People who are energetic, happy and relaxed are less likely to catch colds, while those who are depressed, nervous or angry are more likely to complain about cold symptoms, whether or not they get bitten by the cold bug, according to a recent study. Study participants who had a positive emotional style weren't infected as often and experienced fewer symptoms compared to people with a negative emotional style, say Sheldon Cohen, Ph.D., of Carnegie Mellon University and colleagues, writing in the July issue of Psychosomatic Medicine. Cohen's team interviewed 334 healthy volunteers three evenings a week for two weeks to assess their emotional states. The volunteers described how they felt that day in three positive-emotion areas: vigor, well-being and calm. They were also questioned about three categories of negative feelings: depression, anxiety and hostility.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 4068 - Posted: 07.22.2003

The number of children taking the controversial drug Ritalin has jumped sharply, official figures reveal. According to the Department, the number of prescriptions for the drug increased by 22% last year. The number of children taking the drug now tops 254,000, double what it was five years ago. Ritalin is prescribed to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The symptoms of ADHD range from poor concentration and extreme hyperactivity to interrupting and intruding on other people and not being able to wait in queues. Studies have suggested the condition may affect one in 20 children. Boys are three times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls. (C) BBC

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 4067 - Posted: 07.20.2003

By MELINDA LIGOS ADDICTION costs corporate America billions of dollars a year in lost productivity, absenteeism and higher health care expenses. It also derails many once-promising careers. More companies are willing to offer assistance these days, especially as they deal with higher levels of employee stress from heightened workloads and job cuts. Yet many workers are still reluctant to take advantage of this help, for fear of jeopardizing their positions. "Telling something so personal would have lessened my authority as a leader," said a 65-year-old executive of a computer company in Philadelphia who recently returned from 28 days of treatment for alcoholism. "As a manager, you have to create some distance between you and your employees." The executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, had arranged for the treatment himself at the Caron Foundation, a rehabilitation center in Wernersville, Pa. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4066 - Posted: 07.20.2003

By MICHAEL RUSE Biology may not have the status of physics and chemistry, but it sure is a lot more fun. Did you know that, controlling for body size, the testicles of the chimpanzee are 16 times as large as those of the gorilla? That the chimp has sex 100 times as often as the gorilla? And that the bonobo, the pygmy chimp, has 10 times as much sex as its larger cousin and hence 1,000 times as much as the gorilla? The basic gorilla-chimpanzee difference is a function of the chimpanzee's preference for life in the trees. Male gorillas (those that can) form harems of females, and to this end are much bigger than the females. They need to ward off their rivals. Male chimpanzees cannot afford to grow too much bigger -- that would be bad for climbing. Hence, since chimps are not so readily able to form harems, their strategy is to out-copulate competitors. In the bonobos, for various reasons, the females rule the roost, and the males know that fighting simply will not work. In such a situation, being a superstud -- the Errol Flynn of the primate world -- is the best way forward. Which conclusion certainly gives male chauvinists food for thought. If Andrea Dworkin becomes president, will there be more sex down in the ranks? Or does any of this really pertain to humans? In ''Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human,'' the British science writer Matt Ridley rather suggests it does. Body weight for body weight, our testicles come in at five times the size of gorillas' even if we attain only one-third the size of chimpanzees'. ''This is compatible with a monogamous species showing a degree of female infidelity. The difference between species is the shadow of the similarity within the species.'' Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4065 - Posted: 07.20.2003

For years we’ve been told to blame our obsession with thinness on society's glorification of it, and that eating disorders like anorexia were "social diseases." But research shows that genetics likely plays a big role too. "If there's any disorder that's going to be caused by both nature and nurture, it's something like an eating disorder," says Cynthia Bulik, professor of psychiatry and director of the eating disorders program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "It was believed for a long time that these were socio-cultural disorders, that somehow our culture or the emphasis on thinness caused anorexia. But we know now that that's not entirely true." The first sign of a genetic link came from surveys of families where anorexia appeared. "Family studies show that if you have a family member who has an eating disorder, you're between seven and twelve times at greater risk for developing an eating disorder yourself," says Bulik. "What we can't tell from family studies is whether the reason something runs in a family is because of genes or environment. So we've done twin studies to ask that question and we've found indeed that anorexia is a strongly heritable condition." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 4064 - Posted: 06.24.2010

As many as one in one thousand babies born completely deaf every year. Another two or three per thousand have some hearing loss. As this ScienCentral News video reports, one researcher is calling for hearing screenings for newborns because the earlier hearing loss is discovered, the better. When two-year-old Charlie Knott was born with severe hearing loss, it was not something his parents anticipated before his birth. "We were really shocked," says his mother, Rebecca Knott. "Because out of all the things you worry about with a child, hearing wasn't the one we were thinking about." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 4063 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service Stem cells from the brain do not provoke an immune response when transplanted to different parts of another individual's body, suggests a study in mice. The finding could help overcome immune rejection, one of the most difficult obstacles to developing therapies to treat people with central nervous system problems such as spinal cord injuries and Parkinson's disease. Michael Young, at the Schepens Eye Research Institute, Harvard, and US and Japanese colleagues have shown that stem cells from the brain have a special "immune privilege" even when they are transplanted to places outside their normal location in the central nervous system. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 4062 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brain is constantly striving to find meaning in things, even in situations where there is no meaning. This attempt to find meaning can often lead to what music perception pioneer Diana Deutsch calls 'illusions in the brain.' Just as one might imagine seeing, for example, the outline of a woman's face in a gnarled tree trunk, in its grasp for meaning, the brain often produces auditory illusions that lead us to hear phantom words. "Phantom Words and Other Curiosities," a new CD by Deutsch, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, includes numerous instructive and entertaining sound demonstrations to provide researchers and amateur scientists with the resources to conduct research on how the brain processes sound. The CD will be released at the Second Annual Citizen Science Conference in Pasadena, CA on July 17-20. Like Deutsch's earlier CD, "Musical Illusions and Paradoxes," the demonstrations in "Phantom Words and Other Curiosities" are based on discoveries by Deutsch. Members of the news media can listen to selected tracks from "Phantom Words and Other Curiosities," by visiting the following web site: htttp://philomel.com/press/

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 4061 - Posted: 07.19.2003

NewScientist.com news service A chocolate-scented mousetrap has been developed by UK scientists to catch the pests without the need for bait. Contrary to popular belief, mice are more attracted to the scent of chocolate than the more traditional mouse-bait cheese, or other aromas like vanilla essence, according to Sorex Ltd, a manufacturer of rodent control products based in Cheshire, UK. So the company enlisted researchers at the University of Warwick to help them produce a chocolate-based trap to capture the rodents. Sorex originally had the idea of putting melted chocolate into a depression within the trap. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 4060 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Danny Kingsley, ABC Science Online — People who develop complex networks, like the World Wide Web or electricity grids, could learn a lot from the social behavior of dolphins, a New Zealand zoologist has found. David Lusseau, a zoologist at the University of Otago, spent seven years observing a community of 64 bottlenose dolphins in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand, and found they have a social structure similar to human and human-made networks. His mathematical study of their social behavior is published in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society. Copyright © 2003 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Animal Communication
Link ID: 4059 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARY DUENWALD Scientists have identified a gene that may help explain why some people become depressed in response to the stresses of life and others skate by relatively unscathed. The gene, which comes in two forms, or alleles, can either protect people from depression or make them more vulnerable, researchers report today in the journal Science. In the study, people who experienced job loss, death in the family, abuse or other traumas were much more likely to develop depression if they possessed two copies of the short allele. Those with two copies of the long allele (pronounced uh-LEEL) were able to withstand such events without becoming depressed. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4058 - Posted: 07.18.2003

Among people who suffered multiple stressful life events over 5 years, 43 percent with one version of a gene developed depression (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/depressionmenu.cfm), compared to only 17 percent with another version of the gene, say researchers funded, in part, by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Those with the "short," or stress-sensitive version of the serotonin transporter gene were also at higher risk for depression if they had been abused as children. Yet, no matter how many stressful life events they endured, people with the "long," or protective version experienced no more depression than people who were totally spared from stressful life events. The short variant appears to confer vulnerability to stresses, such as loss of a job, breaking-up with a partner, death of a loved one, or a prolonged illness, report Drs. Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, University of Wisconsin and King's College London, and colleagues, in the July 18, 2003 Science. The serotonin transporter gene codes for the protein in neurons, brain cells, that recycles the chemical messenger after it's been secreted into the synapse, the gulf between cells. Since the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants act by blocking this transporter protein, the gene has been a prime suspect in mood and anxiety disorders. Yet, its link to depression eluded detection in eight previous studies. "We found the connection only because we looked at the study members' stress history," noted Moffitt. She suggested that measuring such pivotal environmental events — which can include infections and toxins as well as psychosocial traumas — might be the key to unlocking the secrets of psychiatric genetics.

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4057 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Antonio Damasio takes neuroscience back to its philosophical origins in Spinoza's "mind-body" and reveals the "embodied consciousness" of art As Byatt Book: Looking for Spinoza Author: Antonio Damasio Price: Heinemann, £20 In his book "Descartes' Error", Antonio Damasio took issue with two aspects of Des-cartes's thought-his use of clockwork as a metaphor for the mind, and his statement of priorities: cogito ergo sum. Damasio reverses this, and shows how the life of the mind arises from the life of the body. He finds the idea of mind as computer programming, as hard-wiring, to be a misleading descendent of the clockwork metaphor. He deals in the "wet stuff" of the living tissues of body and brain. In "Descartes' Error", he gave us a plausible and beautiful idea of how our sense of self and our thought processes arise out of a series of nervous mappings of the body by the brain-from the unconscious visceral reporting to the conscious appetites, to memory and reflection. He does this partly by showing us what happens in brain-damaged people, distinguishing between those who live in vegetative states, those who have lost certain precise things (the left side of the body, or short-term memory, or a sense of responsibility) and those who think and feel more or less as most of us do. In "Looking for Spinoza", he extends his researches into the contribution of emotions and feelings to the constitution of our selves. My only real problem with this book is with the ordinary language slipperiness of two words which Damasio uses very precisely. "Emotions," for Damasio, are involuntary responses like pleasure, pain, disgust and fear, which arise with the appetites early in the life of the body (and which in some cases are innate). "Feelings" are maps and images in the brain of its responses to sensory and emotional stimuli, both external and internal. Both emotions and feelings are an inextricable part of the way we take in the world-including the way we think. Damasio is very persuasive on how we could not survive without the social emotions that have evolved within us. But his greatest skill is making his readers feel the process by which our nervous system maps our body, its surroundings, its history, its needs and its decisions at every moment in our brains. He disposes elegantly of the idea that a metaphorical homunculus sits in our skulls making immutable representations of things to some inner eye, and replaces him with a shifting stream of signals, reinforcing, correcting, congregating into ideas of things and ourselves.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4056 - Posted: 07.17.2003

By Jonathan Amos, BBC News Online science staff The number of primates used in medical research in the UK is set to rise significantly in the coming years. The pharmaceutical industry has acknowledged as much - and the animal rights lobby is convinced of it. As science seeks to tackle the neurological diseases afflicting a "greying population", it will need a steady supply of monkeys on which to test the safety and effectiveness of its next-generation pills. Experts say the extremely specific way these novel pharma products will work means primates - because their brain architecture is very similar to our own - will be the only animals suitable for experimentation. This whole area of research is, of course, a very contentious one. We - humans - are also primates. It is fair to argue there are ethical dilemmas related to primate studies that one does not have to grapple with in, say, mice or rats, which far outnumber monkeys in the lab. (C) BBC

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 4055 - Posted: 07.17.2003

Why your brain routinely breaks its own rules By Eric Haseltine Ask a lawyer for advice on any problem and you'll usually get an equivocating answer like, "It depends." I used to think such vacillation must be taught in law school, but recently I've come to the conclusion that lawyers' brains are like everyone else's—they can't help being ambiguous because that's what each of us is wired to be. The brain's "law" of simultaneous contrast states that the appearance of an object surrounded by a different shade or hue will change in a manner that reflects the opposite of its surroundings. For instance, the small gray diamond in the images above looks lighter when surrounded by black but darker when surrounded by a lighter gray. The same gray diamond looks slightly magenta when surrounded by green, the complement of magenta. Complementary colors are those that produce white when mixed together. This law of contrast holds in all cases—except when it doesn't. Consider the stars in the center of the figures at right. The gray star on the left (with a black inner border) looks darker than its neighbor, which has a light border. Such violations of the law of contrast are called assimilation: Under special conditions, an object will assimilate qualities of its surroundings. © Copyright 2003 The Walt Disney Company.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 4054 - Posted: 06.24.2010

-- A UCSF-led team has demonstrated that the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions, not only perceives pain, but plays a role in regulating pain, and that it does so in part through the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, suggesting a possible target for therapy. The finding, published in the July 17 issue of Nature, provides some of the first neuroanatomical evidence that the cerebral cortex not only receives pain signals from nerve cells in lower regions of the brain, but modulates pain signals. "Our finding suggests that the cerebral cortex is not just the end-point of pain processing. The activity of the cortex can change the set-point of the pain threshold in a top-down manner, completely modifying the experience of pain," says lead author Luc Jasmin, MD, PhD, FRCS, UCSF assistant professor of neurological surgery. Copyright © 1992-2003 Bio Online, Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 4053 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Birds may pitch songs to win mates despite urban din. MICHAEL HOPKIN City birds sing higher-pitched songs than their country cousins. The trick could make their mating calls audible over the low roar of traffic, researchers suggest1. Hans Slabbekoorn and Margriet Peet of Leiden University in the Netherlands surveyed 32 male great tits (Parus major) around Leiden, recording songs and measuring the level of background noise. "Some were next to a really busy road - others were in quiet residential neighbourhoods," Slabbekoorn explains. Town tits hit the high notes, the pair found, whereas rural ones favour their lower registers. Urban birds may stand a better chance of being heard over the loud, low-frequency rumbling of engines if they use mainly high notes. Especially since they don't seem to wait for a quiet moment before performing. "They continue to sing regardless of whether cars are going past," says Slabbekoorn. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 4052 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DALLAS – – Abnormally high calcium levels spurred on by a mutated gene may lead to the death of neurons associated with Huntington's disease, an inherited genetic disorder, characterized by mental and physical deterioration, for which there is no known cure. This discovery by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, published in the current issue of Neuron, sheds new light on the process that causes the selective death of neurons in the region of the brain called the striatum. Neurons in this area control emotions, body movements and several other neurological processes, including addiction. Since the discovery of the huntingtin gene (Htt) in 1993, researchers have been searching for what actually causes certain neurons to die in the striatum, leading to the disease.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 4051 - Posted: 06.24.2010

STANFORD, Calif. - While a trip to the mall may mean a cute sweater or new CD for most of us, it has ominous implications for the thousands of Americans who suffer from compulsive shopping disorder, a condition marked by binge shopping and subsequent financial hardship. Now Stanford University Medical Center researchers have found that a drug commonly prescribed as an antidepressant may be able to curb the uncontrollable shopping urges. In a study appearing in the July issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, patients taking citalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that is approved for use as an antidepressant, scored lower on a scale that measures compulsive shopping tendencies than those on a placebo. The majority of patients using the medication rated themselves "very much improved" or "much improved" and reported a loss of interest in shopping. "I'm very excited about the dramatic response from people who had been suffering for decades," said Lorrin Koran, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and lead author of the study. "My hope is that people with this disorder will become aware that it's treatable and they don't have to suffer."

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 4050 - Posted: 07.17.2003

With rare exceptions, the brain has a deep affinity for music Brad Evenson, National Post One evening in 1995, a Montreal real estate agent and his wife went out for a romantic dinner. It was their wedding anniversary. They felt fortunate. The husband had suffered a minor stroke a few years earlier and had recovered. In neurological test after test, his reading, speech, memory and motor functions seemed to be normal. He had even returned to work and made some lucrative deals. During dinner, his wife noticed a violinist playing for restaurant patrons. "Let's get him to play our song," she suggested. When the song ended, the agent's wife noticed a strange expression on her husband's face. The playing, he complained, had been awful. "The tune was so distorted I couldn't even recognize it," he said. "No, it was beautiful," she countered. After an argument, he realized that all music now sounded strange. The stroke had wiped out his capacity to comprehend the patterns of tone and tempo, pitch and rhythm we call music. © Copyright 2003 National Post

Keyword: Hearing; Stroke
Link ID: 4049 - Posted: 06.24.2010