By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD On a hillside in the badlands of Ethiopia, an ancestral home of the human family, an international team of scientists has uncovered the earliest known stone tools to be found mixed with fragments of fossilized animal bones. The scientists think the material, almost 2.6 million years old, is the strongest evidence yet that the primal technology was used to butcher animal carcasses for meat and marrow. The discovery could go a long way toward resolving a debate in paleoanthropology: which came first, a significant advance in the brain that enabled human ancestors to make tools, or the toolmaking ability that led to an enriched diet and then an evolutionary change in the brain? "I believe the use of stone tools came first and the larger brain came later with a more substantial meat diet," Dr. Sileshi Semaw, the leader of the discovery team, said last week by telephone. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 4403 - Posted: 10.21.2003

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR The notion that poverty and mental illness are intertwined is nothing new, as past research has demonstrated time and time again. But finding evidence that one begets the other has often proved difficult. Now new research that coincided with the opening of an Indian casino may have come a step closer to identifying a link by suggesting that lifting children out of poverty can diminish some psychiatric symptoms, though others seem unaffected. A study published in last week's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at children before and after their families rose above the poverty level. Rates of deviant and aggressive behaviors, the study noted, declined as incomes rose. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4402 - Posted: 10.21.2003

By HOWARD MARKEL While progress has been made in combating alcoholism and drug addiction in the United States, the medical establishment is still failing in large numbers to diagnose the disease in their patients, several experts said at a recent conference. "Although doctors and nurses have the best opportunity to intervene with alcoholics and substance abusers, our research indicates they are woefully inadequate of even diagnosing someone with this disease," said Joseph Califano Jr., the chairman and president of Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. At the conference sponsored by the Columbia center this month, policy makers and addiction specialists evaluated recent research on addiction, which affects 2 of 10 Americans at some point in life and costs billions of dollars for health care each year. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4401 - Posted: 10.21.2003

Genetic discrepancies between males and females measured mid-term. HELEN PEARSON Genes drive the brains of male and female embryos apart as early as midway through gestation, a new study suggests1. These gender differences were assumed to arise around birth due to hormones pumped out by males' budding testes. Halfway into a mouse pregnancy, before the testes have even formed, the activity of 51 genes is different in males and females, says Eric Vilain of the University of California, Los Angeles. His team analysed 12,000 brain genes. The discovery hints that unknown genes hardwire our gender - perhaps influencing the way that men and women think, tackle problems or perceive themselves. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4400 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Participation in a greater overall number of leisure activities during early and middle adulthood is related to lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, according a team of researchers headed by University of Southern California graduate student Michael Crowe. He and his colleagues - University of South Florida faculty member Ross Andel (a recent USC PhD), USC and Karolinska Institute professors Margaret Gatz and Nancy Pedersen, and University of Gothenberg professor Boo Johansson - published the results of this recent study in the September issue of The Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences (Vol. 58B, No.5, September, 2003). "The idea that mental activity is good for the brain is not unlike the idea of 'use it or lose it' when it comes to keeping the body fit," said Andel. Using data from the Swedish Twins Registry, a population-based dataset of twins living in Sweden, the team analyzed information on like-sexed twins born between 1886 and 1925. The study was funded by the Alzheimer's Association and the National Institute on Aging. In the 1960s, these twins had filled out questionnaires about their leisure activities, which included reading, social visits, theater and movie going, club and organization participation, gardening and other outdoor activities, and playing sports. They subsequently participated in clinical follow-ups in the 1980s and 1990s, when they where tested for Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4399 - Posted: 10.21.2003

By Carol Hyman, Media Relations BERKELEY – Imagine the smell of coffee in the morning. Did you close your eyes and inhale deeply through your nose? Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that most people do and that the very act of sniffing plays a vital role in the brain's perception of odor. In the Oct. 19 online issue of Nature: Neuroscience the researchers report that the sniff people take when trying to imagine an odor closely resembles the sniff they would have taken if the odor were really there. For example, when imagining the smell of bus fumes, people take a timid sniff, but when imagining the smell of a rose, they take a vigorous sniff. If people are prevented from sniffing, the vividness of the image is significantly reduced. From these findings, the scientists conclude that the brain recreates the components of real sensation, such as sniffing, in order to create mental images. Copyright UC Regents

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 4398 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ROWAN HOOPER The job of undertaker is not one that is restricted to human society. In honeybee colonies, too, some individuals have the task of removing the cadavers of their dead fellows. Researchers have previously demonstrated that bees are genetically inclined to perform the specialist job of undertaker, though they only take on that role when they reach middle age. (As often seems to be the case with human undertakers.) When they are young adults, honeybees are typically "nurses" who assist with brood care. Nurse bees feed larvae with royal jelly, and later with honey and pollen. When the nurses become older, most become foraging bees, searching for food outside the hive. The Japan Times (C) All rights reserved

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4397 - Posted: 10.20.2003

Making IQ Tests Harder Due To Flynn Effect Has Educational, Financial, Legal and Military Recruiting Implications WASHINGTON — The steady rising of IQ scores over the last century – known as the Flynn effect – causes IQ tests norms to become obsolete over time. To counter this effect, IQ tests are “renormed” (made harder) every 15-20 years by resetting the mean score to 100 to account for the previous gains in IQ scores. But according to new research, such renorming may have unintended consequences, particularly in the area of special education placements for children with borderline or mild mental retardation. The findings are reported on in the October issue of American Psychologist, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). Researchers Tomoe Kanaya, M.A. and Stephen J. Ceci, Ph.D., of Cornell University and Matthew H. Scullin, Ph.D., of West Virginia University used IQ data from nearly 9,000 school psychologist special education assessments from nine school districts across the U.S. to document how the Flynn effect influences mental retardation diagnoses for several years after a new test is introduced. The students (ages 6 – 17) were from different geographical regions, neighborhood types and socioeconomic status. © 2003 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 4396 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service One form of a common brain protein makes us rather worse at remembering things, researchers have discovered. It is a first step towards finding the genes for intelligence. Human intelligence is partly inherited - studies of parents and children show that about half our cleverness, or lack of it, is down to genes rather than environment. Now Dominique de Quervain and colleagues at the University of Zurich in Switzerland have found one of those genes. People who inherit the less common form of a serotonin receptor have worse short-term memory than people with the more common form. It is not - by itself - a gene for intelligence. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4395 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Yankees star says he visited firm last year John Shea, Mark Fainaru-Wada, Chronicle Staff Writers New York Yankees star Jason Giambi is among a number of high-profile athletes called to testify in a San Francisco federal grand jury investigation of a Burlingame nutritional supplement laboratory, the former A's first baseman told The Chronicle before Game 2 of the World Series on Sunday. Giambi joins Giants home run slugger Barry Bonds and Union City track standout Kelli White among as many as 40 athletes who have been subpoenaed to testify in the case that has targeted Victor Conte and his Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO). Conte and BALCO are in the middle of a burgeoning steroid scandal sparked last week by an announcement from U.S. Olympic drug- testing officials. Giambi said he visited BALCO last fall to ask about nutritional supplements. He said he knows Greg Anderson, who is Bonds' personal trainer and who also is connected to the probe. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4394 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower In a cruel double whammy, poor people endure material deprivation while experiencing more than their share of mental disorders. Some scientists theorize that this disproportion of mental illness stems from individuals with genetically based psychological ailments drifting into poverty and staying there. Other researchers suspect that the stress of financial hardship undermines emotional health. An unusual new study boosts the latter view. During the 4 years after their families moved out of poverty thanks to a community-wide economic windfall, Cherokee children in rural North Carolina exhibited marked declines in behaviors such as delinquency, violence, disobedience, and truancy, according to epidemiologist E. Jane Costello of Duke University Medical School in Durham, N.C., and her coworkers. Mental-health clinicians typically diagnose kids with these problems as having either conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder, a penchant to defy authority. "In families that moved out of poverty, parents were better able to supervise their children, apparently leading to fewer behavioral symptoms," Costello says. "Poverty or any other single factor can't fully explain the development of such symptoms." Copyright ©2003 Science Service

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4393 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON, — The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new option for people with Alzheimer's disease, the first treatment specifically for late stages of the illness. The drug, memantine, has long been sold in Germany, and many people in the United States have bought it over the Internet. Now that memantine has been approved, Forest Laboratories will sell it in the United States under the brand name Namenda for patients with moderate to severe symptoms of Alzheimer's. The company said the drug should be on pharmacy shelves in January. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4392 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By EMILY EAKIN Radiant Cool" has the makings of a gripping noir thriller: a missing body, a tough-talking female sleuth and a mustachioed Russian agent mixed up in a shadowy plot to take over the world. But the novel, by Dan Lloyd, a neurophilosopher at Trinity College in Hartford, is also a serious work of scholarship, the unlikely vehicle for an abstruse new theory of consciousness. Lured in by the sinister atmospherics (a possible murder victim turns up on Page 1) and clipped, Sam Spade narration ("He was a fool and a moron, but I never wanted to see him dead"), readers soon find themselves enrolled in a heady tutorial on Husserl, phenomenology, neural networks and multidimensional scaling. Mr. Lloyd says that embedding his theory of consciousness in a novel was essential for making his scholarly case. "I'm trying to show the way that consciousness is personal and idiosyncratic and especially bound up with time," he said. "If you put those factors together, you end up with a novel as a way to express those ideas." ("Radiant Cool," which will be published by M.I.T. Press in December, has a 100-page appendix explaining the theory in technical terms, in case scholars fail to grasp the literary version.) Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 4391 - Posted: 10.18.2003

NewScientist.com news service A skin patch that boosts the "male" hormone testosterone markedly improves the sex lives of women suffering from a loss of sexual desire, following the removal of their ovaries. Testosterone increased desire scores and sexual activity in these women by about 40 per cent compared to a placebo. The international team of researchers tested the patch in European and Australian women who had suffered early menopause due to the surgery and developed hypoactive sexual desire disorder. The disorder is the most common female sexual dysfunction and can be caused by depression, medication or natural menopause. "The results are striking for two specific reasons," says study leader Susan Davis, at the Jean Hailes Foundation, in Melbourne. "There was an extremely low placebo response, so it's a true treatment effect. Also, we are not just talking about sex, this study is really about quality of life. This is about women wanting to feel better." The work was funded by the multinational company Procter & Gamble. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4390 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JERE LONGMAN A previously undetected steroid has been identified and a new test indicates that as many as a half-dozen athletes in track and field have recently used the performance-enhancing drug, American drug-testing officials said yesterday. That is considered a significant number of athletes from one country in a single sport, and would constitute the biggest drug scandal to hit track and field since the Canadian Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal for 100 meters at the 1988 Summer Olympics after testing positive for a steroid. "I know of no other drug bust that is larger than this," Terry Madden, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, an independent group that conducts drug testing for Olympic-related sports, said in a conference call with reporters yesterday. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4389 - Posted: 10.17.2003

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In 1998, scientists found the mammalian version of a gene, known as timeless, which in flies is crucial for the biological clock. However, all but one of the research groups involved determined that timeless did not have such a role in mammals. Now that research group says timeless is indeed a key timekeeper in mammals. In a new complex molecular study of rats, published in the Oct. 17 issue of Science, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign blocked the functional ability of timeless, leaving the circadian clock in disarray. The key difference between the previous studies and this new one was the identification of two timeless proteins -- one a full-length protein and the other a shorter, incomplete version.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 4388 - Posted: 10.17.2003

Radioactive materials for medical imaging produced at lower cost. PHILIP BALL PET scanning could become cheaper and more widespread, thanks to a new bench-top way to produce rare radioactive atoms1. Current methods of making radioisotopes render the medical-imaging technique cumbersome and expensive. Positron-emission tomography (PET) scans of tumours and organs rely on the radioactive decay of isotopes such as carbon-11 and fluorine-18. Isotopes are versions of chemical elements that differ in the number of neutrons in each atom. Carbon's most common isotope, carbon-12, for example, has six neutrons per atom, whereas carbon-11 has five. The isotopes used for PET decay by emitting positrons, which are like positively charged electrons, made from antimatter; normal electrons have a negative charge. When positrons collide with electrons, they annihilate each other in a flash of gamma rays. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 4387 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bird parents typically raise their young in seemingly peaceful cooperation and were therefore seen as reflecting the ideal of monogamous partnership. This view has changed dramatically over the last decade: since molecular ‘fingerprinting’ techniques became available, behavioural ecologists have routinely used paternity analyses to study mating systems. We now know that unfaithful behaviour – referred to as extra-pair copulations – is more the rule than the exception, in particular in socially monogamous songbirds. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Research Centre for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and from the Zoological Museum in Oslo, Norway, now show the evolutionary advantages of this behaviour, using data from a long term study on the blue tit, a small hole-nesting songbird (Nature, October 16 2003). Through extra-pair copulations with distantly breeding males, females produce offspring that are more outbred and therefore genetically more diverse, compared to their half-siblings sired by the social father. Monogamy is rare among animals. Even species that form socially monogamous pairs of one male and one female are often not monogamous in the strict sense. Males and females commonly copulate with more than one partner during a single reproductive event. Therefore, young raised in the same brood are often sired by different males. The evolutionary advantage of unfaithful behaviour is obvious for males: the clutch- or litter size of the partner limits the maximum number of offspring that can be produced. Extra-pair copulations with other females provide the only opportunity for a male to sire additional young. For females, the significance of promiscuity is less obvious. If evolution only favours high numbers of offspring, then females would not benefit from mating with multiple males. However, evolutionary biologists have convincingly shown that the genetic quality of the young has a crucial influence on their subsequent survival and reproductive success. Consequently, not only the quantity, but also the genetic quality of the progeny determines how successfully an individual will spread its genes in future generations.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4386 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alzheimer's disease is the single most common cause of dementia, a chronically progressive brain condition that impairs intellect and behavior to the point where customary activities of daily living become compromised. Over 4 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease. Its high prevalence may lead people to believe that dementia is always due to Alzheimer's disease and that memory loss is a feature of all dementias. However, an article by Alzheimer's disease expert M.-Marsel Mesulam, M.D., in the Oct. 16 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reports that nearly a quarter of all dementias, especially those of presenile onset, may be caused by diseases other than Alzheimer's disease and that some of these so-called atypical dementias involve cognitive abnormalities in areas other than memory. Mesulam is Ruth and Evelyn Dunbar Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and professor of neurology at the Feinberg School of Medicine and director of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4385 - Posted: 10.17.2003

By Lori Valigra | Special to The Christian Science Monitor Ask any aquarium curator, and you'll discover just how much an octopus likes to explore its environment. A master escape artist whose soft body can contort itself through the smallest of openings, the octopus is the brainiest of animals without backbones, and it has keen eyesight. Those attributes attracted Albert Titus, a University of Buffalo professor, to study how an octopus sees, and to mimic that structure and function in a silicon chip called the o-retina. His goal is to create electronic vision systems that could be used in robots to explore the oceans, outer space, and harsh environments. Professor Titus and his colleagues developed an experimental version of the o-retina chip, which is about the size of a narrow Post-it Note. The chip acts as a retina, a sensory membrane in the eye that distills relevant visual information to be sent to the brain. "We'd like to be able to explore new things in a more intelligent way, to have a vision system that perceives its environment and makes decisions without a human always telling it what to do," says Titus. One big challenge is figuring out how the brain uses information to understand and reconstitute an image, and then translating that process onto a chip. The octopus retina provides a simple, yet elegant visual system which, Titus says, is relatively easy to simulate in silicon. Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 4384 - Posted: 06.24.2010