A new cancer gene has been discovered by a research group at the Sahlgrenska Academy. The gene causes an insidious form of glandular cancer usually in the head and neck and in women also in the breast. The discovery could lead to quicker and better diagnosis and more effective treatment.

The study is published October 13 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The cancer caused by this new cancer gene is called adenoid cystic carcinoma and is a slow-growing but deadly form of cancer. The research group can now show that the gene is found in 100% of these tumours, which means that a genetic test can easily be used to make a correct diagnosis.

"Now that we know what the cancer is down to, we can also develop new and more effective treatments for this often highly malignant and insidious form of cancer," says professor Göran Stenman, who heads the research group at the Lundberg Laboratory for Cancer Research at the Sahlgrenska Academy. "One possibility might be to develop a drug that quite simply turns off this gene."

Seeing is believing when it comes to emotions. We smile, we gasp, we yawn when we see others do the same - a phenomenon called emotional contagion.

A new study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that emotional contagion occurs even if the "seeing" step is bypassed. The blind patients in the study could not consciously see images of the faces of happy or fearful people that they were shown. Although their eyes and optic nerves were functional, the region of their brains involved in visual processing had been damaged. Instead, other parts of the brain took over, allowing the subjects to still respond normally with their own happy or scared facial expressions. These patients also made the appropriate happy or fearful face in response to emotions that were communicated through bodily expressions, suggesting that blind empathy can happen even without a facial template to imitate.

"We're actually infected by the emotions of others. [This study shows] this phenomenon can be carried out in the absence of visual awareness," says Marco Tamietto, a neuroscience researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. "We can say that emotional contagion cannot be reduced to a simple mimicry."

They have been hailed as the future of smoking and a non-cancerous alternative to cigarettes that don't fall foul of the ban.

But serious safety concerns have been raised about electronic cigarettes as their popularity continues to grow.

And there are fears children could get hooked on nicotine by using the so-called e-cigs, electronic cigarettes are not liable to age restriction because they do not contain tobacco.

Some are being marketed as appetite suppressants while others are promoted as the choice of fashion-conscious young celebrities

Boston - It is being reported that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have banned the sale of electronic cigarettes in America.

Electronic cigarettes look similar to a regular ciggy, but actually are quite different operating with a battery and a vaporless odor, in place of a lighter and dangerous omitted toxins.

The electronic cigarettes come in an array of flavors, making them very appealing for young people and this fact was one that made it easy for the tobacco companies to target young people.

Altruistic behavior, self-sacrifice among strangers has more to do with nurture than nature, or culture more than genes, U.S. researchers suggest.

Adrian V. Bell and colleagues of the University of California, Davis, say behaviors that help unrelated people while being costly to the individual and creating a risk for genetic descendants could not likely be favored by evolution -- at least by common evolutionary arguments.

The researchers used a mathematical equation -- the Price equation -- that describes the conditions for altruism to evolve. This equation motivated the researchers to compare the genetic and the cultural differentiation between neighboring social groups.

Using previously calculated estimates of genetic differences, they used the World Values Survey -- questions are likely to be heavily influenced by culture in a large number of countries -- as a source of data to compute the cultural differentiation between the same neighboring groups.

Imaging study finds similar brain function among devout, nonreligious

When it comes to religion, believers and nonbelievers appear to think very differently. But at the level of the brain, is believing in God different from believing that the sun is a star or that 4 is an even number?

While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief. Nor is it known whether religious believers differ from nonbelievers in how they evaluate statements of fact.

In the first neuroimaging study to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, UCLA and University of Southern California researchers have found that while the human brain responds very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain.

The study also found that devout Christians and nonbelievers use the same brain regions to judge the truth of religious and nonreligious propositions. The results, the study authors say, represent a critical advance in the psychology of religion. The paper appears Sept. 30 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Researchers manipulate a certain brain wave to slow down voluntary movement in humans

Researchers have found that manipulating a particular brain wave can force human subjects to move more slowly, and provided some of the first evidence of how brain waves can directly affect behavior.

A group of 14 volunteers received brain stimulation as they tried to manipulate the position of a spot on a computer screen with a joystick. That stimulation led to a 10 percent drop in execution of the computer task.

The electrical current used in this study specifically boosted normal beta activity that has links to sustained muscle activities, such as holding a book. Such beta activity typically drops off before people make a move.

A derivative of cholesterol is necessary for the formation of brain cells, according to a study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. The results, which are published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, can help scientists to cultivate dopamine-producing cells outside the body.

The study was led by Professor Ernest Arenas and demonstrates that the formation of dopamine-producing neurons during brain development in mice is dependent on the activation of a specific receptor in the brain by an oxidised form of cholesterol called oxysterol. Dopamine-producing nerve cells play an important part in many brain functions and processes, from motor skills to reward systems and dependency. They are also the type of cell that dies in Parkinson's disease.

The scientists have also shown that embryonic stem cells cultivated in the laboratory, form more dopamine-producing nerve cells if they are treated with oxidised cholesterol. The same treatment also reduced the tendency of the stem cells to show uncontrolled growth.

An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

Hardly less startling than finding herself with breast cancer was Barbara Ehrenreich's discovery of the "pink ribbon culture," of, that is, the enforced cheerfulness and positive thinking that accompanied it (and the teddy bears and "cornucopia of pink-ribbon-themed breast cancer products" which went with that). Back in 2001, she wrote a fierce, wonderful piece for Harper's Magazine, "Welcome to Cancerland," about her experience, and what to do with anger when it's equated with "negativity," and so ill health. (A fine accompaniment for Ehrenreich on this subject would be Ordinary Life, Kathlyn Conway's memoir of surviving cancer with plenty of anger and not the slightest belief in that disease's transformative possibilities.)

Ehrenreich's work is invariably bracing, to say the least -- in part because she's a superb writer, in part because, as in her bestselling book Nickeled and Dimed and other works like Fear of Falling, she has a way of nailing the essential insecurity of life in a corporate/work world that has no pity to offer (but oodles of "positive thinking"). She's always had a wicked tendency to enter worlds, turn them upside down, and report back, as she did recently for the New York Times in a four-part series on poverty in post-meltdown America.

The rites of positive-thinking and the extravagant promises of better health and well-being which are inseparable from them, she soon discovered, were hardly confined to the world of cancer patients. In the ensuing years, she stumbled upon a multitude of worlds central to our lives -- from megachurches to mega-corporations -- in which an ideology of positive thinking ruled the roost. Of course, until the fall of 2008, we were also living through a gusher of positive thinking about an economy that -- so it was firmly believed -- could never go south.

As this piece is posted, Ehrenreich's newest book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is just being published. A full-scale report on the cult of positive thinking in America, its anti-Calvinist roots and present "successes," it represents Ehrenreich at her best. It's hard to read without wondering whether this country isn't, in many ways, just a giant con game run by spielmeisters, touters, and flim-flam artists.

When removing a piece of the brain, location makes a world of difference. If the surgeon cuts one millimeter in the wrong direction, the patient may lose the ability to speak, or a pathway that controls thumb movement, or worse.

For five decades, neurosurgeons seeking to avoid damaging critical brain tissue have used the same technique to map the brain before surgery. Researchers at Albany Medical Center, however, are developing a new technique they hope will be quicker, safer and more accurate.

"It's passive, bed-side, real-time; it takes seconds," said Dr. Anthony L. Ritaccio, a neurologist and director of the epilepsy and human brain mapping program at Albany Med. Most important, he added, is that the technique can create an instant snapshot of brain activity by charting different parts of the brain as its cells fire.