Brain-speak
Glossolalia, known as “speaking in tongues,” is an intense, trance-like state in which the speaker utters meaningless sounds. Some religious groups think it results from a direct connection with God. Recently, University of Pennsylvania psychiatrists have reported capturing brain scans of the phenomenon. They recruited five women from a local Pentecostal congregation and asked them to sing gospel songs and then to speak in tongues, scanning for brain activity during each episode. They found that glossolalia, in comparison to singing, decreased the function of the frontal lobe-the part of the brain responsible for control and judgment. Activity in the brain’s parietal lobe, which integrates sensory information from various parts of the body, was increased during glossolalia. This increase is thought to be due to an enhancement of “touching” sensations, in this case, being touched by the spirit, no doubt. These patterns of brain activity are the opposite of those seen during a meditative state.
Source: Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging
-Mayce Al-Sukhni
Drug be gone, returned
After being abandoned for over a decade, an inexpensive anti-malarial drug may be coming back into favour in Malawi. Chloroquine has been used to treat malaria for 60 years, but its effectiveness has declined in certain regions of the world because the parasite that causes malaria has been growing increasingly resistant to chloroquine treatment. In 1993, Malawi officials abandoned the drug and implemented a new treatment strategy using a combination of two other drugs. This worked for several years, but the malaria parasite soon became resistant to the treatment. This left a newer, more expensive therapy as the treatment of choice. Now, however, researchers have found that most cases of malaria in Malawi have lost resistance to chloroquine, since the drug has not been used for so long. The possibility of bringing back inexpensive and effective chloroquine is an attractive choice, but experts warn that resistant strains of malaria still exist in Africa and they may enter Malawi at any time. Plans to stop and then reinstate chloroquine treatment need to be continent-wide in order to be effective.
Source: New England Journal of Medicine
-M.A.
Sperm study spawns spam?
A recent publication may soon be giving fodder to the spam email that boasts to cure male infertility. Researchers have described the 381 proteins essential to the survival of fruit fly sperm, the first sperm “proteome” ever published for a complex organism. Because half of the proteins in fruit fly sperm have a counterpart in humans, the characterization of this proteome will be an important basis for research into human male fertility and the development of drugs for male infertility. Not only will researchers be able to study the factors that give some sperm an advantage over others, but scientists may soon be able to describe how sex evolved in humans. Both these questions have long been debated, to little result.
Source: Nature Genetics
-Sandy Huen
