In a new issue of Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, researchers from the National Institutes of Health report that another medication, scopolamine, also appears to produce replicable rapid improvement in mood. Scopolamine temporarily blocks the muscarinic cholinergic receptor, thought to be overactive in people suffering from depression.

Drs. Wayne Drevets and Maura Furey recruited outpatients with major depressive disorder who were randomly assigned to receive placebo and then scopolamine treatment, or vice versa, in a double-blinded design so that neither the researchers nor the patients knew which treatment they were receiving.

“Scopolamine was found to reduce symptoms of depression within three days of the first administration. In fact, participants reported that they experienced relief from their symptoms by the morning after the first administration of drug,” explained Dr. Furey. “Moreover, one-half of participants experienced full symptom remission by the end of the treatment period. Finally, participants remained well during a subsequent placebo period, indicating that the antidepressant effects persist for at least two weeks in the absence of further treatment.”

The efficacy of scopolamine is very interesting because the potent blockade of muscarinic receptors was a property of tricyclic antidepressant medications, the oldest type of antidepressants. With these medications, the muscarinic receptor blockade was mostly viewed as the cause of unwanted side effects, such as constipation, sedation, and memory impairments. Newer antidepressants, such as serotonin reuptake inhibitors or serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, were explicitly designed to avoid blocking muscarinic receptors. Yet, the current data raise the possibility that this strategy may have increased safety and tolerability of these medications at the expense of providing effective and timely relief for depression symptoms.

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented that these findings “have the potential to raise expectations for new antidepressant treatments. Three-to-six weeks is a long time to wait for depression symptoms to be alleviated. Depressed people describe their emotional state using terms like ‘agony’ and others compare their condition to ‘living in hell’. Further, depression is a life-threatening condition for some, preventing them from performing basic self-care functions or causing them to exhibit self-destructive behavior.”

Although these findings open the door to a conceptually different approach to the treatment of depression, it remains to be seen whether rapid acting antidepressant effects will be viable clinically. One could imagine that they might mitigate hospitalization in some patients and enhance the overall effectiveness of the treatment of depression. However, this possibility remains to be demonstrated empirically in studies that show that a rapid-acting antidepressant treatment can be smoothly transitioned to definitive long-term treatment for depression.

But only Nissan, so far, has been willing to go all-in on electric cars. The company plans to offer the first mass-produced purely electric vehicle built by a major automaker (unless you count the six-figure boutique sports car made by Tesla) next year. The Nissan Leaf is a five-seat, small to midsize hatchback without any gasoline engine at all, just a battery pack and an electric motor.

Trying to sell an electric car to V8-loving America is a gamble. But the automotive press has finally had the chance to drive a prototype, and early reports say that Nissan may have built something remarkable.

The Los Angeles Times reports, “In the Leaf — an all-electric, five-passenger car that will start hitting American streets in late 2010 — you step on the accelerator and the car spools out velocity in one continuous, syrupy stream. It’s nothing short of elegant.” Under the control of the Times’ Dan Neil, a Leaf loaded down with the weight of four adults “shot across [a] stadium parking lot like it had been pinged with a BB gun.” The Times estimates that the Lead offers zero-to-40 mph acceleration “in the mid-5-second range, which would suit a decently sporty little car.”

And it’s butter-smooth acceleration. The Times explains, “Every year, automotive engineers find new ways to smooth more rough edges off the conventional automobile.” Computer-controlled automatic transmissions boasting as many as eight speeds, Continuously Variable Transmissions with no gears at all, and “suites of computer programming that modulate engine torque at the precise moments of gear change” have made the experience of driving most modern cars very smooth. But they can’t match the simple physics of an electric engine. The Leaf offers nearly 100 percent of its available torque at all times, creating a driving experience the Times calls “Sweet, glycerin smooth, techy, frisky and even a little bit beautiful.”

Autoblog had a little time behind the wheel as well. They report, “While the Leaf powertrain doesn’t accelerate like a Tesla Roadster, it’s got more than enough get-up-and-go for a standard family car, even with four adults on board. Considering the Leaf will cost something like a third or a fourth as much as a standard Roadster, we think the car will cause a fair share of EV grins once it’s unleashed into the wild.” They add, “After getting up to speed, we found the regenerative brakes felt great. While Nissan is still fine-tuning the system for production, they grip solidly whether you’re going fast or slow, gently applying pressure or hitting them hard.”

Nissan hasn’t announced final pricing on the Leaf, but analysts believe the car may cost under $25,000 when it arrives late next year.

It may also be the first of several electric vehicles from Nissan. The Wall Street Journal reports that Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn recently “said in an interview the companies will launch four electric vehicles globally, with three of them coming to the U.S., including the Nissan Leaf compact, a light commercial vehicle suitable for use by companies such as FedEx, and eventually an electric car to be marketed under the Infiniti luxury brand.”

by John A. Speyrer

Scientific studies have shown that the habenula is hyperactive in depression, the idea was to downregulate this structure by deep brain stimulation. The surgical procedure is based on a hypothesis of how the habenula is involved in depression that was first formulated by Dr. Alexander Sartorius, psychiatrist at the Central Institute for Mental Health (CIMH; Director: Professor Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg; former Director CIMH Professor Fritz Henn, Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York). The stereotactic procedure at the Neurosurgery Department of Heidelberg University Hospital (Medical Director: Professor Andreas Unterberg) was performed by Dr. Karl Kiening, head of stereotactic neurosurgery. The concept of habenula stimulation and the case study were published in the leading scientific journal Biological Psychiatry.

A new treatment option for therapy-resistent depression

Depression is a common psychiatric illness; some one third of patients do not respond to medication or psychotherapy. Electroconvulsive therapy, used for such severe or treatment resistant cases, is also not always effective. This was also the case for the Heidelberg/Mannheim patient, who never reached sustained remission after electroconvulsive therapy.

In deep brain stimulation, electrodes are inserted into the brain and are connected with wires under the skin to an electronic impulse generator implanted in the chest. The electrodes emit current that continuously stimulates specific areas of the brain. This therapy, also described as “brain pacemaker,” is already used successfully for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease or other movement disorders.

Depressive patients have already been treated with electrostimulation with some success. However, two other areas of the brain were stimulated, located in the forebrain or midbrain regions. The habenula (Latin for the diminutive of reins) is located further downstream next to the brain stem. “We decided to stimulate the habenula because it is involved is the control of three major neurotransmitter systems, which are known to be disturbed in depression,’” explained psychiatrist Dr. Alexander Sartorius from the Central Institute of Mental Health.

The neurosurgical implantation of two electrodes demands utmost precision in planning and performance. The target area is about half as large as the others that are typically targeted for movement disorders, and in addition, is located in the middle of the brain, i.e. in the wall of what is known as the ‘third ventricle’. Implanting the electrodes in the two habenulae therefore requires the utmost precision that can currently be achieved with stereotactic instruments. “The neurosurgery department at Heidelberg University Hospital is optimally equipped for demanding procedures such as this with among other things, the new intraoperative highfield MRI,” says Dr. Kiening.

Multicenter study on habenula stimulation in preparation

The success of the procedure was confirmed when the electrode was accidentally switched off: the patient had a bicycle accident which required surgery for which an ECG had to be made as preparation. The brain pacemaker was switched off and was not reactivated for a few days, and the depression promptly returned. A few weeks after reactivation, the patient completely recovered again.

The neurosurgeons in Heidelberg and the psychiatrists in Mannheim now want to build on this positive experience and are planning a clinical study in which the habenula stimulation is to be implemented for severely depressive patients at five psychiatric-neurosurgery centers in Germany. “We aim to show that habenula stimulation has a better success rate than other target areas attempted for depression and that it is also safe to use,” says Dr. Sartorius, Coordinating Investigator of the proposed study.

Depression statistics:

-  Approximately 18.8 million American adults, or about 9.5 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year, have a depressive disorder.

-  Nearly twice as many women (12.0 percent) as men (6.6 percent) are affected by a depressive disorder each year. These figures translate to 12.4 million women and 6.4 million men in the U.S.

-  Women between the ages of 25-44 are most often affected by depression with a major cause of depression in women being the inability to express or handle Anger.

-  Depression affects all people regardless of age, geographic location, demographic or social position.

-  Depressive disorders are appearing earlier in life with the average age of onset 50 years ago being 29 whereas recent statistics indicate it at just 14.5yrs in today’s society.

-  Depressive disorders often co-occur with anxiety disorders and substance abuse.

-  A recent study sponsored by the World Health Organization and the World Bank found unipolar major depression to be the leading cause of disability in the United States.

House-flipper Chris Prelitz greenovates a 1600 sq. ft. house in Laguna Woods California.

Dr. Christopher M. Bache has been a professor of Religious Studies at Youngstown State University for almost 30 years as well as an intermittent adjunct faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies. From 2000-2002 he was Director of Transformative Learning at the Institute of Noetic Sciences located outside of San Francisco.
He is the author of “Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind”, “Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life”, and “The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness”.

Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

That was Daniel’s question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.
But does this mean that plastic bags are now off the hook and that plastic packaging has been redeemed? Can we continue to use as much of it as we want guilt-free? Plastic is still made from oil, a non-renewable resource. It’s manufacture uses energy and creates pollution in the form of pre-production plastic pellets, aka nurdles, that can escape and cause harm to the marine environment. And unlike paper bags which biodegrade easily and naturally when exposed to the elements, plastic bags will need to be processed in a controlled way at a temperature of 37°C (99°F) because the microbes that break them down don’t exist in abundance in the natural world, certainly not in the cold ocean.

Daniel’s discovery could be good news for the environment, but only if it’s used as a way to break down the plastic waste that already exists and isn’t simply used as an excuse to create more.

And there are other things to think about…the possibility of continued mutation.  Here is a quote from Micheal Crichtons’  famous book “The Andromeda Strain”:

Hall nodded. “National guardsmen could be on the ground, and not be harmed. But the pilot had his aircraft destroyed because the plastic was dissolved before his eyes.”

Is it wise to intervene with mother nature in this way?  What are your thoughts?

Sustainability consultant Chris Prelitz explains the benefits of investing in energy-efficient lighting.

At 61 years old Fisk remains as passionate about architecture and the environment as he was as a student at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1960s. There he got master’s degrees in architecture and landscape architecture under the tutelage of the legendary Ian McHarg. After completing his studies he taught “ecological design” in the School of Architecture at University of Texas at Austin in the early 1970s and became known for a field lab where he and his students built windmills, raised organic vegetables, and designed buildings using local materials. In 1975 Fisk turned his lab into a nonprofit organization called the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems and left the university to “cause commotion” full time.

For the past 30 years the center has developed a four-pronged approach, emphasizing design, master planning, policy and education, and tools (which include educational games and the creation and testing of building materials). Fisk and his wife, Gail Vittori, who joined the team in the late 1970s and is now codirector, have set up solar hot water heater production for poor towns in South Texas, planned sustainable villages in Nicaragua and China, and created several dozen building materials. In the early 1990s the pair also helped to create Austin’s city-sponsored green building ratings program–the first of its kind in the world and a model for the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system. (Vittori currently sits on that organization’s board of directors.) “Our idea was to extend the Austin program from just considering energy conservation and performance to looking at the total flows of inputs and outputs to a building,” she says.

These days Fisk has added a new building system to the center’s repertoire. The GroHome–part of a broader program Fisk calls “Community-Supported Architecture”–was conceived of as a way to offer residents the flexibility to expand their living space with minimal impact to the site, the local landfill, and residents’ daily lives. The construction is based on a series of joints that can be used to erect a variety of structures, from simple lampposts to large meeting halls. Another component of the system is the FatWall, a thick wall that can be cantilevered off the sides of a GroHome or positioned inside the frame for closet space, a home office, or even a bathroom.

Like many Fisk projects, the GroHome embodies more than just a single principle. It’s one element of an integrated system that includes sustainable thinking on a broad and integrated level. “If you look at the GroHome from a planning perspective, you can take the joint all the way up to the region so that you have a sensible way of understanding your footprint,” Fisk says. Indeed the standards within the joints–which Fisk dubs GroJoints–can accept pipe, conduit, dimensional lumber, bamboo, and many other structural members so that builders can adapt and use whatever is locally available. Any given GroHome then becomes a source of information about the region. “As part of a master plan, a building system becomes a way of communicating,” Fisk says. “Manufacturers can understand how a system works so they can cooperate with each other. It’s also an effective way to inventory resources.”

Fisk has always maintained that for a building or a city to be sustainable it must be created from the resources available in its region as well as contribute to the local economy. His contract work for the Environmental Protection Agency in the mid 1990s crystallized this idea (see “The Infinite Grid,” by Andrea Moed, Metropolis, December 1996). At the time Fisk was asked to create a grid map of the country on which he pinpointed natural resource availability, businesses that were distributing those resources, and people who were knowledgeable on how to use the materials; he called these groups area, point, and network resources. By integrating this information, Fisk says, it’s possible to track the economic resources that go into harvesting and transporting a material. It also allows one to see where materials are used and how they’re recycled (or not) after their initial use–a process now widely known as life-cycle analysis.

Currently Fisk and Vittori are in discussions with grassroots organizations in Louisiana and Mississippi about building GroHome communities for displaced Hurricane Katrina survivors. In a sense this represents the culmination of 30 years of work. The GroHome is a technical fix for a housing need, but the larger initiative is a planning opportunity that can involve residents in the rebuilding, provide local jobs, and teach neighborhood businesses about the benefits of green building. “Bucky Fuller said that we’re all born geniuses, and we’re gradually de-geniused by our parents and teachers,” says Bob Berkebile, principal of BNIM Architects in Kansas City. “Pliny wasn’t de-geniused–he never lost the curiosity for lifelong learning.”

An incisive look at the global economic crisis, our flawed response, and the implications for the world’s future prosperity.

Few are more qualified to comment during this turbulent time than Joseph E. Stiglitz. Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Stiglitz is “an insanely great economist, in ways you can’t really appreciate unless you’re deep into the field” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). In Freefall, Stiglitz traces the origins of the Great Recession, eschewing easy answers and demolishing the contention that America needs more billion-dollar bailouts and free passes to those “too big to fail,” while also outlining the alternatives and revealing that even now there are choices ahead that can make a difference. The system is broken, and we can only fix it by examining the underlying theories that have led us into this new “bubble capitalism.”

Ranging across a host of topics that bear on the crisis, Stiglitz argues convincingly for a restoration of the balance between government and markets. America as a nation faces huge challenges—in health care, energy, the environment, education, and manufacturing—and Stiglitz penetratingly addresses each in light of the newly emerging global economic order. An ongoing war of ideas over the most effective type of capitalist system, as well as a rebalancing of global economic power, is shaping that order. The battle may finally give the lie to theories of a “rational” market or to the view that America’s global economic dominance is inevitable and unassailable.

For anyone watching with indignation while a reckless Wall Street destroyed homes, educations, and jobs; while the government took half-steps hoping for a “just-enough” recovery; and while bankers fell all over themselves claiming not to have seen what was coming, then sought government bailouts while resisting regulation that would make future crises less likely, Freefall offers a clear accounting of why so many Americans feel disillusioned today and how we can realize a prosperous economy and a moral society for the future.