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By Mo Costandi of Nature magazine European researchers have identified a gene that is linked to improved memory, but also to increased risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dominique de Quervain of the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues recruited around 700 healthy young volunteers, obtaining DNA samples from them to analyze the sequence of their PRKCA gene.

Once adult lab mice learn to associate a particular stimulus--a sound, a flash of light--with the pain of an electric shock, they don't easily forget it, even when researchers stop the shocks. But a new study in the December 23 issue of Science shows that the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine) gives mice the youthful brain plasticity they need to learn that a once-threatening stimulus is now benign.

Just watching television footage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was enough to cause clinically diagnosable stress responses in some people who did not even live near the attacks--let alone the millions of people who did . Like many other major disasters, 9/11 brought with it a host of psychological repercussions, one of the most severe of which has been post-traumatic stress disorder . PTSD is characterized by trouble sleeping, difficulty controlling anger, losing interest in activities, flashbacks, emotional numbness and/or other symptoms

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine Memories fade, events get conflated, names get attached to the wrong faces, or, in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, signals in safe environments can mistakenly evoke emotions that rightly belong to a battlefield tragedy. [More]