NYT on pharmacological advances in addiction treatment
An Anti-Addiction Pill? – New York Times Lots of interesting stuff here on new treatments for addiction, including: A methadone (heroin-substitute) replacement called buprenorphine with less dependency...
View ArticleTime for neuroscientists to speak up?
Recently, I was pointed to this article in the WSJ (“A Pentagon Agency Is Looking at Brains — And Raising Eyebrows“) by Sharon Begley. It touches on some noninvasive recording techniques for assessing...
View ArticleIf dopamine fails, try glutamate
Happy Labor Day (US)! Topping the NYT most popular articles list right now is an interesting article about a new schizophrenia treatment that targets certain glutamate receptors unlike previous...
View ArticleCB1 antagonist seems to contribute to depression
I didn’t notice this before, but in a study of about 4000 subjects, people who took Rimonabant (marketed as Acomplia), a selective antagonist of the cannabinoid type 1 receptor (CB1), apparently had a...
View ArticleCount of orphan G protein-coupled receptors
The relatively recently discovered cannabinoid receptors has me wondering how many other neuroreceptors may be left to discover. One way to estimate the number of these is to screen the genome and look...
View ArticleThe truth about TTX!
If the Fish Liver Can’t Kill, Is It Really a Delicacy? [NYT, login] Amazing. It looks like TTX (tetrodotoxin, a potent voltage-gated sodium channel blocker well-known to electrophysiologists) is not...
View ArticlePBS: Not so neuroscience-savvy
Salon has an interesting piece condemning a recent PBS show purportedly on Alzheimer’s treatment but really more of a sketchy informercial. The program concerns a neurologist with tenuous ties to UC...
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Putative (unpleasant) psychedelic effects of anti-smoking drug Varenicline
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varenicline “Varenicline is a partial agonist of the ?4?2 subtype of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor.” — this is apparently the subtype that nicotine acts on in the...
View ArticleBroad PsychHTS brings chemical biology to neuroscience
There’s a nice editorial in Nature Neuroscience about the Broad Institute’s PsychHTS initiative. The initiative invites scientists from outside the Broad to suggest new high-throughput screens that the...
View ArticleFrontiers in Neuroscience Journal
The journal, Frontiers in Neuroscience, edited by Idan Segev, has made it Volume 3, issue 1. Launching last year at the Society for Neuroscience conference, its probably the newest...
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