DURHAM, N.C. — A "stink fight" between ring-tailed lemurs might be dead serious to them. But to observers, the scented struggle ranks among the more odd, even comical sights at the Duke University Primate Center — already renowned for the biological eccentricities of its exotic denizens Preparations for battle begin when male combatants load their "weapons" — vigorously rubbing their tails against their shoulders and between their wrists, infusing the fur with scent from glands there. So armed — or tailed — they launch their attacks, feathery tails arched over their backs, ears flattened and squeaking warnings. They relentlessly flick their tails at one another until one of the adversaries comes to his scentses, gets the odiferous message and retreats. But until the research of Duke biologist Christine Drea and student Elizabeth Scordato, scientists had no idea what chemical messages were being wafted back and forth in such fights. More broadly, they have not understood the complex "language" of multiple scents that lemurs use to communicate a variety of messages from aggression to mating receptiveness.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Language
Link ID: 5980 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin If you're a loser in the dating game, your name might be part of the problem. New research has revealed that the vowel sounds in your name could influence how others judge the attractiveness of your face. Amy Perfors, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who carried out the study, believes the effect is subconscious. Observers unwittingly deem others better looking if they have the right moniker, she says. Perfors made the discovery by posting pictures of 24 friends on hotornot.com, a website that allows users to award marks out of ten for others' attractiveness. Names are not usually displayed with the pictures, but for her experiment Perfors made sure that a name (not necessarily a truthful one) was displayed in the photo's upper corner. She later posted the same photographs with different names, and once again collected the feedback. Average scores for the faces changed depending on the name they were given, Perfors told the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society last week in Chicago, Illinois. ©2004 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5979 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Using a new molecular genetic technique, scientists have turned procrastinating primates into workaholics by temporarily suppressing a gene in a brain circuit involved in reward learning. Without the gene, the monkeys lost their sense of balance between reward and the work required to get it, say researchers at the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). "The gene makes a receptor for a key brain messenger chemical, dopamine," explained Barry Richmond, M.D., NIMH Laboratory of Neuropsychology. "The gene knockdown triggered a remarkable transformation in the simian work ethic. Like many of us, monkeys normally slack off initially in working toward a distant goal. They work more efficiently—make fewer errors—as they get closer to being rewarded. But without the dopamine receptor, they consistently stayed on-task and made few errors, because they could no longer learn to use visual cues to predict how their work was going to get them a reward." Richmond, Zheng Liu, Ph.D., Edward Ginns, M.D., and colleagues, report on their findings in the August 17, 2004 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online the week of August 9th.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5978 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANNETTE RACOND Certain moments in my life are like sharply focused snapshots that never fade. I was in my flannel pajamas watching TV in my parents' bedroom in Douglaston, N.Y., the day Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. More than a decade later, when news broke of John Lennon's death, I was cramming for a test in my dorm room at Boston University. On April 1, 2004, I had another such moment: My mother called to tell me that Jeff Matovic, a 31-year-old husband and father from Lyndhurst, Ohio, had become the first person with Tourette's syndrome in the United States to be treated with deep brain stimulation. His doctors say the procedure has so far relieved Mr. Matovic of the tics that came with his disorder. He is no longer a constant prisoner to the abrupt and repetitive muscle movements and vocalizations that made his life unbearable. Mr. Matovic can now experience the beauty of stillness. As a fellow Tourette's syndrome sufferer, Mr. Matovic's story has given me hope that maybe I, too, can be freed from my tics, twitches, bobs, nods, grunts, squirms, hiccups and jolting motions. Even though I exhibited symptoms of Tourette's syndrome at age 6, the disorder was not diagnosed until I was 28. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 5977 - Posted: 08.10.2004

By JOHN LANGONE At on time or another, every child experiences sadness, anger and loneliness, and displays a range of odd mannerisms. When these normal feelings are overwhelming and interfere with their daily lives, the behavior has become a disorder. Autism and Asperger's syndrome are closely related pervasive developmental disorders. Asperger's is often less severe, but both are marked, among other characteristics, by flawed social interaction and repetitive behavior. Many autistic children never learn to speak, and if they do they may speak in odd ways. They also have difficulty making eye contact. Children with Asperger's have normal language skills and I.Q.'s, although their communication skills are impaired. These books provide an empathetic look into the two complex syndromes and into the minds of children who have them, as well as offering guidelines for parents. Dr. Buten, the founder of an autism treatment center outside Paris, suggests that clear definitions and descriptions of autism are frustratingly elusive. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 5976 - Posted: 08.10.2004

By BENEDICT CAREY Good therapists usually work to resolve conflicts, not inflame them. But there is a civil war going on in psychology, and not everyone is in the mood for healing. On one side are experts who argue that what therapists do in their consulting rooms should be backed by scientific studies proving its worth. On the other are those who say that the push for this evidence threatens the very things that make psychotherapy work in the first place. Which side prevails may shape not only how young therapists are trained and what techniques practitioners use in the future, but also how tightly health insurers restrict the therapies they are willing to pay for, and thus how much the estimated 20 million Americans who enter psychotherapy each year have to pay out of their own pockets. Ultimately, some experts say, the survival of one-on-one counseling, or talk therapy, as an accepted mode of treatment for mental disorders may hang in the balance. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 5975 - Posted: 08.10.2004

What's really going on in a baby's head before he or she is able to talk? "Parents have the propensity to interpret what kids are saying," says Susan Hespos, psychology professor at Vanderbilt University. "So a kid might make a grunting noise and a parent might elaborate that into a full sentence. That's all well and good, but in science, we need objective methods. We wanted to look at infants before they have language and see, do they have thoughts?" One of the ways to explore this is to look at categories that are captured in a language that the infants haven't been exposed to. Hespos used a difference in how two different languages describe space: In Korean, the difference between a "tight fit" and a "loose fit" is marked in the language—a cap on a pen is a tight fit, and a pen on a table is a loose fit. In English, the distinction marked by the language has to do with "support" and "containment"—the ink is in the pen, or the pen is on the table. Hespos wanted to see if infants from native English-speaking homes would notice the loose fit/tight fit distinction. She studied 32 five month olds while they watched hands place a cylinder into tight- or loose-fitting containers. "This is a distinction that if you presented adult English speakers with it, they would gloss over the distinction," Hespos explains. "They wouldn't notice it. It's not captured in our language." © ScienCentral, 2000- 2004.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 5974 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The difference in size between males and females of the same species is all down to the battle for a mate, according to a study of shorebirds published by British scientists today. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the first explanation for a rule identified over forty years ago by German scientist Bernhard Rensch. Rensch's rule, as it has become known, says that the ratio between the sizes of the sexes is related to body size with very few exceptions throughout the animal kingdom - for example, male gorillas are much bigger than female gorillas, whereas male rats are only slightly larger than female rats. In this new research, scientists from the Universities of Bath, Oxford and East Anglia, carried out complex statistical analyses of the mating behaviour, body size and ecology of more than 100 different shorebird species from around the world. They found that in larger shorebirds the battle between males for a mate is highly competitive and larger size offers an advantage over other potential suitors as they battle aggressively on the ground. The evolutionary result is that male Ruffs, a large shorebird, are about twice the size of females. For smaller species, such as Dunlins, battles take place in the air and agility and smallness become more important factors. The result is that Dunlin males are smaller than the females.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 5973 - Posted: 08.10.2004

That young people tend to eat more beef products is not enough to explain the strikingly high proportion of new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease cases among children and adolescents. An article published this week in BMC Infectious Diseases, shows that young people must also be more susceptible to vCJD infection because of their age. New detailed estimates of the UK population's dietary exposure to bovine material according to age have recently become available. Pierre-Yves Boëlle and his colleagues from Assistance Publique Hôpitaux de Paris and Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble plugged this information into a mathematical model that predicts the age distribution of vCJD cases. "We found that exposure alone could not explain the young age of vCJD cases as seen in the UK," said Boëlle. "An additional effect of age-dependent susceptibility was required to fully account for the age of the vCJD cases." If the researchers considered exposure to beef products as the only risk factor, the predicted age distribution did not fit well with the actual age distribution of the 137 reported cases. This model predicted that 48% of those with vCJD are over 40, whereas in reality only 10% of people affected by the disease fall into this age group.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5972 - Posted: 08.10.2004

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Koko, a 33-year-old gorilla that was taught to communicate using American Sign Language, recently told her caregivers that she desired oral surgery to remove an aching tooth, which was extracted with success on Sunday. The unusual request likely marks the first time that an animal ever has used language created by humans to ask for surgery. Lorraine Slater, development director of the Northern California-based Gorilla Foundation that houses Koko, told Discovery News that the lowland gorilla had been signing about tooth discomfort for a while before she communicated that the pain had become more intense in the past three to four weeks. Slater said Koko's caregivers created a chart containing the numbers one through 10 with corresponding amounts of dots, as the gorilla responds to visual information. Over the past several days, the researchers asked the gorilla on a daily basis to communicate her level of tooth pain. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 5971 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Science can put a dent in the sex life of a scarab beetle by blocking its ability to pick up female scent, according to Walter Leal, professor of entomology at UC Davis. The research could eventually lead to methods to control insect pests without affecting harmless or beneficial insects. "Chemical communication is the prime means of communication in insects," Leal said. If those communications can be controlled in the environment, insect pests could be prevented from breeding, he said. Female pale-brown chaffers, a scarab beetle that is an agricultural pest in Japan, release a chemical signal or pheromone to attract males. Insects smell through their antennae. Inside the antennae, pheromone molecules hit a specific switch that sends a nerve signal to the insect's brain. Before the switch can fire again, it must be reset by removing the pheromone, like a wine-taster rinsing her palate.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5970 - Posted: 08.10.2004

Michael Hopkin A mentally stimulating career may help to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease, research suggests. According to a study carried out in the United States, those who develop the debilitating form of dementia are more likely to have had jobs that do not tax the brain. The discovery lends weight to the 'use it or lose it' theory, says Kathleen Smyth of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who led the research. Experts have previously suggested that keeping the mind active, through reading or crossword puzzles, can help to stave off dementia in old age. The latest work, however, shows that mental stimulation throughout life can influence the development of Alzheimer's. The researchers examined 122 people with Alzheimer's disease and 235 healthy subjects, and compared the mental demands they had faced throughout their careers, from their twenties right through to their fifties. The average level of mental strain on the two groups was equal during their twenties. But those without Alzheimer's tended to have had jobs that were more mentally taxing from their thirties through to retirement, the researchers report in the journal Neurology1. "In their thirties, forties and fifties there was a divergence that persisted," Smyth says. ©2004 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5969 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CLEVELAND: Researchers at University Hospitals of Cleveland and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have found a new and interesting link between the mental demands of an occupation and later development of Alzheimer's disease. Their study is published in the August 10th issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. According to the study, people with Alzheimer's are more likely to have had less mentally stimulating careers than their peers who do not have Alzheimer's. The research team, led by Kathleen Smyth, PhD, and Robert Friedland, MD, of the University Memory and Aging Center, studied 122 people with Alzheimer's and 235 people without the disease, all of whom were more than 60 years old. They gathered information about their occupational history over 40 years, from ages 20 through 60. "We didn't simply classify study subjects as blue collar or white collar," said Dr. Smyth. "We drilled down further into occupational tasks, to classify a job as mentally stimulating based on its complexity, variety of tasks, whether it involved creative thinking or manipulation of data. Less mentally demanding jobs included more routine and monotonous tasks."

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5968 - Posted: 08.10.2004

Patrick Barkham Derided for their pathological inability to listen, particularly to words such as "commitment" and "washing-up", men are actually better at hearing and identifying everyday noises than women, according to new research. Even more remarkably, a greater number of men correctly identified the sounds of a number of different household chores in the tests, suggesting a closer familiarity with cleaning and tidying the home than many women might expect. In tests carried out by Dolby Laboratories, in which people had to identify common sounds emanating from different directions, men beat the women by two to one, with 60% of the tests won by men compared with 28% by women. Twelve per cent of tests were drawn. While 16% of women identified the sound of a toilet flushing, 40% of men instantly recognised the noise. One in five men identified the clattering of pots and pans compared with 4% of women. And 94% of men recognised the sound of a vacuum cleaner, which almost a quarter of women failed to identify. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Hearing; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5967 - Posted: 06.24.2010

US scientists believe they have discovered why boys born too early struggle more with schooling in later life than premature baby girls. Doctors have known premature baby boys fare worse than premature baby girls and that both have smaller brains than babies born at the normal time. Now a team at Stanford University have found specific brain areas are much smaller in preterm baby boys. Their findings appear in the journal Pediatrics. Compared with girls, premature boys tend to struggle more with speech and language and can have a harder time at school as a result. Dr Allan Reiss and colleagues were interested to find out whether there might be a physical reason that could explain this difference. They looked at the brains of 96 eight-year-old children, 65 of whom had been born prematurely. Magnetic resonance imaging scans showed the children who had been born prematurely had smaller brains than the other children, as would be expected from previous study findings. The volumes of both grey and white brain matter, the two forms that the brain is made of, were reduced in the premature group. However, when the researchers divided this group's scans by gender they found a difference that has not been shown before. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5966 - Posted: 08.09.2004

British scientists have set up an internet-based library of people stammering which they say will help research into the speech impediment. The archive consists of around 150 recordings made over a decade. Three million Britons are thought to have suffered from the condition at some point during their lives. The database will bring "new hope" to people who stammer, said the project's head Professor Peter Howell from University College London. Celebrity stammerers include pop idol star Gareth Gates. King Charles I, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Aristotle, Marylin Monroe and Winston Churchill are also said to have battled with the condition. Prof Howell said: "Research using these data should place us, better than ever before, in a position to offer accurate and personal advice to help people control their stammers." He decided to compile the stammers due to the lack of available data on the subject. Prof Howell said: "Researchers who want to investigate stammered speech really have a daunting task. "They have to build expertise, get the right equipment, and develop an administrative structure to locate patients as well as obtaining ethical permission. Then comes the actual research. "Once our database is available it will provide terrific encouragement for those thinking of studying in this important area." (C)BBC

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 5965 - Posted: 08.09.2004

Matt Ridley The more we find out about genomes, the more humiliating the news they bring us. The human genome turns out to be profoundly ordinary. We have known for decades that human beings have one fewer chromosome than chimpanzees, which should have been ample warning. We have known for years that grasshoppers have three times as much DNA per cell as we do, deep sea shrimps ten times, salamanders 20 times and African lungfish a staggering 40 times. But we still kidded ourselves until just the last few years that human beings would prove to have more genes, arranged in a more sophisticated way, than most other creatures. How else to explain our exquisite brains? We have 25,000 genes (or recipes for protein molecules) which is the same as a mouse, just 6,000 more than a microscopic nematode worm and 15,000 fewer than a rice plant. However sophisticated our brains are, it is not reflected in our genes. This has led some to suggest that we have been exaggerating the role of genes in shaping our brains. In fact, it reminds us that recipes are more than lists of ingredients. How those ingredients are cooked is also crucial. And the instructions for cooking up a body are hidden in the genome too - between the genes themselves. The deciphered text of the human genome is being joined by an increasing number of other animal volumes on the laboratory shelf. The mouse, rat and chimp genomes are done; the fly, worm and two fish genomes have been ready for a while. The chicken is coming soon; the kangaroo and the dog will follow. Each of them is a book of stupendous length and compendious tedium in itself, written in a four-letter alphabet with no punctuation, and consisting of sometimes upwards of 95 parts gobbledegook to two parts of sense - not exactly bedtime reading.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5964 - Posted: 08.09.2004

Researchers are one step closer to unravelling the mystery of medically unexplained pain such as chronic low back pain, which continues to baffle doctors. A study exploring the experience of pain in hypnotised volunteers has found that some types of pain which cannot be traced to a medical condition may have its origins in our brains, not in our bodies. The study by University College London and University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre found that volunteers who felt pain as a result of hypnotic suggestion showed strikingly similar brain activity to those subjected to physical pain via pulses of heat at 49 degrees Celsius. The study, to appear in the next issue of NeuroImage, also found that when the volunteers were asked to simply imagine that they felt the same pain, they had significantly different brain activity than under hypnotised and physical pain conditions. Dr. David Oakley, Director of UCL's Hypnosis Unit, says: "The fact that hypnosis was able to induce a genuine painful experience suggests that some pain really can begin in our minds. People reporting this type of pain are not simply imagining it."

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5963 - Posted: 08.09.2004

Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation's drinking water, it has been revealed. An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater. A report in Sunday's Observer says the government's environment watchdog has discussed the impact for human health. A spokesman for the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) said the Prozac found was most likely highly diluted. The newspaper says environmentalists are calling for an urgent investigation into the evidence. It quotes the Liberal Democrats' environment spokesman, Norman Baker MP, as saying the picture emerging looked like "a case of hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public". He says: "It is alarming that there is no monitoring of levels of Prozac and other pharmacy residues in our drinking water." Experts say the anti-depression drug gets into the rivers and water system via treated sewage water. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 5962 - Posted: 08.09.2004

A vaccine containing mercury given to babies when they are eight weeks old is to be scrapped amid fears of a link with autism. The move follows recent research in America that suggests a connection between the mercury used to preserve the whooping cough vaccine, and autism. The jab, without mercury, will be given as part of a new five-in-one vaccine. The Department of Health has always maintained there is no evidence of such a link. Doctors are also being told to switch from the live polio vaccine, currently given by mouth, to a "killed" vaccine injection to avoid rare cases of polio contamination, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph newspaper. GP Richard Halverson welcomed the "long overdue" changes. He told BBC News: "I welcome the fact that mercury is being withdrawn because it is toxic and should not be injected into babies full stop. "Mercury is one of the most toxic elements on this planet. It has no business being ingested in any form by anyone, it serves no useful purpose, it is dangerous." He also welcomed changes to the polio vaccine, saying it was "disgraceful" that the only cases of paralysis from polio in the UK in the last 15 years had been as a result of the vaccine. (C)BBC

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 5961 - Posted: 08.07.2004