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RI lawmakers to vote on gay marriage

FILE - In this Jan. 15, 2013 file photo, Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee testifies in support of same-sex marriage before the House Judiciary Committee, at the Statehouse, in Providence, R.I. Following months of review and debate, the Rhode Island state Senate is set to vote on gay marriage legislation Wednesday afternoon, April 24, 2013. The bill easily passed the House in January. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) ? State lawmakers in Rhode Island could decide whether the nation's smallest state becomes the 10th to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry.

Following months of review and debate, the state Senate is set to vote on gay marriage legislation Wednesday afternoon. The bill easily passed the House in January and has the support of independent Gov. Lincoln Chafee.

Gay marriage legislation has been introduced in Rhode Island's General Assembly for nearly two decades only to languish on the legislative agenda. Heavily Catholic Rhode Island is now the only state in New England that does not allow same-sex couples to marry. Gay marriage is law in nine states and the District of Columbia.

Wednesday's vote comes after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 7-4 Tuesday to forward the legislation to the Senate floor. Dozens of supporters cheered and cried following the vote. Ken Fish, a 70-year-old gay man from Warwick, said he watched the committee vote with a mixture of disbelief and elation.

"It's almost unreal to think we're here, after all these years," he said. "I wasn't sure we'd ever get here."

If the bill passes the Senate it must return to the House for a largely procedural vote on small changes made to the bill on the Senate side. House Speaker Gordon Fox, D-Providence, said a final vote could come as early as next week.

Support for the bill has grown since it passed the House in January. On Tuesday, the Senate's five Republicans announced they would all support the legislation, further improving the bill's chances.

"We've got one more step, but I expect it to pass with overwhelming support," said Sen. Dawson Hodgson, R-North Kingstown.

Opponents aren't giving up on efforts to turn back the legislation. Sen. Harold Metts, D-Providence, said he planned to fast and pray ahead of Wednesday's debate.

"Culture may change, but God has an immutable character," he said. "I'll be praying all night."

Chafee encouraged supporters to contact their senators ahead of the vote but signaled that he thinks the bill will pass, saying in a statement that "I believe that when the roll is called, marriage equality will become law in Rhode Island."

The Senate has long been seen as the true test for gay marriage in Rhode Island. Two years ago, gay marriage legislation languished after it became apparent it would be defeated in the Senate. Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed, D-Newport, opposes the bill but has vowed not to obstruct debate.

The Rhode Island legislation states that religious institutions may set their own rules for who is eligible to marry within their faith and specifies that no religious leader is obligated to officiate at any marriage ceremony. While ministers already cannot be forced to marry anyone, the exemption helped assuage concerns from some lawmakers that clergy could face lawsuits for abiding by their religious convictions.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-04-24-US-XGR-Gay-Marriage-RI/id-4700e057a91d42259a2866fb4278542e

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Stern to 'AGT' judges: 'I'm the star of this show!'

By Ashley Majeski, TODAY contributor

Jason Decrow / AP

?America?s Got Talent? fans can expect to see quite a few changes when the show returns next month. From its new location at Radio City Music Hall in New York, to the addition of judges Mel B and Heidi Klum, it promises to be ?bigger and better than any season" before -- at least that's what judge Howie Mandel said during a panel discussion at the NBC Summer Press Day on Monday.

But while changes are in store, returning judge Howard Stern wanted to make it clear to his new co-stars that one thing is going to stay the same.

?I?m the star of this show,? he said.

Stern was certainly the star of the panel discussion, playfully ribbing Klum for getting the lion?s share of the audience questions.

"(Host) Nick (Cannon) is married to Mariah Carey,? Stern told the audience. ?There are questions to be asked. I have about 50 of them! I'm only answering Heidi questions. Why don't you ask me what it's like to be a mom?"

After Klum explained how she managed to juggle the "AGT," in addition to her ?Project Runway? hosting duties and motherhood, Stern was ready with a few more zingers.

?You're gonna judge, but you're gonna be neglecting your children," he told her.? ?Something?s got to give. You're gonna bring the kids while we're doing the show? All, like, ten of them? That's gonna be fun.?

Klum (who, for the record, only has four kids) seemed unfazed by Stern?s jokes. The former model was eager to let the audience know what she would be bringing to the judging table.

"I feel like I've seen things all over the world,? she said. ?Being married to a musician for eight years, I've seen a lot of things, (and) I want to tell everyone how they're doing. I think it's part of my personality too."

In addition to the new four-judge format, "America's Got Talent" executive producer Sam Donnelly said that viewers will see other modifications this season.

"We're making some changes around the way we do storytelling,? she said. ?They're all subtle changes rather than actual big format ones. Generally it's a freshening up of how we tell stories, some backstage reality. We get to some of these guys (the judges) in more candid moments, which will be interesting. They don't know that yet."

One of the biggest changes will be how the judges' votes will work. With four judges on the panel rather than three, a contestant will now be required to get three ?yes? votes in order to move onto the next round.

?If there are two and two -- two people like the performance and two people don?t like it, that?s a no,? Mandel explained. ?You have to have three ?yes? votes to get through.?

?They?ve also given me complete veto power over the rest of the judges,? Stern teased. ?And I?m going to be topless. Everyone?s thrilled about that.?

While the new season of ?AGT? will be different than any before it, Stern sees no reason to alter the way he presents himself on the show.

?"I'm not bringing anything different,? he said. ?I'm an honest judge; you saw how good I was last season. I'm going to take these six- and seven-year-olds and make them cry!"

?America?s Got Talent? returns to NBC at 9 p.m. on June 4.

Are you looking forward to seeing the new judges in action? Share your thoughts on our Facebook page.

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Source: http://theclicker.today.com/_news/2013/04/23/17878753-howard-stern-tells-new-americas-got-talent-co-stars-im-the-star-of-this-show?lite

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Giza Secret Revealed: How 10,000 Pyramid Builders Got Fed

The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation, the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers' town near the pyramids.

The workers' town is located about 1,300 feet (400 meters) south of the Sphinx, and was used to house workers building the pyramid of pharaoh Menkaure, the third and last pyramid on the Giza plateau. The site is also known by its Arabic name, Heit el-Ghurab, and is sometimes called "the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders."

So far, researchers have discovered a nearby cemetery with bodies of pyramid builders; a corral with possible slaughter areas on the southern edge of workers' town; and piles of animal bones.

Based on animal bone findings, nutritional data, and other discoveries at this workers' town site, the archaeologists estimate that more than 4,000 pounds of meat ? from cattle, sheep and goats ? were slaughtered every day, on average, to feed the pyramid builders. [See Photos of the Unearthed Giza Pyramid Site]

This meat-rich diet, along with the availability of medical care (the skeletons of some workers show healed bones), would have been an additional lure for ancient Egyptians to work on the pyramids.

"People were taken care of, and they were well fed when they were down there working, so there would have been an attractiveness to that," said Richard Redding, chief research officer at Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), a group that has been excavating and studying the workers' town site for about 25 years.

"They probably got a much better diet than they got in their village," Redding told LiveScience.

Feeding the Giza work force

At the workers' town, which was likely occupied for 35 years, researchers have discovered a plethora of animal bones. Although the researchers are still unsure of the exact number of bones, Redding estimates he has identified about 25,000 sheep and goats, 8,000 cattle and 1,000 pig bones, he wrote in a paper published in the book "Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of the ICAZ Working Group 'Archaeozoology of southwest Asia and adjacent Areas'" (Peeters Publishing, 2013).

About 10,000 workers helped build the Menkaure pyramid, with a smaller work force present year-round to cut stones and complete preparation and survey work, the AERA team estimates. This smaller work force would have ramped up for a few months starting around July of each year. "What they would do is, for about four or five months a year, they would bring in a big work force to move blocks, and they would do nothing but move blocks," explained Redding, who is also a research scientist at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan. [In Photos: The Beautiful Pyramids of Sudan]

Needless to say, pyramid building is hard work. The workers would need at least 45 to 50 grams of protein a day, Redding said. Half of this protein would likely come from fish, beans, lentils and other non-meat sources, while the other half would come from sheep, goat and cattle, he estimated. Milk and cheese were probably not consumed due to transportation problems and the cattle's low milk yield during that time, Redding said.

Combining these requirements and other protein sources with the ratio of the bones (and the amount of meat and protein one can get from an animal), Redding determined about 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats were consumed each day.

?This would be in addition to supplying workers with grain, beer and other products.

Vast herds ... and herders

In order to maintain this level of slaughter, the ancient Egyptians would have needed a herd of 21,900 cattle and 54,750 sheep and goats just to keep up regular delivery to the Giza workers, Redding estimates.

The animals alone would need about 155 square miles (401 square kilometers) of territory to graze. Add in fallow land, waste land, settlements and agricultural land for the herders, and this number triples to about 465 square miles (1,205 square km) of land ? an area about the size of modern-day Los Angeles. Even so, this area would take up just about 5 percent of the present-day Nile Delta.

These animals also needed herders ? likely one herder for every six cattle and one herder for every 50 sheep or goats, based on ethnographic observations. This brings the total number of herders to 3,650 overall and, once their families are included, 18,980, just under 2 percent of Egypt's estimated population at the time.

These herds would have been spread out in villages across the Nile Delta, then brought to the workers' town at Giza to be slaughtered and cooked. At the end of their lives, the animals were likely kept in the southern part of the town, in a recently unearthed structure that researchers have dubbed the "OK corral." ("OK" stands for "Old Kingdom," the time period in which the Giza pyramids were built.) The structure, which includes two small enclosures where animals may have been slaughtered and a rounded pen, is partly hidden under a modern-day soccer field. [Image Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries]

The boss eats the beef

The research revealed interesting details about life in the workers' town. For instance, the overseers ? who lived in a structure the archaeologists call the "north street gatehouse" ? got to eat the most cattle, and those living in an area called the "galleries," where the everyday workers lived, ate mainly sheep and goats.

Redding said it wasn?t surprising that the overseers preferred to dine on beef, considering it was the most valued meat in ancient Egypt. "Cattle is, of course, the highest-status meat," he said, noting that it appears far more frequently then sheep or goat in tomb scenes, and that pigs never appear in tomb scenes.

The settlement located adjacent to the workers' town, dubbed "eastern town," wasn't as rigidly planned as workers' town, and its residents were eating a considerable number of pigs, the researchers found. Evidence also suggested the people in eastern town were trading with people in workers' town for hippo-tusk fragments.

These finds suggest that the residents of the eastern town were not as directly involved in pyramid building and had a special relationship with the pyramid workers.

"They were not provisioned; they were not given their meat and food every day," like those in the workers' town were, Redding said. "It's more of a typical urban farming settlement, and there was a symbiotic relationship between the two ?probably," he said.

Future discoveries at Giza

Research at workers' town suggests that not all the workers lived there and some may have actually camped out near the Giza pyramids.

"What we think now is ? and this is something we're going to be coming out with in the next little while ? is that, more likely, it was a large portion of the work force, the more skilled laborers [living at workers' town], and that there were temporary camps up by the pyramids where the temporary workers who came in would be housed," he said.

"They probably (didn?t) need much in the way of housing; they would need more shade than anything else. They wouldn't need any kind of warmth because it wouldn't be winter."

Future studies will look for the remains of the workers' towns of Khufu and Khafre, the two other pharaohs who built pyramids at Giza. A dump area, investigated in the 1950s, may hold them; seal impressions found at the dump have the rulers' names on them.

"What we think was going on was that Menkaure came along, he establishes his reign, he leveled that whole area and he took all the levelling debris, took it to the top of the hill and threw it over the back in a big dump," Redding said.

"That dump on the back side of the ridge may represent a remnant of Khufu and Khafre's construction's town," Redding said, adding that he hopes new excavations will begin on the dump in the next year or two.?

Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/giza-secret-revealed-10-000-pyramid-builders-got-125146214.html

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Blast zone slowly comes back to life

Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters

People are escorted across Boylston Street on April 23 as residents and business owners are allowed to return to the street for the first time since the Boston Marathon bombings.

By Matthew DeLuca, Staff Writer, NBC News

BOSTON ? A week and a day after the Boston Marathon bombings, business owners and residents began to return Tuesday to the six-block, cordoned-off area of the attack that investigators painstakingly scoured for evidence.

It has been a long wait for Joy Lee and her employees at Samurai Boston, a store near the race?s finish line on Boylston Street. ?Lee said she has been unable to get to tax and payroll documents since the bombings and she missed a deadline to file meal taxes. Even her car has been blocked off behind the police barriers still decorated with flowers and messages of support.

"We have all the employees text messaging me every single day," Lee said as she waited to return to her business in a steady drizzle Tuesday. "They?re all looking for jobs. They have to pay the rent."

Lee said she would take two employees with her back into the restaurant Tuesday to clean up and clear food gone bad from the refrigerators. She was one of many Boylston business owners expected to show up at the Hynes Convention Center to re-enter their shops under a staggered schedule laid out by the city.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino?s office released a plan Monday night to bring Boylston back to life after investigators handed the site back to the city in a brief ceremony. The plan allowed residents and business owners with essential staff to return to return block-by-block from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Tuesday. The city has not yet announced when the street will be reopened to the public.

At the barricades on Clarendon and Boylston streets, where police allowed pedestrians and vehicles to pass Tuesday, a man and woman in running gear shared a long embrace before jogging away.

Makeshift memorials remain, many of them bearing the names of the victims killed in the attack ? Krystle Campbell, Martin Richard, and Lu Lingzi ? as well as that of Sean Collier, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer believed to have been slain Thursday by the alleged bombers.

The prolonged closure may have untold long-term effects for some businesses in the area, but some Bostonians said Tuesday they?ll dig into their own pockets to ensure the shops and restaurants that line the area around the marathon?s finish line make a strong comeback.

"I already made a reservation at Atlantic Fish Company," said Dan Gross, 30, an account executive at an advertising agency near Boylston. He is booked for 8:15 p.m. on Wednesday, and says if they?re serving, he?ll be there.

The restaurant said that it remained closed "until further notice" in a statement on its website Tuesday.

"I think everyone should just get back there and support the businesses," Gross said. "They lost a lot."

John Berosh, 46, heard the first explosion from his office on the 22nd floor of an office building overlooking the race.

"I knew something wasn?t right," said the software engineer, an 18-year resident of the city. "I went to the window and saw a huge, hideous cloud of smoke coming up from the street." Then he saw the second bomb go off.

Berosh, who said he watches the marathon from his office most years, said he?s ready for Boylston to get back to its usual bustle.

"I am very excited," he said. "I am very proud to tell you that I was here at work last Thursday and Friday, just to hold the door for someone, smile at someone.?

But like Lee, who?s worried about helping her employees make their rents, Berosh said it?s not just the business owners who have been set back by the closure.

"Tip your waiters," Berosh said.

An electronics repair store called iFixYouri on adjacent Newbury Street was shut for several days after the bombings.

"We?re a small, family-run company, and the impact of what happened last week has been significant," said Michelle Zausnig, vice president of marketing for the Florida-based company. ?Being shut down, it impacted us as a small business because we don?t have unlimited resources."

The store saw a return to regular business when it re-opened last Friday.

"We?re expecting to rise again, just like the city," Zausnig said.

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Stream Your Own Internet Radio Station With Grooveshark Broadcast

This player is used on Facebook and anytime it's embedded outside of our sites.

?In the glory days of radio, a DJ could launch a musician?s career with the spin of a record. That same power of individually-curated music discovery is at the root of Broadcast, a new Web application that allows anyone to stream their own online radio show live to a global audience.

Broadcast is part of Grooveshark, a music streaming service founded in 2006. Grooveshark sports a music library of more than 15 million songs, and this sizable library is where users pull tracks to use in their Broadcasts. Unlike streaming giants Rdio and Spotify, Grooveshark allows users to upload their own music files to the service?s library, an ability that has gotten the company into some long-term (and ongoing) legal disputes with record companies. It also makes for a highly diverse music library, featuring rare tracks from international artists and unsigned bands.?

Hands-On with Broadcast

We were excited to give Broadcast a spin. What music fan?doesn?t?relish the chance to share their amazing musical taste with an audience? We fired up the preview version of Grooveshark with Broadcast and hit the Start Broadcasting button to the left of the player controls near the bottom of the screen. We found we were able to get our own station up and running in under a minute.

MORE: 5 Best Headphones with Their Own Apps

Grooveshark Broadcast Screencap 2

We were prompted to title our Broadcast and give it a genre and description so other users could find it. Broadcasts are completely public and can be joined by anyone else using the service.

Grooveshark Broadcast Screencap 3

To get our Broadcast started, we used the Add Song search tool to find a few tracks to kick off our hot new radio show. Searching by title, artist or album triggered a drop-down menu of search results, with the option to add the tracks to our queue. We added a few songs, and just like that our music choices were being broadcast live over the Internet to anyone who cared to listen, which, at first, was no one.

Grooveshark Broadcast Screenshot Social

Broadcasting music in an empty room isn?t much fun, so we brought some of our Laptop coworkers in to check out the social experience. The Broadcast interface is designed to encourage interaction between listeners and the person running the show, and a few handy tools make it easy for listeners to chat and search the Grooveshark library to suggest tracks. Once a track is suggested, the DJ can instantly add it to the Broadcast?s queue.

We were impressed by how much flexibility Broadcast?s interface offered. It?s easy to rearrange your queue on the fly so you can curate the mood of your room. Listeners are able to see the songs that have been suggested, and can vote these songs up or down. The songs that have been voted up appear at the top of the suggestion queue, so they?re more likely to be approved by the DJ. We only had eight people in our room and suggestions still came in faster than we could approve them, so the need for a rating system for suggestions quickly became clear. It?s a thoughtful touch and is a great way for listeners to help moderate the feel of a room.

Broadcast holds a lot of potential as a tool for bands and podcasters who want to develop their?audience. Broadcasters can currently record up to 30 seconds of audio from within the Broadcast interface to include in their queues, and we can see how the ability to record longer stretches of audio could lead to meticulously produced Broadcasts complete with station IDs, commentary between songs and even interviews with artists. We can imagine musicians launching their albums on this service so they can share in a social?listening?experience with their fans.

Broadcast launches today at preview.grooveshark.com and is available for anyone with a Grooveshark account (you can sign up for free).

Follow Ana Hurka-Robles on Twitter and Google+. Follow LAPTOPMAG on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.

Source: http://blog.laptopmag.com/stream-your-own-internet-radio-station-with-grooveshark-broadcast

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Galaxy goes green in burning stellar fuel

Apr. 23, 2013 ? Astronomers have spotted the "greenest" of galaxies, one that converts fuel into stars with almost 100-percent efficiency.

The findings come from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps.

"This galaxy is remarkably efficient," said Jim Geach of McGill University in Canada, lead author of a new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "It's converting its gas supply into new stars at the maximum rate thought possible."

Stars are formed out of collapsing clouds of gas in galaxies. In a typical galaxy, like the Milky Way, only a fraction of the total gas supply is actively forming stars, with the bulk of the fuel lying dormant. The gas is distributed widely throughout the galaxy, with most of the new stars being formed within discrete, dense 'knots' in the spiral arms.

In the galaxy, called SDSSJ1506+54, nearly all of the gas has been driven to the central core of the galaxy, where it has ignited in a powerful burst of star formation.

"We are seeing a rare phase of evolution that is the most extreme -- and most efficient -- yet observed," said Geach.

The results will provide a better understanding of how the central star-forming regions of galaxies take shape.

SDSSJ1506+54 jumped out at the researchers when they looked at it using data from WISE's all-sky infrared survey. Infrared light is pouring out of the galaxy, equivalent to more than a thousand billion times the energy of our sun. The galaxy is so distant it has taken the light nearly six billion years to reach us.

"Because WISE scanned the entire sky, it detected rare galaxies like this one that stand out from the rest," said Ned Wright of UCLA, the WISE principal investigator.

Hubble's visible-light observations revealed that the galaxy is extremely compact, with most of its light emanating from a region just a few hundred light-years across. That's a big star-making punch for such a little size.

"While this galaxy is forming stars at a rate hundreds of times faster than our Milky Way galaxy, the sharp vision of Hubble revealed that the majority of the galaxy's starlight is being emitted by a region with a diameter just a few percent that of the Milky Way," said Geach.

The team then used the IRAM Plateau de Bure Interferometer to measure the amount of gas in the galaxy. The ground-based telescope detected millimeter-wave light coming from carbon monoxide, an indicator of the presence of hydrogen gas, which is fuel for stars. Combining the rate of star formation derived with WISE, and the gas mass measured by IRAM, the scientists get a measure of the star-formation efficiency.

In regions of galaxies where new stars are forming, parts of gas clouds are collapsing due to gravity. When the gas is dense enough to squeeze atoms together and ignite nuclear fusion, a star is born. But this process can be halted by other newborn stars, as their winds and radiation blow the gas outward. The point at which this occurs sets the theoretical maximum for star formation. The galaxy SDSSJ1506+54 was found to be making stars right at this point, just before the gas clouds would otherwise be blown apart.

"We see some gas outflowing from this galaxy at millions of miles per hour, and this gas may have been blown away by the powerful radiation from the newly formed stars," said Ryan Hickox, an astrophysicist at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., and a co-author on the study.

Why is SDSSJ1506+54 so unusual? Astronomers say they're catching the galaxy in a short-lived phase of evolution, possibly triggered by the merging of two galaxies into one. The star formation is so prolific that in a few tens of millions of years, the blink of an eye in a galaxy's life, the gas will be used up, and SDSSJ1506+54 will mature into a massive elliptical galaxy.

The scientists also used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the MMT Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Arizona.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

J. E. Geach, R. C. Hickox, A. M. Diamond-Stanic, M. Krips, J. Moustakas, C. A. Tremonti, A. L. Coil, P. H. Sell, G. H. Rudnick. A REDLINE STARBURST: CO(2-1) OBSERVATIONS OF AN EDDINGTON-LIMITED GALAXY REVEAL STAR FORMATION AT ITS MOST EXTREME. The Astrophysical Journal, 2013; 767 (1): L17 DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/767/1/L17

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/nasa/~3/rDyS8XB5HOM/130423153744.htm

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Stem cell transplant restores memory, learning in mice

Apr. 21, 2013 ? For the first time, human embryonic stem cells have been transformed into nerve cells that helped mice regain the ability to learn and remember.

A study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is the first to show that human stem cells can successfully implant themselves in the brain and then heal neurological deficits, says senior author Su-Chun Zhang, a professor of neuroscience and neurology.

Once inside the mouse brain, the implanted stem cells formed two common, vital types of neurons, which communicate with the chemicals GABA or acetylcholine. "These two neuron types are involved in many kinds of human behavior, emotions, learning, memory, addiction and many other psychiatric issues," says Zhang.

The human embryonic stem cells were cultured in the lab, using chemicals that are known to promote development into nerve cells -- a field that Zhang has helped pioneer for 15 years. The mice were a special strain that do not reject transplants from other species.

After the transplant, the mice scored significantly better on common tests of learning and memory in mice. For example, they were more adept in the water maze test, which challenged them to remember the location of a hidden platform in a pool.

The study began with deliberate damage to a part of the brain that is involved in learning and memory.

Three measures were critical to success, says Zhang: location, timing and purity. "Developing brain cells get their signals from the tissue that they reside in, and the location in the brain we chose directed these cells to form both GABA and cholinergic neurons."

The initial destruction was in an area called the medial septum, which connects to the hippocampus by GABA and cholinergic neurons. "This circuitry is fundamental to our ability to learn and remember," says Zhang.

The transplanted cells, however, were placed in the hippocampus -- a vital memory center -- at the other end of those memory circuits. After the transferred cells were implanted, in response to chemical directions from the brain, they started to specialize and connect to the appropriate cells in the hippocampus.

The process is akin to removing a section of telephone cable, Zhang says. If you can find the correct route, you could wire the replacement from either end.

For the study, published in the current issue of Nature Biotechnology, Zhang and first author Yan Liu, a postdoctoral associate at the Waisman Center on campus, chemically directed the human embryonic stem cells to begin differentiation into neural cells, and then injected those intermediate cells. Ushering the cells through partial specialization prevented the formation of unwanted cell types in the mice.

Ensuring that nearly all of the transplanted cells became neural cells was critical, Zhang says. "That means you are able to predict what the progeny will be, and for any future use in therapy, you reduce the chance of injecting stem cells that could form tumors. In many other transplant experiments, injecting early progenitor cells resulted in masses of cells -- tumors. This didn't happen in our case because the transplanted cells are pure and committed to a particular fate so that they do not generate anything else. We need to be sure we do not inject the seeds of cancer."

Brain repair through cell replacement is a Holy Grail of stem cell transplant, and the two cell types are both critical to brain function, Zhang says. "Cholinergic neurons are involved in Alzheimer's and Down syndrome, but GABA neurons are involved in many additional disorders, including schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression and addiction."

Though tantalizing, stem-cell therapy is unlikely to be the immediate benefit. Zhang notes that "for many psychiatric disorders, you don't know which part of the brain has gone wrong." The new study, he says, is more likely to see immediate application in creating models for drug screening and discovery.