Ben Kuebrich

Author Archive for ‘Ben Kuebrich’

The Coming Alzheimer’s Epidemic, the Cholinergic Hypothesis, and Nerve Growth Factor Gene Therapy

07Oct14

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the top cause of dementia, and the top risk factor for AD is age–with almost half of people above the age of 85 suffering from the disease. With the aging baby boomer generation and medical advances squaring off the life expectancy curve, the United States is projected to have over 9 million […]

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From Tasting Urine to Metabolome-Wide Association Studies–Advances towards personalized nutrition and biomarkers for disease

12Oct12

Metabolomics has come a long way since the days of tasting urine. Now techniques like high-throughput mass spectrometry can provide us detailed information about the small molecules we find in the body–which can be influenced by diet, environmental exposure (to toxins, medicine, etc), or even the gut microbiome. Metabolomics will also capture the genetic or […]

Filed under: Disease, Metabolomics, Nutrition, Psychiatric | 3 Comments

Month in Review: July – Unconscious passwords, “gay genes,” high-less pot, and the Higgs Boson

01Aug12

Here are the articles I thought were tweet-worthy in July 2012. If you find the topics interesting, follow me on twitter. I really appreciate your support. July was an interesting month, including: unconscious passwords stored in procedural memory, neuroethics of the “gay gene,” Virtually THC-free (but CBD-rich) marijuana, oh and lets not forget the Higgs Boson (puts […]

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Single Base Sequencing of 5-hydroxy-methyl CpGs is Now Possible

13Jul12

5-hydroxy-methyl CpGs (5-hmCs) were first discovered in 2009 and shown to be enriched in the brain, but remain a mysterious epigenetic mark, despite intriguing functional findings such as: environmental enrichment’s reduction of it, MeCP2’s preference for 5mc over 5hmc, and it’s possible role as an intermediate in demethylation. This new technique will aid their characterization […]

Filed under: Epigenetics, Genetics, Human, Molecular, Mouse | 1 Comment

Why Conspiracy thinks he’s possessed by two intergalactic space demons – an Interview with Jonathan Balazs director of Mars Project

11Jul12

You may have seen my tweet about the upcoming documentary Mars Project, which tackles complex issues such as mental illness, drug use, psychiatry, race, and stigma. When director Jonathan Balazs contacted me about his film, I got really excited about it. If you liked the teaser but want to learn more about the project, check out Balazs’s Indie-Go-Go page […]

Filed under: Antipsychotics, Antipsychotics, Drugs, Film, Genetics, Human, Psychiatric, Schizophrenia | Leave a Comment

Top 10 most prescribed psychiatric drugs, top 10 overall, and the 10 we spend the most money on

06Jul12

What prescription drugs do we take and why are we taking them? Get a glass of water, choke down your horse pills, and take a look at the 10 most prescribed psychiatric drugs, 10 most prescribed drugs overall, and the 10 most profitable drugs, followed by a bit of analysis (though maybe what you need is psychoanalysis). […]

Filed under: Antipsychotics, Anxiety, Benzodiazepine, Depression, Dopamine, Pharmacology, Psychiatric, Public Health, Schizophrenia, Serotonin, SNRI, SSRI | 5 Comments
Tags: Drugs, Medicine, Pharmaceuticals, Pharmacology, Pharmacy, Prescription Drugs

Card sorting, pot smoking, pleasure and one gene: COMT

29Jun12

COMT, Catechol-O-methyl transferase, is an enzyme that degrades catecholamines–such as dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine (or adrenaline and noradrenaline as they are called in the UK). It was first discovered in the ’50s by Nobel laureate and pirate Julius Axelrod. More recently, scientists discovered an evolutionarily recent nonsynonomous single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the protein-coding portion of […]

Filed under: Behavior, Cannabis, Dorsolateral PFC, Drugs, Genetics, Human, Schizophrenia, SNPs | 9 Comments
Tags: Biology, cogsci, Genetics, neuro, Neuroscience, psychology, Science

Beyond Blogs – Keep up with neuroscience through podcasts

23Jun12

Get those multimodal neurons firing! This is a followup to my post on the most popular neuroscience blogs. I realized that I left out some of my own favorite sources for neuroscience news and information–podcasts! Later on, I’ll make posts about online lectures and courses. Podcasts: Podcasts have gotten me through a lot of boring lab […]

Filed under: Blogs, Podcasts, Review, Talks | 3 Comments

Smartest Mouse in the World? – Amazing mouse agility tests show how intelligent rodents are.

13Jun12

Despite having cared for laboratory mice for years, I’m wowed by the complexity of this task! The trainer’s site: http://mouse-agility.com/ describes the animals living conditions and training method. The trainer keeps the mice housed in groups of 3-4 females, in 3-dimensional cages such as a remodeled cupboard, or: a pyramid of different-sized tables, the several floors […]

Filed under: Behavior, Mouse | 4 Comments
Tags: mice, mouse, Mouse Behavior, obedience, training, tricks

Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are – Sebastian Seung’s new book

08Jun12

The connectome is a map of all neural connections in a brain, which I believe only currently exists for the flatworm C. Elegans. Seung’s group and collaborators are working using serial electron microscopy, and partially automated EM analysis and the crowdsourcing site eyewire to reconstruct parts of the mouse retina, with the hope of steadily improving technologies […]