By Meghan Rosen A short camping trip could help people rise and shine. After a week living in tents in Colorado’s Rockies, volunteers’ internal clocks shifted about two hours earlier, transforming night owls into early birds, researchers report August 1 in Current Biology. “It’s a clever study, and it makes a dramatic point,” says Katherine Sharkey, a sleep researcher and physician at Brown University. People get much more light outside than they do indoors, and that can reset their internal clocks, she says. A master clock in the brain controls the release of melatonin, a hormone that prepares the body for sleep. Melatonin levels rise in the early evening and then taper off in the morning before a person wakes up. But because so many people spend their days indoors and their nights bathed in the glow of electric lights, the body’s clock can get out of sync. Melatonin levels ramp up later in the evening and ebb later in the morning — often after a person has woken up. The lingering sleep hormone can make people groggy. Kenneth Wright Jr., a sleep researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, and colleagues whisked eight volunteers away from artificial lights for a summer camping trip. After nightfall, the campers used only campfires for illumination — no flashlights (or cellphones) allowed. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 18445 - Posted: 08.03.2013

By Lucas Laursen My cousin Guillermo Cassinello Toscano was on the train that derailed in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, last week when it went around a bend at twice the speed limit. Cassinello heard a loud vibration and then a powerful bump and then found himself surrounded by bloody bodies in wagon number nine. Shaking, he escaped the wreckage through either a door or a hole in the train—he cannot recall—then sat amid the smoke and debris next to the track and began to cry. Seventy-nine passengers died. Cassinello doesn’t remember everything that happened to him. The same mechanisms that kept his brain sharp enough to escape immediate danger may also make it harder for him both to recall the accident, and to put the trauma behind him. "The normal thing is that the person doesn't remember the moment of the accident or right after," says clinical psychologist Javier Rodriguez Escobar of trauma therapy team Grupo Isis in Seville, who helped treat and study victims of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. That's because the mind and the body enter a more alert but also more stressed state, with trade-offs that can save your life, but harm your mind’s memory-making abilities. As the train fell over, several changes would have swept through Cassinello’s body. His adrenal glands, near his kidneys, would have released adrenaline (also known as epinephrine) into his bloodstream. The adrenaline would have directed blood to the powerful muscles of his arms and legs, where it would help him escape the wreckage faster. The hormone would have raised his heart and breathing rates. It also would have stimulated his vagus nerve, which runs from his spine to his brain. Although adrenaline cannot cross the blood–brain barrier, the vagus can promote noradrenaline production in the brain. That hormone activates the amygdala, which helps form memories. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18444 - Posted: 08.01.2013

By Jessica Shugart Lunch at a restaurant with a friend could lessen the brain’s aptitude for detailed tasks back at work, a new study suggests. If an error-free afternoon is the goal, perhaps workers should consider hastily consuming calories alone at their desks. But bosses shouldn’t rush to glue workers to their chairs just yet. The research is only a first stab at teasing out how a sociable lunch affects work performance, says study leader Werner Sommer of Humboldt University in Berlin. Researchers have long thought that dining with others fosters mental well-being, cooperation and creativity. To test the effects of a midday social hour on the brain’s capacity to get through the workday, Sommer and his colleagues gave 32 university students lunch in one of two settings and then tested their mental focus. Half of the students enjoyed meals over a leisurely hour with a friend at a casual Italian restaurant. The other group picked up their meals from the same restaurant, but had only 20 minutes to eat alone in a drab office. People who went out to lunch got to choose from a limited vegetarian menu; participants in the office group had meals that matched the choice of a member of the other group. After lunch, the group that dined in bland solitude performed better on a task that assesses rapid decision making and focus, the researchers report July 31 in PLOS ONE. Measurements of brain activity also suggested that the brain’s error-monitoring system could be running at sub-par levels in those who ate out. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18443 - Posted: 08.01.2013

Andrew M. Seaman, Reuters Children with an autism spectrum disorder spend about twice as much time playing video games as kids who don't have a developmental disability, according to a new study. Researchers also found that children with an autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at an increased risk of gaming addictions, compared to children without the disabilities. "What we found is that it looks like (addictive gaming) was largely driven by inattention," Christopher Engelhardt, one of the study's authors from the University of Missouri in Columbia, told Reuters Health. Previous studies have found that children with an autism spectrum disorder or ADHD spend more time playing video games and are at increased risk for gaming addictions than other children, write the researchers in the journal Pediatrics. No single study, however, has looked at the three groups to see whether shared features of autism and ADHD - such as inattention or hyperactivity - seem to drive video game use. For the new study, Engelhardt and his colleague surveyed the parents of 141 boys between the ages of 8 and 18 years old. Of those, 56 had an autism spectrum disorder, 44 had ADHD and 41 were developing normally. Overall, they found that kids with an autism spectrum disorder played - on average - 2.1 hours of video games per day. Children with ADHD spent about 1.7 hours per day playing video games and normally developing kids played about 1.2 hours per day.

Keyword: ADHD; Autism
Link ID: 18442 - Posted: 08.01.2013

By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik According to a legend that one of us (Martinez-Conde) heard growing up in Spain, anybody can see the Devil's face. All you need to do is to stare at your own face in the mirror at the stroke of midnight, call the Devil's name and the Prince of Darkness will look back at you. Needless to say, I was both fascinated and terrified by the possibility. And I knew this was an experiment I must try. I waited a day or two to gather my courage, then stayed awake until midnight, got up from my bed, and into the bathroom I went. I closed the door behind me so that my family would not hear me calling out loud for Satan, faced my wide-eyed reflection, made my invocation, and ... nothing happened. I was disenchanted (literally) but also quite relieved. Now, three decades later, a paper entitled “Strange-Face-in-the-Mirror Illusion,” by vision scientist Giovanni B. Caputo of the University of Urbino in Italy, may explain my lack of results. Caputo asked 50 subjects to gaze at their reflected faces in a mirror for a 10-minute session. After less than a minute, most observers began to perceive the “strange-face illusion.” The participants' descriptions included huge deformations of their own faces; seeing the faces of alive or deceased parents; archetypal faces such as an old woman, child or the portrait of an ancestor; animal faces such as a cat, pig or lion; and even fantastical and monstrous beings. All 50 participants reported feelings of “otherness” when confronted with a face that seemed suddenly unfamiliar. Some felt powerful emotions. After reading Caputo's article, I had to give “Satan” another try. I suspected that my failure to see anything other than my petrified self in the mirror 30 years ago had to do with suboptimal lighting conditions for the strange-face illusion to take place. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 18441 - Posted: 08.01.2013

Elizabeth Pollitzer Transplanting muscle-derived stem cells into diseased muscle regenerates it — a phenomenon that holds major potential for human therapies. But for years, researchers were puzzled by the unpredictability of these cells — sometimes they would promote fast regeneration, at other times none at all. Then, in 2007, a group led by Johnny Huard, a stem-cell researcher at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, hit on the rather surprising explanation — sex1. Muscle stem cells taken from female mice regenerate new muscle much faster than those from male mice when transplanted into diseased muscle of mice of either sex. Researchers have also found that cells taken from male and female mice respond differently to stress2, and that human cells exhibit wildly different concentrations of many metabolites across the sexes3. Evidence is mounting that cells differ according to sex, irrespective of their history of exposure to sex hormones. These differences could have major implications for the susceptibility to and course of many diseases, their diagnosis and treatment. However, most cell biologists do not note whether the cells they are using come from males or females4. Between 1997 and 2001, ten prescription drugs were withdrawn from the market by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), eight of which were more dangerous to women than to men (see go.nature.com/ksindo). The ingredients used in non-prescription drugs can also pose greater health risks to women. In 2000, for instance, the FDA took steps to remove phenylpropanolamine, a component of many over-the-counter medications, from all drug products because of a reported increased risk of bleeding into the brain or into tissue around the brain in women but not in men. Such drug therapies are developed through basic research — but what if sex-related differences in studied cells contribute in a significant way to the observed effects? © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Muscles
Link ID: 18440 - Posted: 08.01.2013

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News Several ancient dinosaurs evolved the brainpower needed for flight long before they could take to the skies, scientists say. Non-avian dinosaurs were found to have "bird brains", larger than that of Archaeopteryx, a 150 million-year-old bird-like dinosaur. Once regarded as a unique transition between dinosaurs and birds, scientists say Archaeopteryx has now lost its pivotal place. The study is published in Nature. A recent discovery in China which unveiled the earliest creature yet discovered on the evolutionary line to birds, also placed Archaeopteryx in less of a transitional evolutionary place. Bird brains tend to be more enlarged compared to their body size than reptiles, vital for providing the vision and coordination needed for flight. Scientists using high-resolution CT scans have now found that these "hyper-inflated" brains were present in many ancient dinosaurs, and had the neurological hardwiring needed to take to the skies. This included several bird-like oviraptorosaurs and the troodontids Zanabazar junior, which had larger brains relative to body size than that of Archaeopteryx. This latest work adds to previous studies which found the presence of feathers and wishbones on ancient dinosaurs. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 18439 - Posted: 08.01.2013

Andrew Curry In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe's first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw. Looking back through the archaeological literature, Bogucki found other examples of ancient perforated pottery. “They were so unusual — people would almost always include them in publications,” says Bogucki, now at Princeton University in New Jersey. He had seen something similar at a friend's house that was used for straining cheese, so he speculated that the pottery might be connected with cheese-making. But he had no way to test his idea. The mystery potsherds sat in storage until 2011, when Mélanie Roffet-Salque pulled them out and analysed fatty residues preserved in the clay. Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that the early farmers had used the pottery as sieves to separate fatty milk solids from liquid whey. That makes the Polish relics the oldest known evidence of cheese-making in the world1. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution; Aggression
Link ID: 18438 - Posted: 08.01.2013

By Darold Treffert So much of what happens to us in life is not by plan, but rather by coincidence or serendipity. Thus it was with me and my career. After completing my residency in psychiatry I was assigned the responsibility of developing a Children’s Unit at Winnebago Mental Health Institute here in Wisconsin. There were over 800 patients at the hospital, some under age 18. We gathered about 30 such children and adolescents and put them on this new unit. Three patients particularly caught my eye. One boy had memorized the bus system of the entire city of Milwaukee with exhaustive detail and precision. Another little guy, even though mute and severely disabled with autism, could put a 200 piece jig saw puzzle together—picture side down—just from the geometric shapes of the puzzle pieces. And a third lad was an expert on what happened on this day in history and even though I would study up the night before, knowing he would quiz me the next day, I could never surpass his recall of events on that day in history. Kim Peek, his father Fran Peek and Dr. Treffert meeting in Milwaukee I was stunned, and intrigued, by this jarring juxtaposition of ability and disability in the same individual and began to study all that I could about savant syndrome—“islands of genius” amidst a sea of impairment. Then in 1980 Leslie Lemke came to Fond du Lac to give a concert. Leslie–blind, cognitively impaired and with such spasticity in his hands that he could not hold a fork or spoon to eat—had become a accomplished pianist, never having had a piano lesson in his life. Somehow the hand spasticity magically disappears when he sits at the keyboard. The 1983 60 Minutes program, which many still remember, recounted in detail the astonishment of Leslie’s mother, May Lemke, one evening, when Leslie, age 14, played back Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 flawlessly, having heard it earlier for the first time that evening as the soundtrack to the movie Sincerely Yours. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18437 - Posted: 08.01.2013

By PAM BELLUCK For some people with severe mental illness, life is a cycle of hospitalization, skipped medication, decline and then rehospitalization. They may deny they have psychiatric disorders, refuse treatment and cascade into out-of-control behavior that can be threatening to themselves or others. Now, a study has found that a controversial program that orders these patients to receive treatment when they are not hospitalized has had positive results. Patients were much less likely to end up back in psychiatric hospitals and were arrested less often. Use of outpatient treatment significantly increased, as did refills of medication. Costs to the mental health system and Medicaid of caring for these patients dropped by half or more. The study evaluated the program run by New York State, known as Kendra’s Law because it was enacted after Kendra Webdale was pushed to her death on the New York City subway tracks by a man with untreated schizophrenia in 1999. Forty-four other states have some form of Kendra’s Law, but New York’s is by far the most developed because the state has invested significant resources into paying for it, experts say. From the start, Kendra’s Law has had staunch defenders and detractors. But the new analysis, led by researchers at Duke University and published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, joins a series of studies that suggest the program can be helpful for patients who, while they constitute only a small number of the people with mental illness, are some of the most difficult and expensive to care for. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 18436 - Posted: 07.31.2013

By Julie Hecht AFTER A LONG DAY of being a dog, no dog in existence has ever curled up on a comfy couch to settle in with a good book. Dogs just don’t roll like that. But that shouldn’t imply that human words don’t or can’t have meaning for dogs. Chaser, a Border Collie from South Carolina, first entered the news in 2011 when a Behavioral Processes paper reported she had learned and retained the distinct names of over 1,000 objects. But that’s not all. When tested on the ability to associate a novel word with an unfamiliar item, she could do that, too. She also learned that different objects fell into different categories: certain things are general “toys,” while others are the more specific “Frisbees” and, of course, there are many, many exciting “balls.” She differentiates between object labels and action commands, interpreting “fetch sock” as two separate words, not as the single phrase “fetchsock.” Fast forward two years. Chaser and her owner and trainer Dr. John Pilley, an emeritus professor of psychology at Wofford College, appeared again in a scientific journal. This time, the study highlighted Chaser’s attention to the syntactical relationships between words, for example, differentiating “to ball take Frisbee” from “to Frisbee take ball.” I’ve been keeping an eye on Chaser, and I’ve been keeping an eye on Rico, Sofia, Bailey, Paddy and Betsy, all companion dogs whose way with human language has been reported in scientific journals. Most media reports tend to focus on outcomes: what these dogs can — or can’t — do with our words. But I think these reports are missing the point. Learning the names of over 1,000 words doesn’t just happen overnight. What does the behind-the-scenes learning and training look like? How did Chaser develop this intimate relationship with human language? © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Language
Link ID: 18435 - Posted: 07.31.2013

A stroke patient has developed a rare neurological condition nine months into his recovery that leaves him disgusted by words printed in a certain shade of blue and lifted to ecstasy by the sound of music by brass instruments, a Toronto neuroscientist says. The case, described in today's issue of the medical journal Neurology, involves an anonymous 45-year-old patient in Toronto who was initially frightened by the conflicting senses he began to experience. It is only the second known case of a patient developing the neurological condition after a brain injury. High-pitched brass instruments like those played in the theme from James Bond movies elicited feelings of ecstasy and created light blue flashes in his peripheral vision. They also caused large parts of his brain to light up in tests, the report says. "I heard it one day some time after the stroke and I went for a ride that was, it was cosmic in its voyage and it was wonderful," the patient said in a hospital YouTube interview. In contrast, when the euphonium was played in the study, the man said the response was cut off. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which one sense, such as hearing, is simultaneously perceived by one or more additional senses, such as sight. The word synesthesia comes from two Greek words, syn (together) and aisthesis (perception); literally, "joined perception." People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 18434 - Posted: 07.31.2013

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News Male zebra finches that fail to socialise with females during adolescence are less successful at courtship later in life, a study says. This effect mimics the "loser effect" where, after a defeat, an animal is more likely to lose a subsequent fight. Social friendships at a young age were also found to be more important than physical and social attractiveness. The findings are reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The loser effect has been well demonstrated in many species, from spiders and fish to birds. After a fight hormonal levels change which negatively affects performance in further fights. Now scientists have found a similar effect for mating. Adolescent males who failed to pair with a juvenile female were later unsuccessful with females they encountered in adulthood. Scientists also paired young males as a control in the experiment. They found that if males failed to pair with another male, it had no effect on their later success. Mylene Mariette, from the University de Saint-Etienne, France, and lead author of the study said: "We know that social interaction is important for some aspects of development, like the role of males to teach youngsters to sing, but so far no study has looked at the effect of how interaction between juveniles affects their behaviour as adults." BBC © 2013

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 18433 - Posted: 07.31.2013

By Jason Castro It’s the premise of every third sci-fi thriller. Man wakes up to his normal seeming life, but of course it isn’t. At first, just the little things are off – the dog won’t eat and the TV keeps looping some strange video – but whatever. A few cuts later, with only his granddad’s rusty brass knuckles and a steely-eyed contempt for authority, our hero reveals a conspiracy that kicks up straight to the top. There were deals. Some blackmailing. A probe or two. But in the end, what’s most important is that everything he thought he knew was wrong. Because the scientists (Noooo!!) got to him with one of those electrode caps and rewrote his memory. Everything – the job, the daughter, the free parking – is a lie. The dramatic ploy works on us because memory seems inviolable, or at least, we desperately hope that it is. We allow that our memories may fade and fail a bit, but otherwise, we go on the sanity-preserving assumption that there is one reason why we remember a particular thing: because we were there, and it actually happened. Now, a new set of experiments, led by MIT neuroscientists Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu in Susumu Tonegawa’s lab, shows that this needn’t be the case. Using a stunning set of molecular neuroscience techniques (no electrode caps involved), these scientists have captured specific memories in mice, altered them, and shown that the mice behave in accord with these new, false, implanted memories. The era of memory engineering is upon us, and naturally, there are big implications for basic science and, perhaps someday, human health and society. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18432 - Posted: 07.31.2013

By Scicurious I’ve got a terrible sweet tooth. And I am kind of proud of it, in a way. Yeah, I CAN eat that whole chocolate cake. I’d even LIKE it. Honeycomb dipped in chocolate? YES PLEASE. There are very few sweet things that I’d refuse. But should I really be ok with my sweet tooth? Could my sweet tooth correlate with something more sinister…a preference for alcohol? I can blame my sweet tooth on my parents, probably. Studies have shown that variability in preference for sweet things (though, to a greater or lesser extent, we all like sweet things), has a genetic basis. But the sweet tooth doesn’t go alone. In animals (mice especially), a preference for sugar in their water correlates with preference for alcohol as well. When you breed mice to make sure they drink alcohol (this is done to study alcoholism, for example), they also tend to really prefer sweet things, above and beyond mice that aren’t so into martinis. There is a correlation in humans, too. Humans who are more into sweet things are slightly more likely to abuse alcohol. But what is the basis? The authors of this study wanted to look at the reward related systems of humans, and see how sweet taste might compare to alcohol drinking. They took 16 people, put them in an fMRI scanner, and then carefully sprayed their tongues with sugar water. fMRI looks at the blood oxygen levels in various areas of the brain. Higher blood oxygen levels are thought to correlate with increased “activity” of the brain (the idea being that more neurons in use means the area needs more oxygen). An example of this would be that your visual cortex will show increased blood oxygen levels when you are looking at something. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 18431 - Posted: 07.30.2013

Erika Check Hayden The hair of three Incan mummies bears evidence that one of them used large amounts of coca and alcohol in the year before she died, which may have been fed to her as part of a ritual that led to her death. The children, who were found in 1999 near the summit of the Llullaillaco volcano in Argentina, probably died about 500 years ago in a sacrificial ritual known as capacocha. In the study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, researchers led by archaeologist Timothy Taylor of the University of Bradford, UK, used mass spectrometry to analyse variations in levels of chemical residues in the children’s hair in the months before their deaths. The researchers looked for by-products of the metabolization of coca and alcohol — both important in Andean culture and ritual — and found that all three children ingested both substances in the year before they died. But the eldest — a 13-year-old girl known as the Maiden — took much more of both substances than the younger children. The pattern of consumption suggests that a series of rituals preparing her for her fate began about a year before she was left to die on top of the 6,739-metre-high Llullaillaco. The levels of metabolites in her hair, for instance, increased about a year before her death and then shot up to very high levels about a month and a half before she died — her hair recorded the highest level of coca ever found in Andean archaeological remains, says John Verano, a biological anthropologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18430 - Posted: 07.30.2013

By CARL ZIMMER The golden lion tamarin, a one-pound primate that lives in Brazil, is a stunningly monogamous creature. A male will typically pair with a female and they will stay close for the rest of their lives, mating only with each other and then working together to care for their young. To biologists, this deeply monogamous way of life — found in 9 percent of mammal species — is puzzling. A seemingly better evolutionary strategy for male mammals would be to spend their time looking for other females with which to mate. “Monogamy is a problem,” said Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in a telephone news conference on Monday. “Why should the male keep to one female?” The evolution of monogamy has inspired many different ideas. “These hypotheses have been suggested for the past 40 years, and there’s been no resolution of the debate,” said Kit Opie of the University College London in an interview. On Monday, Dr. Opie and Dr. Lukas each published a large-scale study of monogamy that they hoped would resolve the debate. But they ended up coming to opposing conclusions, which means the debate over monogamy continues. Dr. Lukas, co-author of a paper in the journal Science with Tim Clutton-Brock of Cambridge, looked at 2,545 species of mammals, tracing their mating evolution from their common ancestor some 170 million years ago. The scientists found that mammals shifted from solitary living to monogamy 61 times over their evolution. They then searched for any factors that these mammals had in common. They concluded that monogamy evolves when females become hostile with one another and live in ranges that do not overlap. When females live this way, they set up so much distance between one another that a single male cannot prevent other males from mating with them. Staying close to one female became a better strategy. Once males began doing so, they sometimes evolved to provide care to their offspring as well. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 18429 - Posted: 07.30.2013

By David Brown, Charles Sabine, who spent more than two decades as a television reporter for NBC covering wars, revolutions and natural disasters, is familiar with something he calls “real fear.” He’s seen it in the eyes of people about to die or be killed. It chilled his blood when a Bosnian guerrilla held a gun to his chest as he stood near a bullet-pocked execution wall. He felt it when he walked point for his camera crew in Baghdad during Iraq’s sectarian war. But nothing terrified him like the news he got eight years ago after taking the gene test for Huntington’s disease, whose slow downward course toward death makes it one of mankind’s most dread afflictions. “I learned that the disease that took my father and is inflicting on my brother the same terrible decline in his prime will take me, too,” said Sabine, 53, an Englishman who worked for NBC for 26 years. And yet Sabine has turned that knowledge to a purpose that can only be called thrilling. He’s on a mission to make Huntington’s the model for a Hopeless Disease About Which There’s Hope. He wants to put it at the forefront of the “patient-centered care” movement, the effort to always ask patients what they consider success or hope to get out of treatment. He wants to make sure there are Huntington’s patients ready for clinical trials that are just around the corner. He wants to get everybody to think a little more sophisticatedly about genetic testing. Closer to home, he’s turning the knowledge of his biological fate into a tool to help him savor every day, be a good father and husband, make amends, not deceive. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Huntingtons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18428 - Posted: 07.30.2013

By JAMES GORMAN Should some of the most social, intelligent and charismatic animals on the planet be kept in captivity by human beings? That is a question asked more frequently than ever by both scientists and animal welfare advocates, sometimes about close human cousins like chimpanzees and other great apes, but also about another animal that is remarkable for its intelligence and complex social organization — the killer whale, or orca. Killer whales, found in all the world’s oceans, were once as despised as wolves. But in the last half century these elegant black-and-white predators — a threat to seals and other prey as they cruise the oceans, but often friendly to humans in the wild — have joined the pantheon of adored wildlife, along with the familiar polar bears, elephants and lions. With life spans that approach those of humans, orcas have strong family bonds, elaborate vocal communication and cooperative hunting strategies. And their beauty and power, combined with a willingness to work with humans, have made them legendary performers at marine parks since they were first captured and exhibited in the 1960s. They are no longer taken from the wild as young to be raised and trained, but are bred in captivity in the United States for public display at marine parks. Some scientists and activists have argued for years against keeping them in artificial enclosures and training them for exhibition. They argue for more natural settings, like enclosed sea pens, as well as an end to captive breeding and to the orcas’ use in what opponents call entertainment and marine parks call education. Now the issue has been raised with new intensity in the documentary film “Blackfish” and the book “Death at SeaWorld,” by David Kirby, just released in paperback. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Intelligence
Link ID: 18427 - Posted: 07.30.2013

By Glen Tellis, Rickson C. Mesquita, and Arjun G. Yodh Terrence Murgallis, a 20 year-old undergraduate student in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at Misericordia University has stuttered all his life and approached us recently about conducting brain research on stuttering. His timing was perfect because our research group, in collaboration with a team led by Dr. Arjun Yodh in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, had recently deployed two novel optical methods to compare blood flow and hemoglobin concentration differences in the brains of those who stutter with those who are fluent. These noninvasive methods employ diffusing near-infrared light and have been dubbed near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) for concentration dynamics, and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) for flow dynamics. The near-infrared light readily penetrates through intact skull to probe cortical regions of the brain. The low power light has no known side-effects and has been successfully utilized for a variety of clinical studies in infants, children, and adults. DCS measures fluctuations of scattered light due to moving targets in the tissue (mostly red blood cells). The technique measures relative changes in cerebral blood flow. NIRS uses the relative transmission of different colors of light to detect hemoglobin concentration changes in the interrogated tissues. Though there are numerous diagnostic tools available to study brain activity, including positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG), these methods are often invasive and/or expensive to administer. In the particular case of electroencephalography (EEG), its low spatial resolution is a significant limitation for investigations of verbal fluency. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 18426 - Posted: 07.30.2013