Robots that act like rat pups can tell us something about the behavior of both, according to UC Davis researchers. Sanjay Joshi, assistant professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering, and associate professor of psychology Jeffrey Schank have recorded the behavior of rat pups and built rat-like robots with the same basic senses and motor skills to see how behavior can emerge from a simple set of rules. Seven to 10-day-old rat pups, blind and deaf, do not seem to do a whole lot. Videotaped in a rectangular arena in Schank's laboratory, they move about until they hit a wall, feel their way along the wall until their nose goes into a corner, then mostly stay put. Because their senses and responses are so limited, pups should be a good starting point for building robots that can do the same thing. Joshi's laboratory built foot-long robots with tapered snouts, about the same shape as a rat pup. The robots are ringed by sensors so that they "feel" when they bump into a wall or corner. They are programmed to stay in contact with objects they touch, as rats do. But when the robotic "rats" were put into a rectangular arena like that used for experiments with real rats, the robots showed a new behavior. They scuttled along the walls and repeatedly bumped into one corner, but favored one wall. Instead of stopping in a corner they kept going, circling the arena.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 6876 - Posted: 02.16.2005

By Sandra G. Boodman From the time her son was born, Jennifer DeWeese said, she suspected something was wrong. As an infant he cried inconsolably and slept mostly in hour-long snatches. At 3, he was always irritable and had prolonged tantrums triggered by the slightest change in his routine. A therapist told his mother he was emotionally disturbed and suggested she read a popular book about childhood bipolar disorder. A year later a child psychiatrist in Virginia Beach made the diagnosis: the 4 1/2 -year-old was manic-depressive. A few months later, when his even-tempered sister grew moody and volatile, DeWeese took her to the same psychiatrist. They sat down with DeWeese's well-thumbed book about bipolar children and went through its symptom checklist. Based largely on those results and the family's history -- DeWeese said she learned during her divorce that the children's father had been diagnosed as bipolar in high school -- the psychiatrist told DeWeese her 5 1/2-year-old daughter was bipolar, too. "I feel relieved to know there is something causing their symptoms and something we can do about it," said DeWeese, 34. She is convinced, she said, that her children's problems are inherited, not a reaction to their father's permanent departure, a bitter divorce marked by allegations of spousal abuse, a bankruptcy that resulted in the loss of the family's house and car, DeWeese's frequent hospitalizations for kidney disease and the arrival of a new stepfather. Now 6 and 8, DeWeese's son and daughter exemplify a trend that is roiling mental heath: the burgeoning number of children diagnosed with bipolar illness, also known as manic depression, which affects about 2.3 million Americans. © Copyright 1996-2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 6875 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY My surgeon did a marvelous job replacing my arthritic knees and, at the same time, straightening my terribly bowed legs when, at 63, I decided to have knee replacement surgery. Although a class given at the hospital before the operation repeatedly emphasized the importance of adequate pain control, the surgeon and his helpers were not experts in treating prolonged, debilitating postoperative pain. They are hardly alone. Pain management is not generally taught as a part of medical education, not even to residents in orthopedic surgery. As a result, most doctors are clueless or unnecessarily cautious about treating pain, especially chronic pain like that caused by incurable neurological or muscular disorders. They are especially ill-informed about opioids, which are synthetic versions of morphine, the most potent painkillers that can be taken by mouth. As Dr. Jennifer P. Schneider writes about opioids in her book "Living With Chronic Pain" (Healthy Living Books, $15.95), "Fear and lack of knowledge of these drugs prevent many doctors from prescribing them for people whose pain is caused by anything other than cancer." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6874 - Posted: 02.15.2005

By ANDREW POLLACK Despite all the advances of modern medicine, the main drugs used to fight pain today are essentially the same as those used in ancient times. Hippocrates wrote about the pain-soothing effects of willow bark and leaves as early as 400 B.C. Opium was cultivated long before that. Aspirin and morphine, based on the active ingredients in these traditional remedies, were isolated in the 1800's and helped form the foundation of the modern pharmaceutical industry. But scientists are now trying to find new ways of fighting pain. The effort has been given new impetus by the recent withdrawal of Vioxx and the questions surrounding the safety of similar pills like Celebrex and Bextra. Those concerns come on top of the problems of abuse of narcotic painkillers like OxyContin. "There's a huge void, and no one is filling it," said Remi Barbier, chief executive of Pain Therapeutics, a company in South San Francisco, Calif. But Dr. Barbier's company and dozens of others are trying. And some new treatments may come from things in nature that soothe or sting, like marijuana, hot chili peppers, nicotine and deadly toxins of snails and fish. While the withdrawal of Vioxx leaves more room for newcomers, it also makes their challenge harder. Not only have opioids and aspirin been hard to beat, but the Food and Drug Administration is now expected to demand more evidence that drugs are safe before approving them. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 6873 - Posted: 02.15.2005

The following statement is being released by the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, located at 710 West 168th Street, New York City. It follows the announcement, earlier today, of a decision by Amgen Incorporated, manufacturer of GDNF, an experimental neural growth factor, to forgo the offer of reinstatement of GDNF to patients who were involved in recent clinical trials of the treatment. The authors of the PDF statement are Stanley Fahn, M.D., the Foundation’s Scientific Director, and Robin Anthony Elliott, its Executive Director. "The Amgen announcement, which followed a resolution by the PDF Board of Directors urging the company to permit patients who participated in the company’s clinical trials the option of continued access to GDNF, is deeply disappointing to PDF, to the Parkinson’s community, and to the participating patients," the statement reads. "However well-intentioned the company may have been in wrestling with this issue, we believe it has reached the wrong decision – whether judged in terms of science, or the desires of the people who participated in the clinical trials, or the issues of safety." "In terms of the science, we would argue that the reinstatement of GDNF, if accompanied by the continuing collection of efficacy and safety data, would enable scientists and regulatory authorities to monitor the long-term aspects of safety and efficacy of the treatment. Furthermore, the observation of increased fluorodopa uptake in PET scans needs to be carefully followed over time to determine if this will eventually translate into clinical improvement. Giving up this opportunity to learn is, in our view, a mistake." © 2005 The Parkinson’s Disease Foundation

Keyword: Parkinsons; Trophic Factors
Link ID: 6872 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The supersensitivity to dopamine that is characteristic of schizophrenia can be caused by mutations to a wide variety of genes, rather than alterations to just two or three specific genes, says a University of Toronto researcher. In research published in the Feb. 15 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Toronto pharmacology professor Philip Seeman and his 16 colleagues in eight universities show that mutations to genes that have no relation to the brain's dopamine receptors can still cause those receptors to become highly sensitive to their own dopamine, a condition that leads to psychosis. By examining brain tissue from mice with various gene mutations, the researchers determined that the brain appears to compensate for the altered gene by becoming supersensitive to dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that allows people to move, think and feel. "The altered genes may provoke the brain to respond and compensate, and compensation often involves the dopamine system going into high gear," says Seeman. "The brain knows about mistakes, and to protect itself, it makes sense for the compensation to re-adjust the dopamine system to preserve the functions – such as movement and thought – that the body and brain needs."

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 6871 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Your parents may have told you about the birds and bees, but scientists are learning a bit about love from fruit flies. As this ScienCentral News video explains, biologists studying flirtatious flies are learning how our genes shape sex appeal—and everything else. For a certain species of male fruit fly, the wing's the thing—male sex appeal boils down to a black spot on the suitor's wings. "The species that have these spots have an elaborate courtship ritual where they dart out in front of the females and they extend their wings and do a little dance while they display these spots," says Sean Carroll, genetics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "It's quite clear that these spots are a visual cue that the females are picking up on in the selection of mates, and the success of mating of males being linked to their possession of this trait—that process is called sexual selection and it's a very powerful evolutionary force." Since fruit flies have long been the workhorses of genetics, Carroll and his colleagues used them to study how such traits evolve at the genetic level. Biologists already knew that every gene has two parts—the DNA that does the work, and the DNA that tells the gene where to work. "And one of the biggest questions in evolution," says Carroll, "is what parts are evolving, is it the part that does the work, or is it the instructions for where that work's going to be done?" © ScienCentral, 2000- 2005.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 6870 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A highly sensitive post-mortem test could help scientists more accurately determine if a person died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a human neurological disorder caused by the same class of infectious proteins that trigger mad cow disease, according to a new study supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The finding opens the possibility that such testing might be refined in the future so it can be used to detect prion disease in living people and animals before the onset of symptoms. The test, called conformation-dependent immunoassay (CDI), was originally developed to detect various forms of disease-causing proteins called prions in cows, sheep, deer and other animals. In the new study, researchers led by Jiri Safar, M.D., Bruce Miller, M.D., Michael Geschwind, M.D., Stephen DeArmond, M.D., and Nobel Laureate Stanley B. Prusiner, M.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, found that CDI not only identifies prions in human brain tissue but is faster and far more precise than the standard immunological detection methods, which only detect a small fraction of the infectious prions that may be in the brain. The finding appears in the March 1, 2005 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, www.pnas.org. Two components of the NIH, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)* and the National Institute on Aging (NIA), supported the study. Additional support was provided by the John Douglas French Foundation for Alzheimer's research, the McBean Foundation, and the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center of California.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 6869 - Posted: 02.15.2005

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — If a man and a woman are in love, the bewitched fellow loses testosterone — a hormone linked to strength and aggressiveness — while his female partner actually gains some of the potent male hormone and its effects, according to a recent study. The findings, published in the current Harvard Health Letter, suggest that love brings members of the opposite sex together by reducing some of their differences. Researchers made the determination after comparing 24 young adults who had recently fallen in love with the same number of people currently not feeling love pangs. Blood was drawn from all of the test subjects. It then was analyzed for hormonal contents, which revealed the testosterone female spike and male drop. Donatella Marazziti and colleague Domenico Canale, University of Pisa scientists who conducted the study, are not sure why men in love lose testosterone while women in love gain it. Marazziti told Discovery News that the changes might be linked to sexual behavior. The blood test also revealed that all people in love, both men and women, gain heightened levels of cortisol, a hormone linked to stress. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 6868 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A pioneering form of gene therapy has apparently cured deafness in guinea pigs, raising hopes that the same procedure might work in people. "It's the first time anyone has biologically repaired the hearing of animals," says Yehoash Raphael at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and head of the US-Japanese team that developed the technique. The therapy promotes the regrowth of crucial hair cells in the cochlea, the part of the inner ear which registers sound. After treatment, the researchers used sensory electrodes around the animals' heads to show that the auditory nerves of treated - but not untreated - animals were now registering sound. Deafness is a major problem in people: millions of people worldwide become deaf or hearing impaired every year. This can occur if a person's inner-ear hair cells are destroyed by exposure to loud noise, to some antibiotic drugs, or simply through old age. The hair cells act like miniature microphones, capturing sound vibrations from fluid in the ear and translating the movement into nerve signals. Raphael says one future possibility would be to use the therapy to improve hearing in people who already wear cochlear implants. These electrical devices are of some help to people lacking hair cells, but the regrowth of even some hairs could boost their hearing further. Raphael says that the next experiments in guinea pigs will focus on this combination. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 6867 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Philip Ball An inability to process language needn't stop you from doing maths, UK researchers have found. They say that three men with severe aphasia, a linguistic impairment, can understand 'grammatical' rules in mathematics even though they cannot handle analogous rules in language. Aphasia leaves people unable to use or comprehend words, and is often triggered by stroke or other brain injuries. The discovery challenges a commonly held view that linguistic and mathematical mental processing draw on the same cognitive resources. "Our findings very strongly turn that idea on its head," says Rosemary Varley, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sheffield, UK. The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. According to the view of cognition developed by linguist Noam Chomsky, language processing is a fundamental skill that is used for related grammatical tasks in the brain, such as certain mathematical ones. Previous studies of the relationship between linguistic and mathematical ability have lent some support to this notion. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 6866 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor There stood Jack Dumbacher, innocently trying to trap a gorgeous bird of paradise in the mist net he'd set up for his research in a New Guinea forest, when the net entangled a flying stranger, all vivid orange and black. The unwanted bird clawed Dumbacher's fingers, nipped them with its beak, and when the startled scientist put a bleeding finger to his mouth, he suddenly felt a burning, tingling sensation on his tongue and lips -- which soon became briefly numb. The bird was a hooded pitohui (pronounced PIT-a-hooey), and the encounter in Papua New Guinea 15 years ago led the ornithologist to abandon his research into birds of paradise and to follow a mysterious, deadly poison that links the birds in the highland Papuan villages to frogs in the lowland South American jungles of Colombia -- and to beetles in both far-off habitats. Dumbacher and his colleagues have now discovered that a family of beetles in New Guinea and their distant relatives more than 9,500 miles away, on the other side of the Pacific, are apparently responsible for the toxins in Dumbacher's pitohui birds -- the first poisonous birds discovered anywhere - - and Phyllobates terribilis, the poison-dart frogs of Colombia. The frogs got their name because the Choco Indians use the same poison to tip their arrows and blowpipe darts when they hunt for monkeys and other game animals. ©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 6865 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Arthur L. Caplan Is the pharmaceutical industry a dangerous and crooked business that federal and state authorities need to bring to heel? Should those who develop, market or prescribe drugs hang their heads in shame when faced with the stark reality of what they do to earn a living? Is Big Pharma in fact the moral equivalent of the tobacco industry? One could well come away from Marcia Angell's The Truth about the Drug Companies or Jerome Kassirer's On the Take thinking so. In both books, the sort of moral opprobrium once directed against Big Tobacco is aimed squarely at the pharmaceutical industry, along with its legions of lobbyists, the politicians awash in its campaign contributions and the doctors it has bought, free meal by free meal, junket by junket, free sample by free sample and trinket by trinket. Kassirer and Angell, who are physicians at Tufts and Harvard, respectively, and who are both former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, are not the only authors currently taking a critical look at industry excesses. Harvard physician and pharmacoepidemiologist Jerry Avorn also has a new book examining some of the problems with the way prescription drugs are brought to market, the thoughtful and incisive Powerful Medicines. It's not hard to see why demonization of the pharmaceutical industry has become such a popular sport. As Avorn points out, drug companies are now so obsessed with profits that they are no longer willing to pay for the innovative research that they claim justifies the high cost of their products. He and Angell each demonstrate that the numbers do not support the contention that without high prices there would be no money for the next generation of miracle drugs. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6864 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Take a moment and look at a picture near you. What did you see? How long did it take you to understand what was in the image, meaning how long did it take you to realize the green blob was a tree? Or that the orange circle was a piece of fruit? Most likely you assume that it took you no time at all, you just knew. Psychologists who study how we perceive images used to think that, before the process of object recognition and categorization could begin, the brain must first separate the figure in the image—such as a tree, or a piece of fruit—from its background. However, new research shows we actually categorize objects before we identify them. It means that, by the time your brain even realizes you are looking at something, you already know what that thing is. The new research was conducted by Kalanit Grill-Spector of Stanford University and Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their article, "Visual Recognition: As Soon as You Know It’s There, You Know What It Is," will appear in the February 2005 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 6863 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sometimes the mere act of eating can make us happy, but new research suggests that consuming the right foods is enough to relieve depression. Two nutrients found in foods such as fish, walnuts, and beets worked as well as prescription antidepressants in preventing depression in rats. The findings may shed new light what causes the disorder and may lead to new therapies for depression. Despite decades of research, scientists are still puzzled about what exactly happens in the brain during bouts of depression. Some cultures suffer less from the disorder, and many researchers believe diet plays a role. But teasing out the culinary panacea has been slow going. Research has linked omega-3 oil, available as an over-the-counter nutritional supplement, to cardiovascular health, and it also appears to improve mood and cognitive function. Other studies suggest that the nutrient uridine also affects brain function. A team of researchers led by neurobiologist William Carlezon at Harvard's McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, studied how omega-3 fatty acids and uridine affect the behavior of rats using a standard depression test. Rats forced to swim in chilled water with no way to escape will normally become hopeless and float motionlessly. But when treated with prescription antidepressants, rats remain active longer, searching for an escape. The team found that rats whose diets were supplemented with high levels of omega-3 oil for at least 30 days stayed active and focused on escape. Similarly, rats injected with high levels of uridine were equally tenacious. These results were not seen in untreated rats, the team reports in the 15 February issue of Biological Psychiatry. Copyright © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6862 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Hamilton, ON - A meticulous diary kept by a mother of twins has revealed indicators of autistic behaviour in children as young as six months of age. The findings are published today in Neurocase. Mel Rutherford, assistant professor of psychology at McMaster University, says the diary provides a rare and unprecedented opportunity to observe the early development of autism. She says the mother of fraternal twins recorded her observations almost daily for about five years, beginning before the twins’ birth. She charted the children’s development in speech, social interactions, growth, and sleep disturbances, unaware that one twin was autistic until a diagnosis was made at three years of age. “It appears that children with autism develop normally for six months, and then begin developing atypically,” says Rutherford. “As typical children begin to accelerate in social development, the child with autism makes only minor gains.” During the first six months, both twins smiled, engaged in socially responsive vocalization, and showed a preference for family members over other people. By the age of one, however, the male twin showed less eye contact, less verbal communication, and less affection toward others than did his sister. His sleep patterns were also noticeably different from his sister’s. By the age of two, the boy had developed a fixation on particular patterns and puzzles; at age three, a child psychologist noted the boy “did not offer comfort if others are in distress and will not come for comfort is he is hurt.” The mother’s diary tells of her son’s facial expressions that ranged from limited to “spaced-out'.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 6861 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Treatments for mood and anxiety disorders are thought to work, in part, by helping patients control the stresses in their lives. A new study in rats by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grantees provides insight into the brain mechanisms likely involved. When it deems a stressor controllable, an executive hub in the front of the brain quells an alarm center deep in the brainstem, preventing the adverse behavioral and physiological effects of uncontrollable stress. "It's as if the prefrontal cortex says: 'Cool it, brainstem! We have control over this and there is no need to get so excited'," quipped Steven Maier, Ph.D., University of Colorado, whose study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Maier and colleagues posted their findings online in Nature Neuroscience, February 6, 2005. Lack of control over stressful life experiences has been implicated in mood and anxiety disorders. Rats exposed to uncontrollable stress develop learned helplessness, a syndrome similar to depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They lose the ability to learn how to escape stressors. Activation of a brainstem area (dorsal raphe nucleus) has been implicated in such reactions. But this area is too small and lacks the proper sensory inputs to judge whether a stressor is controllable. Many of its inputs come conspicuously from the mid-prefrontal cortex area (medial prefrontal cortex), seat of higher order functions, such as problem-solving and learning from experience. These signals are sent via the chemical messenger serotonin, which is involved in mood regulation and in mediating the effects of the most widely prescribed antidepressants. The medial prefrontal cortex has also been implicated as the source of an "all clear" signal that quells fear in rats.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 6860 - Posted: 02.12.2005

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A behavioral neuroscientist at the University at Buffalo holds that the ingestion of afterbirth by a mother, a feature of pregnancy in nearly all non-human mammals, not only relieves postpartum pain, but optimizes the onset of maternal behavior by mediating the activity of specific opioid activity circuits in the brain. Mark Kristal, Ph.D., professor of psychology at UB and director the graduate program in behavioral neuroscience, has received a two-year $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, to test his hypothesis. In 1986 Kristal discovered an opioid-enhancing molecule he called the Placental Opioid-Enhancing Factor or POEF. His discovery led to a series of studies that shed light on the way in which POEF modulates how opioids inhibit nociceptive processing in the nervous system -- processing in specific areas of the brain that recognize certain kinds of pain. Kristal says this research may lead to novel ways of treating addiction in humans by manipulating the effectiveness of the opiates we produce in our own bodies. It also may enable physicians to obtain current levels of pain relief, he says, "by administering much, much, much smaller amounts of opioid analgesics."

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6859 - Posted: 02.12.2005

Nathan Seppa Terrible sadness, a sudden fright, or other emotional stress can bring on heart attack symptoms in people not actually experiencing a heart attack, according to two new reports. The researchers examined people who showed up at hospitals with chest pain and an impaired capacity to pump blood but no heart-tissue damage or clogged coronary arteries. Rather, the patients turned out to be experiencing physical effects after stressful events, such as the death of a loved one. Cardiologist Hunter C. Champion of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore and his colleagues treated 18 women and 1 man with severe symptoms. After initial tests had ruled out a heart attack, bedside talks revealed that all the patients had recently had a stressful experience. These included the death of spouse, a car accident, an armed robbery, a family dispute, a court appearance, and a surprise party. The patients had blood concentrations of catecholamine hormones that were more than seven times normal and two to three times as great as those in five patients having heart attacks triggered by coronary artery blockages. Catecholamines, which include adrenaline and dopamine, are powerful hormones that regulate heart rate, blood pressure, and other body processes. The researchers report their findings in the Feb. 10 New England Journal of Medicine. Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 6858 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A German study has added weight to the argument that a herbal remedy is an effective treatment for depression. Researchers compared the effectiveness of St John's wort to anti-depressant drug paroxetine in treating moderate and severe depression. The team found half of those with the condition improved when given the herb, compared with a third using the drug, the British Medical Journal reported. UK experts said the study of 244 people should be treated with caution. The study also found patients on paroxetine - also known as Seroxat - suffered more side effects. In both cases the most common side effect was stomach upsets, the study by Karlsruhe-based Dr Willmar Schwabe Pharmaceuticals and the Institute for Medical Research Management and Biometrics in Nurnberg found. Report co-author Dr Meinhard Kieser said: "Our results support the use of St John's wort as an alternative to standard anti-depressants in moderate to severe depression, especially as it is well tolerated." The herb is not recommended for use by the UK's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) because of uncertainty about what constitutes an appropriate dose, and its potential side effects when mixed with other drugs. However its guidelines do acknowledge there is some evidence to suggest St John's wort could benefit people with mild or moderate depression. Previous studies have produced mixed results about whether it is effective in treating more serious forms of depression. The herb, which is extracted from bright yellow star-shaped flowers, has been used for centuries as a folk medicine for anxiety and stress. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6857 - Posted: 02.11.2005