By JOHN TIERNEY Long before he brought people into his laboratory at Columbia University to smoke crack cocaine, Carl Hart saw its effects firsthand. Growing up in poverty, he watched relatives become crack addicts, living in squalor and stealing from their mothers. Childhood friends ended up in prisons and morgues. Carl Hart, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia, arranged experiments in which drug addicts were offered a choice between a dose of the drug or cash or vouchers. When the dose was smaller, addicts often chose cash or vouchers instead. Those addicts seemed enslaved by crack, like the laboratory rats that couldn’t stop pressing the lever for cocaine even as they were starving to death. The cocaine was providing such powerful dopamine stimulation to the brain’s reward center that the addicts couldn’t resist taking another hit. At least, that was how it looked to Dr. Hart when he started his research career in the 1990s. Like other scientists, he hoped to find a neurological cure to addiction, some mechanism for blocking that dopamine activity in the brain so that people wouldn’t succumb to the otherwise irresistible craving for cocaine, heroin and other powerfully addictive drugs. But then, when he began studying addicts, he saw that drugs weren’t so irresistible after all. “Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted,” said Dr. Hart, an associate professor of psychology. “And the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18655 - Posted: 09.17.2013

By Philip Yam The harvest moon is almost upon us—specifically, September 19. It’s the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox, and it has deep significance in our cultural histories. Namely, it enabled our ancestral farmers to toil longer in the fields. (Today, electricity enables us to toil longer in the office—thanks, Tom Edison.) One enduring belief is that the harvest moon is bigger and brighter than any other full moon. That myth is probably the result of the well-known illusion in which the moon looks bigger on the horizon than it does overhead. Back when I was taking psych 101, my professor explained that the moon illusion was simply a function of having reference objects on the horizon. But then I saw this TED-Ed video by Andrew Vanden Heuvel. It turns out that the explanation from my college days really isn’t sufficient to explain the illusion. In fact, scientists really aren’t sure, and there is much debate. Check it out and see what you think. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 18654 - Posted: 09.17.2013

By JAMES GORMAN In the first hint of how the Brain Initiative announced by President Obama in April could take shape, an advisory group on Monday recommended that the main target of research by the National Institutes of Health should be systems and circuits involving thousands to millions of brain cells — not the entire brain or individual cells and molecules. The National Institutes of Health working group was meant to focus specifically on how the federal agency should spend its $40 million brain initiative budget in 2014. However, Dr. Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University who was not a member of the group, said that the recommendations, which he agreed with, were so ambitious that it “could be a charter for neuroscience for the next 10 to 15 years.” Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the N.I.H., who accepted the report and its recommendations, said that he had asked the group, led by Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University and Bill Newsome of Stanford, to think big, and that it would be the job of the N.I.H. to make actual spending decisions. Dr. Bargmann agreed that the overall goal of figuring out “how circuits in the brain generate complex thoughts and behavior” was not something to be tackled with the $40 million that the N.I.H. hopes to have for 2014. “You can’t do all of that in year one, you can’t do all of that with $40 million, and you can’t do all of that at N.I.H. either,” she said. The $40 million for the N.I.H. is part of a White House proposal for $100 million in spending on the initiative in the 2014 budget. The initiative also includes money for the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Several major private research foundations are also joining in the effort with their own research. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18653 - Posted: 09.17.2013

By Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer On the heels of the decade of the brain and the development of neuroimaging, it is nearly impossible to open a science magazine or walk through a bookstore without encountering images of the human brain. As prominent neuroscientist, Martha Farah, remarked “Brain images are the scientific icon of our age, replacing Bohr’s planetary atom as the symbol of science”. The rapid rise to prominence of cognitive neuroscience has been accompanied by an equally swift rise in practitioners and snake oil salesmen who make promises that neuroimaging cannot yet deliver. Critics inside and outside of the discipline have both been swift to condemn sloppy claims that MRI can tell us who we plan to vote for, if we love our iPhones, and why we believe in God. Yet, the constant parade of overtrumped results has lead to the rise of “The new neuro-skeptics” who argue that neuroscience is either unable to answer the interesting questions, or worse, that scientists have simply been seduced by the flickering lights of the brain. The notion that MRI images have attained an undue influence over scientists, granting agencies, and the public gained traction in 2008 when psychologists David McCabe and Alan Castel published a paper showing that brain images could be used to deceive. In a series of experiments, they found that Colorado State University undergraduates rated descriptions of scientific studies higher in scientific reasoning if they were accompanied by a 3-D image of the brain (see Figure), rather than a mere bar graph or a topographic map of brain activity on the scalp (presumably from electroencephalography). © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 18652 - Posted: 09.17.2013

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News Smaller animals tend to perceive time in slow-motion, a new study has shown. This means that they can observe movement on a finer timescale than bigger creatures, allowing them to escape from larger predators. Insects and small birds, for example, can see more information in one second than a larger animal such as an elephant. The work is published in the journal Animal Behaviour. "The ability to perceive time on very small scales may be the difference between life and death for fast-moving organisms such as predators and their prey," said lead author Kevin Healy, at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland. The reverse was found in bigger animals which may miss things that smaller creatures can rapidly spot. In humans, too, there is variation among individuals. Athletes, for example, can often process visual information more quickly. An experienced goalkeeper would therefore be quicker than others in observing where a ball comes from. The speed at which humans absorb visual information is also age-related, said Andrew Jackson, a co-author of the work at TCD. "Younger people can react more quickly than older people, and this ability falls off further with increasing age." The team looked at the variation of time perception across a variety of animals. They gathered datasets from other teams who had used a technique called critical flicker fusion frequency, which measures the speed at which the eye can process light. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 18651 - Posted: 09.16.2013

By JAN HOFFMAN When Vinnie Richichi started watching the Pittsburgh Steelers’ home opener against the Tennessee Titans last Sunday, he was feeling great. After all, the Steelers had won their first home game six years in a row. Then things indeed went south. “The worse they looked, the more I kept going to the fridge,” recalled Mr. Richichi, a co-host of a sports talk show on KDKA-FM in Pittsburgh. “First a couple of Hot Pockets. By the second quarter I threw in a box of White Castle hamburgers. As the game progressed, I just went through the refrigerator: the more fear, the more emotion, I’m chomping down. But I’m not going near the salad or the yogurt. If it doesn’t have 700 calories, I’m going right past it.” The aftereffect of the Steelers’ ignominious defeat by a score of 16-9 clung to Mr. Richichi on Monday, when he rejected his regular breakfast of yogurt and strawberries in favor of a bagel sandwich with sausage, eggs, cheese, peppers and hot sauce. Then, his mood hardly improved after spending four hours on the air railing and commiserating with Steelers’ fans, he had pizza for lunch. “My weight goes up and down with my teams, “ said Mr. Richichi. “My team does well? I’m 40, 50 pounds lighter.” Mr. Richichi’s eating habits, joined at the waistline with the N.F.L., were reflected in a recent study that investigated whether a football team’s outcome had an effect on what fans ate the day after a game. Although the study did not look at weight fluctuations, researchers found that football fans’ saturated-fat consumption increased by as much as 28 percent following defeats and decreased by 16 percent following victories. The association was particularly pronounced in the eight cities regarded as having the most devoted fans, with Pittsburgh often ranked No. 1. Narrower, nail-biting defeats led to greater consumption of calorie and fat-saturated foods than lopsided ones. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Aggression
Link ID: 18650 - Posted: 09.16.2013

by Andy Coghlan A girl who does not feel physical pain has helped researchers identify a gene mutation that disrupts pain perception. The discovery may spur the development of new painkillers that will block pain signals in the same way. People with congenital analgesia cannot feel physical pain and often injure themselves as a result – they might badly scald their skin, for example, through being unaware that they are touching something hot. By comparing the gene sequence of a girl with the disorder against those of her parents, who do not, Ingo Kurth at Jena University Hospital in Germany and his colleagues identified a mutation in a gene called SCN11A. This gene controls the development of channels on pain-sensing neurons. Sodium ions travel through these channels, creating electrical nerve impulses that are sent to the brain, which registers pain. Overactivity in the mutated version of SCN11A prevents the build-up of the charge that the neurons need to transmit an electrical impulse, numbing the body to pain. "The outcome is blocked transmission of pain signals," says Kurth. To confirm their findings, the team inserted a mutated version of SCN11A into mice and tested their ability to perceive pain. They found that 11 per cent of the mice with the modified gene developed injuries similar to those seen in people with congenital analgesia, such as bone fractures and skin wounds. They also tested a control group of mice with the normal SCN11A gene, none of which developed such injuries. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18649 - Posted: 09.16.2013

By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. One afternoon at a school not far from the hospital where I was working, a teacher opened a utility closet and found a staff member passed out on the floor. He was clutching a small bloody mass in one hand, a sharp knife in the other, she reported, a red stain spreading rapidly at his middle. He had amputated his genitals. Once he’d been brought to our emergency room and resuscitated, the man refused further treatment. Doctors and nurses, concerned that if they waited any longer to reattach the severed part the surgery might not work, took the necessary steps to deem him mentally incompetent to make such decisions. “The guy was seriously nuts,” I remember one of the doctors saying afterward. “He kept screaming that he didn’t want ‘it’ back.” For days after the successful operation, the gruesome story was all anyone at the hospital could discuss. Most of us chalked it up to his being “certifiable,” and several wondered if maybe they should have skipped the surgery. “After all,” said one clinician, “isn’t that what he wanted?” But in all the chatter none of us mentioned a key part of the patient’s story: the unbearable suffering that must have pushed him to commit so brutal an act. In fact, anyone overhearing our conversations might have been hard pressed to find any of the warmth and sensitivity we routinely displayed toward patients with cancer, AIDS or heart disease. I remembered the man and our reactions this past week while reading “Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters With the Mind in Crisis,” a thought-provoking new book by Dr. Christine Montross. Of all the afflictions that fall upon us, few remain as misunderstood and stigmatized as those that affect the mind. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 18648 - Posted: 09.16.2013

By Tina Hesman Saey About 10 percent of people prefer using their left hand. That ratio is found in every population in the world and scientists have long suspected that genetics controls hand preference. But finding the genes has been no simple task, says Chris McManus, a neuropsychologist at University College London who studies handedness but was not involved in the new research. “There’s no single gene for the direction of handedness. That’s clear,” McManus says. Dozens of genes are probably involved, he says, which means that one person’s left-handedness might be caused by a variant in one gene, while another lefty might carry variants in an entirely different gene. To find handedness genes, William Brandler, a geneticist at the University of Oxford, and colleagues conducted a statistical sweep of DNA from 3,394 people. Statistical searches such as this are known as genome-wide association studies; scientists often do such studies to uncover genes that contribute to complex diseases or traits such as diabetes and height. The people in this study had taken tests involving moving pegs on a board. The difference in the amount of time they took with one hand versus the other reflected how strongly left- or right-handed they were. A variant in a gene called PCSK6 was most tightly linked with strong hand preference, the researchers report in the Sept. 12 PLOS Genetics.. The gene has been implicated in handedness before, including in a 2011 study by the same research group. PCSK6 is involved in the asymmetrical positioning of internal organs in organisms from snails to vertebrates. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Laterality; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18647 - Posted: 09.14.2013

Emily Underwood Jackie Murphy didn't worry that her son Fintan was a late talker, at least at first. Her other two children had been slow to say their first words, so it was only when the former California nurse noticed that her 20-month-old wasn't responding to his name, or even reacting to loud noises, that she became concerned. "One day, I dropped a toy xylophone behind him and he didn't even flinch," she says. "That's when I knew something was wrong." Fintan didn't have a hearing problem—he had autism, his mom finally learned after more than 6 months of searching for a diagnosis. A few months later, Murphy enrolled Fintan in the Autism Phenome Project at the MIND Institute at the University of California (UC), Davis, a long-term assessment of children, as many as 1800, aimed at teasing out subtypes of the complex disorder. Murphy also became a research subject, donating a blood sample. One of the project's researchers, Melissa Bauman, soon informed Murphy that her blood had tested positive for antibodies that react to fetal brain proteins. Bauman asked her to donate more blood for studies exploring the provocative idea that some of Murphy's antibodies had slipped through the placenta and into Fintan's developing brain, affecting its maturation. At that point, Murphy says, she and her husband made a big decision: Fearing that the immune proteins in her blood would harm another baby, they decided that she would not again get pregnant. Many more women could face a similarly difficult choice. In July, immunologist Judy Van de Water and her team at UC Davis, which includes Bauman and Daniel Braunschweig, bolstered the hypothesis that maternal antibodies cause some autism with two studies, including one showing autismlike symptoms in monkeys injected with such antibodies. And women may soon be able to check whether they have the suspect antibodies: California company Pediatric Bioscience announced that it is moving forward with a new diagnostic test, based on patented antibody screening techniques licensed from Van de Water and UC Davis. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18646 - Posted: 09.14.2013

By Philip Yam If you’re a fan of optical illusions and perceptual tricks, check out this AsapSCIENCE video. As usual, producers Michael Moffitt and Gregory Brown do a great job distilling the essential ideas and presenting them in a fun, entertaining and informative way. Here, they show you how your brain judges brightness and color in context. Visit their YouTube channel to see more (including a frequency test for your ears). You can also check out our compilation of the 169 best illusions (ia sampling of them is on our site) as well as our Illusions Chasers blog, by Susana Martinez-Conde and Steven Macknik, which explore illusions each week. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 18645 - Posted: 09.14.2013

Insect leg cogs a first in animal kingdom Philip Ball If you are a young plant hopper, leaping one metre in a single bound, you need to push off with both hind legs in perfect unison or you might end up in a spin. Researchers have discovered that this synchrony is made possible by toothed gears that connect the two legs when the insects jump. Zoologists Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton at the University of Cambridge, UK, say that this seems to be the first example in nature of rotary motion with toothed gears. They describe their findings today in Science1. When the insect jumps, the cog teeth join so that the two legs lock together, ensuring that they thrust at exactly the same time (see video above and image at left). “The gears add an extra level of synchronization beyond that which can be achieved by the nervous system,” says Burrows. Infant plant hoppers, known as nymphs, can take off in just 2 milliseconds, reaching take-off speeds of almost 4 metres a second (see video below). For motions this rapid, some mechanical device is needed to keep the legs synchronized and to avoid lopsided jumps that might lead to the insects spinning out of control. The problem does not, however, arise in all jumping insects: whereas the attachments of plant hoppers' hind legs are adjacent to each other, the legs of grasshoppers and fleas attach to opposite the sides of the body and move in parallel planes. This helps to stabilize the insects and even enables them to jump one-legged. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18644 - Posted: 09.14.2013

By Philip Yam New Hampshire health officials announced last week that hospitals in three New England states may have accidentally exposed 15 people to prions, the infectious protein that ravages the brain and leaves it full of holes. Evidently, the hospitals involved used surgical tools that had previously been deployed on a patient who officials suspect later died from a particular prion infection called sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). As disturbing as the revelation was, it pales in comparison with the announcement in 2002, when the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Presbyterian announced that up to 4,000 patients might have been exposed to the prion. Both incidents show that the hospital transmission of prion diseases remains an ever-present possibility, if thankfully a very unlikely one. Prions are unusual pathogens distinct from parasites, fungi, bacteria and viruses. They are misfolded proteins that can transform healthy proteins into sickly versions, leading to the death of cells. Particularly abundant in the brain, they took center stage in the late 1980s, during the mad cow outbreak in the U.K. People who ate beef from infected cows ran the risk of contracting a variant of CJD. The panic brought to light the range of prion diseases that can affect humans and animals, including one that develops spontaneously. Called sporadic CJD, this spontaneous form strikes about one in every million people each year for no apparent reason. What’s more, the brain tissue from the unlucky few can infect healthy brains—hence, the worry over surgical transmission. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 18643 - Posted: 09.14.2013

By Melissa Healy It's a question that has long fascinated and flummoxed those who study human behavior: From whence comes the impulse to dream? Are dreams generated from the brain's "top" -- the high-flying cortical structures that allow us to reason, perceive, act and remember? Or do they come from the brain's "bottom" -- the unheralded brainstem, which quietly oversees such basic bodily functions as respiration, heart rate, salivation and temperature control? At stake is what to make of the funny, sexual, scary and just plain bizarre mental scenarios that play themselves out in our heads while we sleep. Are our subconsious fantasies coming up for a breath of air, as Sigmund Freud believed? Is our brain consolidating lessons learned and pitching out unneeded data, as neuroscientists suggest? Or are dreams no more meaningful than a spontaneous run of erratic heartbeats, a hot flash, or the frisson we feel at the sight of an attractive passer-by? A study published this week in the journal Brain suggests that the impulse to dream may be little more than a tickle sent up from the brainstem to the brain's sensory cortex. The full dream experience -- the complex scenarios, the feelings of fear, delight or longing -- may require the further input of the brain's higher-order cortical areas, the new research suggests. But even people with grievous injury to the brain's prime motivational machinery are capable of dreams, the study found.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 18642 - Posted: 09.14.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS As readers of this column know, short, intense workouts, usually in the form of intervals that intersperse bursts of hard effort with a short recovery time, have become wildly popular lately, whether the sessions last for four minutes, seven minutes or slightly longer. Studies have found that such intense training, no matter how abbreviated, usually improves aerobic fitness and some markers of health, including blood pressure and insulin sensitivity, as effectively as much longer sessions of moderate exercise. What has not been clear, though, is whether interval training could likewise also aid in weight control. So for a study published online in June in The International Journal of Obesity, researchers at the University of Western Australia in Perth and other institutions set out to compare the effects of easy versus exhausting exercise on people’s subsequent desire to eat. To do so, they recruited 17 overweight but otherwise healthy young men in their 20s or 30s and asked them to show up at the university’s exercise physiology lab on four separate days. One of these sessions was spent idly reading or otherwise resting for 30 minutes, while on another day, the men rode an exercise bike continuously for 30 minutes at a moderate pace (equivalent to 65 percent of their predetermined maximum aerobic capacity). A third session was more demanding, with the men completing 30 minutes of intervals, riding first for one minute at 100 percent of their endurance capacity, then spinning gently for 4 minutes. The final session was the toughest, as the men strained through 15 seconds of pedaling at 170 percent of their normal endurance capacity, then pedaled at barely 30 percent of their maximum capacity for a minute, with the entire sequence repeated over the course of 30 minutes. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 18641 - Posted: 09.14.2013

By Gary Stix New types of drugs for schizophrenia, depression and other psychiatric disorders are few and far between—and a number of companies have scaled back or dropped development of this class of pharmaceuticals. One exception stands out. Ketamine, the anesthetic and illegal club drug, is now being repurposed as the first rapid-acting antidepressant drug and has been lauded as possibly the biggest advance in the treatment of depression in 50 years. A few trials by large pharma outfits are now underway on a new, purportedly improved and, of course, more profitable variant of ketamine, which in its current generic drug form does not make pharmaceutical marketing departments salivate. Some physicians have decided they simply can’t wait for the lengthy protocols of the drug approval process to be sorted out. They have read about experimental trials in which a low-dose, slow-infusion of ketamine seems to produce what no Prozac-like pill can achieve, lifting the black cloud in hours, not weeks. With nothing to offer desperate, sometimes suicidal patients, physicians have decided against waiting for an expensive, ketamine lookalike to arrive and have started writing scripts for the plain, vanilla generic version that has been used for decades as an anesthetic. Ketamine, it seems, has captivated a bunch of white coats with the same grassroots energy that has propelled the medical marijuana movement. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18640 - Posted: 09.12.2013

by Andy Coghlan Normal adult cells have been reprogrammed to become stem cells inside live mice for the first time. As stem cells can be coaxed into developing into almost any kind of cell, being able to prompt this behaviour in the body could one day be used to repair ailing organs including the heart, liver, spinal cord and pancreas. "By doing it in situ, the cells are already there in the tissue, in the right position," says Manuel Serrano at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, and co-leader of the new work. The technique overcomes the difficulties inherent in making cells outside the body, grafting them into people, and then of potential rejection. It opens up new clinical opportunities, say the researchers. Since 2006, when Nobel-prizewinning researcher Shinya Yamanaka first made adult cells return to a stem-cell-like state of being pluripotent – able to turn into almost any cell type – all such induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have been made in vitro. This is done by taking a sample of adult cells, such as skin cells, and treating them with four proteins that rewind the cells back to an embryonic-like state. Serrano genetically altered mice to give them extra copies of the four genes that produce these proteins: Oct, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc. The genes were programmed to kick into action when exposed to doxycycline, an antibiotic. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 18639 - Posted: 09.12.2013

Associated Press It's the ape equivalent of Google Maps and Facebook. The night before a big trip, Arno the orangutan plots his journey and lets others know where he is going with a long, whooping call. What he and his orangutan buddies do in the forests of Sumatra tells scientists that advance trip planning and social networking aren't just human traits. A new study of 15 wild male orangutans finds that they routinely plot out their next-day treks and share their plans in long calls, so females can come by or track them, and competitive males can steer clear. The researchers closely followed the males as they traveled on 320 days during the 1990s. The results were published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. Typically, an orangutan would turn and face in the direction of his route and let out a whoop, sometimes for as long as four minutes. Then he'd go to sleep and 12 hours later set on the heralded path, said study author Carel van Schaik, director of the Anthropological Institute at the University of Zurich. "This guy basically thinks ahead," van Schaik said. "They're continuously updating their Google Maps, so to speak. Based on that, they're planning what to do next." The apes didn't just call once - they kept at it, calling more than 1,100 times over the 320 days. © 2013 The Hearst Corporation

Keyword: Animal Migration; Animal Communication
Link ID: 18638 - Posted: 09.12.2013

By GINA KOLATA It is the scourge of many a middle-aged man: he starts getting a pot belly, using lighter weights at the gym and somehow just doesn’t have the sexual desire of his younger years. The obvious culprit is testosterone, since men gradually make less of the male sex hormone as years go by. But a surprising new answer is emerging, one that doctors say could reinvigorate the study of how men’s bodies age. Estrogen, the female sex hormone, turns out to play a much bigger role in men’s bodies than previously thought, and falling levels contribute to their expanding waistlines just as they do in women’s. The discovery of the role of estrogen in men is “a major advance,” said Dr. Peter J. Snyder, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading a big new research project on hormone therapy for men 65 and over. Until recently, testosterone deficiency was considered nearly the sole reason that men undergo the familiar physical complaints of midlife. The new frontier of research involves figuring out which hormone does what in men, and how body functions are affected at different hormone levels. While dwindling testosterone levels are to blame for middle-aged men’s smaller muscles, falling levels of estrogen regulate fat accumulation, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, which provided the most conclusive evidence to date that estrogen is a major factor in male midlife woes. And both hormones are needed for libido. “Some of the symptoms routinely attributed to testosterone deficiency are actually partially or almost exclusively caused by the decline in estrogens,” said Dr. Joel Finkelstein, an endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, in a news release on Wednesday. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18637 - Posted: 09.12.2013

By Melanie Tannenbaum I can remember exactly where I was twelve years ago when I learned why the sky was starting to fill with smoke about 30 miles to the west. Though I live in Illinois now, I’m originally from Long Island. In September 2001, I was just beginning the 9th grade at Friends Academy, my new high school in Locust Valley. I had just started getting to know the people who would become my closest friends over the next four years. I was on my way to Computer Programming when I ran into Molly, a girl on my bus. “Hey, did you hear?” Molly asked, somewhat casually. “No, what’s up? Oh, is Maggie taking the bus today?!” I asked excitedly. Maggie was Molly’s adorable baby sister, whose expeditions onto our bus were rare (but exciting) events. “No…apparently something really big just happened in the city. They’re canceling class right now and calling an all-school assembly in the Dolan Center. You didn’t hear?” “Oh, no, but thank God. I didn’t finish my math homework last night and I didn’t have time to do it on the bus, this is awesome,” I said with a smile. “Do you have any idea why they’re canceling class, though?!” I had no idea at the time how much I would cringe for the rest of my life whenever I looked back and thought about my first reaction to hearing that “something big” was going on in the city. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18636 - Posted: 09.12.2013