Despite decades of research, the biological basis of depression is unknown, and the molecular and cellular targets of antidepressant treatment remain elusive, although it is likely that these drugs have one or more primary targets.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have discovered that a change in the location of a protein in the brain could serve as a biomarker for depression, allowing a simple, rapid, laboratory test to identify patients with depression and to determine whether a particular antidepressant therapy will provide a successful response.

Though they perch far apart on the avian family tree, birds with the ability to learn songs use similar brain structures to sing their tunes. Neurobiologists at Duke University Medical Center now have an explanation for this puzzling likeness.

In all three groups of birds with vocal learning abilities – songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds – the brain structures for singing and learning to sing are embedded in areas controlling movement, the researchers discovered. The team also found that areas in charge of movement share many functional similarities with the brain areas for singing. This suggests that the brain pathways used for vocal learning evolved out of the brain pathways used for motor control.

Bipolar Disorder (BPD or manic-depressive illness) is one of the most serious of all mental disorders, affecting millions of individuals worldwide. Affected individuals alternate between states of deep depression and mania. While depression is characterized by persistent and long-term sadness or despair, mania is a mental state characterized by great excitement, flight of ideas, a decreased need for sleep, and, sometimes, uncontrollable behavior, hallucinations, or delusions.

BPD likely arises from the complex interaction of multiple genes and environmental factors. Unlike some brain diseases, no single gene has been implicated in BPD.

Cocaine addicts often suffer a downward emotional spiral that is a key to their craving and chronic relapse. While researchers have developed animal models of the reward of cocaine, they have not been able to model this emotional impact until now.

Regina Carelli and colleagues report experiments with rats in which they have mimicked the negative affect of cocaine addiction and even how it drives greater cocaine use. They said their animal model could enable better understanding of the emotional motivations of cocaine addiction and how to ameliorate them.

LONDON, March 12 /PRNewswire/ --

- With Photo.

Cigarettes are set to be hit with another rise in tobacco duty during today's Budget. The Budget announcement coincides with the 25th annual No Smoking Day, which takes place today (12 March).

To mark the event, the No Smoking Day charity has released new research showing almost one in five smokers plan to stop today(i). Studies show the rising cost of smoking is proving a key factor in triggering quit attempts.

This year's campaign, The Great No Smoking Day Challenge, sees events taking place across the UK, with local stop smoking services, employers, GPs and others providing support and advice to those that are ready to stop.

Notes to editors

WASHINGTON, March 11 /PRNewswire/ --

The chairman of the US House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee told a Platts Energy Podium event in Washington on Tuesday that he supports a greenhouse gases (GHG) cap-and-trade system that would provide nearly all emission credits for free to electric utilities, oil refineries and other industrial operations.

Representative Rick Boucher, Democrat-Virginia, said he believes the US should model its GHG control law on the country's successful acid rain program that is designed to cut national sulfur dioxide emissions from electric utilities through a cap-and-trade system.

DENVER, March 11 /PRNewswire/ --

CQG, the leading analytics and trade routing platform for global electronically-traded futures markets, today announced the connection of its hosted order routing gateways to the LIFFE CONNECT(R) trading system via NYSE Euronext, Liffe's new 100Mbps High Speed Access line. To further enhance its service, CQG has also acquired space and exchange gateways in Liffe's Co-Location facility, enabling them to offer hosted high-speed, close-proximity exchange access to their partner firms.

In the first installment of this series, we encountered the common misconception that the order of the terminal nodes ("tips") on an evolutionary tree reflects the actual relatedness among the species represented. Simply rotating some internal nodes without affecting the branching order ("topology") of the tree -- and thus, making no change to the relationships among species -- showed that that the order of tips on a tree is actually arbitrary. What matters is the way that the species are connected through their common ancestors.

NEW YORK, March 11 /PRNewswire/ --

- TraderTools Enables Canada-Based Investment Bank to Pass the Book Between Seven International Sites with Full Sales and Trading Functionality

TraderTools LLC (TraderTools), one of the world's leading suppliers of electronic Foreign Exchange (eFX) software solutions, announced today that TD Securities, a Toronto-based financial services firm, has licensed TraderTools' straight-through processing platform, STPlatform. TD Securities intends to take advantage of STPlatform's comprehensive FX order management features, including full STP, AutoFill(TM) (automatic order execution), an Order API with order importing capabilities, as well as complete branch and customer functionality.

LONDON, March 11 /PRNewswire/ -- NHS Choices (http://www.nhs.uk), the digital 'front door' to the NHS launches a new smoking calculator that will allow users to see both the physical and financial cost of smoking in one simple tool.

Based on NHS accredited information, the interactive calculator (http://www.nhs.uk/Tools/Pages/Smoking.aspx) enables users to not only see the positive impact of quitting - totting up how much you could save over one to ten years - but also highlights dramatically through graphic images the negative effects of not stopping. This interactive tool is the latest addition to the NHS Choices' extensive tools library.

Notes for Editors: