Scientists at Children’s National Medical Center have demonstrated conclusively that a specific protein is instrumental in myelination and remyelination, processes essential to the creation and repair of the brain’s white matter.

This groundbreaking discovery in mouse models points the way to developing treatments or interventions to enhance healthy brain development and/or brain disease repair in children and adults.

“By understanding the fundamental mechanisms of brain development, we get closer to finding clear instructions to repairing developmental brain disorders and injuries,” said Vittorio Gallo, PhD, Director, Center for Neuroscience Research, Children’s Research Institute at Children’s National Medical Center.

Like crowds of people, microscopic particles can act together under the right conditions. By exposing crowd behavior at the atomic scale, scientists discover new states and properties of matter. Now, ultrafast lasers have revealed a previously unseen type of collective electronic behavior in semiconductors, which may help in the design of optoelectronic devices.

Design of optoelectronic devices, like the semiconductor diode lasers used in telecommunications, currently involves a lot of trial and error. A designer trying to use basic theory to calculate the characteristics of a new diode laser will be off by a significant amount because of subtle interactions in the semiconductor that could not be detected until recently.

A role for prion proteins, the much debated agents of mad cow disease and vCJD, has been identified. It appears that the normal prions produced by the body help to prevent the plaques that build up in the brain to cause Alzheimer’s disease. The possible function for the mysterious proteins was discovered by a team of scientists led by Medical Research Council funded scientist Professor Nigel Hooper of the University of Leeds.

Alzheimer’s and diseases like variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease follow similar patterns of disease progression and in some forms of prion disease share genetic features. These parallels prompted Professor Hooper’s team to look for a link between the different conditions. They found an apparent role for normal prion proteins in preventing Alzheimer’s disease.

A virus that has been specifically designed by scientists to be safe to normal tissue but deadly to cancer is showing early promise in a preliminary study, researchers said today at the ESMO Conference Lugano (ECLU), Switzerland, 5-8 July 2007.

The virus, called NV1020, is a type of herpes simplex virus modified so that it selectively replicates in virus cells, killing them in the process.

In some regions of Central Europe, salad dressing is made with pumpkin seed oil, which has a strong characteristic nutty flavor and striking color properties - in the bottle it appears red, but it looks green in a salad dressing.

Samo and Marko Kreft's paper examines the remarkable two-tone (or dichromatic) color of pumpkin seed oil, by the use of a combination of imaging and CIE (International Commission on Illumination) chromaticity coordinates. The paper also explains why human vision perceives substances like pumpkin seed oil as dichromatic or polychromatic (exhibiting a variety of colors).

Two phenomena explain the perceived shift in color of pumpkin seed oil from red to green:

First, the change in color is due to a change in oil layer thickness.

The Ugandan government wants to change the law to allow Mabira Forest Reserve, the 30,000 hectare rainforest in Uganda which has been protected since 1932, to be carved up and a quarter of it used for sugar cane production by huge firms, notably the Mehta Group, which has close ties to politicians within and outside the country.

The forest is home to nearly one third of Uganda's bird life.