by John Horgan As a science writer, I am sometimes asked what I consider to be the most important unsolved scientific problem. I used to rattle off pure science’s major mysteries: Why did the big bang bang? How did life begin on Earth, and does it exist anywhere else in the cosmos? How does a brain make a mind? Sometime after 9/11, however, I started replying that by far the biggest problem facing scientists—and all of humanity—is the persistence of warfare, or the threat thereof, as a means for resolving disputes between people. Skeptics might object that war is not a scientific issue. Certainly, it is a dauntingly complex phenomenon, with political, economic, and social ramifications. But the same could be said of problems such as global warming, population growth, and AIDS, all of which are being rigorously addressed by scientists. Moreover, I believe that the problem of warfare— unlike mysteries such as the origin of the universe or life or consciousness, which may prove to be intractable—can and will be solved. Research has already revealed enough about warfare to dispel two persistent, contradictory myths. One is the idea of the noble savage, which blames warfare on civilization and holds that humans in their primordial state were peaceful and loving. This is the implicit theme of Margaret Mead’s classic bestseller Coming of Age in Samoa. Mead describes the Polynesian island as a blissful utopia, whose inhabitants make love, not war. Actually, as critics of Mead have pointed out, Samoa has historically been wracked by warfare. © 2002 Science & Spirit Magazine.

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 7209 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Greg Ross Economist Paul Seabright is fascinated by human cooperation. Mistrust and violence are in our genes, he says, but abstract, symbolic thought permits us to accept one another as "honorary relatives"—a remarkable arrangement that ultimately underlies every aspect of modern civilization. In developing these ideas for his latest book—The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life—Seabright traveled widely, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. He currently lives in southwest France, where he teaches economics at the University of Toulouse. You point out that human society has led us to interact as strangers only in the last 10,000 years, while we still carry deeper instincts toward violence and suspicion of outsiders. How fragile is the social contract? How full is the glass? It can seem extraordinary that the vast complexity of human cooperation—from road traffic patterns to markets, the Internet and the systems that keep our houses and cities safe—should rest on nothing more solid than social convention, as though civilization were founded purely on table manners. I may think my property is secure and my life reasonably protected, but that is only because the rest of the world has agreed, for the time being, to let them be so. And what people have agreed to respect today they can agree to violate tomorrow. Yet it is just as remarkable how robust many of our conventions turn out to be in practice. Partly this is because conventions govern our reactions to people as roles and not just as individuals—an assassinated president can be replaced by a vice president, and the system as a whole can go on functioning, with people listening to the new president much as they would have listened to the old. Partly it is because the hydra of social life has too many heads to be easily incapacitated: The conventions that sustain our physical security are not coordinated in one place, such as the U.N. or the Pentagon, but are the result of billions of individual decisions concerning how we react to neighbours, friends and colleagues. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Evolution; Aggression
Link ID: 7208 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WHETHER it's driving too fast, bungee-jumping or reckless skateboarding, young men will try almost anything to be noticed by the opposite sex. But a study of attitudes to risk suggests that the only people impressed by their stunts are other men. Futile risk-taking might seem to have little going for it in Darwinian terms. So why were our rash ancestors not replaced by more cautious contemporaries? One idea is that risk-takers are advertising their fitness to potential mates by showing off their strength and bravery. This fits with the fact that men in their prime reproductive years take more risks. To test this idea, William Farthing of the University of Maine in Orono surveyed 48 young men and 52 young women on their attitudes to risky scenarios. Men thought women would be impressed by pointless gambles, but women in fact preferred cautious men (Evolution and Human Behaviour, vol 26, p 171). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 7207 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Goettingen (Germany) have uncovered the behaviour of microglial cells in the brain. In the current online edition of Science (Science, Epub ahead of print, 14. April 2005) they report on the busy action of these immune defense cells in the normal brain and their rapid response to cerebral hemorrhage in the first few hours following injury. Their imaging approach is transferable to other models of disease, and monitoring microglia behaviour under such circumstances promises to substantially enhance our knowledge about brain pathologies. Microglial cells are the primary immunocompetent cells in the brain. They are the first responsive element to any kind of brain damage or injury. Microglia are critically involved, for example, in neurodegenerative diseases and stroke. So far, microglial cells have been studied in vitro, i.e. outside the living organism. As a result, key aspects of microglia function have remained elusive such as their behavior in the intact brain or their immediate response to brain injury. Now a German team of researchers from two Max Planck Institutes in Heidelberg and Goettingen (Germany) report a breakthrough in the study of microglial cells in vivo. They uncovered the behaviour of microglial cells in the intact brain by making use of two key technologies: two-photon microscopy and a transgenic mouse model. While mice employed in their experiments were genetically modified to produce a green fluorescent protein (GFP), infrared laser light was used to excite GFPs and thus to visualize stained cells in the micoscope via detection of emitted fluorescent light - even through the intact mouse skullcap. Their findings appear in this weeks online edition of Science (Epub ahead of print).

Keyword: Glia; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 7206 - Posted: 04.16.2005

Understanding the interaction of Fragile X mental retardation protein and kissing complex RNAs Fragile X syndrome is the most common inherited form of mental retardation, affecting approximately 1 in 3600 males and 1 in 4000-6000 females. Fragile X syndrome results from loss of expression of the Fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP), the product of the FMR1 gene. Now, Drs. Robert and Jennifer Darnell and colleagues, from The Rockefeller University, report the uncovering of a new interaction between FMRP and messenger RNAs (mRNAs) containing a tertiary RNA structure termed a "kissing complex". Their studies, published in the April 15th issue of Genes & Development, provide a new direction for efforts to understand how the loss of FMRP function leads to the complex behavioral and cognitive defects characteristic of Fragile X syndrome. While the importance of identifying a function for FMRP has been clear for some time, what this function actually is has continued to evade researchers. FMRP is a protein characterized by the presence of three RNA binding domains: two tandem KH-type RNA binding domains and an RGG box. Scientists have focused on the identification of FMRP RNA ligands in an effort to understand FMRP function. This effort is particularly meaningful since FMRP is believed to regulate mRNA translation in the brain, and identifying the mRNA targets of this regulation would be a huge step in understanding how loss of this protein results in the varied and complex phenotypes of Fragile X syndrome.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7205 - Posted: 04.16.2005

Rest assured, the cells that guard your brain are no slackers. New movies of brain cells called microglia reveal that these sentries constantly extend and retract tiny arms to probe the fluid spaces between brain cells for signs of injury or infection. The findings present a radically new view of how these cells protect the brain. Microglia are the immune system's foot soldiers in the brain. They spring into action when damage occurs, creating a protective barrier around the injury and cleaning up dead cells and other debris. What the microglia do between crises has been unclear, largely because getting the cells under a microscope has required excising a chunk of brain tissue--thereby causing damage that sends the cells into emergency response mode. The new study gets around that obstacle by using genetically engineered mice whose microglia produce a fluorescent green protein. The research team, led by Axel Nimmerjahn at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, created a window on the brain of 12 such mice by shaving away a small patch of skull until only a transparent sliver of bone remained. Using a noninvasive technique called two-photon microscopy, the team snapped pictures of glowing microglia near the surface of the brain for several hours and compiled the images into time-lapse movies. Copyright © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 7204 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sid Perkins For the first time, scientists have found eggs with shells inside a dinosaur fossil, strengthening previous conjectures about the ancient reptiles' reproductive physiology. The dinosaur remains were unearthed in southern China from petrified sediments laid down between 100 million and 65 million years ago. The fragmentary fossil includes six back vertebrae, two adjacent tail vertebrae, and other bones from the dinosaur's pelvic area, says Tamaki Sato of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. The remains were too scant to assign to a particular species but enough for Sato and her colleagues to identify the creature generally as an oviraptorosaur, a member of a group of dinosaurs that includes the feathered Caudipteryx. The newfound specimen probably would have measured about 3 meters from head to tail. It's crystal clear that the creature was a female. Inside its pelvis, paleontologists found two 17-centimeter-long, potato-shaped eggs, complete with shells. Because the eggs nearly filled the dinosaur's pelvic cavity, they were ready to be laid, says Sato. The soft tissues inside eggs at that stage of development wouldn't have readily fossilized, so the shells are probably all that's preserved. Sato and her colleagues describe the fossil find in the April 15 Science. Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 7203 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PRACTICE doesn't make perfect for duelling meerkats. Vigorous play fighting as a pup does not improve a meerkat's chances in important adult battles, dispelling the most popular theory to explain youthful brawls. As juveniles, many animals indulge in dangerous and energetically costly battles with litter-mates or other youngsters. Biologists have often assumed the rationale behind this play fighting is to develop the motor skills and coordination necessary for successful adult fights. For meerkats the stakes are particularly high as only the dominant male-female pair in a colony gets to breed. The others are condemned to mere nest attendant duties. Lynda Sharpe at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, studied a population of wild meerkats in the southern Kalahari desert in South Africa from 1996 to 2002. She followed 18 pairs of same-sex litter-mates, recording the number, frequency and outcome of play fights and the individuals' ultimate status within the group as an adult. She found that young meerkats who played frequently were no more likely to win play fights, adult fights or become a member of the dominant pair. Furthermore, meerkats showed no sign of improvement with extra play sessions (Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2004.07.013). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 7202 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Chris Roberts THE enterprising vision of a medical electronics engineer at Bart's hospital has earned him a top prize. Clive Curtis's unique walking glasses, which improve mobility for people with brain conditions, won first prize in the technology section of the London NHS Innovation Competition. Mr Curtis came up with the idea after hearing about the walking problems of a friend with Parkinson's disease. "People with some brain conditions can walk reasonably well if they have a line to follow like the pattern of slabs on pavement," said Mr Curtis. "But if the pattern suddenly ends, they freeze and find it difficult to carry on. It makes life very difficult and could put them into potentially difficult situations if they step off a pavement into a road, for example." Mr Curtis's glasses generate these cue lines and are worn over a pair of normal specs. Now Mr Curtis has been given £5,000 from the East London Innovations Hub (ELIH) to further his work. Copyright © 2005 Archant Regional.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Vision
Link ID: 7201 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Mark Thiessen SALT LAKE CITY, -- A federal judge Thursday struck down the FDA ban on supplements containing ephedra, the once-popular weight-loss aid that was yanked from the market one year ago after it was linked to dozens of deaths. The judge ruled in favor of a Utah supplement company that challenged the Food and Drug Administration's ban. Nutraceutical International Corp. claimed that ephedra has been safely consumed for hundreds of years. Industry groups said supplements that included ephedra were once used by 12 million people. Last year's ban of ephedra was the first such outlawing of a dietary supplement. Research shows that ephedra -- an amphetamine-like herb -- can speed heart rate and constrict blood vessels even in seemingly healthy people but that it is particularly risky for those with heart disease or high blood pressure or who engage in strenuous exercise. Among the deaths linked to the substance was that of Baltimore Orioles pitching prospect Steve Bechler, who collapsed and died during spring training two years ago. © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7200 - Posted: 06.24.2010

-- Fatty molecules may modulate the electrical characteristics of nerve and heart cells by regulating the properties of key cell pores, according to research conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The findings suggest a novel mechanism in which dietary fat can attach directly to proteins that regulate bioelectricity. This can affect the performance of nerve and heart cells, with potentially broad-ranging health implications. The researchers report in the April 26 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the proteins in specific electrically responsive cell pores--voltage-sensing potassium channels--can bind to molecules of palmitate. Palmitate is a saturated fatty acid previously linked to "hardening" of the arteries and obesity and is a common fat in unhealthy diets. "In effect, the attachment of palmitate makes these potassium channels, called Kv1.1 channels, open more easily, and this can influence the transmission of electrical impulses along nerve cells and the contraction of heart muscle cells," says senior author Richard Gross, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine, of chemistry and of molecular biology and pharmacology and director of the Division of Bioorganic Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 7199 - Posted: 04.15.2005

NEW YORK--When Daniel Tammet set the European record for pi memorization last year, memorizing 22,514 digits in just over 5 hours, he attributed the feat to his ability to see numbers as complex, 3-dimensional landscapes, complete with color, texture, and sometimes even sound. Now researchers say they've found evidence to support Tammet's claim that his enriched perception is at the heart of his knack for number memorization. Tammet's experience with numbers is an example of synesthesia, a puzzling phenomenon in which a certain type of stimulus triggers a hallucinatory perception. Some synesthetes associate musical notes with distinct colors, for example, or foods with shapes (as in "pointy" flavored chicken) [ScienceNOW, 24 March 2005]. Tammet, a 26-year-old from Kent, United Kingdom, says he sees digits from 0 to 9 as having distinct sizes and locations in space. To test whether this aspect of his synesthesia aids his numerical memory, neuroscientists Vilayanur Ramachandran, Shai Azoulai, and Edward Hubbard at the University of California, San Diego, gave him a series of memory tests in which he had 3 minutes to memorize 100 digits and their locations in a 10 by 10 array. When the digits were all the same font size, Tammet recalled 68 correctly, compared to an average of about eight for a control group, and he remembered all 68 when tested again 3 days later. But when the researchers repeated the test using an array in which the digits varied in size to disrupt Tammet's synesthetic sizing scheme, his performance plummeted to just 16 correct on the day of the test and zero 3 days later, according to a poster presented here 10 April at a meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Copyright © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 7198 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan Freinkel The brain and other complex mechanisms of the human nervous system rely on 40 or so basic nutrients to run smoothly. The lack of any one—be it zinc or magnesium, chromium or folic acid—can cause a malfunction, leading to depression, irritability, or worse. When pigs are penned in close quarters, some become so irritable they savage their pen mates’ ears and tails, a problem farmers call ear-and-tail-biting syndrome. David Hardy, a Canadian hog-feed salesman from the farmlands of southern Alberta, knew that behavior well. Years of experience had taught him something else: All it takes to calm disturbed pigs down is a good dose of vitamins and minerals in their feed. That came to Hardy’s mind one November evening in 1995 when an acquaintance, Tony Stephan, began confiding his troubles. His wife, Deborah, had killed herself the year before after struggling with manic depression and losing her father to suicide. Now two of his 10 children seemed headed down the same road: Twenty-two-year-old Autumn was in a psychiatric hospital and 15-year-old Joseph had become angry and aggressive. He had been diagnosed as bipolar, a term for manic depression, but even with medication he was prone to outbursts so violent that the rest of the family feared for their lives. The boy’s irritability sounded familiar to Hardy. I don’t know a whole lot about mental illness, Hardy told Stephan, but I’ve seen similar behavior in the hog barn, and it’s easy to cure. © 2004 The Walt Disney Company

Keyword: Depression; Aggression
Link ID: 7197 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Delinquency, violence, and/or drug abuse are known to be influenced by the way that psychosocial, situational, and hereditary factors interact. Only recently have researchers begun to examine the effects that specific genotypes and psychosocial factors may have on behavior. A study in the April issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research looks at what impact interactions between a polymorphism of the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene and family relations may have on adolescent drinking. "Hereditary factors can explain quite a lot of the variance in alcohol consumption," said Kent W. Nilsson, a researcher at the Centre for Clinical Research at Uppsala University in Sweden and corresponding author for the study. "Likewise, environmental factors can have a fairly high impact on alcohol consumption. In addition, other studies have shown that hereditary risks may be amplified in an unfavourable environment, and that different, and sometimes contradicting, results of gene associations may be explained by different environmental/background factors of the study participants." "Most complex behavioral disorders such as alcoholism have a heritability in the range of 40 to 60 percent, so we know there must be an important influence of life experience as well, and potential for interactions," said Markus Heilig, clinical director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "The problem is that these disorders are also polygenic. That means that each specific locus is only likely to contribute a small component of disease risk, a few percent at best. That in itself is hard enough to find unless studies are very large. Finding the interaction of course is even more challenging."

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7196 - Posted: 04.15.2005

CHAMPAIGN, IL. -- According to conventional wisdom, babies don't begin to develop sophisticated psychological reasoning about people until they are about 4 years old. A study of 15-month-olds at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proves otherwise. The findings, published in the April 8 issue of the journal Science, potentially could lead to an early screening tool for autism, a developmental disability that is marked by a failure on false-belief and related tasks, the researchers say. In a non-verbal experiment, each participating baby, 56 in all, sat on a parent's lap and faced an actor (a university student). On the table between the baby and the actor was a toy watermelon slice and two boxes whose openings faced each other; one box was green, the other yellow. To start, the actor picked up the watermelon slice, played with it, and then hid it in the green box. On subsequent trials, the actor always reached into the green box, as though to grasp the watermelon slice she had hidden there. Then, seemingly unbeknownst to the actor but in sight of the infant, the watermelon slice moved to the yellow box.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 7195 - Posted: 04.15.2005

Roxanne Khamsi Women who have had both their ovaries removed are at double the normal risk of developing Parkinson's disease, according to a study of medical records stretching back half a century. But experts stress that ovary removal - or ovariectomy - can in many cases save lives. Women's ovaries produce significant amounts of the hormone oestrogen, which has been shown to protect certain types of nerve cell. "It acts on cells to make them less susceptible to toxins," says Kieran Breen, director of research at the Parkinson's Disease Society in London. He adds that this may happen because the hormone activates certain genes that produce protective proteins. The nerve cells that oestrogen seems to help include those in the substantia nigra, an area deep in the brain that controls voluntary movements. Patients with Parkinson's disease show degeneration in this region, leading to the disease's characteristic shaking and unsteadiness, explains neurologist Walter Rocca of the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota. Rocca and his colleagues wanted to understand how surgical removal of the ovaries influences a woman's chance of developing Parkinson's disease or its symptoms. To do this, they searched medical records from 1950 to 1987 from Olmstead County in Minnesota, which had a linkage system that consolidated each person's medical files in a single dossier. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Parkinsons; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 7194 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Execution by lethal injection may not be the painless procedure most Americans assume, say researchers from Florida and Virginia. They examined post-mortem blood levels of anaesthetic and believe that prisoners may have been capable of feeling pain in almost 90% of cases and may have actually been conscious when they were put to death in over 40% of cases. Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated in the US, 788 people have been killed by lethal injection. The procedure typically involves the injection of three substances: first, sodium thiopental to induce anaesthesia, followed by pancuronium bromide to relax muscles, and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart. But doctors and nurses are prohibited by healthcare professionals’ ethical guidelines from participating in or assisting with executions, and the technicians involved have no specific training in administering anaesthetics. “My impression is that lethal injection as practiced in the US now is no more humane than the gas chamber or electrocution, which have both been deemed inhumane,” says Leonidas Koniaris, a surgeon in Miami and one of the authors on the paper. He is not, he told New Scientist, against the death penalty per se. But Kyle Janek, a Texas senator and anaesthesiologist, and a vocal advocate of the death penalty, insists that levels of anaesthetic are more than adequate. He says that an inmate will typically receive up to 3 grams - about 10 times the amount given before surgery. “I can attest with all medical certainty that anyone receiving that massive dose will be under anaesthesia,” he said in a recent editorial. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 7193 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A PIONEERING treatment has allowed paralysed dogs to regain some movement. The results have raised hopes that the method will work in people too. So far, nine dogs paralysed in road accidents or by spinal disc injuries have been treated by veterinary surgeons Robin Franklin and Nick Jeffery of the University of Cambridge. Within a month, all regained the ability to make jerky movements in their hind legs, Jeffery told a meeting in Birmingham, UK, this week, although they are only slowly gaining the ability to support their own weight. Many different approaches to treating spinal injuries are being explored, but promising results in small animals such as rats have often not been repeated in larger animals. That is one of the reasons why the dog results are exciting, says Geoffrey Raisman of the Institute of Neurology at University College London, one of the pioneers of the method used by the Cambridge team. "I think that these findings in dogs are directly relevant to the human situation," he says. "Of course, we canıt know for sure without doing the work but it is a very good indicator that we can expect the same effects. We are hoping to start similar trials in humans within a couple of years." In Australia, three patients have already been treated using the same method (New Scientist, 12 July 2002, p 18). But the results will not be revealed until 2007. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 7192 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By STEPHANIE PACE A UC Berkeley psychology researcher is experimenting with inbred mouse strains to forage for insight into how genes affect behavioral traits and emotionality. The research shows that prenatal and postnatal environments are also useful in determining adult behavior in mice. “Why are some people highly responsive and highly reactive to stress? Why are some people calm and mellow?” said Darlene Francis, a professor in the School of Public Health and a researcher in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. Francis claims that it is more likely that the development of behavioral traits result more from environmental factors during development rather than from genetic differences between offspring. “We’re using rat and mice models as mathematical approaches to research and as an alternative system to ask questions we can’t ask in people,” Francis said. According to Francis, the mechanisms of gene regulation are similar among rats, mice and humans. Though there are critical variables in humans that are different from rat and mice models, the mechanism by which genes are regulated are the same, Francis said. To investigate the biological basis of stress responses and differences in stress levels, Francis works with animal models to design experiments that cannot be duplicated in the real world. (c) 2005

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7191 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A treatment that has helped paralysed dogs to move could also help people, researchers have claimed. Veterinary surgeons from the University of Cambridge have treated nine dogs, who were all able to move their hind leg jerkily, within a month. The treatment takes nerve cells from the brain and injects them into the damaged part of the spinal cord. An expert from the Institute of Neurology said he believed the same benefits could be seen in humans. An Australian team has already treated humans with OEG cells, but the results will not be published until 2007. The UK researchers studied dogs which had been paralysed in road accidents, or through spinal cord injuries. All had been unable to move for at least three months. The treatment uses olfactory ensheathing glia (OEG) cells, which are present at the back of the nose. They are the only nerve cells capable of constant regeneration. The cells were collected by opening the dogs' skulls. They were then multiplied in the lab, and injected into the spinal cord. In addition to regaining some movement, the animals also appeared to recover some sensation below the injury site. Three can now warn their owners if they need to empty their bladder, although they have not regained control. The researchers say there is no indication the dogs can feel pain again but, by the same token, they do not appear to be suffering pain from a severed nerve - a potential side effect of the treatment. (C)BBC

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 7190 - Posted: 04.14.2005