Rat results hint at possible alternative to Viagra. MICHAEL HOPKIN A new brain drug gives erections to lab rats - raising the possibility that it could some day rival existing human sexual dysfunction therapies such as Viagra. The new molecule, called ABT-724, is a variant of an anti-impotence drug called apomorphine, which is currently on offer to European men. Both work by activating receptors in the brain for a molecule called dopamine, triggering a rush of blood to the penis. But whereas apomorphine stimulates all dopamine receptors, ABT-724 targets only a subset of these, called D4 receptors, report researchers led by Jorge Brioni of Abbott Laboratories in Abbott Park, Illinois. This could potentially sidestep the side-effects, such as nausea and vomiting, suffered by some apomorphine users. "It separates out the dopamine receptors responsible for the main effect," explains Abbott Laboratories' James Sullivan, one of the researchers in the study. Rats injected with ABT-724 developed erections without getting sick, the team reports in this week's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5278 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Harold Lee, DAILY BRUIN REPORTER Humans and finches may be birds of a feather when it comes to learning how to speak and sing. According to UCLA researchers, similarities between how humans learn to speak and songbirds learn to sing may be rooted in shared genes. The researchers reported in the March 31 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience that the zebra finch shares the genes FoxP1 and FoxP2 with humans. These genes play similar roles in the vocal learning of humans and of zebra finches. "Surprisingly, the expression (of FoxP1 and FoxP2) was very parallel, suggesting they're doing the same function in both species, or perhaps an overlapping function," said Dan Geschwind, director of the neurogenetics program and associate professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine. It is hypothesized that FoxP2 is involved in vocal learning – how songbirds learn songs from their environments or tutors, Geschwind said. In humans, FoxP2 seems to play a vital role in the development of the brain. Rare mutations of the FoxP2 gene have been found in a few individuals in an English family, who have trouble understanding and producing language. Those affected by the mutation have structural abnormalities in the brain. Copyright 2004 ASUCLA Student Media

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5277 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Only Michael Berman's small thumbs move inside the giant MRI machine, pushing buttons in a video game-like test as the scanner measures how the youngster's brain processes light and motion. At 6, he's one of the youngest children to undergo such advanced scanning as part of a new effort to discover what goes wrong inside brains affected by autism. It's work that might lead to much earlier diagnosis of the mysterious neurological disorder. It usually goes undetected until age 3 or later, when much of the damage to the developing brain is thought already to have been done. "The feeling is if you intervene early, it'll be more effective," explains Dr. Thomas Zeffiro of Georgetown University Medical Center, who is researching technology that he hopes will go a step further and one day scan preschoolers' or even infants' brains. ©2004 Associated Press AP

Keyword: Autism; Brain imaging
Link ID: 5276 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARGARET WERTHEIM — Sitting at lunch on the patio of his home here one muggy day last June, Francis Crick was expounding on the mind-body problem and the thorny subject of the human "self." Where is the line between mind and matter? he asked. Aside from the neurons in our brains, the human body contains tens of millions of neurons in the enteric nervous system, which extends into the stomach and intestines. "When you digest your lunch is that you?" Dr. Crick asked. Body and mind are the twin problems around which Dr. Crick's life has spiraled, much like the double helix structure of DNA that he and Dr. James D. Watson are famous for discovering half a century ago. Though his research on "the molecule of life" is what he is best known for, in his 28 years at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, his work has focused on the mind, and in particular the question of consciousness. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5275 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANDREW POLLACK Can a machine read a person's mind? A medical device company is about to find out. The company, Cyberkinetics Inc., plans to implant a tiny chip in the brains of five paralyzed people in an effort to enable them to operate a computer by thought alone. The Food and Drug Administration has given approval for a clinical trial of the implants, according to the company. The implants, part of what Cyberkinetics calls its BrainGate system, could eventually help people with spinal cord injuries, strokes, Lou Gehrig's disease or other ailments to communicate better or even to operate lights and other devices through a kind of neural remote control. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 5274 - Posted: 04.13.2004

By MARGARET WERTHEIM — Sitting at lunch on the patio of his home here one muggy day last June, Francis Crick was expounding on the mind-body problem and the thorny subject of the human "self." Where is the line between mind and matter? he asked. Aside from the neurons in our brains, the human body contains tens of millions of neurons in the enteric nervous system, which extends into the stomach and intestines. "When you digest your lunch is that you?" Dr. Crick asked. Body and mind are the twin problems around which Dr. Crick's life has spiraled, much like the double helix structure of DNA that he and Dr. James D. Watson are famous for discovering half a century ago. Though his research on "the molecule of life" is what he is best known for, in his 28 years at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, his work has focused on the mind, and in particular the question of consciousness. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5273 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINA KOLATA Alzheimer's disease can seem unrelentingly grim. There is no cure, no known way to prevent the illness, and the benefits of current treatments are modest at best. But in laboratories around the country, scientists are uncovering clues that may eventually — perhaps even in the next two decades — allow them to prevent, slow or even reverse the ruthless progression of the illness. "Things are more hopeful than perhaps people think," Dr. Karen Duff of the Nathan Kline Institute of New York University said. "We are on the cusp of having something really useful." That hope comes on the heels of disappointment. Aricept and other drugs to slow the disease's progress have not lived up to the public's high expectations. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5272 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER Sometimes it takes the great Dustbuster of fate to clear the room of bullies and bad habits. Freak cyclones helped destroy Kublai Khan's brutal Mongolian empire, for example, while the Black Death of the 14th century capsized the medieval theocracy and gave the Renaissance a chance to shine. Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate. In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 5271 - Posted: 04.13.2004

Thirty-five million Americans, more than 16% of the population, suffer from depression severe enough to warrant treatment at some time in their lives. Poet Eve Stern has battled depression for years, taking different medications for her condition. "The usual direction the doctors will point you in is in the direction of medication," says Stern. "I got pushed there to the point where I had tried over 50 meds and one became poisonous to my brain and I nearly died." To prevent situations like this, scientists are trying to learn how the brain reacts to depression remedies. "We have no idea about the neurobiology of what starts depression," says Helen Mayberg, a neurologist at the Emory University School of Medicine. "We've got clues from these studies of different kinds of depressed people. We have clues knowing that not everybody gets better on whatever you treat them with first. But we've not got these clues that the brain may be actually giving us very important info so that we can treat optimally." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 5270 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Primatologists often characterize learned behavioral differences as "cultural" traits, since they arise independently of genetic factors and can be passed on to succeeding generations. Such cultural traditions have been documented in African chimp populations (e.g. using stones to crack nuts). While most of these cases involve tool use, Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share now provide evidence, in the latest issue of the open-access journal PLoS Biology, of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, they reveal the emergence of a unique pacific culture affecting this troop. Typically, male baboons angle either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engage in bloody battles with lower ranking males. Females are often harassed and attacked and internecine feuds are routine. However, in the mid-1980s an unexpected outbreak of TB infected and killed the most aggressive males of Forest Troop, drastically changing the gender composition and the behavior of the group; males were significantly less aggressive.

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 5269 - Posted: 04.13.2004

If you're one of those insufferable people who can finish the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, you probably have a gift for insight. The puzzles always have an underlying hint to solving them, but on Saturdays that clue is insanely obtuse. If you had all day, you could try a zillion different combinations and eventually figure it out. But with insight, you'd experience the usual clueless confusion, until--voilą--the fog clears and you get the clue, which suddenly seems obvious. The sudden flash of insight that precedes such "Aha!" moments is characteristic of many types of cognitive processes besides problem-solving, including memory retrieval, language comprehension, and various forms of creativity. Now, researchers from Northwestern and Drexel Universities report on studies revealing a unique neural signature of such insight solutions. Mark Jung-Beeman and colleagues mapped both the location and electrical signature of neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the electroencephalogram (EEG). Neural activity was mapped with fMRI while the participants were given word problems--which can be solved quickly with or without insight, and evoke a distinct Aha! moment about half the time they're solved. Subjects pressed a button to indicate whether they had solved the problem using insight, which they had been told leads to an Aha! experience characterized by suddenness and obviousness.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5268 - Posted: 04.13.2004

By Elizabeth Svoboda Remembering Satan, Lawrence Wright’s widely read book, profiles a 1980s father who “remembers” inflicting ritual abuse on his daughters. The book blames false memories primarily on interrogators who use techniques like hypnosis and leading questions. New neuroimaging research at Johns Hopkins University, however, suggests that what happens in the brain at the moment a memory forms is just as essential to false-memory development as are retrieval methods that are used much later. Yoko Okado, a psychology graduate student at Johns Hopkins, and her adviser, Craig Stark, wanted to find out if differences in brain activation during an event influenced subsequent memories. Their subjects first sat in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and read short descriptions of ordinary events, each containing 12 critical details, such as “left-handed robber.” The subjects then returned to the fMRI scanner and read similar descriptions in which the 12 details had been changed (the “misinformation” phase). The participants who successfully identified which details had appeared during the first phase showed more neural activity in the hippocampus, a brain area important in establishing memories, during that initial phase. © Copyright 1991-2004 Sussex Publishers

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5267 - Posted: 06.24.2010

"Functional" MRI is yielding a clearer picture of what thoughts look like The clanking from within the giant white magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner sounds like somebody banging a wrench on a radiator. "Tommy," a healthy 8-year-old, is halfway inside the machine's round chamber, and his little white-sweat-socked feet keep time with the noise. A mirror on a plastic cage around his head will allow him to see images and video. During the next 45 minutes, Dr. Golijeh Golarai, a researcher at Stanford University, will ask Tommy to hold his feet still, as she directs a computer to flash pictures at him, including faces of African American men, landscapes, faces of white men, then scrambled faces in a cubist redux. When the boy thinks he sees the same image twice, he pushes a button. The machine is tracking the blood in his brain as it flows to the neurons he is using to perform the assigned task. When Golarai's software is done analyzing the data, she'll have nothing less than a set of snapshots of the boy's thoughts, pinpointing exactly what part of his brain recognizes faces. "There go those feet again," chuckles Tommy's father, watching from the control room. Copyright 2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5266 - Posted: 04.13.2004

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. The Department of Agriculture refused yesterday to allow a Kansas beef producer to test all of its cattle for mad cow disease, saying such sweeping tests were not scientifically warranted. The producer, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to use recently approved rapid tests so it could resume selling its fat-marbled black Angus beef to Japan, which banned American beef after a cow slaughtered in Washington State last December tested positive for mad cow. The company has complained that the ban is costing it $40,000 a day and forced it to lay off 50 employees. The department's under secretary for marketing and regulation, Bill Hawks, said in a statement yesterday that the rapid tests, which are used in Japan and Europe, were licensed for surveillance of animal health, while Creekstone's use would have "implied a consumer safety aspect that is not scientifically warranted." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5265 - Posted: 04.12.2004

By FELICIA R. LEE She has been called "the closest thing we have to a doyenne of psychiatric disorder" by The Village Voice, because of her quirky memoirs and her offbeat takes on subjects like self-esteem. Peter D. Kramer, author of "Listening to Prozac," calls her "smart, charming, iconoclastic and inquisitive." Now Lauren Slater, a 39-year-old psychologist, is being called a liar. The charges, which Dr. Slater denies, are being circulated mostly among academics in psychology and psychiatry. Some say that she put invented quotations in her new book, "Opening Skinner's Box," her reflections on 10 major psychological experiments, which was published in the United States by Norton last month. Others question her methods and data in her own experiment in faking mental illness or challenge the accuracy of her description of some famous past experiments. Critics have been publicizing their accusations in book reviews on Amazon.com and other Internet sites, while professors at several schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Emory universities, have been exchanging information on their views of the book's failings. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5264 - Posted: 04.12.2004

WASHINGTON— There really may be something different about the brains of math-heads. Mathematically gifted teens did better than average-ability teens and college students on tests that required the two halves of the brain to cooperate, as reported in the April issue of Neuropsychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). In the study, a joint effort of psychologists at the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences at Fort Benning, Ga. and the University of Melbourne, Australia, researchers studied 60 right-handed males: 18 mathematically gifted (averaging nearly 14 years in age), 18 of average math ability (averaging just over 13), and 24 college students (averaging about 20). Math giftedness seems to favor boys over girls, appearing an estimated six to 13 times more often. It’s not known why but prenatal exposure to testosterone is suspected to be one influence due to its selective benefit to the right half of the brain. The gifted boys were recruited from a Challenges for Youth-Talented program at Iowa State University. Whereas the average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) math score for college-bound high-school seniors is 500 (out of 800), the mathematically gifted boys’ average SAT math score in middle school was 620. © 2004 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 5263 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON— There really may be something different about the brains of math-heads. Mathematically gifted teens did better than average-ability teens and college students on tests that required the two halves of the brain to cooperate, as reported in the April issue of Neuropsychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). In the study, a joint effort of psychologists at the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences at Fort Benning, Ga. and the University of Melbourne, Australia, researchers studied 60 right-handed males: 18 mathematically gifted (averaging nearly 14 years in age), 18 of average math ability (averaging just over 13), and 24 college students (averaging about 20). Math giftedness seems to favor boys over girls, appearing an estimated six to 13 times more often. It’s not known why but prenatal exposure to testosterone is suspected to be one influence due to its selective benefit to the right half of the brain. The gifted boys were recruited from a Challenges for Youth-Talented program at Iowa State University. Whereas the average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) math score for college-bound high-school seniors is 500 (out of 800), the mathematically gifted boys’ average SAT math score in middle school was 620. © 2004 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 5262 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DURHAM, N.C. -- Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found that a new generation of medications called "atypical antipsychotics" can significantly lower the risk of violent behavior in people with schizophrenia who are being treated in community-based centers. In a two-year study, the researchers found that patients who consistently took one of the newer medications had less than one-third the incidence of getting into fights or engaging in violent actions toward others, compared to subjects who consistently took one of the older antipsychotic medications. This study is the first to examine the long-term impact of treatment with the newer class of drugs on violent behavior measured directly in the community, under "real world" conditions, the researchers said. Examples of drugs in this newer class include clozapine, risperidone and olanzapine. © 2001-2004 Duke University Medical Center.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 5261 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Approximately 2 percent of Caucasians have a gene segment variation that can cause a certain form of schizophrenia. Most people with the variation, known as a polymorphism, do not have the disease. A University of Iowa Health Care study reveals a good prognosis for people who do have this form of schizophrenia. The team also found that this polymorphism is associated with overall benefits for human survival, and the initial mutation occurred in a single common ancestor about 100,000 years ago. The findings have implications for finding better ways to treat this particular type of schizophrenia and possibly augmenting the positive influences of the polymorphism on human survival. The findings also point the way for studying other gene defects. The UI Research Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) share a patent for this X-chromosome gene polymorphism, known as HOPA12pb. The study results appeared in the February 11 online issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics. "While this polymorphism makes us more vulnerable to a certain illness, in this case schizophrenia, overall it is evolutionarily beneficial," said Robert Philibert, M.D., Ph.D., UI associate professor of psychiatry in the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine and the study's principal investigator.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5260 - Posted: 04.12.2004

By Laura Spinney A prominent British psychiatrist recently revived old arguments about the origins of language and the evolution of humans. Tim Crow at Warneford Hospital in Oxford says that reports on ape brain asymmetry are distorted by observer bias.1 Those criticized point to "plenty of evidence" that general functions and skills have gravitated to one side of the brain or the other in animals from chicks to chimps. Crow argues that researchers are finding evidence of language precursors in apes because they want to believe in a graduated theory of evolution, rather than the leap proposed by Thomas Huxley, Stephen J. Gould, and others. Crow points to studies that have reanalyzed data and found no support for initial conclusions of asymmetry.2 He also asserts his support for the model proposed by neuropsychologist Marian Annett in 2002,3 in which she suggests that a single gene gave rise to language in the brain's left hemisphere, and brought a shift towards right-handedness. In 1877, Paul Broca argued that brain asymmetry distinguishes humans from other animals and gives humans the capacity for language. Then scientists started finding evidence of asymmetry in other vertebrates. "Many of the lateralized functions of the human are the same as those in animals," says Lesley Rogers of the University of New England in Australia, who with Richard Andrew coauthored the 2002 book Comparative Vertebrate Lateralization.4 "Language has a left-hemisphere location in most humans. It might rely on the evolution of some nuance of laterality, but the point is, it was superimposed on other lateralities that were already there." © 2004, The Scientist LLC, All rights reserved.

Keyword: Language; Laterality
Link ID: 5259 - Posted: 06.24.2010