Brain imaging has revealed a breakdown in normal patterns of emotional processing that impairs the ability of people with clinical depression to suppress negative emotional states. Efforts by depressed patients to suppress their feelings when viewing emotionally negative images enhanced activity in several brain areas, including the amygdala, known to play a role in generating emotion.

“Identifying areas in the nervous system that correlate to pathological mood states is one of the pressing questions in mental illness today,” says Carol Tamminga, MD, of the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center. Tamminga was not involved in the study.

Individuals with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) are treated first with a drug known as imatinib (Gleevec), which targets the protein known to cause the cancer (BCR-ABL). If their disease returns, because BCR-ABL mutants emerge that are resistant to the effects of imatinib, individuals are treated with a drug known as dasatinib (SPRYCEL), which targets BCR-ABL in a different way.

However, patients that relapse after treatment with dasatinib, because BCR-ABL mutants emerge that are resistant to the effects of this drug, are now beginning to be seen in the clinic.

An unusual investigation was recently carried out by researchers under the guidance of Tatiana Rebeko, Ph.D. at the Institute of Psychology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Their interest was beauty aids and what it could tell them about personality strains.

They determined that the types of beauty creams a woman uses can provide insight about how their owner copes with stresses, finds the way out of conflict situations and also about the person’s self-appraisal. The researchers call it the “structure of feminine identity.”

The investigation involved 28 women, ages 22 to 65 and the psychologists studied websites and catalog of the leading cosmetic companies to single out basic useful properties of creams produced by them.

Vampire bats that live in Latin America have switched to blood meals from cattle instead of from rainforest mammals, ecological physiologists report in the Journal of Comparative Physiology B.

They say that the conversion of rainforests ecosystems into livestock producing farmland resulted in the expansion of vampire bat populations in Latin America.  

Farmers are observing vampire bats satisfying their need for blood by attacking cattle instead of wild mammals. To document this change in behavior, Dr Christian Voigt and colleagues analyzed the stable carbon isotope ratio of exhaled CO2 in vampire bats.

New scientific findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, explaining riddles that scientists have wrestled with for decades, including an abrupt cooling of much of the planet and the extinction of large mammals.

The discovery was made by scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara and their colleagues. James Kennett, a paleoceanographer at the university, said that the discovery may explain some of the highly debated geologic controversies of recent decades.

The period in question is called the Younger Dryas, an interval of abrupt cooling that lasted for about 1,000 years and occurred at the beginning of an inter-glacial warm period.

Australian scientists have identified the missing deep ocean pathway – or ‘supergyre’ – linking the three Southern Hemisphere ocean basins in research that will help them explain more accurately how the ocean governs global climate.

The new research confirms the current sweeping out of the Tasman Sea past Tasmania and towards the South Atlantic is a previously undetected component of the world climate system’s engine-room – the thermohaline circulation or ‘global conveyor belt’.

Wealth from Oceans Flagship scientist Ken Ridgway says the current, called the Tasman Outflow, occurs at an average depth of 800-1,000 metres and may play an important role in the response of the conveyor belt to climate change.