently many of the moa species — and probably many of the iconic New Zealand animals and plants — evolved in the South Island after the uplift of the Alps. The Alps brought rain and allowed wet rainforests to develop in the west and generated a drier, warmer climate to the east, creating a mix of upland and lowland environments, wet and dry habitats and a variety of forest, shrubland, and grasslands.”

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by University of New South Wales. Original article written by Bob Beale.

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Journal Reference:

1. M. Bunce, T. H. Worthy, M. J. Phillips, R. N. Holdaway, E. Willerslev, J. Haile, B. Shapiro, R. P. Scofield, A. Drummond, P. J. J. Kamp, and A. Cooper. The evolutionary history of the extinct ratite moa and New Zealand Neogene paleogeography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906660106

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091118092633.htm

Cat Brain-Based Computer: Scientists Perform Cat-Scale Cortical Simulations and Map the Human Brain

BlueMatter, a new algorithm created in collaboration with Stanford University, exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information. (Credit: Image courtesy of IBM)

IBM has announced significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain’s low power and energy consumption and compact size.

The cognitive computing team, led by IBM Research, has achieved significant advances in large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data — two major milestones that indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip.

Scientists, at IBM Research-Almaden, in collaboration with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The announcement was made at SC 09, the supercomputing conference, being held in Portland, Oregon.

Additionally, in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, IBM scientists have developed an algorithm that exploits the Blue Gene® supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.

These advancements will provide a unique workbench for exploring the computational dynamics of the brain, and stand to move the team closer to its goal of building a compact, low-power synaptronic chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions. The team’s work stands to break the mold of conventional von Neumann computing, in order to meet the system requirements of the instrumented and interconnected world of tomorrow.

As the amount of digital data that we create continues to grow massively and the world becomes more instrumented and interconnected, there is a need for new kinds of computing systems — imbued with a new intelligence that can spot hard-to-find patterns in vastly varied kinds of data, both digital and sensory; analyze and integrate information real-time in a context-dependent way; and deal with the ambiguity found in complex, real-world environments.

Businesses will simultaneously need to monitor, prioritize, adapt and make rapid decisions based on ever-growing streams of critical data and information. A cognitive computer could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of this complex puzzle, while taking into account context and previous experience, to help business decision makers come to a logical response.

“Learning from the brain is an attractive way to overcome power and density challenges faced in computing today,” said Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and lab director of IBM Research — Almaden. “As the digital and physical worlds continue to merge and computing becomes more embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, it’s imperative that we create a more intelligent computing system that can help us make sense the vast amount of information that’s increasingly available to us, much the way our brains can quickly interpret and act on complex tasks.”

To perform the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceed the scale of the cat cortex, the team built a cortical simulator that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication as well as sophisticated biological details from neurophysiology and neuroanatomy. This scientific tool, akin to a linear accelerator or an electron microscope, is a critical instrument used to test hypotheses of brain structure, dynamics and function. The simulation was performed using the cortical simulator on Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory.

The algorithm, when combined with the cortical simulator, allows scientists to experiment with various mathematical hypotheses of brain function and structure of how structure affects function as they work toward discovering the brain’s core computational micro and macro circuits.

After the successful completion of Phase 0, IBM and its university partners were recently awarded $16.1Min additional funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 1 of DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative. This phase of research will focus on the components, brain-like architecture and simulations to build a prototype chip. The long-term mission of IBM’s cognitive computing initiative is to discover and demonstrate the algorithms of the brain and deliver low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence and use significantly less energy than today’s computing systems. The world-class team includes researchers from several of IBM’s worldwide research labs and scientists from Stanford University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center and University of California- Merced.

“The goal of the SyNAPSE program is to create new electronics hardware and architecture that can understand, adapt and respond to an informative environment in ways that extend traditional computation to include fundamentally different capabilities found in biological brains,” said DARPA program manager Todd Hylton, Ph.D.

Modern computing is based on a stored program model, which has traditionally been implemented in digital, synchronous, serial, centralized, fast, hardwired, general-purpose circuits with explicit memory addressing that indiscriminately over-write data and impose a dichotomy between computation and data. In stark contrast, cognitive computing — like the brain — will use replicated computational units, neurons and synapses that are implemented in mixed-mode analog-digital, asynchronous, parallel, distributed, slow, reconfigurable, specialized and fault-tolerant biological substrates with implicit memory addressing that only update state when information changes, blurring the boundary between computation and data.

For more information about IBM Research, please visit www.ibm.com/research.

Technical insight and more details on the SyNAPSE project and recent milestones can also be found on the Cognitive Computing blog at http://modha.org/.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by IBM.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091118133535.htm

Do Cosmic Rays Affect Growth of Life on Earth?

A new study shows that cosmic radiation could be accelerating the growth of our Earth forests, though – as with most cosmic radiation effects – we don’t know how it’s happening or what the effects are.  But in accordance with standard “Science From Fantastical Space Radiation” practice, the results were only discovered by accident.

A team from the University of Edinburgh scanned samples from felled Scottish spruce trees to examine the rings.  Which, when you think about it, is just like scanning a document but without all the intermediary steps.  By examining the width of the yearly rings that form you can examine the growth of the tree over time, and while they were expecting climate factors to dominate cosmic ones turned up instead.

There was a clear correlation between cosmic radiation levels and growth, and while it wasn’t the usual “Grow to twice the size and change color” effect we normally associate with radiation-fueled growth it still outperformed links with little things like “temperature” or “rain.”  Which was a bit of a surprise.

If you’re asking “How could cosmic radiation change tree growth?”, you and the researchers have a lot in common.  There are a few theories about how high energy protons slamming into the upper atmosphere, exploding into showers of exotic particles as they collide with air, could do this.  None of which people can agree on.  The idea that increased particle showers in the upper atmosphere can seed clouds and regular water showers further down has studies both for and against, while the idea that the unleashed particles are somehow spurring growth directly has only scifi for support so far.  Well, scifi and the fact it actually seems to be happening.
In any case, we can count ourself lucky the cosmic radiation didn’t have more Fantastic effects on the foliage: invisible trees would be a major hazard, rubber trees don’t grow in Scotland, and the environmental effects of forests turning to stone or catching fire are undesirable.

 

Luke McKinney

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8311000/8311373.stm

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122652654/HTMLSTART

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/new-discovery-cosmic-rays-accelerate-growth-of-life-on-earth-.html