By snooping on one another's social lives, animals can work out how to behave when they meet in the future. JOHN WHITFIELD Nosiness isn't nice. But in the past few years, behavioural biologists have shown the trait in a more positive and intriguing light. Animals from fish to songbirds, they have found, can achieve success by keeping watch on their neighbours' social lives. Such eavesdropping may also be woven into the fabric of human societies - and might even help to explain why people often behave charitably. Prying animals reap significant rewards. They know when to pick a fight and when to back down; who to mate with, and who to cuckold. Not surprisingly, perhaps, researchers have also found that animals behave differently depending on who is watching or listening. Animal communication, experts are coming to realize, has evolved to fit into a social network, rather than being a collection of signals intended simply to impress a particular mate or rival1. Eavesdropping shows "how incredibly subtle animal strategies are", says evolutionary biologist Lee Dugatkin of the University of Louisville in Kentucky. This subtlety explains why it went unnoticed until recently - it's tricky to design experiments to tease out the effects on one animal of watching other animals interact. Peter McGregor, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, suggests that researchers may also have neglected such experiments because they underestimated animals' cunning. "For most people, fish don't rate when it comes to cognitive abilities," he observes. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Evolution; Animal Communication
Link ID: 2680 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A hormone common in pregnant women shows promise as an easily administered treatment for people with early-stage multiple sclerosis (MS). A new study by UCLA neuroscientists shows for the first time in humans that estriol in oral tablet form can decrease the size and number of brain lesions, and increase protective immune responses in patients with relapsing remitting MS. The results of the Phase I clinical trial led by Dr. Rhonda Voskuhl, an associate professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the study's principal investigator, appear in the October edition of the Annals of Neurology. Previous research has found similar results in pregnant women and animals with early-stage MS. "I am excited by the prospect of finding an easily administered treatment for MS based on a naturally occurring phenomenon in pregnancy. At present the only approved treatments are anti-inflammatory drugs administered with injections," said Voskuhl, also a research scientist at UCLA's Brain Research and Neuropsychiatric institutes. "Our findings also hold promise for finding new treatments for a host of other autoimmune disorders that improve during pregnancy, such as rheumatoid arthritis."

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 2679 - Posted: 09.21.2002

Copyright © 2002 AP Online By ANGELA POTTER, Associated Press BALTIMORE )- Heather Whitestone McCallum, deaf since childhood, could deal with not hearing her name announced as the next Miss America in 1995. But when one of her sons fell and scraped his head in the back yard and she couldn't hear his cry, she drew the line. Suddenly, the hearing aid she relied on to hear muffled words and shifting, shapeless sounds wasn't enough. Copyright © 2001 Nando Media

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 2678 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People with nerve or limb injuries may one day be able to command wheelchairs, prosthetics and even paralyzed arms and legs by "thinking them through" the motions By Miguel A. L. Nicolelis and John K. Chapin Belle, our tiny owl monkey, was seated in her special chair inside a soundproof chamber at our Duke University laboratory. Her right hand grasped a joystick as she watched a horizontal series of lights on a display panel. She knew that if a light suddenly shone and she moved the joystick left or right to correspond to its position, a dispenser would send a drop of fruit juice into her mouth. She loved to play this game. And she was good at it. Belle wore a cap glued to her head. Under it were four plastic connectors. The connectors fed arrays of microwires--each wire finer than the finest sewing thread--into different regions of Belle's motor cortex, the brain tissue that plans movements and sends instructions for enacting the plans to nerve cells in the spinal cord. Each of the 100 microwires lay beside a single motor neuron. When a neuron produced an electrical discharge--an "action potential"--the adjacent microwire would capture the current and send it up through a small wiring bundle that ran from Belle's cap to a box of electronics on a table next to the booth. The box, in turn, was linked to two computers, one next door and the other half a country away. In a crowded room across the hall, members of our research team were getting anxious. After months of hard work, we were about to test the idea that we could reliably translate the raw electrical activity in a living being's brain--Belle's mere thoughts--into signals that could direct the actions of a robot. Unknown to Belle on this spring afternoon in 2000, we had assembled a multijointed robot arm in this room, away from her view, that she would control for the first time. As soon as Belle's brain sensed a lit spot on the panel, electronics in the box running two real-time mathematical models would rapidly analyze the tiny action potentials produced by her brain cells. Our lab computer would convert the electrical patterns into instructions that would direct the robot arm. Six hundred miles north, in Cambridge, Mass., a different computer would produce the same actions in another robot arm, built by Mandayam A. Srinivasan, head of the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics (the Touch Lab) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At least, that was the plan. © 1996-2002 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Robotics; Regeneration
Link ID: 2677 - Posted: 06.24.2010

As children and parents prepare for the new school year, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) encourages them to put adequate nighttime sleep on the “back to school” list, along with pencils, binders and backpacks. According to the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research (NCSDR) at NHLBI, children need at least nine hours of sleep each night on a regular basis for their health, safety, and best performance in school and other activities. Inadequate sleep in children can lead to attention difficulties, easy frustration, and difficulty controlling emotions. “Adequate nighttime sleep is just as important as healthy eating and exercise for children’s development,” said NHLBI Director Claude Lenfant, M.D. “The start of the new school year is a great time to establish a good night’s sleep as a lifelong habit.” To ensure parents and their children get a strong start this school year, the NHLBI and NCSDR are launching a “How I Get a Heap of Sleep” contest with Paws, Inc., the creative studio behind Garfield the Cat and NHLBI’s partner in the Sleep Well. Do Well. Star Sleeper Campaign. The Campaign’s goal is to educate children ages 7-11 — their parents, teachers, and health care providers — about the importance of adequate nighttime sleep.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 2676 - Posted: 06.24.2010

AFP Out-of-body experiences, which in the 1970s became popularly attributed to intervention by God or by space aliens, are likely to emanate from a more mundane source: our own minds. Swiss neurologists believe the sensation of floating above one's body or feeling being disconnected from it, an experience sometimes recounted by people who have had surgery, is triggered by the angular gyrus, in the right cortex of the human brain. A team led by Olaf Blanke at Geneva University Hospital used electrodes to stimulate the brain of a 43-year-old woman who had suffered chronic epileptic seizures for 11 years. Copyright 2002 AFP. Copyright © 2002 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Epilepsy; Miscellaneous
Link ID: 2675 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Shorter lives are a price of machismo. JOHN WHITFIELD The bigger and badder a male mammal is, the more ridden with parasites he his, compared with the female members of his species. This could be one reason why males die sooner than females. As the size gap between the sexes widens, so does the difference in parasite burden and lifespan, say Ken Wilson and Sarah Moore, two ecologists at the University of Stirling, UK. They reviewed 355 studies on wild mammals' worms, bloodsuckers and bugs. But diseases caused by parasites, such as tuberculosis and malaria, also afflict men more severely than they do women. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 2674 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nocaine, a new drug developed through Georgetown University Medical Center's Drug Discovery Program may help cocaine addicts withdraw from their habit in much the same way that methadone helps heroin addicts withdraw, according to a study conducted by Georgetown researchers, with colleagues at the University of Mississippi and the University of Texas. Their findings will be published in the October issue of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, which is available now online. In the study, designed to examine Nocaine's cocaine-like properties, the scientists found that research animals worked harder to get doses of Nocaine than to receive a placebo (saline solution). However, the amount of effort expended for Nocaine was significantly lower than the effort expended to obtain doses of cocaine. "Our study results imply that Nocaine is a weak reinforcer--meaning that it provides some of cocaine's effects, but at a much lower level," said William L. Woolverton, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where this portion of the research was conducted.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 2673 - Posted: 09.20.2002

Multiple sclerosis (MS) might be triggered by a sexually transmitted infection, an expert has suggested. However, the theory has been dismissed as pure speculation by other MS researchers. The disease, which progressively attacks the nervous system, is commonly thought to be the result of a malfunctioning of the immune system. Many doctors believe this is down to faulty genes. But Dr Christopher Hawkes, of London's Institute of Neurology, believes the disease may be triggered by a sexually transmitted agent, and that young people, who are more prone to sexual experimentation, might be most at risk. Dr Hawkes conducted an analysis of the known patterns of the disease, and examined clusters found in such places as the Faroe Islands, Iceland, the Orkneys and the Shetlands. (C) BBC

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 2672 - Posted: 09.19.2002

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced grants totaling $19 million to support the first two research centers of a major network of facilities to focus on the biomedical and behavioral aspects of autism. The overall initiative, called STAART (Studies to Advance Autism Research and Treatment) Centers Program, was established in response to the Children’s Health Act of 2000, which calls for five new autism research centers by the end of FY 2003. The STAART program will expand NIH’s commitment to autism research, which last year totaled $56 million. The NIH Autism Coordinating Committee (NIH/ACC) coordinates autism research conducted by its five member Institutes: The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). All will contribute funds to the STAART program. Autism is a brain disorder that affects social, communicative, and behavioral functioning from an early age. It is a lifelong condition for which there is currently no cure. Recent findings indicate that autism rates are increasing. Although it is known that genetics and brain dysfunction are involved in autism, exact causes have yet to be identified.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 2671 - Posted: 06.24.2010

STANFORD, Calif. - Old dogs may be able to learn new tricks after all, according to recent findings in owls. Researchers at Stanford University Medical Center have discovered that owls adapt better when taught in small steps as opposed to a single larger dose. These results, published in the Sept. 19 issue of the journal Nature, could eventually help doctors treat adults with brain injuries. "Instead of asking the owls to learn in one large step, we broke the problem down into small steps," said Brie Linkenhoker, a Stanford graduate student and first author on the paper. "We found that they could learn substantially more this way." Adult animals are less able to learn new skills - witness any adult trying to master a new language. It turns out that the brains of younger animals are more able to make and break connections between neurons, allowing those animals to quickly pick up new skills and information. This phenomenon is the reason that children recover much faster from head injuries than adults.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Hearing
Link ID: 2670 - Posted: 09.19.2002

Changes in the brain's white matter may play a major role in the onset of Alzheimer's disease, whose baffling origin has traditionally been blamed on the gray matter. The new findings could provide a fresh direction for Alzheimer's research in this neglected part of the brain, offering the potential for early diagnosis and enhanced therapies. The results are reported in the Sept. 17 print edition of Biochemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. "Alzheimer's disease is conventionally considered a disease of the brain gray matter because its most prominent consequence is severe memory loss," says Alex Roher, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, Ariz., and lead author of the paper. The overwhelming majority of Alzheimer's research has focused on gray matter, despite the fact that white matter makes up about 50 percent of total brain tissue and is substantially altered during Alzheimer's progression, Roher says.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Glia
Link ID: 2669 - Posted: 09.19.2002

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A drug used to help control psychotic behavior in people with schizophrenia holds promise for controlling similar symptoms in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests. What sets this drug – called quetiapine – apart from its contemporary counterparts is its apparent lack of serious side effects, such as confusion, muscle stiffness and imbalance in the joints, said Douglas Scharre, a study co-author and an associate professor of clinical neurology at Ohio State University. None of the 10 subjects in the study reported any of these symptoms during a 12-week trial.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 2668 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Stimulating brain region elicits illusion often attributed to the paranormal. HELEN PEARSON Activity in one region of the brain could explain out-of-body experiences. Researchers in Switzerland have triggered the phenomenon using electrodes1. People describe out-of-body experiences as feeling that their consciousness becomes detached from their body, often floating above it. Because these lucid states are popularly linked to the paranormal, "a lot of people are reluctant to talk about them", says neurologist Olaf Blanke of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland. Blanke found that electrically stimulating one brain region — the right angular gyrus — repeatedly triggers out-of-body experiences. Blanke and his team were using electrodes to excite the brain of a woman being treated for epilepsy. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Epilepsy; Miscellaneous
Link ID: 2667 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Drinking heavily during pregnancy may cause serious health problems in some - but there may be subtle signs of brain damage even in those spared this. A UK expert says that the latest evidence suggests that it may be safer for women to abstain completely during pregnancy. Cases of "foetal alcohol syndrome" are well documented. Babies of heavy-drinking mothers can develop a wide range of physical and neurodevelopmental problems. However, some babies appear to be far less affected, and it can be harder to measure the extent of the problem. Even children with equivalent IQ may have different levels of damage. A team of scientists from San Diego State University has used the reaction time of children to check for subtle brain damage perhaps sustained during pregnancy. (C) BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2666 - Posted: 09.18.2002

(Little Rock) Back in the mid-1980s, W. Sue T. Griffin had a wild idea: What if functions of immune molecules in the brain contributed to Alzheimer's disease? She has come a long way. Today, scientists widely accept the theory that first met with laughter. Moreover, Dr. Griffin has moved on from explaining how Alzheimer's disease occurs and predicting who will get the disease to finding how to prevent it. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded her and her colleagues at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) another $7 million to continue her work on Alzheimer's disease and related problems of aging. Dr. Griffin earned a Ph.D. in physiology at the University of Rochester in 1974 and in the mid-1980s was doing research in developmental neurobiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas. She noticed that the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease and Down's syndrome had a similar excess of cytokines, immune signal proteins that cause inflammation and - sometimes - the death of neighboring neurons.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 2665 - Posted: 09.18.2002

The treatment of neuropsychological deficits that follow stroke or head injury comes under scrutiny at an international conference-aimed of determining which treatments work, how well they work and for whom. The 600 delegates at the Effectiveness of Rehabilitation for Cognitive Deficits conference, organised by Cardiff University’s School of Psychology are drawn from all sectors of health care management and include medical doctors, clinical psychologists, research neuropsychologists, therapists, insurers, lawyers, patients and their families. “The volume of interest that the conference has generated reflects the originality and significance of the theme,” said conference organiser, Professor Peter Halligan. “As far as we are aware, there has never been a formal international meeting dedicated to considering the efficacy of existing treatments and employing an evidence based approach for cognitive disorders in patients following brain damage”. Rehabilitation for brain injury is expensive and time consuming.

Keyword: Regeneration; Stroke
Link ID: 2664 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Penn scientists map and measure the seat of impulsive behavior in the brain (Philadelphia, PA) -- There is a sound neurological basis for the cliché that men are more aggressive than women, according to new findings by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, the Penn scientists illustrated for the first time that the relative size of the sections of the brain known to constrain aggression and monitor behavior is larger in women than in men. The research, by Ruben C. Gur, PhD, and Raquel E. Gur, MD, PhD, and their colleagues in Penn's Department of Psychiatry and the Department of Epidemiology, is published in the recent issue of the Journal of the Cerebral Cortex.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 2663 - Posted: 09.18.2002

Cultural differences that discourage alcohol misuse among Jews may be backed up by a gene that has much the same effect, say scientists. Statistics suggest that Jews have fewer problems with alcohol than Caucasians in general. Deborah Hasim, from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, looked at the genetic makeup of 68 Israeli Jews aged between 22 and 65. They were also quizzed on their alcohol consumption. They were looking for a variation of a gene called ADH2 which appears to have a role in the way the body metabolises alcohol. Previous studies have suggested that one in five Jews have this gene variation - higher than in a Caucasian population. The Columbia research found that their participants with the gene variation were far less likely to have suffered alcohol dependence. (C) BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 2662 - Posted: 09.17.2002

By MARY DUENWALD College students can recognize signs of stress like headache, upset stomach, fatigue and insomnia. But the worst, said Micaela Mendlow, a physics and music major at Amherst, are anxiety attacks, when it can seem difficult even to breathe. "You feel winded," Ms. Mendlow said, "and you get to the point of tears, where you just can't sort things out and feel like you have a grasp on the work you have to do. It's theoretically manageable, but you just want to cry." Twice when she was a sophomore, anxiety attacks sent her to the campus counseling center. It helped to talk with someone who cared, she said. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 2661 - Posted: 09.17.2002