UO E-clips, Oct. 9

New hand, same brain map (Science News): David Savage probably never expected to look down and see someone else’s hand attached to his right arm. Neither did he anticipate using the strange appendage to illuminate how the brain works. But that’s precisely what the 56-year-old hand-transplant patient has done. Four months after his December 2006 transplant, Savage’s partial sense of touch in the new hand activated the same brain area that would have controlled his original right hand 35 years earlier, say neuroscientist Scott Frey of the University of Oregon in Eugene and colleagues.

Brain rewires itself after hand transplant (HealthDay, appearing in U.S News and World Report and WashingtonPost.com): Providing more evidence of the brain's remarkable ability to transform itself in adulthood, new research reveals that neurons can rewire themselves to adjust to a hand transplant. Even though he had lost his hand 35 years ago, a 54-year-old man was able to feel sensations on his new transplanted hand four months after surgery. Scans of his brain revealed that it had reorganized itself to adjust to the new hand. "Up until now, we weren't able to reverse amputations," said study author Scott H. Frey, director of the University of Oregon's Lewis Center for Neuroimaging. But the research shows that "even in a mature brain that has been deprived of sensory input for an extremely long period of time, it's possible for those areas to regain their function," he said. Decades ago, scientists assumed that the brain stopped growing in adulthood and couldn't grow new neurons. "The prevailing view was that all the things that are set up during development stay that way for the rest of life," Frey said. But over the last 20 years, researchers have begun to understand that the brain can rewrite itself and adjust to the world around it. In the new study, published in the Oct. 14 issue ofCurrent Biology, Frey and colleagues tried to understand more about that process.

Global credit blaze: Greed goes, fear wins (ComodityOnline.com and The Salt Lake Tribune): The global credit blaze raged on overnight despite signs that additional central banks joined the worldwide rate cut campaign. The intense heat melted Iceland - its banks, stock market, and currency dissolved into a sorry-looking puddle. The financial ramifications of the collapse raised tensions with the UK as it prepared to sue Iceland over lost depositors' savings. .... When experts and authority figures are uncertain, it's especially crippling, says Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene and founder of Decision Research, which investigates decision making and risk.