Studies with rats have revealed the potential in an entirely new class of antidepressants that take effect after only days of treatment versus the weeks required for current drugs.

The researchers, Guillaume Lucas and colleagues, said that they hope their findings will spur development of such new antidepressant drugs so that clinical testing can begin quickly.

Depression can be treated by enhancing the action of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Such neurotransmitters are the chemical signals that one neuron launches at another to trigger a nerve impulse in the target neuron.

In experiments with mice, Lennart Mucke and colleagues have discovered a mechanism by which the toxic brain protein produced in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) could contribute to the cognitive deficits that are its hallmark. They found evidence that the toxic protein, called Aβ peptide, triggers overexcitation of neurons in the brain’s learning centers, inducing compensatory rewiring of brain circuitry in the centers—all of which could cause deterioration of neural function.

The researcher wrote that their results showed the need for studies to explore whether blocking that overexcitation might prevent such neurological deficits in AD.

In work that could lead to safe and effective techniques for gene therapy, MIT researchers have found a way to fine-tune the ability of biodegradable polymers to deliver genes.

Gene therapy, which involves inserting new genes into patients' cells to fight diseases like cancer, holds great promise but has yet to realize its full potential, in part because of safety concerns over using viruses to carry the genes.

The new MIT work, published this week in Advanced Materials, focuses on creating gene carriers from synthetic, non-viral materials.

Gene therapy, a field of intense research for nearly 20 years, involves inserting new genes into patients' cells to fight diseases like cancer. It holds great promise but has yet to realize its full potential, in part because of safety concerns over the conventional technique of using viruses to carry the genes - more than 1,000 gene-therapy clinical trials have been conducted and most trials use viruses as carriers, or vectors, to deliver genes.

However, there are risks associated with using viruses. To date there are no FDA-approved gene therapies. As a result, many researchers have been working on developing non-viral methods to deliver therapeutic genes.

Weather forecasting and climate modelling for the notoriously unpredictable Sahel region of Africa could be made easier in the future, thanks to new research results coming from the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis study (AMMA).

A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters describes how the AMMA scientists gathered new atmospheric data by using satellite imagery to plot flight paths over areas where storms had produced very wet soils. Dropsondes (weather reconnaissance devices) were launched from a research aircraft above these wet areas to record data such as humidity, wind strength and temperature. The findings allowed the scientists to compare the atmospheric conditions above wet soils with those above adjacent dry soils.

Apes bite and try to break a tube to retrieve the food inside while children follow the experimenter's example to get inside the tube to retrieve the prize, showing that even before preschool, toddlers are more sophisticated in their social learning skills than their closest primate relatives, according to a new report.

This innate proficiency allows them to excel in both physical and social skills as they begin school and progress through life.

"We compared three species to determine which abilities and skills are distinctly human," explained Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and lead author of the research paper.

Here are nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. Blazing with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is a hundred to a thousand times smaller than our Milky Way Galaxy.

"These are among the lowest mass galaxies ever directly observed in the early universe," says Nor Pirzkal of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the European Space Agency in Baltimore, Md.

The conventional model for galaxy evolution predicts that small galaxies in the early universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing.

In this sixth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview Howard Bloom. Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the mainstream media. If you have missed the first five interviews, please click my name at the top and it will take you to my profile with all of my articles.

A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates biologists trying to save Colorado's native greenback cutthroat trout from extinction over the past several decades through hatchery propagation and restocking efforts have, in most cases, inadvertently restored the wrong fish.

According to a sophisticated DNA analysis, five of nine "relic" populations of what biologists believed to be greenback cutthroat trout living in isolated pockets of the state actually are Colorado River cutthroat trout, a closely related subspecies, said lead author Jessica Metcalf, a researcher in CU-Boulder's ecology and evolutionary biology department.