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mutations

Internet addiction fueled by gene mutation, scientists say

Internet addiction is real, researchers out of the University of Bonn say, and its source can be explained at the molecular level.

Researchers from the school's departments of psychology and neuroscience report in the September 2012 issue of the Journal of Addiction Medicine that a simple variation on the CHRNA4 gene results in a significantly higher prevalence of Internet addiction -- and particularly in women.

"Internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination," lead author Christian Montag says in a news release. "The current data already shows that there are clear indications for genetic causes of Internet addiction... If such connections are better understood, this will also result in important indications for better therapies."… Read more

Nifty stem-cell engineering sheds light on Parkinson's disease

Researchers at the University at Buffalo may have taken a significant step toward unraveling the way Parkinson's disease assails the human nervous system--thanks in part to a nifty bit of stem-cell engineering.

Scientists led by physiologist Jian Feng took skin cells from healthy control subjects and people with a particular type of Parkinson's disease and transformed them into a type of primordial cell--technically, an "induced pluripotent stem cell." Such iPS cells, as they're known, can be coaxed into developing as almost any type of cell in the body.

Here, they turned into brain cells. … Read more

Ahhh! Mutating faces!

Big on Digg yesterday was a face mutations site called Mutating Pictures that would let you rate how much a randomly thrown together pile of geometric objects looked like a human face. Voting up a picture would in turn create more "offspring," or similar variants of the chosen picture, while simultaneously "killing off" the lower ranked faces. The result is a user-controlled evolutionary system at a very basic level.

Today, almost ironically, we've got a mutation of the site called Face Maker that attempts to solve the same problem using an either-or model. Instead of … Read more