Daniel Cressey The controversy over electronic cigarettes has been reignited today with the publication of a study claiming that they do not help smokers to quit their habit. Whether or not ‘e-cigarettes’ are an effective aid in the cessation of smoking has become a major issue for the rapidly growing industry that produces the devices, and for the tobacco researchers struggling to assess their impact. There is widespread agreement that inhaling from an e-cigarette, where a heating element vapourizes a liquid containing nicotine, is not as harmful as smoking a conventional cigarette, and proponents say that the products could save millions of lives. But some researchers and tobacco-control activists fear that the devices could make tobacco use seem socially acceptable again and may not assist people in actually reducing their addiction. Pamela Ling, a tobacco researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues followed 949 people who detailed their smoking habits though an online survey, and found that 88 of those who had used e-cigarettes were no more likely to have quit or reduced their smoking after a year than other smokers. “We found that there was no difference in the rate of quitting between smokers who used an e-cigarette and those who did not”, even after controlling for factors such as the user's dependence on tobacco, Ling told Nature in an e-mail. She added: “Advertising suggesting that e-cigarettes are effective for smoking cessation should be prohibited until such claims are supported by scientific evidence.” Her team reports the results today in JAMA Internal Medicine1. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19405 - Posted: 03.25.2014

Claudia Dreifus The biochemist Ricardo E. Dolmetsch has pioneered a major shift in autism research, largely putting aside behavioral questions to focus on cell biology and biochemistry. Dr. Dolmetsch, 45, has done most of his work at Stanford. Since our interviews — a condensed and edited version of which follows — he has taken a leave to join Novartis, where his mission is to organize an international team to develop autism therapies. “Pharmaceutical companies have financial and organizational resources permitting you to do things you might not be able to do as an academic,” he said. “I really want to find a drug.” Q. Did you start out your professional life studying the biochemistry of autism? A. No. In graduate school and as a postdoc, I’d done basic research on the ion channels on the membranes of cells. By my mid-20s, I had my name on some high-profile papers. Then, around 2006, my son who was then 4 was diagnosed with autism. We had suspected it. He didn’t talk much, was hyperactive, very moody. He assembled huge towers based on the color spectrum. He did all sorts of things that were very unusual. Given the signs, why did you wait that long to seek a diagnosis? I’m from Latin America [Cali, Colombia], and my Latin thing was, “This is the way boys are.” But he would just scream for hours and hours, uncontrollable. He didn’t sleep. We didn’t understand it. After a while, his teachers said, “You probably ought to have him seen.” So we went to a psychiatrist and neurologist and ultimately we got differing diagnoses. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 19404 - Posted: 03.25.2014

By Gisela Telis, Jodi Corbitt had been battling depression for decades and by 2010 had resigned herself to taking antidepressant medication for the rest of her life. Then she decided to start a dietary experiment. To lose weight, the 47-year-old Catonsville, Md., mother stopped eating gluten, a protein found in wheat and related grains. Within a month she had shed several pounds — and her lifelong depression. “It was like a veil lifted and I could see life more clearly,” she recalled. “It changed everything.” Corbitt had stumbled into an area that scientists have recently begun to investigate: whether food can have as powerful an impact on the mind as it does on the body. Research exploring the link between diet and mental health “is a very new field; the first papers only came out a few years ago,” said Michael Berk, a professor of psychiatry at the Deakin University School of Medicine in Australia. “But the results are unusually consistent, and they show a link between diet quality and mental health.” “Diet quality” refers to the kinds of foods that people eat, how often they eat them and how much of them they eat. In several studies, including a 2011 analysis of more than 5,000 Norwegians, Berk and his collaborators have found lower rates of depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder among those who consumed a traditional diet of meat and vegetables than among people who followed a modern Western diet heavy with processed and fast foods or even a health-food diet of tofu and salads. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 19403 - Posted: 03.25.2014

By Maggie Fox Medical marijuana pills or an oral spray made from cannabis may help ease some of the painful spasms caused by multiple sclerosis that make day-to-day life hard for patients, according to new guidelines from the American Academy of Neurology. But the synthetic formulations of marijuana don’t change the course of the disease and might cause unpleasant side-effects, the experts at the academy caution. There is not enough evidence to make any recommendation on smoking marijuana for MS patients, stresses Dr. Vijayshree Yadav of Oregon Health & Science University, who led the team writing the guidelines. Synthetic marijuana in pill form, including the Marinol brand, is legal for use in treating nausea and loss of appetite in cancer. An oral spray called Sativex is approved for treating MS symptoms in Britain but not in the U.S. MS patients often seek alternative and complementary therapies because they have so few options for the chronic and incurable condition, caused when the immune system mistakenly attacks the nerves. A review of those therapies found there's no evidence most of them work. The review found that the herb Ginkgo biloba might help fatigue, but not thinking and memory problems. There’s also some evidence that magnetic therapy may help fatigue.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 19402 - Posted: 03.25.2014

By ANNE EISENBERG People who strain to hear conversations in noisy places sometimes shun hearing appliances as telltale signs of aging. But what if those devices looked like wireless phone receivers? Some companies are betting that the high-tech look of a new generation of sound amplifiers will tempt people to try them. The new in-ear amps come with wireless technology and typically cost $300 to $500. The devices include directional microphones and can be fine-tuned by smartphone apps. Whatever you do, don’t call these amplifiers hearing aids. They are not considered medical devices like the ones overseen by the Food and Drug Administration and dispensed by professionals to aid those with impaired hearing. Rather, they are over-the-counter systems cleared by the F.D.A. for occasional use in situations when speech and other sounds are hard to discern — say, in a noisy restaurant or while bird-watching. “The market is proliferating with lots of devices not necessarily made for impaired hearing, but for someone who wants a boost in certain challenging conditions like lectures,” said Neil J. DiSarno, chief staff officer for audiology at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Dr. DiSarno is among the many audiologists who strongly urge people to see a physician first, in order to rule out medical causes of hearing loss, which could vary from earwax to a tumor, rather than self-diagnosing and self-treating a condition. Carole Rogin, president of the Hearing Industries Association, a trade group, said the biggest problem with personal amplification products was that people might use them instead of seeking appropriate medical oversight. “Untreated hearing loss is not a benign condition,” she said. “We want people to do something about it as soon as they notice a problem,” rather than using these devices to mask a potentially dangerous condition. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 19401 - Posted: 03.24.2014

by Clare Wilson It's a vicious circle of the cruellest kind. Stress might be causing infertility in women, according to new research. This could explain some cases in which couples are diagnosed as infertile with no apparent cause. Taking longer than usual to conceive can lead to stress, so the problem could become self-perpetuating. A link between everyday life stresses and infertility has long been suspected, but there has been little hard evidence connecting the two. Women receiving fertility treatment are generally advised to avoid stress, but not so the average person trying to conceive. An estimated one in seven couples in the UK have fertility problems and, in about a quarter of those, there is no known medical explanation, and they are given a diagnosis of "unexplained infertility". To explore the role of stress, Courtney Lynch at Ohio State University in Columbus and her colleagues collected saliva samples from 373 women in the US who had just started trying to conceive naturally and measured levels of an enzyme called alpha-amylase, a marker of stress. After one year of regular unprotected sex, about 13 per cent of the couples had failed to get pregnant, the standard definition of infertility. The third of women who had the highest alpha-amylase levels were twice as likely to be in the infertile group as the third with the lowest levels. In a previous study, Lynch's team found that those with higher levels of the stress enzyme were slightly less likely to conceive in their first month of trying. But this is the first time that alpha-amylase has been linked to clinical infertility. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19400 - Posted: 03.24.2014

By MATT RICHTEL A dangerous new form of a powerful stimulant is hitting markets nationwide, for sale by the vial, the gallon and even the barrel. The drug is nicotine, in its potent, liquid form — extracted from tobacco and tinctured with a cocktail of flavorings, colorings and assorted chemicals to feed the fast-growing electronic cigarette industry. These “e-liquids,” the key ingredients in e-cigarettes, are powerful neurotoxins. Tiny amounts, whether ingested or absorbed through the skin, can cause vomiting and seizures and even be lethal. A teaspoon of even highly diluted e-liquid can kill a small child. But, like e-cigarettes, e-liquids are not regulated by federal authorities. They are mixed on factory floors and in the back rooms of shops, and sold legally in stores and online in small bottles that are kept casually around the house for regular refilling of e-cigarettes. Evidence of the potential dangers is already emerging. Toxicologists warn that e-liquids pose a significant risk to public health, particularly to children, who may be drawn to their bright colors and fragrant flavorings like cherry, chocolate and bubble gum. “It’s not a matter of if a child will be seriously poisoned or killed,” said Lee Cantrell, director of the San Diego division of the California Poison Control System and a professor of pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s a matter of when.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 19399 - Posted: 03.24.2014

Visual illusions, such as the rabbit-duck (shown above) and café wall (shown below) are fascinating because they remind us of the discrepancy between perception and reality. But our knowledge of such illusions has been largely limited to studying humans. That is now changing. There is mounting evidence that other animals can fall prey to the same illusions. Understanding whether these illusions arise in different brains could help us understand how evolution shapes visual perception. For neuroscientists and psychologists, illusions not only reveal how visual scenes are interpreted and mentally reconstructed, they also highlight constraints in our perception. They can take hundreds of different forms and can affect our perception of size, motion, colour, brightness, 3D form and much more. Artists, architects and designers have used illusions for centuries to distort our perception. Some of the most common types of illusory percepts are those that affect the impression of size, length or distance. For example, Ancient Greek architects designed columns for buildings so that they tapered and narrowed towards the top, creating the impression of a taller building when viewed from the ground. This type of illusion is called forced perspective, commonly used in ornamental gardens and stage design to make scenes appear larger or smaller. As visual processing needs to be both rapid and generally accurate, the brain constantly uses shortcuts and makes assumptions about the world that can, in some cases, be misleading. For example, the brain uses assumptions and the visual information surrounding an object (such as light level and presence of shadows) to adjust the perception of colour accordingly. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 19398 - Posted: 03.22.2014

By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWISy The traffic was bad, even by the warped standards of a Southern California commute. We were headed south from Los Angeles to San Diego on an overcast morning last spring, but we hadn’t moved in 10 minutes. I was sandwiched in the back seat of the car between John Sylla and Denise Penn, two board members of the Los Angeles-based American Institute of Bisexuality (A.I.B.), a deep-pocketed group partly responsible for a surge of academic and scientific research across the country about bisexuality. We were on our way to an A.I.B. board meeting, where members would decide which studies to fund and also brainstorm ways to increase bisexual visibility “in a world that still isn’t convinced that bisexuality — particularly male bisexuality — exists,” as Allen Rosenthal, a sex researcher at Northwestern University, told me. When someone suggested that we try another route, Sylla, A.I.B.’s friendly and unassuming 55-year-old president, opened the maps app on his iPhone. I met Sylla the previous day at A.I.B. headquarters, a modest two-room office on the first floor of a quiet courtyard in West Hollywood that’s also home to film-production companies and a therapist’s office. Tall and pale, with an easy smile, Sylla offered me books from A.I.B.’s bisexual-themed bookshelf and marveled at the unlikelihood of his bisexual activism. “For the longest time, I didn’t even realize I was bi,” Sylla said. “When I did, I assumed I’d probably just live a supposedly straight life in the suburbs somewhere.” In the back seat, Sylla lifted his eyes from his phone and suggested an alternate course. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “We could go either way, really,” he told us. He smiled at me. “Get it? Either way?” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 19397 - Posted: 03.22.2014

By Ariana Eunjung Cha, Millions of ordinary Americans are now able to walk into a marijuana dispensary and purchase bags of pot on the spot for a variety of medical ailments. But if you’re a researcher like Sue Sisley, a psychiatrist who studies post- traumatic stress disorder, getting access to the drug isn’t nearly so easy. That’s because the federal government has a virtual monopoly on growing and cultivating marijuana for scientific research, and getting access to the drug requires three separate levels of approval. Marijuana offers hope for 6-year-old girl with rare condition: In marijuana, Lydia Schaeffer’s family members think they might have found a treatment that works. Now, they are trying to help legalize the drug. Sisley’s fight to get samples for her study — now in its fourth month — illuminates the complex politics of marijuana in the United States. While 20 states and the District have made medical marijuana legal — in Colorado and Washington state the drug is also legal for recreational use — it remains among the most tightly controlled substances under federal law. For scientists, that means extra steps to obtain, transport and secure the drug — delays they say can slow down their research by months or even years. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 19396 - Posted: 03.22.2014

by Barbara J. King Why do little boys tend to behave differently from little girls? Why do boys and girls play differently, for instance, choosing different toys as their favorites? Ask these questions and you invite a firestorm — of more questions. Is the premise behind these queries even accurate? Aren't our sons and daughters really more similar than different, after all? And when behavioral sex differences do occur, aren't parents who inflict sex-stereotypical expectations on their children largely responsible? Seven experts on chimpanzee behavior, led by of Franklin and Marshall College and including the world-famous primatologist , have in Animal Behaviour that speaks, they say, to these issues. Their data on wild chimpanzees from , Tanzania, indicate that human sex differences in childhood are primarily the result of biological, evolutionary mechanisms. The scientists analyzed data on the behavior of 12 male and eight female chimpanzee youngsters, ages 30-36 months. At that age, chimpanzees, who develop quite slowly compared with many other mammals, are still considered infants. As a rule, chimpanzees spend most of their day in close proximity to their mothers clear through their ninth year of life. In the Gombe study, male infants were found to be more gregarious than female chimpanzees; they interacted with significantly more individuals outside the immediate family, including more adult males, than did females. This result held even when the number of the mothers' social partners was controlled. ©2014 NPR

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19395 - Posted: 03.22.2014

Jessica Morrison The human nose has roughly 400 types of scent receptors that can detect at least 1 trillion different odours. The human nose can distinguish at least 1 trillion different odours, a resolution orders of magnitude beyond the previous estimate of just 10,000 scents, researchers report today in Science1. Scientists who study smell have suspected a higher number for some time, but few studies have attempted to explore the limits of the human nose’s sensory capacity. “It has just been sitting there for somebody to do,” says study co-author Andreas Keller, an olfactory researcher at the Rockefeller University in New York. To investigate the limits of humans' sense of smell, Keller and his colleagues prepared scent mixtures with 10, 20 or 30 components selected from a collection of 128 odorous molecules. Then they asked 26 study participants to identify the mixture that smelled differently in a sample set where two of three scents were the same. When the two scents contained components that overlapped by more than about 51%, most participants struggled to discriminate between them. The authors then calculated the number of possible mixtures that overlap by less than 51% to arrive at their estimate of how many smells a human nose can detect: at least 1 trillion. Donald Wilson, an olfactory researcher at the New York University School of Medicine, says the findings are “thrilling.” He hopes that the new estimate will help researchers begin to unravel an enduring mystery: how the nose and brain work together to process smells. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 19394 - Posted: 03.21.2014

by Simon Makin How much can environmental factors explain the apparent rise in autism spectrum disorders? Roughly 1 per cent of children in the US population are affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Rates in many countries, including the US, have risen sharply in recent years but no one is sure why. It is still not clear whether this is prompted by something in the environment, increased awareness of the condition and changes in diagnoses, or a result of people having children later. The environmental case is hotly debated. There is some evidence that maternal infections during pregnancy can increase the risk. Other studies have pointed to a possible link with antidepressants while others have looked at elevated levels of mercury. But determining prenatal exposure to any substance is difficult because it is hard to know what substances people have been exposed to and when. To get around this, Andrey Rzhetsky and colleagues at the University of Chicago analysed US health insurance claims containing over 100 million patient records – a third of the population – dating from 2003 to 2010. They used rates of genital malformations in newborn boys as a proxy of parents' exposure to environmental risk factors. This is based on research linking a proportion of these malformations to toxins in the environment, including pesticides, lead and medicines. Toxic environment? The team compared the rates of these malformations to rates of ASD county by county. After adjusting for gender, income, ethnicity and socio-economic status, they found that a 1 per cent increase in birth defects – their measure for environmental effects - was associated with an average increase of 283 per cent in cases of ASD. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 19393 - Posted: 03.21.2014

By Shelly Fan One of the tragedies of aging is the slow but steady decline in memory. Phone numbers slipping your mind? Forgetting crucial items on your grocery list? Opening the door but can’t remember why? Up to 50 percent of adults aged 64 years or older report memory complaints. For many of us, senile moments are the result of normal changes in brain structure and function instead of a sign of dementia, and will inevitably haunt us all. Rather than taking it lying down, scientists are devising interventions to help keep the elderly mind sharp. One popular approach—borrowed from the training of memory experts—is to teach the elderly mnemonics, or little tricks to help encode and recall new information using rhythm, imagery or spatial navigation. By far the most widely used mnemonic device is the method of loci (MoL), a technique devised in ancient Greece. In a 2002 study looking at the neural correlates of superior human memory, nine of 10 memory masters employed the method spontaneously. It involves picturing highly familiar routes through a building (your childhood home) or a town (your way to work). Walk down the route and imagine placing to-be-remembered items at attention-grabbing spots along the way; the more surreal or bizarre you make these images, the better they can help you remember. To recall these stored items, simply retrace your steps. Like fishing lines, the loci are hooked to the memory and help you pull them to the surface. Although generally used to remember objects, numbers or names, the MoL has also been used in people with depression to successfully store bits and pieces of happy autobiographical memories that they can easily retrieve in times of stress. © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 19392 - Posted: 03.21.2014

By Dominic Basulto In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, two leading brain researchers conjectured that as a result of rapid breakthroughs in fields such as molecular biology and neuroscience, one day “brain implants” will be just about as common as getting a bit of plastic surgery is today. In short, today’s tummy tucks are tomorrow’s brain tucks. Similar to what you’d expect from watching science fiction films such as “The Matrix,” these brain implants would enable you to learn foreign languages effortlessly, upgrade your memory capabilities, and, yes, help you to know Kung Fu. Vinton Cerf argues that today’s Internet (think Google) is already a form of cognitive implant, helping us to learn the answer to just about anything within seconds. If computing power continues to increase at the same rate as it has for the past 50 years, it is likely that a single computer will have the computing capacity of a human brain by 2023. By 2045, a single computer could have the processing capability of all human brains put together. Just think what you’d be able to use Google to do then. You wouldn’t even need to type in a search query, your brain would already know the answer. Of course, the ability to create these brain implants raises a number of philosophical, ethical and moral questions. If you’re a young student having a tough time in a boring class, why not just buy a brain module that simulates the often repetitive nature of learning? If you’re a parent of a child looking to get into a top university, why not buy a brain implant as a way to gain an advantage over children from less privileged backgrounds, especially when it’s SAT time? Instead of the digital divide, we may be talking about the cognitive divide at some point in the next two decades. Some parents would be able to afford a 99 percent percentile brain for their children, while others wouldn’t. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 19391 - Posted: 03.21.2014

Neuroscientist Bevil Conway thinks about color for a living. An artist since youth, Conway now spends much of his time studying vision and perception at Wellesley College and Harvard Medical School. His science remains strongly linked to art--in 2004 he and Margaret Livingstone famously reported that Rembrandt may have suffered from flawed vision--and in recent years Conway has focused his research almost entirely on the neural machinery behind color. "I think it's a very powerful system," he tells Co.Design, "and it's completely underexploited." Conway's research into the brain's color systems has clear value for designers and artists like himself. It stands to reason, after all, that someone who understands how the brain processes color will be able to present it to others in a more effective way. But the neuroscience of color carries larger implications for the rest of us. In fact, Conway thinks his insights into color processing may ultimately shed light on some fundamental questions about human cognition. Step back for a moment to one of Conway's biggest findings, which came while examining how monkeys process color. Using a brain scanner, he and some collaborators found "globs" of specialized cells that detect distinct hues--suggesting that some areas of the primate brain are encoded for color. Interestingly, not all colors are given equal glob treatment. The largest neuron cluster was tuned to red, followed by green then blue; a small cell collection also cared about yellow. © 2014 Mansueto Ventures, LLC.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 19390 - Posted: 03.21.2014

Want to live a long, dementia-free life? Stress your cells out. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that heightened cellular stress causes brain cells to produce a protein that staves off Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. The work could lead to new ways to diagnose or treat such diseases. “This paper is very impressive,” says neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who was not involved in the new work. “It puts a finger on a particular pathway that can provide some explanation as to why some people are more susceptible to Alzheimer’s.” Alzheimer’s disease, characterized by a progressive loss of memory and cognition, affects an estimated 44.4 million people worldwide, mostly over the age of 65. The illness has been linked to the accumulation of certain proteins in the brain, but what causes symptoms has been unclear. That’s because the brains of some elderly people without dementia have the same clumps of so-called amyloid β and τ proteins typically associated with Alzheimer’s. The new study deals with a protein called repressor element 1-silencing transcription factor (REST), which turns genes and off. Scientists knew that REST played a key role in fetal brain development by controlling the activity of certain genes, but they thought it was absent in adult brains. However, when Bruce Yankner, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, looked at all the genes and proteins that change in brains as people age, he found that REST levels begin increasing again when a person hits their 30s. Stumped as to why, he and his colleagues isolated human and mouse brain cells and probed what factors altered REST levels and what consequences those levels had. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 19389 - Posted: 03.20.2014

By JAMES GORMAN There are lots of reasons scientists love fruit flies, but a big one is their flying ability. These almost microscopic creatures, with minimalist nervous systems and prey to every puff of wind, must often execute millisecond aerial ballets to stay aloft. To study fly flight, scientists have to develop techniques that are almost as interesting as the flies. At Cornell University, for instance, researchers have been investigating how the flies recover when their flight is momentarily disturbed. Among their conclusions: a small group of fly neurons is solving calculus problems, or what for humans are calculus problems. To do the research, the members of Cornell team — Itai Cohen and his colleagues, including Z. Jane Wang, John Guckenheimer, Tsevi Beatus and Leif Ristroph, who is now at New York University — glue tiny magnets to the flies and use a magnetic pulse to pull them this way or that. In the language of aeronautics, the scientists disturb either the flies’ pitch (up or down), yaw (left or right) or roll, which is just what it sounds like. The system, developed by Dr. Ristroph as a graduate student in Dr. Cohen’s lab, involves both low and high tech. On the low end, the researchers snip bits of metal bristle off a brush to serve as micromagnets that they glue to the flies’ backs. At the high end, three video cameras record every bit of the flight at 8,000 frames per second, and the researchers use computers to merge the data from the cameras into a three-dimensional reconstruction of the flies’ movements that they can analyze mathematically. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 19388 - Posted: 03.20.2014

Helen Shen For Frank Donobedian, sitting still is a challenge. But on this day in early January, he has been asked to do just that for three minutes. Perched on a chair in a laboratory at Stanford University in California, he presses his hands to his sides, plants his feet on the floor and tries with limited success to lock down the trembling in his limbs — a symptom of his Parkinson's disease. Only after the full 180 seconds does he relax. Other requests follow: stand still, lie still on the floor, walk across the room. Each poses a similar struggle, and all are watched closely by Helen Bronte-Stewart, the neuroscientist who runs the lab. “You're making history,” she reassures her patient. “Everybody keeps saying that,” replies the 73-year-old Donobedian, a retired schoolteacher, with a laugh. “But I'm not doing anything.” “Well, your brain is,” says Bronte-Stewart. Like thousands of people with Parkinson's before him, Donobedian is being treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS), in which an implant quiets his tremors by sending pulses of electricity into motor areas of his brain. Last October, a team of surgeons at Stanford threaded the device's two thin wires, each with four electrode contacts, through his cortex into a deep-seated brain region known as the subthalamic nucleus (STN). But Donobedian's particular device is something new. Released to researchers in August 2013 by Medtronic, a health-technology firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it is among the first of an advanced generation of neurostimulators that not only send electricity into the brain, but can also read out neural signals generated by it. On this day, Bronte-Stewart and her team have temporarily turned off the stimulating current and are using some of the device's eight electrical contacts to record abnormal neural patterns that might correlate with the tremors, slowness of movement and freezing that are hallmarks of Parkinson's disease. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Parkinsons; Robotics
Link ID: 19387 - Posted: 03.20.2014

by Ashley Yeager Owl monkeys don't sleep around, genetic tests show. That could be a result of the amount of care males provide for their young, a new study suggests. Infidelity appears to be common in mammals that live in pairs. But new genetic tests suggest that Azara's owl monkeys are unusually faithful. Scientists studied 35 infants born to 17 owl monkey pairs and found that in all cases the youngsters were being raised by their biological parents. Data from the owl monkeys and 14 other species showed that the more involved the males were in raising an infant, the more likely the males were to be faithful, the team reports March 18 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Owl monkeys are the only primates and one of five mammal species, including coyotes and California mice, that don’t seem to cheat, according to genetic studies. The evolution of animals’ sexual fidelity is probably linked to the intensity of male care, the researchers suggest. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19386 - Posted: 03.20.2014