A drug to beat Parkinson's

---

Rebecca Knight, FT Syndication Service
Researchers have discovered a drug that slows, and may even halt, the progression of Parkinson's disease.
Isradipine, widely used for hypertension and stroke, rejuvenates ageing dopamine cells, whose death in the brain causes the symptoms of the illness. Dopamine is a chemical messenger that affects a person's ability to direct his movements. In Parkinson's disease, the neurons that release dopamine die, making movement increasingly difficult.
"Our hope is that this drug will protect dopamine neurons so if you began taking it early enough, you would not get Parkinson's disease even if you were at risk," says James Surmeier, a professor of physiology at University's Feinberg School of Medicine, who led the study.
Isradipine may also help people who already have Parkinson's disease. In animal models, the team found the drug protected dopamine meurons from toxins by restoring them to a younger state in which they were less vulnerable.

Evidence for a Martian ocean

A study by geophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, undermines one of the main arguments against the past presence of an ocean on Mars.
Whether Mars once had an ocean has long been a topic of scientific debate. In the 1980s, Viking spacecraft images showed two possible ancient shorelines near the planet's north pole, each thousands of kilometres long, with features like those found in Earth's coastal regions. They date from 2.0bn-4.0bn years ago.
In the 1990s, however, Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor mapped the Martian topography to a higher resolution and found the shoreline varied in elevation by several kilometres, undulating like a wave, with several thousand kilometres from one peak to the next. Because shoreline elevations on Earth, measured relative to sea level, are usually constant, many experts discarded the notion of a Martian ocean.
But in this new study, which appears in the journal Nature, scientists discovered that these rolling Martian shorelines can be explained by the movement of Mars's spin axis, and thus its poles, by nearly 3,000km at some time within the past 2.0bn-3.0bn years. Because spinning objects bulge at their equator, this "true polar wander" could have caused shoreline elevation shifts similar to those on Mars.