Chinese Girl Has Basketball for a Body | Weird Asia News.

Chinese Girl Has Basketball for a Body

Qian Hongyan, who was forced to use half a basketball as her prosthetic body, has inspired millions recently with her ambition to compete as a swimmer in the 2012 Paralympics in London.

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Qian swims about 2000 meters a day and trains really hard.

“Qian Hongyan studies hard. She never grouches in training although she was confronted with many difficulties at the beginning, ” her coach said.

The 10 year-old was injured trajically in an auto accident when she was only 3 years old. To insure her survival, the doctors were forced to amputate her legs.

Qian’s family, living in Zhuangxia, China, was unable to afford modern prosthetics and instead used a half a basketball to get around on. Once on the ball she uses two wooden props to help her move around.

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Qian now has a pair of proper prosthetic legs, but still says she likes to use the basketball from time to time as it is easier for her to get in and out of the pool with.

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People who suffer from anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous situations, situations that could potentially be dangerous but not necessarily so, as threatening. Researchers from the Mouse Biology Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Italy have now uncovered the neural basis for such anxiety behaviour in mice. They state that a receptor for the messenger serotonin and a neural circuit involving a brain region called the hippocampus play crucial roles in mediating fear responses in ambiguous situations.

A mouse that has learned that a certain cue, for example a tone, is always followed by an electrical shock comes to associate the two and freezes with fear whenever it hears the tone even if the shock is not delivered. But in real life the situation is not always so clear; a stimulus will only sometimes be followed by a threat while other times nothing might happen. Normal mice show less fear towards such ambiguous cues than to clearly threatening stimuli.

A team of researchers led by Cornelius Gross at the EMBL Mouse Biology Unit now discovered that this response to ambiguous stimuli requires a specific receptor molecule for serotonin, a signal many brain cells use to communicate. Mice that lack the serotonin receptor 1A have problems processing ambiguous stimuli and react to them with full-fledged fear responses. The cause is wrongly connected cells in their brains. Serotonin signalling is very important for brain development and if the receptor 1A is missing, defects arise in the wiring of the brain that affect the behaviour of mice later on in life.

“In humans serotonin signalling has been implicated in disorders including depression and anxiety and like our mice patients suffering from these conditions also overreact to ambiguous situations,” Gross says. “The next step was to identify the brain regions that are responsible for such complex fear behaviour and the processing of ambiguous cues.”

Using a new technique to switch off neural activity in selective brain cells in living mice, Gross and his colleagues discovered that a specific part of the hippocampus is required for correct processing of ambiguous stimuli.

“Shutting down a specific circuit in the hippocampus abolished fear reactions only to ambiguous cues,” says Theodoros Tsetsenis who carried out the research in Gross’ lab. “The pathway must be involved in processing and assessing the value of stimuli. It seems to bias mice to interpret situations as threatening.”

The hippocampus is mainly known as a region important for learning and memory, but the results reveal a more general role in evaluating information and assessing contingencies.

Neural circuits that govern fundamental behaviours like fear are often often conserved between species and patient studies suggest a role for the hippocampus in anxiety also in humans.

The new insights gained into serotonin signalling via the receptor 1A and the role of the hippocampus in fear behaviour in mice promise to shed light on the neural basis of anxiety disorders and open up new avenues for therapies.

The Beatles’ George Harrison wondered in his famous love song about the “something” that “attracts me like no other lover.” A University at Buffalo expert explains that that “something” is actually several physical elements that — if they occur in a certain order, at the right time and in the right place — can result in true love.

“There are several types of chemistry required in romantic relationships,” according to Mark Kristal, professor of psychology at UB. “It seems like a variety of different neurochemical processes and external stimuli have to click in the right complex and the right sequence for someone to fall in love.”

First, there’s smell, made up of learned or cultural preferences, such as the smell of a dozen long-stemmed red roses.

“Smell forms part of the framework that conforms to cultural attractiveness standards; for example, smelling like a strawberry instead of mildew,” he says. Next, there are pheromones, which are more mysterious to us humans.

“Pheromones are unlearned, and perhaps unsmellable, signals that enter the brain through the olfactory system. They can function in sex, alarm, territoriality, aggression, and fear,” Kristal said, adding that while sex attractant pheromones may explain changes in libido, they don’t explain why we choose a specific person for a mate.

“In humans, specific mates are more probably chosen on the basis of other sensory cues: visual, regular olfactory, auditory and tactile cues,” Kristal notes. And these cues, especially smell, strengthen with time.

“After a certain amount of bonding, specific mates may be more recognizable to each other by smells rather than by pheromones. Studies show that people can recognize unwashed t-shirts belonging to their mates by the smell.”

Then there is the brain, which produces its own substances that are involved in bonding.

“Two related brain peptides, vasopressin and oxytocin, have been shown to be involved in both the permanent or long-term social bonding that underlies mating,” Kristal says. “The neurotransmitter dopamine, in a part of the brain called the VTA, is certainly involved in the rewarding properties of love and sex.”

But aphrodisiacs — foods, drugs and other substances that claim to increase sexual interest — are a “myth,” according to Kristal, who advises that it would be better to “smell good and look successful” in order to attract a potential mate this Valentine’s Day.

And keep handy a copy of the “Something” CD, just in case.

Source: University at Buffalo