By Jason G. Goldman One of the key differences between humans and non-human animals, it is thought, is the ability to flexibly communicate our thoughts to others. The consensus has long been that animal communication, such as the food call of a chimpanzee or the alarm call of a lemur, is the result of an automatic reflex guided primarily by the inner physiological state of the animal. Chimpanzees, for example, can’t “lie” by producing a food call when there’s no food around and, it is thought, they can’t not emit a food call in an effort to hoard it all for themselves. By contrast, human communication via language is far more flexible and intentional. But recent research from across the animal kingdom has cast some doubt on the idea that animal communication always operates below the level of conscious control. Male chickens, for example, call more when females are around, and male Thomas langurs (a monkey native to Indonesia) continue shrieking their alarm calls until all females in their group have responded. Similarly, vervet monkeys are more likely sound their alarm calls when their are other vervet monkeys around, and less likely when they’re alone. The same goes for meerkats. And possibly chimps, as well. Still, these sorts of “audience effects” can be explained by lower-level physiological factors. In yellow-bellied marmots, small ground squirrels native to the western US and southwestern Canada, the production of an alarm call correlates with glucocorticoid production, a physiological measurement of stress. And when researchers experimentally altered the synthesis of glucocorticoids in rhesus macaques, they found a change in the probability of alarm call production. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 18605 - Posted: 09.04.2013

A "window to the brain" implant which would allow doctors to see through the skull and possibly treat patients has been devised by US researchers. It uses a see-through version of the same material used for hip implants. The team at University of California, Riverside, say it could allow lasers to be fired into the brain to treat neurological disorders. The implant was reported in the journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine. The researchers say emerging laser-treatments in stroke and cancer care and brain imaging require access to the brain. However, they are limited as a part of the skull needs to be removed and replaced each time a treatment is performed. Instead the team of scientists have devised a transparent implant that would replace a small section of the skull. They have converted a material - yttria-stabilized zirconia that is used in some ceramic hip implants and dental crowns - to make it transparent. They argue the material would be safe to implant, but would also provide a window onto the brain. Professor of mechanical engineering, Guillermo Aguilar, said: "This is a case of a science fiction sounding idea becoming science fact, with strong potential for positive impact on patients. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18604 - Posted: 09.04.2013

According to new research on epilepsy, zebrafish have certainly earned their stripes. Results of a study in Nature Communications suggest that zebrafish carrying a specific mutation may help researchers discover treatments for Dravet syndrome (DS), a severe form of pediatric epilepsy that results in drug-resistant seizures and developmental delays. Scott C. Baraban, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), carefully assessed whether the mutated zebrafish could serve as a model for DS, and then developed a new screening method to quickly identify potential treatments for DS using these fish. This study was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health and builds on pioneering epilepsy zebrafish models first described by the Baraban laboratory in 2005. Dravet syndrome is commonly caused by a mutation in the Scn1a gene, which encodes for Nav1.1, a specific sodium ion channel found in the brain. Sodium ion channels are critical for communication between brain cells and proper brain functioning. The researchers found that the zebrafish that were engineered to have the Scn1a mutation that causes DS in humans exhibited some of the same characteristics, such as spontaneous seizures, commonly seen in children with DS. Unprovoked seizure activity in the mutant fish resulted in hyperactivity and whole-body convulsions associated with very fast swimming. These types of behaviors are not seen in normal healthy zebrafish.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 18603 - Posted: 09.04.2013

by Adam Gopnik Good myths turn on simple pairs— God and Lucifer, Sun and Moon, Jerry and George—and so an author who makes a vital duo is rewarded with a long-lived audience. No one in 1900 would have thought it possible that a century later more people would read Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson stories than anything of George Meredith’s, but we do. And so Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek,” despite the silly plots and the cardboard-seeming sets, persists in its many versions because it captures a deep and abiding divide. Mr. Spock speaks for the rational, analytic self who assumes that the mind is a mechanism and that everything it does is logical, Captain Kirk for the belief that what governs our life is not only irrational but inexplicable, and the better for being so. The division has had new energy in our time: we care most about a person who is like a thinking machine at a moment when we have begun to have machines that think. Captain Kirk, meanwhile, is not only a Romantic, like so many other heroes, but a Romantic on a starship in a vacuum in deep space. When your entire body is every day dissolved, reënergized, and sent down to a new planet, and you still believe in the ineffable human spirit, you have really earned the right to be a soul man. Writers on the brain and the mind tend to divide into Spocks and Kirks, either embracing the idea that consciousness can be located in a web of brain tissue or debunking it. For the past decade, at least, the Spocks have been running the Enterprise: there are books on your brain and music, books on your brain and storytelling, books that tell you why your brain makes you want to join the Army, and books that explain why you wish that Bar Refaeli were in the barracks with you. The neurological turn has become what the “cultural” turn was a few decades ago: the all-purpose non-explanation explanation of everything. Thirty years ago, you could feel loftily significant by attaching the word “culture” to anything you wanted to inspect: we didn’t live in a violent country, we lived in a “culture of violence”; we didn’t have sharp political differences, we lived in a “culture of complaint”; and so on. In those days, Time, taking up the American pursuit of pleasure, praised Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”; now Time has a cover story on happiness and asks whether we are “hardwired” to pursue it. © 2013 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Consciousness
Link ID: 18602 - Posted: 09.03.2013

By Scicurious For my food week post, I’m going at it a little differently. We spend a lot of time talking about food, thinking about whether it’s good for us, bad for us, which aspects of it are good or bad for us. We talk about why we crave some foods vs others, and we talk about why some foods taste disgusting. We talk about whether you’d want to replace your entire diet with a chalky fluid substance. Foodies spend a lot of time taking pictures of it, diet mags spend a lot of time talking about how to eat less of it. Food is surrounded by a culture that permeates almost everything we put in our mouths. But food is more than what we like or don’t like. Food is more than a relationship between our stomach and our tongues and noses. There is a very strong relationship between food and your brain, and when it goes wrong, the results can be devastating. There is anorexia, where there is distorted body perception, huge fear of weight gain, and food restriction so severe it can kill. On the opposite end, there is binge eating, uncontrollable eating that people are unable to stop, despite health consequences and social stigma. Critical to both of these problems are issues with “reward”. Food needs to be rewarding, it needs to make you crave it, want more of it, seek it out, work to obtain it. We need to crave food because if we didn’t, we’d all starve to death due to lack of motivation. In binge eating, though, that craving becomes an obsession. And it’s a dangerous one. People who binge eat severely are at risk for obesity, heart problems, diabetes, and other health problems. There is also a lot of anxiety, depression, guilt, and other mental distress that goes along with binge eating. This is more than just a need for portion control or more exercise. It’s a serious compulsion and mental illness, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Obesity
Link ID: 18601 - Posted: 09.03.2013

by Jennifer Viegas Goldfish not only listen to music, but they also can distinguish one composer from another, a new study finds. The paper adds to the growing body of evidence that many different animals understand music. For the study, published in the journal Behavioural Processes, Shinozuka and colleagues Haruka Ono and Shigeru Watanabe played two pieces of classical music near goldfish in a tank. The pieces were Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach and The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. The scientists trained the fish to gnaw on a little bead hanging on a filament in the water. Half of the fish were trained with food to gnaw whenever Bach played and the other half were taught to gnaw whenever Stravinsky music was on. The goldfish aced the test, easily distinguishing the two composers and getting a belly full of food in the process. The fish were more interested in the vittles than the music, but earlier studies on pigeons and songbirds suggest that Bach is the preferred choice, at least for birds. “These pieces can be classified as classical (Bach) and modern (Stravinsky) music,” Shinozuka explained. “Previously we demonstrated that Java sparrows preferred classical over modern music. Also, we demonstrated Java sparrows could discriminate between consonance and dissonance.” © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hearing; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18600 - Posted: 09.03.2013

by Michael Marshall Life is tough when you're small. It's not just about getting trodden on by bigger animals. Some of the tiniest creatures struggle to make their bodies work properly. This leads to problems that us great galumphing humans will never experience. For instance, the smallest frogs are prone to drying out because water evaporates so quickly from their skin. Miniature animals can't have many offspring, because there is no room in their bodies to grow them. One tiny spider has even had to let its brain spill into its legs, because its head is too small to accommodate it. Gardiner's Seychelles frog is one of the smallest vertebrates known to exist, at just 11 millimetres long. Its tiny head is missing parts of its ears, which means it shouldn't be able to hear anything. It can, though, and that is thanks to its big mouth. One of only four species in the genus Sechellophryne, Gardiner's Seychelles frog is a true rarity. It is confined to a few square kilometres of two islands in the Seychelles, and even if you visit its habitat you're unlikely to see it. That's because the frog spends most of its time in moist leaf litter, so that it doesn't dry out. It eats tiny insects and other invertebrates. When it comes to hearing, it is sadly under-equipped. Unlike most frogs, it doesn't have an external eardrum. Inside its head, it does have the amphibian equivalent of a cochlea, which is the bit that actually detects sounds. But it doesn't have a middle ear to transmit the sound to the cochlea, and is also missing a bone called the columella that would normally help carry the sound. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 18599 - Posted: 09.03.2013

By STUART ELLIOTT Electronic cigarettes may be a creation of the early 21st century, but critics of the devices say manufacturers are increasingly borrowing marketing tactics that are more reminiscent of the heady days of tobacco in the mid-1900s. With American smokers buying e-cigarettes at a record pace — annual sales are expected to reach $1.7 billion by year’s end — e-cigarette makers are opening their wallets wide, spending growing sums on television commercials with celebrities, catchy slogans and sports sponsorships. Those tactics can no longer be used to sell tobacco cigarettes, but are readily available to the industry because it is not covered by the laws or regulations that affect the tobacco cigarette industry. The e-cigarette industry is also spending lavishly on marketing methods that are also still available to their tobacco brethren, including promotions, events, sample giveaways and print ads. The Blu eCigs brand — which recently added the actress Jenny McCarthy to its roster of star endorsers, joining the actor Stephen Dorff — spent $12.4 million on ads in major media for the first quarter of this year compared with $992,000 in the same period a year ago, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. And ad spending in a category that Kantar Media calls smoking materials and accessories, which includes products like pipes and lighters in addition to e-cigarettes, has skyrocketed: from $2.7 million in 2010 to $7.2 million in 2011 to $20.8 million last year. In the first quarter of 2013, Kantar Media reported, category ad spending soared again, reaching $15.7 million, compared with $2 million in the same period a year ago. In fact, that $15.7 million total exceeded the spending for ads in major media for tobacco cigarettes, at $13.9 million, according to Kantar Media. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18598 - Posted: 09.03.2013

By Michele Solis Loneliness is bad for our health, according to a robust body of research. And isolation is known to shorten lives—but experts were not sure if the real culprit was the pain and stress of loneliness, as opposed to a lack of social connectedness. Now psychologists have untangled the two factors and discovered that even superficial contact with other people may improve our health. Led by Andrew Steptoe of University College London, the study surveyed 6,500 people aged 52 or older about their social contacts and experiences of loneliness. After seven years, the researchers followed up to see who had died. Initially, people rated as highly lonely seemed to die at a higher rate than those with low or average scores. Yet this difference disappeared when taking into account a person's health. Greater social isolation, however, came with an increased incidence of death: 21.9 percent of people ranked as highly isolated died compared with 12.3 percent of less isolated people. After taking into account health and other demographic factors, this difference amounted to a 1.26-fold increase in mortality associated with high social isolation. The findings, published online on March 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, suggest that even brief social contact that does not involve a close emotional bond—such as small talk with a neighbor or a bus driver—could extend a person's life. Although the results hint that city living or group homes may be beneficial, Steptoe says they do not negate the downside of loneliness. “There's ample evidence that loneliness relates to well-being and other health outcomes besides death,” he says. “But our study suggests a broader view of beneficial social relationships. They're not simply to do with close emotional relationships.” © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 18597 - Posted: 09.03.2013

By TOM FIELDS-MEYER I was looking in my closet, choosing a shirt, when I lost my mind. Four hours later, I’m in the E.R., and I don’t know how I got here. My wife, Shawn, stands at my bedside, her expression alternating between reassuring and dismayed. Next to her, a doctor in his mid-50s calmly tells me he’s going to name three objects. “I want you to hold these in your mind,” he says. “Apple, table, penny.” I nod, noticing a semicircle of young interns behind him, listening intently. Then the doctor asks me to multiply 17 times 3. “I’m not very good at math,” I say. He waits. “Let’s see. Twenty times 3 is 60, minus 6.” I pause, correcting myself. “No, minus 9. Fifty-one?” “Good.” He smiles. “Now, what were those three objects I named?” I can’t recall the objects. I barely remember that he listed them. Flustered, I purse my lips and slowly shake my head, looking at Shawn. She fills in the blanks for me: I woke up, took a shower, and when I stepped out, I seemed disoriented. I sat down on the bed. “Wait, remind me, what are we doing today?” I asked her. “Do I need to remind you again? We’re having lunch at the Swerdlows’.” I didn’t remember that. I put a hand on my forehead, then lay on my back. “What day is it?” I asked her. Concerned by my blank stare, Shawn shot me questions: Do you know who came over last night? (I didn’t.) Do you remember what we argued about yesterday morning? (I couldn’t.) © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18596 - Posted: 09.02.2013

Alison Abbott Like humans, Drosophila fruitflies become forgetful with age. But at least their memory deficits can be reversed by eating a diet rich in polyamines, according to a study published online today1 in Nature Neuroscience. “There’s a great need for cognitive enhancers to keep us healthy into old age — now polyamines are offering a new approach,” says learning and memory specialist Ronald Davis at the Scripps Research Institute Florida in Jupiter, who was not involved in the study. “There are reasons for optimism that this fly work will translate into human.” Polyamines — which include the graphically named putrescine, cadaverine and spermidine — are small molecules that are essential for cells to survive and grow. But their cellular levels decline with age. Some foods that are popularly considered to have health benefits — such as wheatgerm and fermented soya beans — contain high levels of polyamines. Japanese scientists have shown that natto, a fermented soya-bean product, raises the level of polyamines in the blood in humans2. But there is a long way to go before anyone can say that polyamines can help to stave off memory decline in ageing people, cautions Stephan Sigrist of the Free University of Berlin, one of the study's principal investigators. “Still, the polyamine system does offer a new target for those interested in developing therapies.” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18595 - Posted: 09.02.2013

By Maia Szalavitz That little zing you get when someone “likes” your picture or sings your praises on Facebook? That’s the reward center in your brain getting a boost. And that response can predict how much time and energy you put into the social media site, according to new research. In one of the first studies to explore the effects of social media on the brain, scientists led by Dar Meshi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin, imaged the brains of 31 Facebook users while they viewed pictures of either themselves or others that were accompanied by positive captions. The research was published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. “We found that we could predict the intensity of people’s Facebook use outside the scanner by looking at their brain’s response to positive social feedback inside the scanner,” says Meshi. Specifically, a region called the nucleus accumbens, which processes rewarding feelings about food, sex, money and social acceptance became more active in response to praise for oneself compared to praise of others. And that activation was associated with more time on the social media site. Social affirmation tends to be one of life’s great joys, whether it occurs online or off, so it’s not surprising that it would light up this area. Few people are immune to the lures of flattery, after all. But do these results suggest that the “likes” on Facebook can become addictive? While all addictive experiences activate the region, such activation alone isn’t sufficient to establish an addiction. © 2013 Time Inc

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18594 - Posted: 09.02.2013

by Nancy Shute It was hard to ignore those headlines saying that people with migraine have brain damage, even if you're not among the 12 percent or so who do suffer from these painful, recurring headaches. Don't panic, says the neurologist whose work sparked those alarming headlines. "It's still not something to stay up nights worrying about," says Dr. Richard Lipton, director of the Montefiore Headache Center in New York. But knowing about the brain anomalies that Lipton and his colleagues found might help people reduce their stroke risk. Some people who get do have a slightly . And some of the brain changes identified in the study look like mini-strokes. "On the MRI they look like very tiny strokes," Lipton tells Shots. But the people aren't having any stroke symptoms. Still, Lipton is convinced that the process is the same. "We now know it's a risk factor for these very small silent strokes," he says. The scientists evaluated data from 19 studies in which people with migraine headaches got MRI scans of their brains. Just about everybody is going to have some abnormalities show up in a scan. But the people who had migraines were more likely to have two common abnormalities: white matter abnormalities and infarct-like lesions. The were published in the journal Neurology. ©2013 NPR

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Stroke
Link ID: 18593 - Posted: 09.02.2013

by Bob Holmes It's the cruel cycle of poverty. The many challenges that come with being poor can sap people's ability to think clearly, according to a new study. The findings suggest that governments should think twice before tying up social-assistance programmes in confusing red tape. Sociologists have long known that poor people are less likely to take medications, keep appointments, or be attentive parents. "Poor people make poorer decisions. They do. The question is why," says Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But does bad decision-making help cause poverty, or does poverty interfere with decision-making? To explore this question, psychologist Eldar Shafir at Princeton University and his colleagues took advantage of a natural experiment. Small-scale sugar-cane farmers in Tamil Nadu in southern India receive most of their year's income all at once, shortly after the annual harvest. As a result, the same farmer can be poor before harvest and relatively rich after. And indeed, Shafir's team found that farmers had more loans, pawned more belongings, and reported more difficulty paying bills before the harvest than after. The researchers visited 464 farmers in 54 villages both before and after harvest. At each visit, they gave the farmers two tests of their cognitive ability: a multiple-choice pattern-matching test, and one in which they had to declare the number of digits shown rather then their value: seeing "5 5 5" but saying "three", for example. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 18592 - Posted: 08.31.2013

By Susan Milius Here’s a lesson on road trips from whooping cranes: For efficient migration, what matters is the age of the oldest crane in the group. These more experienced fliers nudge youngsters away from going off course on long flights. “The older birds get, the closer they stick to the straight line,” says ecologist Thomas Mueller of the University of Maryland in College Park, who crunched data from 73 Grus americana migrating between Wisconsin and Florida. One-year-olds traveling with other birds of the same age, the analysis says, tend to deviate about 76 kilometers from a direct route. But if they fly in a group with an 8-year-old crane, they stray 38 percent less, or about 47 kilometers, Mueller and his colleagues report in the August 30 Science. Eight years of data on these endangered cranes summering in Wisconsin’s Necedah National Wildlife Refuge offered a rare chance to parse how birds find their way. Conservationists have been rebuilding this eastern migratory population of the once widespread birds. Researchers release captive-bred cranes in Wisconsin and lead each class of newbies, just once, with an ultralight aircraft to Florida’s Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge for the winter. Cranes navigate back to Wisconsin on their own. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Animal Migration; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18591 - Posted: 08.31.2013

Charlie Cooper Scientists have moved a step closer to creating a specialist pill for jet lag, after research in mice revealed a possible mechanism for speeding up the body's natural response to moving across time zones. Researchers at the University of Oxford found they could improve the recovery time of mice exposed to irregular patterns of light and dark by blocking a particular gene in the brain, responsible for regulating the body's internal clock. Nearly all living things have an internal, subcellular mechanism - known as the circadian clock - that synchronises a variety of bodily functions to the 24-hour rhythm of the Earth's rotation. The circadian clock is regulated by a number of stimuli - chief among them light detected by the eye. But when daily patterns of light and dark are disrupted - as when we travel across several time-zones - the body clock falls out of synch, resulting in several days of fatigue and discomfort as our cells adjust to new daily patterns - experienced by long-haul fliers as jet lag. The body takes about one day to adjust for every time zone crossed. To understand the effect this has on the brain, researchers at the University of Oxford exposed mice to irregular patterns of light and dark to simulate moving across time zones. They monitored the activity of genes in the part of the brain responsible for setting the circadian clock - the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) and observed that hundreds of genes were activated by light detected from the eye, all of which helped the body adjust to a new day-night rhythm. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 18590 - Posted: 08.31.2013

Brain scans of people who say they have insomnia have shown differences in brain function compared with people who get a full night's sleep. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, said the poor sleepers struggled to focus part of their brain in memory tests. Other experts said that the brain's wiring may actually be affecting perceptions of sleep quality. The findings were published in the journal Sleep. People with insomnia struggle to sleep at night, but it also has consequences during the day such as delayed reaction times and memory. The study compared 25 people who said they had insomnia with 25 who described themselves as good sleepers. MRI brain scans were carried out while they performed increasingly challenging memory tests. One of the researchers, Prof Sean Drummond, said: "We found that insomnia subjects did not properly turn on brain regions critical to a working memory task and did not turn off 'mind-wandering' brain regions irrelevant to the task. "This data helps us understand that people with insomnia not only have trouble sleeping at night, but their brains are not functioning as efficiently during the day." BBC © 2013

Keyword: Sleep; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18589 - Posted: 08.31.2013

By MIKE STOBBE / AP Medical Writer ATLANTA (AP) — Can’t get enough shuteye? Nearly 9 million U.S. adults resort to prescription sleeping pills — and most are white, female, educated or 50 or older, according to the first government study of its kind. But that’s only part of the picture. Experts believe there are millions more who try options like over-the-counter medicines or chamomile tea, or simply suffer through sleepless nights. ‘‘Not everyone is running out to get a prescription drug,’’ said Russell Rosenberg, an Atlanta-based sleep researcher. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study was based on interviews with about 17,000 adults from 2005 through 2010. Study participants were even asked to bring in any medicines they were taking. Overall, 4 percent of adults said they'd taken a prescription sleeping pill or sedative in the previous month. The study did not say whether use is increasing. But a CDC researcher calculated that use rose from 3.3 percent in 2003-2006 to 4.3 percent in 2007-2010. That echoes U.S. market research — as well as studies in some other countries — that indicate an increase in insomnia in recent decades. ‘‘Sleep disorders overall are more prevalent than what they were,’’ said Dr. Ana Krieger, medical director of New York’s Weill Cornell Center for Sleep Medicine. © 2013 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 18588 - Posted: 08.31.2013

by Jacob Aron DOES your brain work like a dictionary? A mathematical analysis of the connections between definitions of English words has uncovered hidden structures that may resemble the way words and their meanings are represented in our heads. "We want to know how the mental lexicon is represented in the brain," says Stevan Harnad of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. As every word in a dictionary is defined in terms of others, the knowledge needed to understand the entire lexicon is there, as long as you first know the meanings of an initial set of starter, or "grounding", words. Harnad's team reasoned that finding this minimal set of words and pinning down its structure might shed light on how human brains put language together. The team converted each of four different English dictionaries into a mathematical structure of linked nodes known as a graph. Each node in this graph represents a word, which is linked to the other words used to define it – so "banana" might be connected to "long", "bendy", "yellow" and "fruit". These words then link to others that define them. This enabled the team to remove all the words that don't define any others, leaving what they call a kernel. The kernel formed roughly 10 per cent of the full dictionary – though the exact percentages depended on the particular dictionary. In other words, 90 per cent of the dictionary can be defined using just the other 10 per cent. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 18587 - Posted: 08.31.2013

By Felicity Muth In my previous post, I talked about how crickets were influenced by who was watching them when they performed a victory dance after winning a fight. Although this is a unique finding, it fits into a larger picture of many animals (including insects) being affected by their social context. At the animal behaviour conference I went to in Colorado (where I heard both about the cricket research and about the study I’m going to write about today), you could see how people were affected by what others were doing around them. When one person sneaked out before the end of a talk to go to a talk in a different room, a load of other people would follow. When chatting with a friend, a person would modify what they were saying depending on who else was in the vicinity. Whether we are aware of it all of the time or not, we constantly modify our behaviour depending on the social context we’re in. Well, in addition to crickets, it turns out that honeybees are affected by social context too. This isn’t surprising, given that these bees are highly social animals, but quite how they are affected is rather interesting. Honeybees live in colonies of up to 40, 000 – 80, 000 individuals, almost all females. Like humans, honeybees like to keep their dwelling at constant temperature, not least to make sure that their brood can develop. Unlike humans however, bees think around 36°C (96.8°F) is a great temperature to have their home at. In the winter, honeybees shiver to produce heat, pressing their abdomens against their brood (stored in cells) to distribute the heat more evenly. In the summer however, it can get pretty hot, and so the bees use some strategies to cool down that are not dissimilar to our own. They collect water that can evaporate in the colony and cool it down. They also fan to circulate air around the colony. However, until recently it was not clear how bees decide to start fanning, and whether this might be influenced by what others are doing. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18586 - Posted: 08.31.2013