The seeds were stored at room temperature until 2005, when scientists performed radiocarbon dating and identified them as the famed date palm of Judea. (Psalm 92: “The righteous will flourish like a palm tree…They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green.”) The researchers planted the remaining three seeds. One of them grew. When the results were published, in 2008, the plant, nicknamed Methuselah, was more than three feet tall. By this past November, it was more than six feet tall, and healthy enough to be moved out of quarantine and into a park.

No one knows exactly how the seeds managed to survive so long, but it almost certainly had to do with the extremely high temperatures and low humidity of the desert. Methuselah is just one of many examples of organisms that can preserve themselves by shutting down for awhile. In the winter, the wood frog’s heart stops beating and up to 45 percent of its body turns to ice. The tardigrade, a microscopic eight-legged ‘waterbear’, can survive at least 10 years in a cold environment by expelling nearly all of the water from its body.

“Nature is very wise at solving these problems,” says cryobiologist Amir Arav, whose company, Core Dynamics, is based about 85 miles from Masada. For nearly 30 years, Arav has been trying to mimic nature’s preservation feats in the lab. He has frozen rat livers and hearts, and sheep ovaries, and has freeze-dried human sperm, knee cartilage, stem cells and blood.

Read more at…

The Last Word on Nothing, January 2012.

The high-level definition: It’s a common and time-intensive treatment for autism, often based on applied behavioral analysis, an approach in which bad behaviors are discouraged and positive behaviors reinforced.

But it’s not that simple. Behavioral interventions take many forms — discrete trial training, pivotal response training and the Picture Exchange Communication System, to name just a few. The differences among these are subtle and not easy to describe.

Happily, a new online resource of definitions and short video clips helps distinguish them.

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SFARI, January 2012.

So someone with autism, who presumably lacks the ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings, couldn’t possibly manage a meaningful relationship. Right?

In fact, many people with autism forge deep romantic relationships, as I learned last month from an engaging New York Times profile of two teenagers with Asperger syndrome.

The couple, Kirsten and Jack, live together and are in love — and they’re not all that unusual, according to the article. There are apparently large online communities devoted to helping people with Asperger syndrome find dates and improve their intimate relationships.

Read more at…

SFARI, January 2012.

Both reports analyze so-called ‘resting-state functional connectivity’ studies: the increasingly popular five-minute brain scans that measure synchrony between different regions when the brain is at rest.

Together, they call into question high-profile findings published in the past couple of years showing that short-range connections in the brain start off strong in children and weaken over the course of typical development, while long-range connections begin weak in children and strengthen over time.

In a study published 14 October, researchers reanalyzed data from several of their own functional connectivity studies after correcting for head motion and found that this maturation pattern usually disappears once head motion is taken into account.

“It really, really, really sucks. My favorite result of the last five years is an artifact,” says lead investigator Steve Petersen, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis.

It’s unclear how many published results head motion has skewed, and whether this changes the bottom-line conclusions. But many researchers are concerned.

“It’s going to impact some findings with regard to the robustness, but whether it completely wipes out the findings that are out there is another question,” says Damien Fair, assistant professor of behavioral neuroscience and psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University. “It is going to require folks to reanalyze their data, controlling for these new ways of examining motion.”

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SFARI, January 2012.

Until the late 1960s the museum was the pathology department of the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane. The bits of brain in the jars were collected during patient autopsies performed between 1896 and 1938. Most of the jars sat on a shelf until the summer of 2010, when Indiana University School of Medicine pathologist George Sandusky began popping off the lids.

Frustrated by a dearth of postmortem brain donations from people with mental illness, Sandusky—who is on the board of directors at the museum—seized the chance to search this neglected collection for genes that contribute to mental disorders.

Sandusky is not alone. Several research groups are now seeking ways to mine genetic and other information hidden in old, often forgotten tissue archives—a handful of which can be found in the U.S., along with many more in Europe. Several technical hurdles stand in the way, but if these can be overcome, the archives would offer several advantages. Beyond supplying tissues that can be hard to acquire at a time when autopsies are on the decline, the vintage brains are untainted by modern psychiatric drugs and are often paired with detailed clinical notes that help researchers make more accurate post hoc diagnoses.

“There are probably a fair number of these collections around the country that grew out of state hospitals,” says John Allman, professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology. “It is an untapped resource. If it were carefully planned and reasonably funded, it could become quite a valuable thing.”

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Scientific American, January 2012.

Larry Reiter

But in the past couple of years, as competition has intensified in autism research, Reiter has had trouble gaining access to new mouse models. Frustrated, he has decided to focus instead on fruit flies.

Reiter says he worries that others might be similarly discouraged. “People will shy away from working in this area, because they can’t get the mouse to work on,” he says.

On paper, most funding organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and SFARI — this website’s parent organization — as well as most scientific journals stipulate that once researchers publish details of a model animal, they must make the animals available to other labs (see list).

“Failure to comply with the sharing plan may be carefully considered in future funding decisions for the investigator and their institution,” says J.P. Kim, director of the Division of Extramural Inventions and Technology Resources within the NIH Office of Extramural Research.

In practice, however, many researchers intentionally delay sharing or don’t share at all.

“It’s sort of the ugly secret,” Reiter says. “There is a long and proud tradition in the mouse field of holding on to your mouse, sometimes for 20 years.”

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SFARI, January 2012.

Julius Wagner-Jauregg treated several men with psychosis by exposing them to malaria, and won a Nobel Prize for the work.

In the summer of 1917, an Austrian doctor named Julius Wagner-Jauregg gave a man with advanced symptoms of syphilis, including psychotic episodes, a very peculiar treatment: malaria.

The parasitic infection causes fever, and Wagner-Jauregg had a theory that fever treatment, or ‘pyrotherapy,’ could cure psychosis. The doctor injected the man with blood drawn from a soldier with malaria. Within weeks, as expected, this brought on episodes of fever. After the sixth fever, the man’s psychotic fits ended, and he eventually recovered completely from both syphilis and malaria. Wagner-Jauregg repeated the experiment on nine more men with psychosis, and six of them improved.

This marked the first time that scientists had identified a physical treatment for a mental disorder — a feat that earned Wagner-Jauregg a Nobel Prize. To this day, scientists don’t know the mechanisms underlying his success.

Despite a century-long history, we rarely hear about the link between the immune system and mental illness. But the science behind it is rich and varied — from massive epidemiological studies of twins and pregnant women, to the screening of immune molecules in amniotic fluid and postmortem studies of brain inflammation.

For the non-expert, this field can be more intimidating than a box of jumbled Christmas decorations. In his new book, Infectious Behavior: Brain-Immune Connections in Autism, Schizophrenia, and Depression, biologist Paul Patterson nimbly untangles the strings of lights.

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SFARI, January 2012.

Ten years later, a journalist at a big newspaper pointed out that, well, no, the $3 billion we spent on the human genome — a dollar for each pair of DNA letters — had not bought us the ability to diagnose, prevent or treat common diseases. The genome had revolutionized basic biology, sure, but done little for human health.

The newspaper article made a lot of scientists angry. (Some of them are still sputtering about it at conferences.) It also launched a broader discussion about science communication and hype. A month ago, I went to a public event at the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan, called “The Human Genome and Human Health: Will the Promise Be Fulfilled?” Four experts on genetics, medicine, ethics and law discussed whether the promises of that 2000 announcement would ever come true. The general consensus was that the White House hoopla had raised expectations much too high, inevitably leading to disappointment. Pride goeth before the fall.

As a journalist, I hate hype, and I will never argue that journalists should be anything but skeptical of scientific advancements. But I recently learned that, like all of the Seven Deadly Sins, pride is necessary for survival. So I wonder, does science need hubris?

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The Last Word on Nothing, December 2011.

In the November 1925 issue of Popular Science, Houdini wrote an essay describing his obsession with the other kind of mystifiers: those who claim to have supernatural powers. Every day of his 35-year career, Houdini wrote, he had been thinking about psychics who supposedly communicate with the dead. He visited dozens of them and, as described at length in the essay, uncovered all of their lazy tricks. To give just one fun example, Houdini showed how mediums, during pitch-black seances, used trumpets controlled by their feet and mouths to produce voices that their audience believed to be ghosts.

Houdini did not consider himself a skeptic, but rather a public servant.

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The Last Word on Nothing, December 2011.

With so many gaps in our knowledge of adults with autism, where should research begin?

A list of top priorities appears in the November issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The report summarizes a meeting of the Autism-in-Older-Adults Working Group, which met in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in March 2010.

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SFARI, December 2011.