A narrowing of the veins from the brain is unlikely as a cause multiple sclerosis, say researchers from B.C. and Saskatchewan who found the narrowing is a common and normal finding in most people. Italian Paolo Zamboni made headlines in Canada four years ago for his belief that clearing blocked or narrowed neck veins could relieve MS symptoms. Since then probably more than 3,000 Canadians have gone out of country for dilation treatment, said Dr. Anthony Traboulsee of the University of British Columbia. In Tuesday's online issue of the The Lancet, Traboulsee and his co-authors published their findings on the prevalence of narrowing, known as chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency or CCSVI, in people with MS, their siblings and unrelated healthy controls. Using catheter venography to directly visualize veins, the researchers found three people tested positive for CCSVI: One of 65 (2 per cent) of those with MS. One of 46 (2 per cent) of siblings. One of 32 (3 per cent) on unrelated controls. "This was a big surprise to all of us," Traboulsee told reporters. "We were really expecting to find many more people with this feature." When the researchers used ultrasound to look for CCSVI, they found narrowing in more than 50 per cent of all three groups. The hypothesis that vein narrowing has a role in the cause of MS is unlikely since its prevalence was similar in all three groups, the study's authors concluded. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 18765 - Posted: 10.09.2013

By Justin Gregg Santino was a misanthrope with a habit of pelting tourists with rocks. As his reputation for mischief grew, he had to devise increasingly clever ways to ambush his wary victims. Santino learned to stash his rocks just out of sight and casually stand just a few feet from them in order to throw off suspicion. At the very moment that passersby were fooled into thinking that he meant them no harm, he grabbed his hidden projectiles and launched his attack. Santino was displaying an ability to learn from his past experiences and plan for future scenarios. This has long been a hallmark of human intelligence. But a recently published review paper by the psychologist Thomas Zentall from the University of Kentucky argues that this complex ability should no longer be considered unique to humans. Santino, you see, is not human. He’s a chimpanzee at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. His crafty stone-throwing escapades have made him a global celebrity, and also caught the attention of researchers studying how animals, much like humans, might be able to plan their behavior. Santino is one of a handful of animals that scientists believe are showing a complex cognitive ability called episodic memory. Episodic memory is the ability to recall past events that one has the sense of having personally experienced. Unlike semantic memory, which involves recalling simple facts like “bee stings hurt,” episodic memory involves putting yourself at the heart of the memory; like remembering the time you swatted at a bee with a rolled up newspaper and it got angry and stung your hand. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 18764 - Posted: 10.09.2013

Alison Abbott In a sign that psychiatric-disease research is entering a new era, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis has hired an expert in neural circuitry, rather than pharmacology, to head its relaunched neuroscience division. The appointment of 42-year-old Ricardo Dolmetsch, who has spent his entire career in academic research, signifies a radical policy shift for the company, as it moves away from conventional neurotransmitter research to concentrate on analysing the neural circuitry that causes brain diseases. The decision suggests Novartis is confident that after years of fruitless research in the field, revolutionary advancements in, for example, genetic and stem-cell technologies will pay dividends. The company intends to hire 100 new staff members for the department over the next 3 years. But the move is risky: even if it pans out, new drugs for common disorders such as schizophrenia could be decades away from reaching the market. Dolmetsch, a former senior director at the Allen Institute for brain Science in Seattle, Washington, who has also worked at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, says that his new role gives him access to previously unimaginable resources. “I had this idea that big pharma was a slow, plodding, conservative giant,” he says. “I was surprised by the depth of science at Novartis.” An expert in autism spectrum disorder, he was also attracted by the prospect of contributing to the development of therapies — something that academic institutions are poorly equipped to do — particularly because one of his own sons has autism. There was “not much enthusiasm” for studying disease at the Allen Institute, which focuses instead on basic research into brain science, he says. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Autism
Link ID: 18763 - Posted: 10.09.2013

By JAMES GORMAN SEATTLE — To hear Michael Dickinson tell it, there is nothing in the world quite as wonderful as a fruit fly. And it’s not because the fly is one of the most important laboratory animals in the history of biology, often used as a simple model for human genetics or neuroscience. “I don’t think they’re a simple model of anything,” he says. “If flies are a great model, they’re a great model for flies. “These animals, you know, they’re not like us,” he says, warming to his subject. “We don’t fly. We don’t have a compound eye. I don’t think we process sensory information the same way. The muscles that they use are just incredibly much more sophisticated and interesting than the muscles we use. “They can taste with their wings,” he adds, as his enthusiasm builds. “No one knows any reason why they have taste cells on their wing. Their bodies are just covered with sensors. This is one of the most studied organisms in the history of science, and we’re still fundamentally ignorant about many features of its basic biology. It’s like having an alien in your lab. “And,” he says, pausing, seeming puzzled that the world has not joined him in open-mouthed wonder for his favorite creature, “they can fly!” If he had to define his specialty, Dr. Dickinson, 50, who counts a MacArthur “genius” award among his honors, would call himself a neuroethologist. As such, he studies the basis of behavior in the brain at the University of Washington, in Seattle. In practice he is a polymath of sorts who has targeted the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and its flying behavior for studies that involve physics, mathematics, neurobiology, computer vision, muscle physiology and other disciplines. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 18762 - Posted: 10.08.2013

Many people, I've heard talk, wonder what's going on inside Republican speaker John Boehner's brain. For cognitive neuroscientists, Boehner's brain is a case study. At the same time, others are frustrated with Democrat Harry Reid. The Senate Majority leader needs to take a tip from our founding fathers. Many of the intellectual giants who founded our democracy were both statesmen and scientists, and they applied the latest in scientific knowledge of their day to advantage in governing. The acoustics of the House of Representatives, now Statuary Hall, allowed John Quincy Adams and his comrades to eavesdrop on other members of congress conversing in whispers on the opposite side of the parabolic-shaped room. Senator Reid, in stark contrast, is still applying ancient techniques used when senators wore togas -- reason and argument -- and we all know how badly that turned out. The search for a path to compromise can be found in the latest research on the neurobiological basis of social behavior. Consider this new finding just published in the journal Brain Research. Oxytocin, a peptide produced in the hypothalamus of the brain and known to cement the strong bond between mother and child at birth, has been found to promote compromise in rivaling groups! This new research suggests that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi could single-handedly end the Washington deadlock by spritzing a bit of oxytocin in her perfume and wafting it throughout the halls of congress. One can only imagine the loving effect this hormone would have on Senate Republican Ted Cruz, suddenly overwhelmed with an irresistible urge to bond with his colleagues, fawning for a cozy embrace like a babe cuddling in its mother's arms. And it is so simple! No stealthy spiking the opponent's coffee (or third martini at lunch) would be required, oxytocin works when it is inhaled through the nasal passages as an odorless vapor. © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18761 - Posted: 10.08.2013

by Linda Geddes There's little doubt that smoking during pregnancy is bad for the baby. But besides stunting growth and boosting the risk of premature birth, it seems that tobacco smoke leaves a lasting legacy on the brain. Children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy have altered brain growth, which may put them at greater risk of anxiety and depression. Hanan El Marroun at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and her colleagues had previously seen impaired brain growth in babies born to women who smoked throughout their pregnancy, although no differences were seen if women stopped smoking soon after learning that they were pregnant. The question was whether these changes were permanent, or would correct themselves as the child developed. So El Marroun's team used MRI to look at the brains of 113 children aged between 6 and 8 years old whose mothers smoked during pregnancy, and another 113 children whose mums did not. The children's behavioural and emotional functioning was also tested. Depression link Those whose mothers smoked throughout pregnancy had smaller total brain volumes and reduced amounts of grey and white matter in the superior frontal cortex, an area involved in regulating moods. What's more, these structural differences correlated with symptoms of depression and anxiety in the children. Not every child whose mother smoked showed these symptoms, and the study could not definitively prove cause and effect. However, because we already know that smoking is bad for babies, pregnant women should continue to be advised not to smoke, El Marroun says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18760 - Posted: 10.08.2013

By Scicurious When most of us hear birds twittering away in the trees, we hear it as background noise. It’s often hard to separate out one bird from another. But when you can, you begin to hear just how complex birdsong can be, a complex way of male signaling to a female how THEY are the best, and THEY are the one they should clearly pick. You hear ups and downs and trills and repeating themes. We used to think that birdsong was a relatively simple gene by environment interaction. The big males with the big songs get the best females, and then it’s a matter of also getting the best food, and the then healthy bird teaches its offspring to sing, and the health offspring goes on to display the best song. The song is therefore an “honest signal” of the bird’s fitness, it’s got good genes and good food and it is ready to MATE, baby! But how much of it is really training and how much is genetic? To find out, we go to what may possibly be the cutest of research subjects…the zebra finch. To look at the relationship between genes and environment in song learning, the authors turned to the zebra finch. Many other studies have also looked at the zebra finch and how it learns song, and how environmental pressures (like say, not enough food) change the way the song is displayed. But those experiments usually bred the birds and looked at the environment…they didn’t look at the teachers. The father birds, who were “teaching” their offspring to sing. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18759 - Posted: 10.08.2013

by Colin Barras Male marsupial mice just don't know when to stop. For Antechinus stuartii, their debut breeding season is so frenetic and stressful that they drop dead at the end of it from exhaustion or disease. It may be the females of the species that are driving this self-destructive behaviour. Suicidal breeding, known as semelparity, is seen in several marsupials. This is likely linked to short breeding seasons and the fact that the marsupial mice only breed once a year. It is not clear why this is, but it may be that females can only breed when the population of their insect prey reaches its peak. A year is a long and dangerous time for a small animal, so under these circumstances males might do best to pump all their resources into a single breeding season. To test this idea, Diana Fisher of the University of Queensland in St Lucia, Australia, and her colleagues tracked how insect abundance changed with the seasons in the marsupials' home forests. Sure enough, they found that the marsupials' breeding seasons were shortest where insect abundance followed a predictable annual pattern. But the insects are not the whole explanation. It turns out that females do sometimes survive the year and breed again. So why do the males always die? The key factor is that the females are highly promiscuous, says Fisher. Coupled with the short breeding season, this leads to intense competition between males. "Males that exert extreme effort in this short time are at an advantage." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18758 - Posted: 10.08.2013

By Cat Bohannon Halos, auras, flashes of light, pins and needles running down your arms, the sudden scent of sulfur—many symptoms of a migraine have vaguely mystical qualities, and experts remain puzzled by the debilitating headaches' cause. Researchers at Harvard University, however, have come at least one step closer to figuring out why women are twice as likely to suffer from chronic migraines as men. The brain of a female migraineur looks so unlike the brain of a male migraineur, asserts Harvard scientist Nasim Maleki, that we should think of migraines in men and women as “different diseases altogether.” Maleki is known for looking at pain and motor regions in the brain, which are known to be unusually excitable in migraine sufferers. In one notable study published in the journal Brain last year, she and her colleagues exposed male and female migraineurs to painful heat on the backs of their hands while imaging their brains with functional MRI. She found that the women had a greater response in areas of the brain associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, than did the men. Furthermore, she found that in these women, the posterior insula and the precuneus—areas of the brain responsible for motor processing, pain perception and visuospatial imagery—were significantly thicker and more connected to each other than in male migraineurs or in those without migraines. In Maleki's most recent work, presented in June at the International Headache Congress, her team imaged the brains of migraineurs and healthy people between the ages of 20 and 65, and it made a discovery that she characterizes as “very, very weird.” In women with chronic migraines, the posterior insula does not seem to thin with age, as it does for everyone else, including male migraineurs and people who do not have migraines. The region starts thick and stays thick. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18757 - Posted: 10.08.2013

By Rebecca Lanning, Everywhere I went, people asked me about my son Will. They knew he’d graduated from high school, and they wanted to know what he was doing. Smiling politely, I told them that Will had been accepted to his first-choice college. But, I always added — in case someone saw him around town — that he had deferred enrollment. He was taking a gap year, I’d say. “So what’s your son doing with his windfall of free time? Traveling abroad? Doing research?” My cheeks burned as I played along, offering sound bites. A start-up venture. A film project. Independent study. Anything to avoid the truth: that my handsome, broad-shouldered son was, probably, at that very moment, home in bed with the shutters drawn, covers pulled over his head. Officially, Will was taking a gap year. But after 13 years of school, what he needed, what he’d earned, was a nap year. Will has long suffered from learning difficulties. It took years to pinpoint a diagnosis — and even when we did, figuring out how to manage it wasn’t easy. He needed a break. So did I. Will’s problems began to surface when he was in kindergarten. “He’s not where the other children are,” his teacher whispered to me one morning. I knew what she meant. Clumsy and slow to read, Will rested his head on his desk a lot. His written work, smudgy from excessive erasing, looked like bits of crumpled trash. School was torture for Will. He couldn’t take notes, failed to turn in homework, forgot when tests were coming up. Yet on standardized tests, his verbal scores consistently exceeded the 99th percentile. I wondered why he struggled, when clearly he was bright. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18756 - Posted: 10.08.2013

At the TEDx conference in Detroit last week, RoboRoach #12 scuttled across the exhibition floor, pursued not by an exterminator but by a gaggle of fascinated onlookers. Wearing a tiny backpack of microelectronics on its shell, the cockroach—a member of the Blaptica dubia species—zigzagged along the corridor in a twitchy fashion, its direction controlled by the brush of a finger against an iPhone touch screen (as seen in video above). RoboRoach #12 and its brethren are billed as a do-it-yourself neuroscience experiment that allows students to create their own “cyborg” insects. The roach was the main feature of the TEDx talk by Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo, co-founders of an educational company called Backyard Brains. After a summer Kickstarter campaign raised enough money to let them hone their insect creation, the pair used the Detroit presentation to show it off and announce that starting in November, the company will, for $99, begin shipping live cockroaches across the nation, accompanied by a microelectronic hardware and surgical kits geared toward students as young as 10 years old. That news, however, hasn’t been greeted warmly by everyone. Gage and Marzullo, both trained as neuroscientists and engineers, say that the purpose of the project is to spur a “neuro-revolution” by inspiring more kids to join the fields when they grow up, but some critics say the project is sending the wrong message. "They encourage amateurs to operate invasively on living organisms" and "encourage thinking of complex living organisms as mere machines or tools," says Michael Allen Fox, a professor of philosophy at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18755 - Posted: 10.08.2013

by Linda Geddes They are identical in almost every way, except one twin is fat and the other is thin. Now a study of this rare group is shedding light on a medical mystery: how some people can be obese and perfectly healthy. Obesity usually goes hand in hand with metabolic syndrome – high blood pressure, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes – but a minority of obese people escape this fate. To probe the fit fat phenomenon, Jussi Naukkarinen at the University of Helsinki in Finland and his colleagues turned to a registry of identical twins, picking 16 pairs whose body weight differed by 17 kilograms on average. They are a perfect model for studying such differences because they are genetically identical and have usually been raised in very similar environments. Naukkarinen's team started by looking at the siblings' body fat distribution and quickly saw that the fat twins fell into two groups: those that tended to accumulate fat within their livers, and those whose liver fat resembled that of their thin twin. Suppressed activity Next, they looked at other markers of ill-health, including insulin resistance, cholesterol, inflammation and blood pressure. These measures also divided the group. "Basically all the hallmarks of the metabolic syndrome were lacking in the group where there was no liver fat," Naukkarinen says. Researchers also compared samples of the twins' abdominal fat, or adipose tissue. In unhealthy obese twins, genes involved in inflammation were activated – genes that were not activated in their thin twin. The activity of cellular powerhouses called mitochondria seemed to be suppressed as well. But in healthy obese twins, gene expression was similar to that of the thin twin. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18754 - Posted: 10.07.2013

By John Horgan Last spring, I kicked up a kerfuffle by proposing that research on race and intelligence, given its potential for exacerbating discrimination, should be banned. Now Nature has expanded this debate with “Taboo Genetics.” The article “looks at four controversial areas of behavioral genetics”—intelligence, race, violence and sexuality—”to find out why each field has been a flashpoint, and whether there are sound scientific reasons for pursuing such studies.” Behavioral genetics has failed to produce robust evidence linking complex traits and disorders to specific genes. The essay provides a solid overview, including input from both defenders of behavioral genetics and critics. The author, Erika Check Hayden, quotes me saying that research on race and intelligence too often bolsters “racist ideas about the inferiority of certain groups, which plays into racist policies.” I only wish that Hayden had repeated my broader complaint against behavioral genetics, which attempts to explain human behavior in genetic terms. The field, which I’ve been following since the late 1980s, has a horrendous track record. My concerns about the potential for abuse of behavioral genetics are directly related to its history of widely publicized, erroneous claims. I like to call behavioral genetics “gene whiz science,” because “advances” so often conform to the same pattern. Researchers, or gene-whizzers, announce: There’s a gene that makes you gay! That makes you super-smart! That makes you believe in God! That makes you vote for Barney Frank! The media and the public collectively exclaim, “Gee whiz!” © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18753 - Posted: 10.07.2013

By Matthew D. Lieberman The popular conception of human nature emerging from psychology over the last century suggests that we are something of a hybrid, combining reptilian, instinct-driven motivational tendencies with superior higher-level analytic powers. Our motivational tendencies evolved from our reptilian brains eons ago and focus on the four Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fooling around. In contrast, our intellectual capacities are relatively recent advances. They are what makes us special. One of the things that distinguishes primates from other animals, and humans from other primates, is the size of our brains—in particular, the size of our prefrontal cortex, that is, the front part of the brain sitting right behind the eyes. Our big brains allow us to engage in all sorts of intelligent activities. But that doesn’t mean our brains evolved to do those particular things. Humans are the only animals that can learn to play chess, but no one would argue that the prefrontal cortex evolved specifically so that we could play the game of kings. Rather, the prefrontal cortex is often thought of as an all-purpose computer; we can load it up with almost any software (that is, teach it things). Thus, the prefrontal cortex seems to have evolved for solving novel hard problems, with chess being just one of an endless string of problems it can solve. From this perspective there might not be anything special at all about our ability and tendency to think about the social world. Other people can be thought of as a series of hard problems to be solved because they stand between us and our reptilian desires. Just as our prefrontal cortex can allow us to master the game of chess, the same reasoning suggests that our all-purpose prefrontal cortex can learn to master the social game of chess—that is, the moves that are permissible and advantageous in social life. From this perspective, intelligence is intelligence whether it’s being applied to social life, chess, or studying for a final exam. The creator of one of the most widely used intelligence tests espoused this view, arguing that social intelligence is just “general intelligence applied to social situations.” This view implies social intelligence isn’t special and our interest in the social world is just an accident—a consequence of the particular problems we are confronted with. © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 18752 - Posted: 10.07.2013

Alice Roberts It's the rutting season. From Richmond Park to the Isle of Rum, red deer hinds will be gathering, and the stags that have spent the past 10 months minding their own business in bachelor groups are back in town, with one thing on their minds. A mature male that has netted himself a harem is very dedicated. He practically stops eating, focusing instead on keeping his hinds near and his competitors at bay. If you're a red deer stag, one of the ways you make sure that your adversaries know you mean business – and that you're big – is roaring. And you don't let up. You can keep roaring all day, and through the night too, twice a minute, if necessary. While female red deer prefer the deeper roars of larger stags, roaring also appears to be part of how stags size one another up, before deciding whether or not to get engaged in a full-on physical fight. Most confrontations are settled without locking antlers. In male red and fallow deer, the voicebox or larynx is very low in the throat – and gets even lower when they roar. Strap-like muscles that attach to the larynx contract to drag it down towards the breastbone – lengthening the vocal tract and deepening the stag's roar. Deepening the voice exaggerates body size. Over generations, stags with deeper roars presumably had more reproductive success, so the position of the larynx moved lower and lower in the neck. When a red deer stag roars his larynx is pulled down so far that it contacts the front of his breastbone – it couldn't get any lower. In human evolution, much is made of the low position of the larynx in the neck. So much, in fact, that it has been considered to be a uniquely human trait, and intrinsically linked to that other uniquely human trait: spoken language. But if red and fallow deer also have low larynges, that means, first, that we're not as unusual as we like to think we are, and second, that there could be other reasons – that are nothing to do with speaking – for having a descended larynx. © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 18751 - Posted: 10.07.2013

Smart, successful, and well-connected: a good description of Albert Einstein … and his brain. The father of relativity theory didn’t live to see modern brain imaging techniques, but after his death his brain was sliced into sections and photographed. Now, scientists have used those cross-sectional photos to reveal a larger-than-average corpus callosum—the bundle of nerve fibers connecting the brain’s two hemispheres. Researchers measured the thickness of the famous noggin’s corpus callosum (the lighter-colored, downward-curving region at the center of each hemisphere, above) at various points along its length, and compared it to MRIs from 15 elderly men and 52 young, healthy ones. The thickness of Einstein’s corpus callosum was greater than the average for both the elderly and the young subjects, the team reported online last week in the journal Brain. The authors posit that in Einstein’s brain, more nerve fibers connected key regions such as the two sides of the prefrontal cortex, which are responsible for complex thought and decision-making. Combined with previous evidence that parts of the physicist’s brain were unusually large and intricately folded, the researchers suggest that this feature helps account for his extraordinary gifts. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Intelligence; Laterality
Link ID: 18750 - Posted: 10.07.2013

By EILEEN POLLACK Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts. The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income? As one of the first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics from Yale — I graduated in 1978 — this question concerns me deeply. I attended a rural public school whose few accelerated courses in physics and calculus I wasn’t allowed to take because, as my principal put it, “girls never go on in science and math.” Angry and bored, I began reading about space and time and teaching myself calculus from a book. When I arrived at Yale, I was woefully unprepared. The boys in my introductory physics class, who had taken far more rigorous math and science classes in high school, yawned as our professor sped through the material, while I grew panicked at how little I understood. The only woman in the room, I debated whether to raise my hand and expose myself to ridicule, thereby losing track of the lecture and falling further behind. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18749 - Posted: 10.05.2013

The discovery of "missing" genes could help scientists understand how autism develops, a study suggests. US researchers looked at the genetic profiles of more than 431 people with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and 379 without. They found those with an ASD were more likely to have just one copy of certain genes, when they should have had two. UK experts said genetic factors were one promising area of research into the causes of autism. About 1% of the population has an ASD. They can run in families - but scientists have not identified a cause. Gene deletions or additions happen in everyone - it is why people are different. It is which genes are affected that determines what the effect is. 'Mis-wiring' There were far more gene deletions in the ASD group, and they were more likely to have multiple deletions. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the team from Mount Sinai suggests this "mis-wiring" could alter the activity of nerve cells in the brain. Prof Joseph Buxbaum, who led the research team, said: "This is the first finding that small deletions impacting one or two genes appear to be common in autism, and that these deletions contribute to risk of development of this disorder." BBC © 2013

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18748 - Posted: 10.05.2013

By Gary Stix Psychological depression is more than an emotional state. Good evidence for that comes from emerging new uses for a technology already widely prescribed for Parkinson’s patients. The more neurologists and surgeons learn about the aptly named deep brain stimulation, the more they are convinced that the currents from the technology’s implanted electrodes can literally reboot brain circuits involved with the mood disorder. Thomas Schlaepfer, a psychiatrist from the University of Bonn Hospital and a leading expert in researching deep brain stimulation, describes in the interview that follows the workings of the technique and why it may help the severely depressed. Can you explain what deep brain stimulation is and what it is currently used for? Deep brain stimulation refers to the implantation of very small electrodes in both hemispheres of the brain, which are connected to a neurostimulator, usually placed under the skin on the right chest. This device is in size and function very similar to a heart pacemaker. It allows stimulations of different pulse width and frequency. Depending on the chosen stimulation parameters the electrodes in the brain are able to “neuromodulate” – to reversibly alter the function – of the surrounding brain tissue. Deep brain stimulation has gained widespread acceptance as a successful treatment for tremor associated with Parkinson’s disease. More than 80,000 patients worldwide have been treated with this method. Some see deep brain stimulation as a much less invasive and fully reversibly alternative to historical neurosurgical interventions, which require tiny amounts of brain tissue to be destroyed in order to have clinical effects. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 18747 - Posted: 10.05.2013

by Laura Sanders When I started to get out and about with Baby V, I occasionally experienced a strange phenomenon. Women would approach and coo some pleasant little noises. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, these strangers would lean in close and ask to smell my baby. I’m the first to admit that this sounds creepy. Truth be told, it is a little creepy. But now I completely get it. The joy from a single whiff of newborn far outweighs any trifling social conventions about personal space and body odors. So when women approach looking for a little hit of eau de bebe, I get sharey. By all means, ladies, lean in and smell away. Tiny babies smell very, very good. So good that I’m getting a little high from just thinking about how good babies smell. So good that people attempt to bottle and sell this scent (like this baby-head-scented spray— pleasant, but pales in comparison). So good that scientists really want to know why some women find this smell irresistible. Scientists recently studied the brains of women as they sniffed new baby scent. Two-day-old babies delivered the good stuff by wearing the same pajamas for two nights. Women then sniffed the odor extracted from the outfit while brain scans assessed neural activity. Overall, the 30 women in the study (who weren’t told what they were sniffing, by the way) rated the scent as mildly pleasant. As the intoxicating scent of newborn wafted into their brains, neural activity increased in areas of the brain linked to good feelings, called neostriate areas. In the brains of the 15 women who also happened to be mothers, the brain activity seemed stronger. (No word yet on what new baby smell does to dads’ brains.) © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18746 - Posted: 10.05.2013