By CAROL KAESUK YOON In Ivory Coast, the jungle is theater for a boisterous symphony of sound: the penetrating buzz of cicadas; the barks, whistles and moans of monkeys; the deafening roar of leopards; and the melodies of songbirds from earth to treetop. These animal Towers of Babel are so overwhelming that it would seem a challenge for any creature to decipher its own species' calls, let alone translate the language of another. But in a study in the April 7 issue of The Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, scientists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland report that in the African rain forest, large fruit-eating birds known as hornbills can decipher calls of the Diana monkey. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 5443 - Posted: 05.11.2004

A preliminary study has shown for the first time that it may be possible to help people who have suffered partial damage to their spinal cord by applying a magnetic therapy to their brain. Writing in this month's Spinal Cord, a team of UK doctors describe how patients with incomplete spinal cord injuries received repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), leading to improvements in their ability to move muscles and limbs, and ability to feel sensations. rTMS uses an electromagnet placed on the scalp to generate brief magnetic pulses, about the strength of an MRI scan, which stimulate the part of the brain called the cerebral cortex. Incomplete spinal cord injuries are a type of spinal injury where the spinal cord has not been entirely severed, but the patient has still lost the ability to move or feel properly below the injury point.

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 5442 - Posted: 05.11.2004

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Computers, for all of their computational muscle, do not hold a candle to humans in the ability to recognize patterns or images. This basic quandary in computational theory – why can computers crunch numbers but cannot efficiently process images – has stumped scientists for many years. Now, researchers at Arizona State University have come up with a model that could help unlock some of the secrets of how humans process patterns and possibly lead to smarter robots. The advance concerns oscillatory associative memory networks, basically the ability to see a pattern, store it and then retrieve that pattern when needed. A good example is how humans can recognize faces. "It is still a really big mystery as to how human beings can remember so many faces, but that it is extremely difficult for a computer to do," said Ying-Cheng Lai, an ASU professor of mathematics and a professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5441 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Obesity researchers have found that the mere presence of food triggers brain regions associated with motivation and pleasure. This ScienCentral report has the skinny on what might be making us fat. Whether we live to eat or eat to live, Americans are tipping the scale more and more these days. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity has increased by epidemic proportions since the 1980s. How did we get to this point? Studying the brain mechanism involved in feeding behaviors, obesity researcher Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory has found that food stimuli—sights, smells and sounds—trigger the brain regions that are also associated with addictive responses to cocaine and other drugs. “The high sensitivity of this brain region to food stimuli, coupled with the huge number and variety of these stimuli in the environment, likely contributes to the epidemic of obesity in this country," says Wang. Wang used a brain-scanning technique called positron emission tomography, or PET, to see what happened inside the brains of 12 hungry subjects of normal weight when they saw, smelled and tasted—but didn’t eat—food. The volunteers fasted for at least 17 hours before the test, and then they relaxed on the scanning bed while the smell of their favorite foods wafted in their direction. The PET machine captured snapshots of brain metabolism, or activity, in response to these food stimuli. The subjects also described their hunger sensation, on a scale of 1 to 10, at five-minute intervals for a total of 45 minutes. © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5440 - Posted: 06.24.2010

As pain sufferers can attest, there’s room for improvement in painkilling medications. Many of the current ones can cause side effects, such as stomach ulcers, particularly in people who have to take them over long periods of time for conditions such as arthritis. Now, recent research points to what may be a good new target for analgesic drugs. It also sheds light on inflammatory pain sensitization, which causes patients to feel intense pain even in response to normally innocuous stimuli, such as a light touch. In the 7 May issue of Science, an international team led by Ulrike Müller of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, reports having identified the α3 form of the receptor for the neurotransmitter glycine as a key intermediate in transmitting pain signals from the spinal cord to the brain. The work shows that the receptor is needed for pain sensitization--the first time that a function has been identified for this particular receptor. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5439 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Cancer strategy could be used to treat obesity. NADJA NEUMANN Chubby mice have shaped up with a new slimming aid, based on a technique used in cancer therapy that destroys blood vessels. The researchers say that after clinical trials on humans this may become a useful weapon in the war on obesity. One promising technique for treating cancer involves starving a tumour of the nutrients it needs to grow. The most effective way to do this is by killing off the blood vessels that supply the cancer cells. This technique is currently being evaluated in clinical trials. In the same way, each fat cell relies on a network of capillaries to deliver the chemicals it needs to reproduce and grow. So Mikhail Kolonin and his colleagues from the University of Texas and Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, reasoned that if they could kill off these blood vessels, the fat cells would die too. To do this, they targeted a molecule called prohibitin. It is present on the surface of fat cells, but not other types of cells, and it helps to regulate the growth of surrounding blood vessels. The researchers took a fragment of protein that binds to prohibitin, and attached it to another protein fragment that is used in cancer therapy to kill blood vessels. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5438 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Pat Hagan Hearing a skilled musician play a piece note-perfect is one of the joys of life. But do some professional musicians pay a terrible price for their talent? A team of British researchers has recently embarked on a study that they hope will shed light on a mysterious condition that can affect the brains of up to one in ten musical artists. Aided by a grant of over £92,000 from the charity Action Medical Research, experts from the Institute of Neurology and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London hope to come up with a treatment for a condition called occupational dystonia - which leaves many experienced players with involuntary muscle spasms of the hand. The disorder can affect people in many occupations that involve high levels of skill in performing certain types of movement. But it appears to be particularly striking in musicians and for some, the consequences for their performing career can be catastrophic. Experts believe the root cause of occupational dystonia is that the brain somehow becomes "overspecialised" in carrying out very specific movements. In short, part of the brain becomes permanently "rewired" so that it is highly adept at the skills it has been using for years but unable to learn new, more flexible movements. (C)BBC

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 5437 - Posted: 05.09.2004

By AMY HARMON NO sooner was Peter Alan Harper, 53, given the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder last year than some of his family members began rolling their eyes. To him, the diagnosis explained the sense of disorganization that caused him to lose track of projects and kept him from completing even minor personal chores like reading his mail. But to others, said Mr. Harper, a retired journalist in Manhattan, it seems like one more excuse for his inability to "take care of business." He didn't care. "The thing about A.D.D. is how much it affects your self-esteem,'' Mr. Harper said. "I had always thought of myself as someone who didn't finish things. Knowing why is such a relief.'' As the number of Americans with brain disorders grows, so has skepticism toward the grab bag of syndromes they are being tagged with, from A.D.D. to Asperger's to bipolar I, II or III. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Autism
Link ID: 5436 - Posted: 05.09.2004

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News To woo females, some male fish take on motherly duties while others emit love calls that researchers liken to human snoring, according to two recent studies. The first paper, published in the current Behavioral Ecology journal, found that male sand gobies — small fish native to European waters — act like mothers when females are present. The fish fathers play Mr. Mom by building nests, guarding eggs and nests, and even fanning eggs with their pectoral fins to freshen and oxygenate water when the real mother is in sight. However, when mother is not around, the sand goby dads slack off their motherly ways and have a tendency to gulp down the eggs. The finding represents the first time that "courtship parental care" has been documented for any species. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5435 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Channels help cells cope with the stress and strain of everyday living By Megan M. Stephan Stress - the bane of modern existence. Even cells have to deal with it, in its mechanical forms, at least. Osmotic pressure and shear forces from the environment signal dangerous situations that threaten the integrity of the cell membrane. Membrane channels sense and respond to these signals allowing cells to cope. In complex organisms, specialized cells go beyond mere coping, turning the signals into interpretable sensations such as touch and hearing. In recent years, biologists have discovered a wide array of mechanosensitive channels that mediate responses to physical forces, including members of at least four major protein families. The challenge now is to separate the wheat from the chaff and find which channels are directly responsible for mechanosensation and which ones play secondary roles. Even more fundamental questions as to how physical force regulates these channels remain unanswered. Very little is known about "how these proteins sense variation in shape and pressure in the bilayer," says Michel Lazdunski, at the Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology Institute, Valbonne, France. Cells experience both internal and external forces. Internal forces such as hydrostatic pressure, cytoskeletal changes, and molecular motors affect cell shape, growth, and motility. External forces can be as simple as Brownian collisions and osmotic pressures experienced by single cells, or as complex as the hemodynamic forces experienced by blood vessel epithelia, or the sound waves that are transduced into hearing by inner-ear hair cells (see Research | Listen Up). © 2004, The Scientist LLC, All rights reserved.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Hearing
Link ID: 5434 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS A top federal drug official said yesterday that he rejected not only the judgment of an advisory panel but also the recommendations of his own staff when he refused to allow a morning-after pill to be sold over the counter. Dr. Steven Galson, acting director of the Food and Drug Administration's center for drug evaluation and research since October, acknowledged in an interview that his action was not the norm. "I am not trying to convey this decision as being common or usual," Dr. Galson said. The morning-after pill, called Plan B, is an emergency birth-control medicine that is currently sold only by prescription. Made of high-dose birth-control pills, it can interfere with ovulation and perhaps prevent a fertilized egg from being implanted if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5433 - Posted: 05.08.2004

Roman Kyzyk was standing on his Brooklyn brownstone's rooftop with a clear view of the World Trade Center when the second plane hit the second tower on September 11th, 2001. Ever since he then he has been unable to fly. "I was constrained and disabled by this," he says. "I had an incident where I literally was on a plane, and I was sitting in the middle seat in the back of the aircraft, and I was overwhelmed. I literally had to get off and leave the plane before take-off, before they closed the doors, because it was too difficult for me to be able to tolerate it." Kyzyk knows that, statistically, flying isn't actually very dangerous. But nearly three years later he's still unable to fly anywhere and he's in cognitive behavioral therapy to try to remedy that. His psychologist says his predicament is a common one. © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5432 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The first inkling of maleness began when parasitic bacteria jumped between cells, dragging their host's genes with them. And according to the researcher who came up with the controversial idea, the vestiges of this inauspicious beginning persist in the sperm of animals today. Some time between 2000 million and 700 million years ago, bacteria entered into an uneasy truce with larger cells. These cells were the precursors of complex eukaryotic cells, that eventually evolved into today's multicellular animals and plants. The bacteria wound up losing around 90 per cent of their genes to the host nucleus and became mitochondria - the energy-generating components of complex cells. But modern mitochondria are so intimately involved in sexual reproduction that one scientist thinks they may even have been responsible for the evolution of sex itself. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5431 - Posted: 06.24.2010

But antidepressant Paxil has no effect on physical symptoms PORTLAND, Ore. – A well-known drug used to treat hyperactive children boosts the potency of another drug that reduces Parkinson's disease symptoms, an Oregon Health & Science University study has found. Scientists at the OHSU Parkinson Center of Oregon found that methylphenidate, known commercially as Ritalin, bolsters the effects of levodopa, a drug converted in the brain to dopamine. Methylphenidate inhibits the reabsorption of dopamine into nerve cells, increasing the neurotransmitter's potency. Parkinson's disease is caused by a deficiency of nerve cells that produce dopamine. A parallel study by Parkinson center researchers found that paroxetine, a popular antidepressant best known under the brand name Paxil, doesn't augment the effects of levodopa and has little benefit in reducing physical symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 5430 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The science of neural development tangles with the juvenile death penalty Bruce Bower Later this year, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether federal law should continue to permit executions of 16- and 17-year-olds convicted of murder. On this life-or-death issue, controversial legal and ethical views on teenagers' capacity to control their behavior and obey the law will take center stage. However, a relative newcomer to the debate—the burgeoning science of brain development—may critically influence the high court's final decision. A coalition of psychiatric and legal organizations plans to submit a brief to the justices contending that teenagers often make poor decisions and act impulsively because their brains haven't attained an adult level of organization. Consequently, the coalition argues, teenage killers are less culpable for their crimes than their adult counterparts are. Capital punishment of teens thus violates the constitutional amendment protecting citizens from cruel and unusual punishment. "Our objection to the juvenile death penalty is rooted in the fact that adolescents' brains function in fundamentally different ways than adults' brains do," says David Fassler, a psychiatrist at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a leader of the effort to infuse capital-crime laws with brain science. Copyright ©2004 Science Service

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5429 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower A new brain-imaging study indicates that a specially designed program for second and third graders deficient in reading boosts their reading skills while prodding their brains to respond to written material in the same way that the brains of good readers do. The same investigation found that the remedial instruction typically offered to poor readers in the nation's schools doesn't improve their skills and fails to ignite activity in brain areas that have been linked to effective reading. "Good teaching can change the brain in a way that has the potential to benefit struggling readers," says pediatrician Sally Shaywitz of Yale University School of Medicine. At least one in five U.S. grade-schoolers with average or above-average intelligence encounters severe difficulties in learning to read, researchers estimate. In 2000, a panel of educators and scientists convened by Congress concluded that reading disability stems primarily from difficulties in recognizing the correspondence between speech sounds and letters. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Dyslexia; Language
Link ID: 5428 - Posted: 06.24.2010

- Researchers, using a new combination of techniques, have discovered that dopamine levels in our brains vary the most in situations where we are unsure if we are going to be rewarded, such as when we are gambling or playing the lottery. The research results, "Dopamine Transmission in the Human Striatum during Monetary Reward Tasks," were published online April 28 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Dopamine has long been known to play an important role in how we experience rewards from a variety of natural sources, including food and sex, as well as from drugs such as cocaine and heroin, but pinning down the precise conditions that cause its release has been difficult. "Using a combination of techniques, we were actually able to measure release of the dopamine neurotransmitter under natural conditions using monetary reward," said David Zald, assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5427 - Posted: 05.08.2004

By Becky Ham, Science Writer A study of Swiss women with eating disorders suggests that those who binge and purge are more likely to have attempted suicide in the past, regardless of whether they have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, bulimia or another eating disorder. Women with anorexia, however, are more likely to have suicidal thoughts than those with bulimia or other disorders, say Gabriella Milos, M.D., and colleagues at the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. Their study appears in the journal General Hospital Psychiatry. The researchers also found that most of the women in the study had other psychiatric disorders besides an eating disorder, including depression, drug or alcohol abuse or fearfulness or anxiety. Almost 84 percent of the patients had at least one other psychiatric problem. Milos and colleagues say the link between purging and suicidal attempts might be due to a lack of impulse control, which would affect both behaviors.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 5426 - Posted: 05.08.2004

Scientists have discovered how the brain can summon up our oldest memories from years past. They have found that the process is controlled by an area called the anterior cingulate. It is hoped that the breakthrough could lead to the development of new treatments for Alzheimers and other forms of dementia. The work, by the University of California Los Angeles, is published in Science. Scientists have long known that a structure called the hippocampus processes recent memories. However, it was also known that the hippocampus did not store this information permanently. And just how the brain is able to retrieve more distant recollections, often from many years ago, had been a mystery. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5425 - Posted: 05.07.2004

Results examine long-term social, professional and scholastic effects of ADHD NEW YORK, -- Adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have grown up with the condition, but have they outgrown its effects? Findings from a new national survey, "Capturing America's Attention," indicate that adults with ADHD experience life-long impairments in several facets of their lives, including educational and professional achievements, self-image and interpersonal relationships. This survey is the first to examine the long-term impact of ADHD among 1,001 adults. Results were presented today at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) annual meeting. While the exact number of adults with ADHD is unknown, it is estimated that four percent of the U.S. adult population is affected by ADHD. The survey found that the repercussions of ADHD may prohibit adults with the condition from reaching their full academic and occupational potential, and limit their satisfaction with themselves and their relationships. "The importance of diagnosing and helping adults with ADHD has often been debated by individuals, health care professionals and by society in general," saidJoseph Biederman, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and Chief of Pediatric Psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital. "The compelling results of this survey reinforce the fact that ADHD is a serious medical condition causing significant, life-long impairments. ADHD can no longer be dismissed as a 'fake' or 'made-up' disorder."

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 5424 - Posted: 05.07.2004