Word: spinal
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...plane abruptly entered a smooth 650-ft. dive (which the crew sensed was not being caused by turbulence) that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane's luggage bins and ceiling. More than 100 of the 300 people on board were hurt, with broken bones, neck and spinal injuries, and severe lacerations splattering blood throughout the cabin. (Read a Q&A on how to survive a plane crash...
...embryos (researchers currently use embryos that have been discarded during fertility treatments). President Obama recently lifted the long-standing ban on federal funding of human-embryonic-stem-cell research, but still, these stem cells are unlikely to prove useful as human treatments - for maladies like diabetes, Parkinson's or spinal-cord injuries - since they would not be tissue-matched to the individual patients who need them. The new method could allow scientists to create stem cells using a patient's own skin cells, eliminating the possibility of rejection...
...would prevent scientists from studying the one thing that would bring this treatment from the lab bench to the patient bedside: patient-specific stem cells. Because stem cells from donated embryos would not be genetically matched to the patients who need them, in practice, treating a patient with a spinal cord injury or diabetes who could benefit from the cells would create the serious possibility of immune rejection...
...Minnesota study, researchers sedated macaque monkeys and placed recording electrodes in their spinal nerves. They injected histamine into the monkeys' lower legs to produce an itch, and the STT neurons fired up. The researchers then scratched the paralyzed, itchy legs with a metal device that mimics the sensation of monkey fingers and found that the firing rate in the neurons dropped rapidly. That sudden drop-off in firing is the neurological equivalent of the relief felt after a good scratch, indicating that scratching seemed to calm the nerves and therefore relieve the itch. The findings supported the researchers' initial hunch...
...Giesler theorizes that the itch sensation creates an excited state in the STT neurons that scratching inhibits - as if our fingernails were sending a message to spinal-cord neurons to cool off. Scientists are still a long way from understanding the itch-scratch phenomenon, and while Giesler's study gives them a good place to start, neuroscientists caution that in humans, the mysteries of itching and scratching may go beyond the physiological: emotional and psychological factors are also often at play, especially in cases of unexplained, unremitting itching or itching of phantom limbs...