The Weather Authority: Sun, clouds, humidity, rain – it’s all in your weekend forecastChaotic lake getting fence and security
Southwest Florida The Weather Authority: Sun, clouds, humidity, rain – it’s all in your weekend forecast Saturday afternoon will be hot and humid, with a mix of sun and clouds.
LEHIGH ACRES Chaotic lake getting fence and security Now, with all the negative attention it has gotten, some think putting up a fence is a great way to keep that bad activity out.
CAPE CORAL What we learned about Cape Coral’s water crisis after a ride along On Friday, WINK News got to ride along to see just what people are doing that could be wasting water.
FORT MYERS Students affected by COVID-19 able to graduate for the first time For many young people, COVID stripped away one of their greatest rites of passage: graduation.
Deadly crash on State Road 29 in Hendry County Authorities are at the scene of a deadly crash on State Road 29 in Hendry County on Friday afternoon.
Celebrating Free Comic Book Day in SWFL JP Sports store manager Jonathan Powell said this is a generational event that brings families together to reminisce on comics and other hobby-related knickknacks.
FORT MYERS Group rescues dogs before getting put down in Lee County Our animal shelters are packed with amazing puppies who have the sole desire to be loved.
FORT MYERS FGCU student beats all odds and is able to graduate Nearly four years ago, Marisa Manning had her heart set on going to Florida Gulf Coast University but never thought she’d find her passion for studying parasites.
FORT MYERS Victim in MLK Blvd. shooting identified as social media influencer The victim of the Martin Luther King Boulevard shooting has been identified as a local social media influencer.
FORT MYERS Could a Ferris wheel in downtown Fort Myers work? Right now, there are talks to bring a Ferris wheel to downtown Fort Myers, but several things are still up in the air.
LITTLE HICKORY BAY Improving ‘Hell’s Gate’ safety, a notoriously dangerous waterway for boaters A push to make an area known as “Hell’s Gate” safer since it’s a dangerous stretch of water with several blind corners within Little Hickory Bay.
Fixing failed back surgeries More than a million and a half people in the U.S. undergo back surgery each year. However, classic back surgery has one of the highest failure rates of any surgery.
WINK NEWS Getting an inside look at the FEMA discount controversy Picking up the pieces after Hurricane Ian has been difficult for many and moving on can impact our wallets.
FGCU FGCU pitcher Dylan Wolff playing for hometown team after labrum injury FGCU pitcher Dylan Wolff is living the dream playing for the hometown team after he overcame a labrum injury.
LEHIGH ACRES Frustrated Lehigh parents want action after violent school fights go viral online Violence at a Lehigh Acres Middle school was captured and posted online.
Southwest Florida The Weather Authority: Sun, clouds, humidity, rain – it’s all in your weekend forecast Saturday afternoon will be hot and humid, with a mix of sun and clouds.
LEHIGH ACRES Chaotic lake getting fence and security Now, with all the negative attention it has gotten, some think putting up a fence is a great way to keep that bad activity out.
CAPE CORAL What we learned about Cape Coral’s water crisis after a ride along On Friday, WINK News got to ride along to see just what people are doing that could be wasting water.
FORT MYERS Students affected by COVID-19 able to graduate for the first time For many young people, COVID stripped away one of their greatest rites of passage: graduation.
Deadly crash on State Road 29 in Hendry County Authorities are at the scene of a deadly crash on State Road 29 in Hendry County on Friday afternoon.
Celebrating Free Comic Book Day in SWFL JP Sports store manager Jonathan Powell said this is a generational event that brings families together to reminisce on comics and other hobby-related knickknacks.
FORT MYERS Group rescues dogs before getting put down in Lee County Our animal shelters are packed with amazing puppies who have the sole desire to be loved.
FORT MYERS FGCU student beats all odds and is able to graduate Nearly four years ago, Marisa Manning had her heart set on going to Florida Gulf Coast University but never thought she’d find her passion for studying parasites.
FORT MYERS Victim in MLK Blvd. shooting identified as social media influencer The victim of the Martin Luther King Boulevard shooting has been identified as a local social media influencer.
FORT MYERS Could a Ferris wheel in downtown Fort Myers work? Right now, there are talks to bring a Ferris wheel to downtown Fort Myers, but several things are still up in the air.
LITTLE HICKORY BAY Improving ‘Hell’s Gate’ safety, a notoriously dangerous waterway for boaters A push to make an area known as “Hell’s Gate” safer since it’s a dangerous stretch of water with several blind corners within Little Hickory Bay.
Fixing failed back surgeries More than a million and a half people in the U.S. undergo back surgery each year. However, classic back surgery has one of the highest failure rates of any surgery.
WINK NEWS Getting an inside look at the FEMA discount controversy Picking up the pieces after Hurricane Ian has been difficult for many and moving on can impact our wallets.
FGCU FGCU pitcher Dylan Wolff playing for hometown team after labrum injury FGCU pitcher Dylan Wolff is living the dream playing for the hometown team after he overcame a labrum injury.
LEHIGH ACRES Frustrated Lehigh parents want action after violent school fights go viral online Violence at a Lehigh Acres Middle school was captured and posted online.
MGN NEW YORK (AP) – Scientists pursuing the biological roots of schizophrenia have zeroed in on a potential factor – a normal brain process that gets kicked into overdrive. The finding could someday lead to ways to treat the disease or even prevent it. The result – accomplished by analysis of genetics, autopsy brain tissue and laboratory mice – is “going to be a game-changer” in terms of understanding schizophrenia and offering routes for treatment and potential for prevention, said Bruce Cuthbert, acting deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund the research. An expert unconnected to the research said the study’s conclusion was not yet proven, but plausible. Almost 1 percent of the general population will have schizophrenia at some point in their lives. They may hear voices or hallucinate, talk about strange ideas, and believe others are reading their minds or plotting against them. Nobody knows what causes the disorder, so the new result offers a possible peek into a black box. The work is reported in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature. The finding might pertain to “a very substantial fraction of cases, maybe most cases, even,” said senior author Steven McCarroll, of Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The result links schizophrenia risk to a problem with a normal process that happens in adolescence and early adulthood, when disease symptoms often appear. That age range is when the brain trims back the number of specialized places on brain cells where the cells signal each other, called synapses. The new work suggests a connection to schizophrenia when this process gets out of hand, deleting too many synapses. “It’s like you have a gardener who was supposed to prune the bushes and just got overactive,” Cuthbert observed. “You end up with bushes that are pruned way too much.” The result doesn’t mean over-pruning causes schizophrenia on its own. It could promote the disease in combination with other factors in the brain, McCarroll said. The work began with a genetic investigation. Previous analysis of the human DNA indicates over 100 places that influence the risk of getting schizophrenia, but detailed biological explanations for those influences are very rare. The new work identified a risk gene and found evidence for the over-pruning idea. Drawing on DNA data from 28,799 people with schizophrenia and 35,986 people without it, the researchers found that a gene called C4 can raise a person’s risk by about 30 percent over that of the general population. The gene comes in several forms, and researchers examining brain tissue found evidence that the forms that pose the most risk of schizophrenia were also the most active in the brain. In lab mice, they found that the gene plays a key role in pruning synapses. The study doesn’t directly demonstrate that that excessive pruning of synapses plays a role in schizophrenia, but the idea makes sense, McCarroll said. It ties together previous observations, among them that schizophrenia most often develops during youth and that patients’ brains show unusually few synapses, he said. Dr. Kenneth Kendler, a schizophrenia genetics expert at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond who didn’t participate in the project, said the work presents an impressive array of results. The evidence that C4 can raise schizophrenia risk is strong, he said. The proposal that it does so through excessive pruning of synapses is “plausible and interesting, but not yet fully convincing,” he said. “We don’t yet know (whether) their hypothesis is completely true,” Kendler said, but the work is still “a pretty big deal.” If it’s true, scientist can think about finding drugs that would intervene, McCarroll said. They might be useful to give when young people show symptoms that suggest they may be on the road to developing schizophrenia, he said. And even after the diagnosis, such drugs might keep the disease from getting worse, he said. But any such treatments are years away, he cautioned. ___ Online: Schizophrenia: http://1.usa.gov/1UmjwkX Journal Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature