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While general wisdom says that you look at the eyes first in order to recognize a face, UC San Diego computer researchers now report that you look at the nose first. The nose may be the where the information about the face is balanced in all directions, or the optimal viewing position for face recognition, the scientists from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering propose in a paper recently reported in the journal Psychological Science........

Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of. However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something. What we do know is that changes in the contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it is much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn something completely new? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have been able to show that new cell contacts established during a learning process stay put, even when they are no longer required. The reactivation of this temporarily inactivated "stock of contacts" enables a faster learning of things forgotten. (Nature, November 12, 2008)........

Whether someone will become the next Richard Branson, Steve Jobs or Henry Ford may be down to whether they make risky decisions, scientists at the University of Cambridge have concluded. The article, published in the journal Nature, asserts that entrepreneurs are riskier decision-makers than their managerial counterparts.

GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) and XenoPort, Inc. (Nasdaq: XNPT) announced that the New Drug Application (NDA) for SolziraT (gabapentin enacarbil) Extended Release Tablets for the treatment of moderate-to-severe primary Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) has been withdrawn. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has requested that the data in a single study be reformatted.

UroToday.com - Despite an absence of regulatory approval, botulinum toxin A (BoNTA) has been used in a large number of neurogenic patients since its first appearance for the treatment of neurogenic detrusor overactivity (NDO) in patients with spinal cord lesions. Giulio Del Popolo from Florence, Italy, in a thoughtful editorial this year, crystallizes the current state of the art of BoNTA and notes the better understanding about its efficacy and how it works, at least in the short-term.

Neuroscientist Dr. Mariano Belluscio of Rutgers University is one of 10 2008 Pew Latin American Fellows in Biomedical Sciences awarded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Launched in 1991, the Pew Latin American Fellows Program in Biomedical Sciences helps develop highly trained Latin American scientists who show potential for stimulating and contributing to the growth of quality biomedical science as well as fostering collaboration between scientists in Latin America and the United States.