Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution:
In February 1837--even before he sailed on the Beagle--Charles Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline, discussing the linguist Sir John Herschel's idea that modern languages were descended from a common ancestor. If this were really the case, it cast doubt on the Biblical chronology of the world: "[E]veryone has yet thought that the six thousand odd years has been the right period but Sir J. thinks that a far greater number must have passed since the Chinese [and] the Caucasian languages separated from one stock".
The Effects of International Monetary Fund Loans on Health Outcomes:
What kind of impact might IMF loans, and their conditionalities, have upon health outcomes? A new study in this issue of PLoS Medicine attempts to address this question by examining IMF programs and tuberculosis (TB) outcomes in post-communist countries [1].
Critics of the IMF charge that IMF conditionalities have helped undermine the health of some of the world's most vulnerable populations. They argue that health outcomes suffer from reduced government spending on health care and on other inputs to health, such as food, as well as from the capping of public sector wages. IMF policies are also cited as having led to the diversion of foreign aid intended for health to the repayment of domestic debt. Such an outcome could serve as a strong disincentive for external funders to increase future health financing.
WikiPathways: Pathway Editing for the People:
The exponential growth of diverse types of biological data presents the research community with an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. The challenge is to stay afloat in the flood of biological data, keeping it as accessible, up-to-date, and integrated as possible. The opportunity is to cultivate new models of data curation and exchange that take advantage of direct participation by a greater portion of the community.
This combination of challenge and opportunity is especially relevant to the task of collecting biological pathway information. Pathways are critical to understanding the functions of individual genes and proteins in terms of systems and processes that contribute to normal physiology and to disease. Each biological pathway must be hewn from a mass of biological information distributed across multiple publications and databases.
Visuomotor Transformation in the Fly Gaze Stabilization System:
Many behavioral tasks rely on sensory information. This information, however, needs to be transformed into a format that is compatible with the requirements of motor systems. In this study we characterize the neural basis of such a sensorimotor transformation in a model system. Flies, like humans, stabilize their gaze to keep their eyes level, even when the body is rotating. An identified population of fly brain neurons called lobula plate tangential cells (LPTCs) contributes to this task. These cells analyze the wide-field retinal image shifts generated when the fly is moving relative to its environment. We have characterized the visual receptive fields of motor neurons that use the information encoded by LPTCs to control gaze-stabilizing head movements. Our results suggest that the motor neurons use their LPTC inputs in a comparatively simple and direct way: they combine inputs from both sides of the brain to increase the motor neurons' selectivity for rotations. Such a mechanism enables a specific, fast, and surprisingly simple sensorimotor transformation in which visual information contributes to gaze stabilization.
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