By Roger Dobson A word in your ear, Tom. The Hollywood star's problems with women - he's divorced from two and broken up with several - may be solely down to his tendency to whisper sweet nothings to the wrong side of the head. According to new research, the key to capturing the attentions of a lover could be boosted massively by whispering into the left ear. Men and women are able to accurately identify and recall more than 70 per cent of emotional words like love, kiss and passion with their left ear, compared to only 58 per cent with the right. This is because the left ear is controlled by the right side of the brain, the so-called emotional side, and triggers much better responses from prospective lovers. The findings may also help to explain why mothers mostly cradle babies on their left side, closer to the left ear, and why some research shows that listening to music with the left ear can be more stimulating. In the studies, to be published by Sam Houston State University in the US, 100 men and women wore earphones to listen to a number of emotional and neutral words being read in each ear separately. The words were read without any emotion. Some time later, the volunteers were asked to write down the words they had heard in each ear. The results show that the test accuracy for emotional words was 70 per cent in the left ear, and 58 per cent in the right. © 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

Keyword: Laterality; Hearing
Link ID: 9971 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Archaeologists working in the rain forest of West Africa's Ivory Coast say they have found a site where prehistoric families of chimpanzees fashioned crude stone hammers to crack open nuts for their food. The flaked stones made by those savvy animals at least 4,300 years ago are remarkably similar, the scientists said, to those made by the earliest known prehuman tool-users -- the race of hominids known as Australopithecines, whose fossils show they lived some 2.5 million years ago or more. The chimps, therefore, must have shared "cultural attributes" with the hominids who lived and went extinct almost at the start of the long and complex human lineage, said Julio Mercader an archaeologist at Canada's University of Calgary. Perhaps, Mercader speculated, the hominid race known as Australopithecines and ancient ancestors of tool-making chimps inherited their jointly shared "technology" from some common ancestor before the apes and human lineages split 6 to 7 million years ago. His conclusions, reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are already controversial. Tim White, the noted Berkeley paleoanthropologist who has long explored human evolution in Africa, insists, for instance, that it's impossible to tell just who or what made the scattered stones found by Mercader's group. © 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 9970 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Love can be divided into three entities: lust, romance and attachment, according to anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher, who has been studying the subject for 32 years. These three brain systems can operate in any order and in any combination. You can fall in love with someone before you sleep with them; you can become deeply attached to somebody and then fall in love with them; and you can have a sexual relationship, fall in love and then become deeply attached. Lust is a craving for sexual gratification, which you can feel for a whole range of people. Those caught up in romantic love focus all their attention on the object of their affection. Not only do they crave them, but they are highly motivated to win them, they obsessively think about them and become extremely sexually possessive. Perhaps illogically, if things go wrong. they are attracted to them even more. During this state the brain is driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter central to the reward system. Romantic love is much more powerful than sex drive, says Dr Fisher, of Rutgers University, New Jersey. And she believes it to be a drive, rather than an emotion. "It doesn't have any facial expression, it's very difficult to control and it's one of the most powerful neural systems that has evolved," she says. © 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9969 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden Weight gain can be a serious problem for patients taking antipsychotic drugs for schizophrenia--not only do the drugs have a sedative effect that slows people down, but they also stimulate the appetite, a combination that can mean a big weight gain. It so happens that this is also what certain antihistamines, which counter allergic reactions, do. Now scientists say they have identified a common mechanism: Both types of drugs act on the same histamine receptor in the brain. The knowledge should help drug makers avoid this side effect in the next generation of antipsychotics and other drugs. Previous research had already suggested that the actions of a particular enzyme, AMP kinase (AMPK), are directly related to appetite control, apparently through action on the H1 histamine receptor. To see if antipsychotic drugs cause excess production of the enzyme, researchers led by neuroscientist Solomon Snyder of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, injected mice with clozapine, a commonly prescribed antipsychotic drug. The injection resulted in quadrupled AMPK activity in the mice's brains. The researchers then gave the mice leptin, an appetite-suppressing hormone, and saw the AMPK levels go down. The scientists then established the histamine link by giving clozapine to mice bred to lack H1 receptors. In this case, the mice failed to react with raised levels of AMPK, showing that the stimulation of the enzyme by the drug depends on the stimulation of the H1 histamine receptor, the researchers report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We've now connected a whole class of antipsychotics to natural brain chemicals that trigger appetite," said Snyder. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 9968 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Love is a mysterious thing and never easily explained. Now an evolutionary psychologist has shown that true romance requires a special kind of chemistry. Literally. "I think that these findings really get at one of Cupid's tricks," says Christine Garver-Apgar of the University of New Mexico. "We don't know all of his tricks but this study is one of the first studies that gives us a specific mechanism to define romantic chemistry. It tells us what it is about two individuals that just makes two people crazy about each other." Garver-Apgar gave 48 romantically involved heterosexual couples questionnaires that measured aspects of their relationships and sex lives. She also took DNA samples to test how similar or different the couples were in a specific area of the genome, called the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC. As she wrote in the journal Psychological Science, if their genes in this area were very similar, there was a greater chance of trouble in paradise. "The more genes that a couple shares in this particular family of genes, the more men and women reported that women were less sexually satisfied with their partners, they were more sexually attracted to men outside of their current relationship, particularly when they were nearing ovulation, and they actually reported having more extra-pair sexual partners during the course of their relationship ... in other words, the more they were cheating on their current partner," says Garver-Apgar. © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9967 - Posted: 06.24.2010

“Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction” was unveiled today by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health. The 30-page full-color booklet explains in layman’s terms how science has revolutionized the understanding of drug addiction as a brain disease that affects behavior. NIDA hopes this new publication will help reduce stigma against addictive disorders. “Thanks to science, our views and our responses to drug abuse have changed dramatically, but many people today still do not understand why people become addicted to drugs or how drugs change the brain to foster compulsive drug abuse,” said NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. “This booklet aims to fill that knowledge gap by providing scientific information about the disease of drug addiction in language that is easily understandable to the public.” The “Science of Addiction” booklet discusses the reasons people take drugs, why some people become addicted while others do not, how drugs work in the brain, and how addiction can be prevented and treated. Like diabetes, asthma or heart disease, drug addiction is a chronic disease that can be managed successfully. Treatment helps to counteract addiction’s powerful disruptive effects and helps people regain control of their lives. The new booklet points out that just as with other chronic diseases, relapses can happen. The publication further explains that relapse is not a signal of treatment failure — rather, it indicates that treatment should be reinstated or adjusted to help the addict fully recover.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9966 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi New high-speed video footage has revealed the extraordinary dexterity with which rats use their whiskers. The rodents are able to move these groupings of feelers independently on each side of their heads, allowing them to navigate efficiently in the dark, the film shows. It was previously assumed that rats lacked the ability to isolate the movement of their whiskers, says Tony Prescott at the University of Sheffield in the UK. To get a more sophisticated view of this animal behaviour, he and colleagues used high-speed cameras and muscle sensors to record how rats swept their whiskers across various surfaces. When the whiskers on one side of the rodents' face hit a surface, they slow down by around one-third, the team found. Meanwhile, those whiskers on the other side begin rapidly sweeping back and forth, even more broadly, in search of another contact point (watch a rat's asymmetrical whisker activity in this video, 2.3 MB, requires Quicktime). Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2007.0347) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 9965 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Japanese researchers have gained an insight into the behaviour of the elusive Taningia danae, one of the world's largest squid species, thanks to the first footage of the deep-sea creature. The video reveals that the animal is a speedy swimmer — not, as was thought, a lazy drifter. The footage also shows that the squid, which can grow to 2.3 metres long, apparently uses luminescent spots on its arms to confuse prey, and may also use the glowing dots in courtship. The video was made off Japan's Ogasawara Islands, using an underwater high-definition camera, by Tsunemi Kubodera of the National Science Museum in Tokyo, together with colleagues from the Japan Broadcasting Corporation and the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association. They describe their observations in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1. Remains of T. danae often show up in the stomachs of sperm whales. The squid's flabby flesh led experts to think that it floats in the water column like a neutrally buoyant scuba diver. But the new footage shows it can reach speeds of up to 9 kilometres per hour. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 9964 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Aria Pearson People who have lost their sense of balance could one day be fitted with an inner ear implant modelled on the body’s own balance organs, say researchers. Current designs are successful in animals, but two new studies promise a smaller, more accurate device, with a longer battery life – the crucial prerequisites for use in humans. The sense of balance is controlled by the vestibular portion of the inner ear. It keeps track of the motion and position of the head using three fluid-filled hoops, called semicircular canals. These sit at perpendicular angles to each other. When the head rotates quickly in a certain direction, the fluid in the corresponding hoop pushes against a membrane, bending hair cells that trigger a nerve. The nerve sends the information to the brain which tells the eyes to adjust. “It’s the fastest reflex in the body,” says Charles Santina at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, US, who is designing an implant to restore this phenomenon, called the vestibular-ocular reflex, in humans. “Without it, the world looks like you’re watching it through a hand-held video camera,” he explains. People lose this reflex when the vestibular hair cells die, usually from genetic disorders, infections or antibiotic poisoning. Hearing loss can also be caused by hair cell death, and since cochlear implants have been successful at restoring partial hearing (see Implant works wonders for deaf babies), scientists reasoned a similar implant could work for balance. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 9963 - Posted: 06.24.2010

AUDIO VISUAL LINK As London fashion week begins there is concern about the effect 'thinspirational' websites have on anorexic people.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 9962 - Posted: 02.13.2007

Women are more likely to injure themselves at specific times in their menstrual cycle, research suggests. London's Portland Hospital surveyed 1,000 osteopaths, and studied 17 women with a regular menstrual cycle. The study suggests the risk of injury is linked to fluctuating hormone levels which affect the muscles and ligaments. Both tissues appear to be vulnerable midway through the menstrual cycle, while the ligaments are at greater risk at the end. Midway through the cycle, the level of the female sex hormone oestrogen, which gives strength to muscles and ligaments, drops dramatically, resulting in sudden weakness. At the end of the cycle levels of another hormone, relaxin, rise. This is to allow the cervix to open so that menstruation can occur, but it also means the ligaments in general are softened. The researchers found that strains and other injuries were more likely at both these stages. Lead researcher Dr Stephen Sandler, an experienced osteopath, said: "There was a clear link between hormone levels and laxity of joints, making women more vulnerable to injury." Dr Sandler compared hormone levels in the blood with the laxity of the forefinger joint (C)BBC

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 9961 - Posted: 02.13.2007

By JANE E. BRODY Midway through a delightful school outing on the local ice-skating rink, my daughter-in-law, a good skater, suddenly fell backward, hitting her head so hard she was knocked out. After she was wheeled into the first aid room, she asked: “Where am I? How did I get here?” Though her sons, who are novice skaters, were wearing helmets, my daughter-in-law, like the other adults on the ice, was not. And she had suffered a concussion. The external bump on her head was of no consequence, but the internal “whiplash” of her brain had caused an intense headache, nausea and amnesia about the event. An ambulance took her to a trauma center, where a CT scan and X-rays showed no fractures or internal bleeding. After a few hours of observation she was sent home under 24-hour surveillance and told to return immediately if she became disoriented, confused or extremely fatigued, if her headache worsened or if she started vomiting. She was also told that it was normal for the headache, nausea and neck pain to continue for several days. What she was not told, however, was how important it was to rest and minimize stress to give her brain a chance to heal. Taking a week or so off from work might have been a good idea. Nor was she told that even a mild concussion may leave “invisible” but disturbing symptoms: fatigue, irritability, difficulty concentrating, memory problems and sometimes depression. These are indicators of a postconcussive syndrome that months later could result in impulsive behavior, easy frustration, impaired social judgment and unpleasant personality changes. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 9960 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Binge eating is not yet officially classified as a psychiatric disorder. But it may be more common than the two eating disorders now recognized, anorexia nervosa and bulimia. The first nationally representative study of eating disorders in the United States, a nationwide survey of more than 2,900 men and women, was published by Harvard researchers in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry. It found a prevalence in the general population of 0.6 percent for anorexia, 1 percent for bulimia and 2.8 percent for binge-eating disorder. Lifetime rates of the disorders, the researchers found, are higher in younger age groups, suggesting that the problem is increasingly common. Eating disorders are about twice as common among women as men, the study reports. Experts not involved in the study called it significant. “This is probably the best study yet conducted of the frequencies of eating disorders in American households,” said Dr. B. Timothy Walsh, director of the eating disorders research unit of the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University Medical Center. “It confirms that anorexia nervosa and bulimia are uncommon but serious illnesses, especially among women,” Dr. Walsh said. “It also finds that many more individuals, especially those with significant obesity, are troubled by binge eating, and underscores the need to better understand this problem.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 9959 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ELIZABETH SVOBODA More than a decade ago, Diana Duyser of Hollywood, Fla., received a religious message through an unlikely medium: a grilled cheese sandwich she had made herself. As she gazed at the brown skillet marks on the surface of the bread, a familiar visage snapped into focus. “I saw a face looking up at me; it was the Virgin Mary staring back,” she told reporters in 2004. “I was in total shock.” After holding onto the stale relic for 10 years, Ms. Duyser put it up for sale on eBay. The auction generated so much excitement that the sandwich eventually sold for $28,000, proving that she was not alone in seeing a face where none should reasonably exist. (Efforts to locate her to comment for this article were unsuccessful.) Such faces made headlines again near the end of 2006, when Mars Express, an orbiter from the European Space Agency, captured the highest-quality three-dimensional images to date of what looks like a face in the Cydonia region of Mars. The photos reignited conspiracy theories that governments on Earth are trying to hide the existence of intelligent life on Mars. Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun? Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 9958 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Smoking marijuana eases a type of chronic foot pain in people with the AIDS virus, according to a study published on Monday that the researchers touted as demonstrating marijuana's medicinal benefits. But the White House drug policy office said the research was flawed and offered only "false hope." The study, appearing in the journal Neurology, focused on sensory neuropathy -- a kind of severe nerve pain usually felt as aching, painful numbness and burning in the feet -- associated with human immunodeficiency virus infection. HIV-infected people who smoked marijuana reported a 34-percent reduction in daily pain from this condition, compared to a 17-percent decline among those who smoked placebos. Fifty HIV-infected adults, mostly men, who had this pain but otherwise were in stable health took part from 2003 to 2005. All were previous marijuana smokers but not considered drug abusers. They were told to stop using it prior to the study. Half of them smoked marijuana cigarettes three times a day for five days. The other half smoked placebo cigarettes that were identical other than having had the cannabinoids -- the primary active components of the plant -- extracted. Half the marijuana smokers said their pain level had declined by more than 30 percent, while a quarter of the placebo group reported similar pain reduction. The volunteers had no serious side effects. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9957 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Debora McKenzie Viruses, not prions, may be at the root of diseases such as scrapie, BSE and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), researchers say. If true, the new theory could revolutionise our understanding of these so-called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), and potentially lead to new ways of treating them. The widely accepted theory of what causes infectious prion diseases – such as vCJD, scrapie and “mad cow disease” – is that deformed proteins called prions corrupt other brain proteins, eventually clogging and destroying brain cells. However, this theory has not been definitively proven. Laura Manuelidis at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US, has insisted for years that tiny virus-like particles observed in TSE-infected brains may be the culprits. But such brains are degenerating, so the particles had been dismissed as general debris. When Manuelidis studied cultures of neural cells infected with two particular strains of scrapie and CJD, she found that these virus-like particles were clustered in regular arrays within the cells – in a pattern that viruses regularly form in cells – and she saw no apparent prions in the cells. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 9956 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Narelle Towie In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools thousands of years older than the previous oldest finds in the same area. The discovery suggests that chimps may have passed cultural information down the generations for more than 4,000 years. The human fossil record dates back 2.6 million years, thanks to our ancestors' who lived in more arid areas, where bones are well preserved. But the chimp fossil record is very sparse. We know little about ancient chimps' lifestyles, and only one previous set of old tools, dating from 100 years ago, has been found1. Both sets of tools consist of stones used to smash open the nuts of the panda tree (Panda oleosa), and the flakes of stone chipped off by this hammering. They were found in the same spot of rainforest in the Côte d'Ivoire. The recently discovered set is dated to 4,300 years ago, researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences2. "What makes this find interesting is that the rocks are so old," says Huw Barton, an archaeologist from the University of Leicester, UK. We have no idea how far back such tools were used, he adds: "For all we know stone tool use behaviour could be very ancient." Although panda nuts are found across Africa, only West African chimps (Pan troglodytes) have been seen cracking them with rocks, using a piece of granite and steadying the nut against a cracking post, usually the nook of a tree stump. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 9955 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON — German researchers have found additional evidence that the stress hormone cortisol can have positive effects in certain situations. Although chronic stress, which brings long-term elevations of cortisol in the bloodstream, can weaken the immune system and induce depression, this new study adds to mounting evidence that cortisol given near in time to a physical or psychological stress may lessen the stressor's emotional impact. Psychologists are especially interested in what this means for preventing and treating post-traumatic stress disorder. The findings appear in the February issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Psychologists Serkan Het, MSc, and Oliver Wolf, PhD, of the University of Bielefeld, enlisted 44 healthy women for a double-blind study, in which neither researchers or participants knew the condition to which the women were assigned. One hour before a psychosocial stress test, participants were given either a 30 mg. dose of oral cortisol or a placebo. That 30 mg. dose is considered high, translating to a severe stressor. Experimenters tracked participant mood through self report, and measured their cortisol levels with a simple swab check of their saliva, before and after the psychosocial stress test. Participants were asked to give five-minute oral presentations as if interviewing for their dream job, focusing on their personal strengths and weaknesses. For the next five minutes, they had to count backwards by 17s from a very high number; every time they made a mistake, they had to start over. During both tasks, participants faced a "committee" of one man and one woman, both of whom acted cold and reserved without actually being unfriendly or rude. To heighten discomfort over being evaluated, participants spoke into microphones and knew they were being videotaped.

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 9954 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Sleep deprivation can severely hamper the brain’s ability to learn, a new study demonstrates. The experiment showed that people who fail to get a good night’s sleep before studying new information remember roughly 10% less than their well-rested counterparts. The researchers say it is “a worrying finding” considering the average amount of sleep people get each night is decreasing. Seung-Schik Yoo at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, US, and colleagues asked 14 people to avoid sleeping one night by playing board games and checking email in the lab. The participants stayed awake until the next evening, when they had to view a sequence of 150 images – as their brains were scanned – before going home to sleep. After two good nights’ rest, the participants returned to the lab thinking they would simply have to sign some papers. But researchers surprised them with a pop quiz: The subjects had to pick out the 150 images they had seen before from a series of 225 pictures. They correctly identified 74% of the previously viewed images, on average. By comparison, another group who had a proper night’s rest before viewing the 150 images at the start of the experiment correctly identified 86% of these pictures in the pop quiz. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9953 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Missing out on sleep may cause the brain to stop producing new cells, a study has suggested. The work on rats, by a team from Princeton University found a lack of sleep affected the hippocampus, a brain region involved in forming memories. The research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science showed a stress hormone causes the effect. A UK expert said it would be interesting to see if too little rather than no sleep had the same consequence. The researchers compared animals who were deprived of sleep for 72 hours with others who were not. They found those who missed out on rest had higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone. They also produced significantly fewer new brain cells in a particular region of the hippocampus. When the animals' corticosterone levels were kept at a constant level, the reduction in cell proliferation was abolished. The results suggest that elevated stress hormone levels resulting from sleep deprivation could explain the reduction in cell production in the adult brain. Sleep patterns were restored to normal within a week. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 9952 - Posted: 02.11.2007