Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
June 27, 2025 June 27, 2025 | Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
June 27, 2025 June 27, 2025 | Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
Fifty years ago, a winning science project for a high school science fair might have been building a rocket in the backyard of your house. All you had at your disposal was whatever you could buy at the local stores. Your lab space was most likely the basement or the garage.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is often associated with people exposed to catastrophic situations, such as combat soldiers and rape victims. A recent study by a research group at the Hopkins School of Medicine, however, suggests that people who experience traumas such as war, assault and natural disasters may not be the only ones susceptible to PTSD.
The Ebola outbreak, which began more than a year ago, has finally begun to subside. While the reduction in the number of Ebola patients has given cause for the relaxation of quarantine measures and the reopening of schools, the Ebola outbreak has yet to reach zero new cases in the most affected West African countries.
Almost half of Costa Rica is covered by forests that host an array of flora and fauna, including a newly discovered specie of glass frogs.
“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” While the common saying may be cliché, a new study may provide scientific support for the importance of sleeping and waking early.
It seems that our comfortable modern lifestyles may have gutted our microbiomes.
Many dread the aging process due to the likelihood of acquiring certain diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s. However, memory loss is not an inevitable part of everyone’s future. A recent study indicates that social activities that engage seniors may improve their memory retention.
The fundamental goal of neuroscience is to establish the link between physical events in the brain and human consciousness, from complex thoughts to emotion. Understanding the patterns of brain activity that underlie behavior is a major step toward accomplishing this goal.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent government agency which regulates interstate communications in the United States, recently fined AT&T $25 million for a privacy leak regarding personal information and Social Security numbers of nearly 280,000 customers over a period of three years. It is the largest fine which has ever been issued for data and privacy violations in the history of the U.S.
Chronic sleep disorders are estimated to affect 50 to 70 million Americans, the majority of whom are undiagnosed and untreated. While the diminished quality of sleep has a profound effect on the overall health of those who suffer from sleep disorders, most do not suspect sleep disruptions to be the root of such symptoms as fatigue. Added to this quandary is the lack of experts in sleep medicine and the lack of education on the topic among physicians in general.
Until recently, scientists have known relatively little about the formation of our moon. However, new research by the University of Maryland brings light to this mystery and, in doing so, greatly expands humankind’s understanding of the universe.
Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, has become a controversial subject in recent years as it becomes a more and more common way to dredge natural gas and petroleum out of the ground. However, the process may not be safe for people who live near the fracking sites. A recent study by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health has suggested that increased levels of radon in homes in Pennsylvania are related to the onset of fracking in the area.
The brain regulates nearly everything about us — homeostasis, perception and cognitive function — but how specific brain regions connect and work together is still not perfectly understood. Recently, a team at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Texas-Houston uncovered a previously unknown role of the region that initiates the processing of visual input. The brain’s primary visual cortex, referred to as V1, is responsible for sensing visual information about the world around us. The primary visual cortex, located in the occipital lobe at the back the brain, creates a map of our visual field. This map is then relayed to other areas of brain, which make decisions based on these visual clues and generate a motor response. This is the traditional or canonical view. However, a recent study conducted by Dr. Marshall Shuler and his team implicates the V1 region in more than just visual sensing. The work, published in Neuron, suggests that the V1 primary visual cortex plays a role in making time-based action decisions following visual stimuli. Shuler is an assistant professor within the department of neuroscience at the School of Medicine. In order to investigate the role of V1 in time-based action, Shuler’s team used mice fitted with a special set of goggles capable of presenting a visual stimulus in the form of light and thereby stimulating the V1 region. The mice, thirsty from a lack of water, were given access to a waterspout. Water would flow from the spout at a specific time interval following a light stimulus that was presented in the goggles. Licking the waterspout in the target interval gave the mice a small amount of water as a reward. However, if they timed it incorrectly, they would receive no water. The researchers then investigated whether mice were capable of being trained to receive the most water. That is, could mice learn to wait and time their licks to get the most water after V1 cortex stimulation by visual cues? This allowed the researchers to test the role of the V1 cortex in making time-based action decisions. The team found that mice could indeed be trained to receive the maximal amount of water. With increased trials, the mice gradually learned to time their licks in order to receive the greatest amount. But this result does not relate the V1 cortex to time-based action. In order to test the role of V1 in time-based action making, they measured the activity of V1 neurons during the same waterspout activity. Shuler and his team found that there was a “trial-by-trial correlation between the neural representation of the interval and the action” in 77 out of the 122 neurons they measured. That is, longer V1 neural firing indicated a longer delay between the visual stimulus and the mouse licking the waterspout. But this correlation was only present when mice were given a visual stimulus. In cases of a non-visual stimulus (such as nose-poke entry), there was no such correlation between neural activity and action. This showed that the V1 region may indeed be regulating time-based action following a visual stimulus. The researchers next tried to optogenetically stimulate V1 neurons, seeing whether it was possible to influence the mice’s behavior by presenting different signals to the V1 cortex. Optogenetics, a relatively new development in the field of neuroscience, enables researchers to stimulate genetically-altered neurons with light. Upon optogenetic stimulation of V1 neurons, the researchers found that he was able to change the waiting time in visually stimulated mice. Consistent with his neural activity findings, they found no change in the non-visually stimulated mice upon optogenetic perturbation. The results suggest that the V1 primary visual cortex, traditionally thought of as being the primary visual sensory area in the brain, may actually play a far larger role in making decisions and performing time-based actions. His findings expand our traditional view of the brain as a compartmentalized organ, with each region having a specific function.
Drug abuse is a major societal problem. According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, substance abuse imparts an annual economic burden of more than $600 billion. In particular, cocaine is a powerful stimulant that can cause severe medical consequences, such as heart attacks and strokes. Currently, there is no single medication that can treat cocaine addiction, and psychosocial therapies are often not effective in a significant population of cocaine abusers. Research into how drugs affect the brain is crucial for development of better therapies to reverse addiction and prevent relapse. The most studied cocaine mechanism is how the drug affects the brain’s reward pathway. The reward pathway is a system of neural circuitry that allows us to associate beneficial behaviors with feelings of pleasure. The neurons that are responsible for pleasure form a group called nucleus accumbens (NAc). NAc neurons are activated by a chemical called dopamine, which is released by ventral tegmental area (VTA) neurons. Under normal conditions, the reward pathway is kept in check by the dopamine transporter, which brings back excess dopamine inside the cell. Scientists believe that cocaine produces its addictive effects by blocking these dopamine transmitters, leading to a buildup of dopamine that is responsible for the intense feelings of pleasure and euphoria. Although the reward pathway is an attractive drug target, prevention of abuse is still preferable to treating an already formed addiction. Even if treatment is successful, almost of half of cocaine users will relapse within two and a half months. As a result, identifying risk factors for drug abuse is a critical area of research that will set the stage for strategies to prevent addiction. Outside of the reward pathway, cocaine has been shown to induce changes in the brain’s plasticity. One form of plasticity is neurogenesis (the creation of neurons), which occurs in the hippocampus even during adulthood. What is important to realize is that adult neurogenesis is an elaborate biological pathway in which neural stem cells proliferate to produce neuroblasts, which then migrate and differentiate into newborn neurons. Moreover, the newborn cells have to survive long enough to be able to integrate into preexisting circuitries. Studies have shown that administration of cocaine to rats decreases cellular proliferation in the hippocampus, whereas cocaine’s effect on long-term survival is still unclear. Regardless, these studies at least show that cocaine addiction and decreased neurogenesis appear to be correlated, suggesting a possible role of neurogenesis in the development of cocaine abuse. To investigate the causal role of neurogenesis in drug addiction, one study reduced hippocampal neurogenesis by exposing rats to radiation. The study found that inhibition of adult neurogenesis increased cocaine-seeking behavior and likelihood of relapse. These findings were the first to show that the manipulation of neurogenesis could be an effective strategy in preventing drug abuse behavior. More specifically, increasing neurogenesis could perhaps prevent cocaine addiction. So far, no published study has examined this possibility. Given that there are mice genetically engineered to have more neurogenesis than normal, we can easily test the hypothesis that increasing neurogenesis may prevent cocaine abuse. Why might a decrease in neurogenesis contribute to addiction behavior? Cocaine can rewire the brain through a variety of pathways, and a decrease in neurogenesis could represent changes in neural plasticity that reinforces addiction behavior. Some reports have shown that cocaine can cause neuronal loss, and thus increasing neurogenesis can boost the body’s endogenous regenerative mechanism to compensate for damaged circuits. Additionally, it is known that stress can also reduce neurogenesis. Given that depressed individuals are more vulnerable to drug addiction, decreased neurogenesis might simply be a reflection of stress that puts individuals at risk for drug abuse. Regardless of my interest in neurogenesis, I don’t think that focusing only on neurogenesis will solve the drug addiction problem, given the multitude of other brain processes involved. I envision that a future treatment might be a combination of both social counseling and medications that target multiple neuronal underpinnings of drug addiction. However, a better understanding of how neurogenesis contributes to drug abuse may lead us toward a greater insight into how neurogenesis participates in brain function.
Scientists have known for a while that male and female brains in many mammals differ in both form and function, but how they become that way is still a mystery. However, a new study published in Nature Neuroscience sheds some light on how gender may be determined in the brain.
You’re working on your laptop as usual one morning, perusing your favorite social network, when your computer requests a system update. Although nothing seems out of the ordinary, one of those language pack updates you normally barely pay attention to is carrying a not-so-ordinary payload. In the blink of an eye, your system is wrenched from your control, and a complete hard-drive wipe commences, destroying all of your most important work and personal files. An ominous red skeleton appears on your screen with a host of demands. Before you know it, all of your personal files will be shared publicly on the world wide web. This modern-day horror story may seem distant, but company-wide attacks like this occurred just last December, targeting businesses like Sony Pictures Entertainment. These attacks against American individuals and companies have not gone without response. American intelligence agencies traced the attack’s trail across the globe as it bounced from compromised computer to compromised computer until it eventually led to its source — North Korea. The question, however, isn’t how to find cyber criminals, but what to do once they are caught. In the case of the Sony attacks, any actions taken become a sensitive diplomatic move. On Jan. 2, U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order instructing several government agencies to take action against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The Treasury Department, for example, froze any assets controlled by the American financial system of individual officials, the DPRK and its supporters. On April 1, Obama signed a new, more powerful executive order. This new executive order has no geographic limits and expands possible sanctions to any foreign attackers and their supporters. “Cyber threats pose one of the most serious economic and national security challenges to the United States, and my administration is pursuing a comprehensive strategy to confront them,” Obama said in his press conference. “As we have seen in recent months, these threats can emanate from a range of sources and target our critical infrastructure, our companies and our citizens.” The U.S. government is now authorized to freeze the assets of any identified perpetrators. Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, wrote on the White House Blog, “Our focus will be on the most significant cyber threats we face — namely, on actors whose malicious activities could pose a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, economic health, or financial stability of the United States.” Daniel listed cyber threats that will be targeted by the government: compromising critical services in American infrastructure; disrupting computer or network availability; misappropriating funds, economic resources, trade secrets or personal information for gain; knowingly receiving said misappropriations, or attempting or assisting in any of these attacks. Daniel believes it is also important to note who the U.S. government is not targeting. “These sanctions will in no way target the victims of cyber attacks, like people whose computers are unwittingly hijacked by botnets or hackers. Nor is this Order designed to prevent or interfere with the cybersecurity research community when they are working with companies to identify vulnerabilities so they can improve their cybersecurity,” Daniel said. Looking forward, we can expect further bolstering of U.S. cyber defenses. From diplomacy engagements to trade policy to law enforcement mechanisms, the government will be taking a more severe stance against cyber and technology threats. Congress legislation is currently under works to enhance and modernize the American cybersecurity approach. Thus, while we have been introduced to a new, modern-day horror story, we are also introduced to a new, modern-day hero. As Obama announced upon signing this new executive order: “Starting today, we’re giving notice to those who pose significant threats to our security or economy by damaging our critical infrastructure, disrupting or hijacking our computer networks or stealing the trade secrets of American companies or the personal information of American citizens for profit.”
Over two-thirds of the adults in America are considered overweight or obese, and nearly two-thirds of those have reported trying to lose that weight. This desire for weight loss fuels a $2.5 billion per year industry, but new research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine suggests that many commercial programs may not even be very effective.
