THOUGHT POWER

" Thoughts are Energies

and thoughts can be Changed,

thoughts change our Beliefs

and belief changes the patterns of Experiences.
So think positive for a Positive Life .

Beware of your thoughts at all times to bring CHANGE"

SOCIAL INTERACTION CAN ALTER GENE EXPRESSION IN BRAIN…

"LET US INTERACT AND REACT"

Our DNA determines a lot about who we are and how we play with others, but recent studies of social animals (birds and bees, among others) show that the interaction between genes and behavior is more of a two-way street than most of us realize.

This is not a new idea to neuroscience, but one that is gaining strength, said University of Illinois entomology and neuroscience professor Gene Robinson, lead author of a review on the subject this week in the journal Science. Stanford University biology professor Russell Fernald and Illinois cell and developmental biology and neuroscience professor David Clayton are co-authors.
Genes in the brain are malleable, turning on or off in response to internal and external cues. While genetic variation influences brain function and social behavior, the authors write, social information also alters gene expression in the brain to influence behavior.

Thanks to the newly sequenced genomes of several social animals, including honey bees and zebra finches, and new technologies such as microarrays (which allow researchers to glimpse the activity of thousands of genes at a time) neuroscientists are gradually coming to understand that “there is a dynamic relationship between genes and behavior,” Robinson said. “Behavior is not etched in the DNA.”

A critical insight came in 1992, in a study of songbirds led by David Clayton. He and his colleagues found that expression of a specific gene increases in the forebrain of a zebra finch or canary just after it hears a new song from a male of the same species. This gene, egr1, codes for a protein that itself regulates the expression of other genes.

The finding was not unprecedented; previous studies had shown that genes switch on and off when an animal is trained to perform a task in the laboratory, Robinson said.

Clayton discovered in 1992 that gene expression changes in the brain of a zebra finch or canary when it hears a new song from a male of the same species.

But when Clayton’s team found this change in gene expression in response to a social signal – a song from a potential competitor, something the bird would likely hear in nature – it drew attention to how powerfully social interactions can alter gene expression in the brain.

“What’s more significant to a bird than hearing another bird singing?” Clayton said. “This is going on in the equivalent of our auditory cortex and association cortex, so this is pretty high-level stuff going on in the brain. And this was happening in more or less real time by very naturalistic stimuli.”

Reading Clayton’s 1992 paper “was a eureka moment for me,” Robinson said.
“This just brought it out into the social world, saying that this occurred in animals that have to make a living in the real world and pay attention to a lot of nuanced stimuli,” he said. “So I think that was really a very important step in our understanding.”

In his own work, Robinson has used microarrays to study this phenomenon on a larger scale and has found that literally thousands of genes turn on or off in the honey bee brain in response to social stimuli. One such gene, called for (for foraging), was originally discovered in fruit flies by Marla Sokolowski at the University of Toronto. Flies that carry different versions of for show different types of foraging behavior. Each version gives its bearer a behavioral advantage in certain environmental conditions.

Robinson knew that honey bee workers start out working in the hive as nurses and only later graduate to the role of foragers. Perhaps, he reasoned, even though the differences in for are etched in the DNA in flies, this same gene in the bee might be more dynamic and help influence the transition from hive work to foraging.

In a study published in 2002, Robinson and his colleagues reported that expression of for did in fact increase in the brains of honey bees as they developed into foragers, and manipulating its expression caused bees to forage precociously.

The researchers also found that social factors, in the form of chemical signals called pheromones, induced this “upregulation” of for. Foragers produce a pheromone that signals to the younger bees that there are enough foragers. If the foragers are removed from the hive, some young bees develop into foragers much earlier in life than usual.

Sokolowski’s work indicated that for had changed over evolutionary time, producing two varieties of fruit flies that differed in their behavior. Robinson had found that social information altered expression of the same gene over a much shorter timescale – within the lifespan of a honey bee – also changing its behavior.

“An appreciation of the idea that differences in gene expression can occur over vastly different time scales helps understand some of the complex relationships between genes, brain and behavior,” Robinson said.

The picture that is emerging from these and other studies suggests that social signals can have a profound effect on when and how genes function.

An organism’s genes, its environment, the social information it receives, “all these things interact,” said Clayton. “Experience is constantly coming back in to the level of the DNA and twiddling the dials and the *****.”

'DON'T EVER BE ALOOF..INSTEAD MINGLE WITH OTHERS AND INCLUDE MORE AND MORE FRIENDS...HAVE YOUR FRIENDS AMONG VARIOUS AGE GROUPS'

LIFE..

Life is a paradox

"Life is a paradox whatever you want - you dont get,

Whatever you get - you don’t enjoy,

Whatever you enjoy - is not permanent

and Whatever is permanent - is boring..!! "

DIET

Boost your brainpower by feeding your brain ‘brain foods’. Here are 4 tips for an intelligent diet: -

1. Balance your glucose - it provides fuel for your brain. Try to eat carbohydrate foods in the evening as it promotes relaxation and sleep.
2. Eat essential fats - ensure your diet is rich in omega-3 fats found in oily fish.
3. Include plenty of protein rich foods in your diet. Proteins are essential to make neurotransmitters which are vital for the thinking process. Try to eat a protein based lunch to optimise your mental performance and alertness throughout the day.
4. Eat foods rich in vitamins and minerals to ‘fine tune’ your mind.
5. Drink 1.5 to 2 Litres (Minimum)of water a day to keep your brain well hydrated.
6. Oxygenate your brain by exercising and eating little and often. Eat your main meal before 7pm.

BRAILLE SYSTEMS

Battle of the dots?

This is a highly edited picture, representing something. What?

Answer: This is the New York Point, system of writing for the blind invented by William Bell Wait.

Quoting wikipedia,
"Wait advocated the New York System as more logical than either the American Braille or the British Braille systems, and these systems competed in what was known as the War of the Dots."

EDISON

Thomas Alva Edison

The modern world is an electrified world. The light bulb, in particular, profoundly changed human existence by illuminating the night and making it hospitable to a wide range of human activity. The electric light, one of the everyday conveniences that most affects our lives, was invented in 1879 by Thomas Alva Edison. He put together what he knew about electricity with what he knew about gas lights and invented a whole of electrical system.

Inventor: Thomas Alva Edison
Criteria: First practical. Modern prototype. Entrepreneur.

Birth: February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio

Death: October 18, 1931 in West Orange, New Jersey

Nationality: American
Invention: electric light bulb in 1879

Function: noun / electric light bulb / incandescent lampDefinition: An electric lamp in which a filament is heated to incandescence by an electric current. Today’s incandescent light bulbs use filaments made of tungsten rather than carbon of the 1880’s.Patent: 223,898 (US) issued January 27, 1880

Milestones:-

1868 Edison’s first invention was a Vote Recorder

1869 Printing Telegraph

1869 Stock Ticker

1872 Automatic Telegraph

1876 Electric Pen

1877 Carbon Telephone Transmitter

1877 Phonograph1879 Dynamo

1878 Thomas Edison founded the Edison Electric Light Company

1879 Incandescent Electric Lamp

1880 223,898 Thomas Edison 1/27 for Electric Lamp and Manufacturing Process

1881- Electric Motor

1881- 238,868 Thomas Edison 3/15 for Manufacture of Carbons for Incandescent Lamps

1881- 251,540 Thomas Edison 12/27 for Bamboo Carbons Filament for Incandescent Lamps

1883 he observed the flow of electrons from a heated filament—the so-called “Edison effect”

1886 Talking Doll

1889 Edison Electric Light Company consolidated and renamed Edison General Electric Company.

1890 Edison, Thomson-Houston, and Westinghouse, the “Big 3″ of the American lighting industry.

1892 Edison Electric Light Co. and Thomson-Houston Electric Co. created General Electric Co.

1897 Projecting Kinetoscope

1900 Storage BatterycapS: Edison, Thomas Alva Edison, Incandescent Electric Lamp, electric lamp, electric light bulb, light bulb, General Electric, most U.S. patents, electric industry, inventor, biography, profile, history, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts.

The Story:-

Thomas Alva Edison, whose development of a practical electric light bulb, electric generating system, sound-recording device, and motion picture projector had profound effects on the shaping of modern society. His greatest invention may not have been his products but the funding and impotence he placed on his company’s research and development efforts

Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847. He attended school for only three months, in Port Huron, Michigan. When he was 12 years old he began selling newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railway, devoting his spare time mainly to experimentation with printing presses and with electrical and mechanical apparatus. In 1862 he published a weekly, known as the Grand Trunk Herald, printing it in a freight car that also served as his laboratory. For saving the life of a station official’s child, he was rewarded by being taught telegraphy. While working as a telegraph operator, he made his first important invention, a telegraphic repeating instrument that enabled messages to be transmitted automatically over a second line without the presence of an operator.

Edison next secured employment in Boston and devoted all his spare time there to research. He invented a vote recorder that, although possessing many merits, was not sufficiently practical to warrant its adoption. He also devised and partly completed a stock-quotation printer. Later, while employed by the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company of New York City he greatly improved their apparatus and service. By the sale of telegraphic appliances, Edison earned $40,000, and with this money he established his own laboratory in 1876. Afterward he devised an automatic telegraph system that made possible a greater speed and range of transmission. Edison’s crowning achievement in telegraphy was his invention of machines that made possible simultaneous transmission of several messages on one line and thus greatly increased the usefulness of existing telegraph lines. Important in the development of the telephone, which had recently been invented by the American physicist and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, was Edison’s invention of the carbon telephone transmitter.

In 1877 Edison announced his invention of a phonograph by which sound could be recorded mechanically on a tinfoil cylinder. Two years later he exhibited publicly his incandescent electric light bulb, his most important invention and the one requiring the most careful research and experimentation to perfect. This new light was a remarkable success; Edison promptly occupied himself with the improvement of the bulbs and of the dynamos for generating the necessary electric current. In 1882 he developed and installed the world’s first large central electric-power station, located in New York City. His use of direct current, however, later lost out to the alternating-current system developed by the American inventors Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse.

In 1887 Edison moved his laboratory from Menlo Park, New Jersey, to West Orange, New Jersey, where he constructed a large laboratory for experimentation and research. (His home and laboratory were established as the Edison National Historic Site in 1955). In 1888 he invented the kinetoscope, the first machine to produce motion pictures by a rapid succession of individual views. Among his later noteworthy inventions was the Edison storage battery (an alkaline, nickel-iron storage battery), the result of many thousands of experiments. The battery was extremely rugged and had a high electrical capacity per unit of weight. He also developed a phonograph in which the sound was impressed on a disk instead of a cylinder. This phonograph had a diamond needle and other improved features. By synchronizing his phonograph and kinetoscope, he produced, in 1913, the first talking moving pictures. His other discoveries include the electric pen, the mimeograph, the microtasimeter (used for the detection of minute changes in temperature), and a wireless telegraphic method for communicating with moving trains.

At the outbreak of World War I, Edison designed, built, and operated plants for the manufacture of benzene, carbolic acid, and aniline derivatives. In 1915 he was appointed president of the U.S. Navy Consulting Board and in that capacity made many valuable discoveries. His later work consisted mainly of improving and perfecting previous inventions. Altogether, Edison patented more than 1000 inventions. He was a technologist rather than a scientist, adding little to original scientific knowledge. In 1883, however, he did observe the flow of electrons from a heated filament—the so-called Edison effect—whose profound implications for modern electronics were not understood until several years later. Edison died in West Orange on October 18, 1931.