By RONI CARYN RABIN Marie Theriault started having trouble with her hands more than three years ago. She was the director of a day care center, but suddenly she couldn’t change diapers or tie shoelaces. She started dropping things. “People would say to me, ‘Look, you dropped your folder,’ ” Mrs. Theriault, 59, said. “I wasn’t aware I had dropped it.” Though she did not have any problems with memory, Mrs. Theriault eventually found out that she has a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnosis enabled her family to plan ahead: Her husband took early retirement and found a clinical trial for her to enroll in, and the two went on a safari that had been a dream for years. “We’re front-loading a bit, enjoying life as much as we can, now that the disease is manageable,” said Paul Theriault, 57. “It can get pretty ugly.” For the Theriaults, getting an accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease brought a measure of relief, even though the future might be grim. Indeed, there is a growing interest in the early detection of dementia, not only in patients like Mrs. Theriault but also in people with normal age-related memory changes or even no symptoms at all. The idea is that treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias have been largely ineffective because the conditions aren’t caught early enough. Now researchers are starting clinical trials that focus on people in the “pre-symptomatic phase” of Alzheimer’s disease. Medicare is paying for wellness visits that include cognitive assessments and screening. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18425 - Posted: 07.30.2013

By Daniel Engber Brain-bashing, once an idle pastime of the science commentariat, went mainstream in June. At the beginning of the month, Slate contributor Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld published Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, a well-informed attack on the extravagances of “neurocentrist” thought. We’re living in dangerous era, they warn in the book’s introduction. “Naïve media, slick neuroentrepreneurs, and even an occasional overzealous neuroscientist exaggerate the capacity of scans to reveal the contents of our minds, exalt brain physiology as inherently the most valuable level of explanation for understanding behavior, and rush to apply underdeveloped, if dazzling, science for commercial and forensic use.” In the United Kingdom, the neuro-gadfly Raymond Tallis—whose own attack on popular brain science, Aping Mankind, came out in 2011—added to the early-summer beat-down, complaining in the Observer that “studies that locate irreducibly social phenomena … in the function or dysfunction of bits of our brains are conceptually misconceived.” By mid-June, these sharp rebukes made their way into the mind of David Brooks, a long-time dabbler in neural data who proposed not long ago that “brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.” Brooks read Brainwashed and became a convert to its cause: “From personal experience, I can tell you that you get captivated by [neuroscience] and sometimes go off to extremes,” he wrote in a recent column with the headline “Beyond the Brain.” Then he gave the following advice: “The next time somebody tells you what a brain scan says, be a little skeptical. The brain is not the mind.” © 2013 The Slate Group, LLC

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18424 - Posted: 07.30.2013

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. A journey into the human brain starts with the usual travel decisions: will you opt for a no-frills sightseeing jaunt, a five-star luxury cruise, or trek a little off the beaten track, skipping the usual tourist attractions? Now that science’s newfound land is suddenly navigable, hordes of eager guides are offering up books that range from the basic to the lavishly appointed to the minutely subspecialized. But those who prefer wandering off trail may opt for two new ones, neither by a neuroscientist. When the philosopher Patricia S. Churchland explains that her book represents “the story of getting accustomed to my brain,” she is speaking as both a brain-owning human being and a career humanist. An emerita professor at the University of California, San Diego, she has spent a career probing the physical brain for the self and its moral center. And unlike many humanists who hate the science for the irritating violence it does to centuries of painstaking intellectual labor, she is entranced by the power of the data, and her delight is utterly contagious. She loses little time in dispatching the archaic notion of the soul, and suggests that near-death visions of heaven simply represent “neural funny business” in a malfunctioning brain. Can humans still live a moral and spiritual life even without the ideas of soul and heaven? You bet they can. “We may still say that the sun is setting even when we know full well that earth is turning,” Professor Churchland points out, and she is off and running. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Consciousness
Link ID: 18423 - Posted: 07.30.2013

By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills. What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects. That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood. Even those who later ascend economically may show persistent effects of early-life hardship. Scientists find them more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age. Even those who become rich are more likely to be ill if they suffered hardship early on. The British epidemiologist Michael Marmot calls the phenomenon “status syndrome.” He’s studied British civil servants who work in a rigid hierarchy for decades, and found that accounting for the usual suspects — smoking, diet and access to health care — won’t completely abolish the effect. There’s a direct relationship among health, well-being and one’s place in the greater scheme. “The higher you are in the social hierarchy,” he says, “the better your health.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18422 - Posted: 07.29.2013

Adam Withnall Drinking several cups of coffee a day could halve the risk of suicide in men and women, scientists from Harvard suggest In a study published by the Word Journal of Biological Pyschiatry, researchers analysed the caffeine consumption of more than 200,000 people spanning a period of nearly 20 years. They found that, for both men and women, those who took in 400mg of the stimulant a day – the equivalent of two to three cups of coffee – were statistically 50 per cent less likely to commit suicide. And while the research surveyed people on all sorts of caffeine sources, from tea to chocolate, they found that between 71 and 80 per cent of intake was from coffee. Lead researcher Michel Lucas, from the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said: “Unlike previous investigations, we were able to assess association of consumption of caffeinated and non-caffeinated beverages, and we identify caffeine as the most likely candidate of any putative protective effect of coffee.” The scientists said the statistics could possibly be explained by the fact that caffeine boosts production of serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline, effectively acting as a mild antidepressant. Coffee has in the past been shown to reduce the risk of depression in women, and it also stimulates the central nervous system. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18421 - Posted: 07.29.2013

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Researchers believe they are closer to developing a blood test that could diagnose Alzheimer's. There is no definitive test for the brain-wasting disease. Doctors rely on cognition tests and brain scans. A technique published in the journal Genome Biology showed differences in the tiny fragments of genetic material floating in the blood could be used to identify patients. The test was accurate 93% of the time in trials on 202 people. One of the main goals of Alzheimer's research is to find ways of detecting the disease earlier. It starts years before symptoms appear and it is thought that future treatments will need to be given before large parts of the brain are destroyed. This will require new ways of testing for the condition. The team at the Saarland University, in Germany, analysed 140 microRNAs (fragments of genetic code) in patients with Alzheimer's disease and in healthy people. They found 12 microRNAs in the blood which were present in markedly different levels in people with Alzheimer's. These became the basis of their test. Early trials showed it was successful and was "able to distinguish with high diagnostic accuracies between Alzheimer's disease patients and healthy" people. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18420 - Posted: 07.29.2013

If you look directly at the "spinning" ball in this illusion by Arthur Shapiro, it appears to fall straight down. But if you look to one side, the ball appears to curve to one side. The ball appears to swerve because our peripheral vision system cannot process all of its features independently. Instead, our brains combine the downward motion of the ball and its leftward spin to create the impression of a curve. Line-of-sight (or foveal) vision, on the other hand, can extract all the information from the ball's movement, which is why the curve disappears when you view the ball dead-on.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 18419 - Posted: 07.29.2013

John Hawks Humans are known for sporting big brains. On average, the size of primates' brains is nearly double what is expected for mammals of the same body size. Across nearly seven million years, the human brain has tripled in size, with most of this growth occurring in the past two million years. Determining brain changes over time is tricky. We have no ancient brains to weigh on a scale. We can, however, measure the inside of ancient skulls, and a few rare fossils have preserved natural casts of the interior of skulls. Both approaches to looking at early skulls give us evidence about the volumes of ancient brains and some details about the relative sizes of major cerebral areas. For the first two thirds of our history, the size of our ancestors' brains was within the range of those of other apes living today. The species of the famous Lucy fossil, Australopithecus afarensis, had skulls with internal volumes of between 400 and 550 milliliters, whereas chimpanzee skulls hold around 400 ml and gorillas between 500 and 700 ml. During this time, Australopithecine brains started to show subtle changes in structure and shape as compared with apes. For instance, the neocortex had begun to expand, reorganizing its functions away from visual processing toward other regions of the brain. The final third of our evolution saw nearly all the action in brain size. Homo habilis, the first of our genus Homo who appeared 1.9 million years ago, saw a modest hop in brain size, including an expansion of a language-connected part of the frontal lobe called Broca's area. The first fossil skulls of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, had brains averaging a bit larger than 600 ml. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 18418 - Posted: 07.29.2013

By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer NEW YORK (AP) — There's extensive evidence that pigs are as smart and sociable as dogs. Yet one species is afforded affection and respect; the other faces mass slaughter en route to becoming bacon, ham and pork chops. Seeking to capitalize on that discrepancy, animal-welfare advocates are launching a campaign called The Someone Project that aims to highlight research depicting pigs, chickens, cows and other farm animals as more intelligent and emotionally complex than commonly believed. The hope is that more people might view these animals with the same empathy that they view dogs, cats, elephants, great apes and dolphins. "When you ask people why they eat chickens but not cats, the only thing they can come up with is that they sense cats and dogs are more cognitively sophisticated that then species we eat — and we know this isn't true," said Bruce Friedrich of Farm Sanctuary, the animal-protection and vegan-advocacy organization that is coordinating the new project. "What it boils down to is people don't know farm animals the way they know dogs or cats," Friedrich said. "We're a nation of animal lovers, and yet the animals we encounter most frequently are the animals we pay people to kill so we can eat them." The lead scientist for the project is Lori Marino, a lecturer in psychology at Emory University who has conducted extensive research on the intelligence of whales, dolphins and primates. She plans to review existing scientific literature on farm animals' intelligence, identify areas warranting new research, and prepare reports on her findings that would be circulated worldwide via social media, videos and her personal attendance at scientific conferences. © 2013 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 18417 - Posted: 07.29.2013

Kelly Servick Our imperfect memory is inconvenient at the grocery store and downright dangerous on the witness stand. In extreme cases, we may be confident that we remember something that never happened at all. Now, a group of neuroscientists say that they’ve identified a potential mechanism of false memory creation and have planted such a memory in the brain of a mouse. Neuroscientists are only beginning to tackle the phenomenon of false memory, says Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, whose team conducted the new research. “It’s there, and it’s well established,” he says, “but the brain mechanisms underlying this false memory are poorly known.” With optogenetics—the precise stimulation of neurons with light—scientists can seek out the physical basis of recall and even tweak it a bit, using mouse models. Like us, mice develop memories based on context. When a mouse returns to an environment where it felt pain in the past, it recalls that experience and freezes with fear. Tonegawa’s team knew that the hippocampus, a part of the brain responsible for establishing memory, plays a role in encoding context-based experiences, and that stimulating cells in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus can make a mouse recall and react to a mild electric shock that it received in the past. The new goal was to connect that same painful shock memory to a context where the mouse had not actually received a shock. © 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18416 - Posted: 07.27.2013

Sleepless night, the moon is bright. People sleep less soundly when there's a full moon, researchers discovered when they analyzed data from a past sleep study. If you were tossing and turning and howling at your pillow this week, you’re not necessarily a lunatic, at least in the strictest sense of the word. The recent full moon might be to blame for your poor sleep. In the days close to a full moon, people take longer to doze off, sleep less deeply, and sleep for a shorter time, even if the moon isn’t shining in their window, a new study has found. “A lot of people are going to say, ‘Yeah, I knew this already. I never sleep well during a full moon.’ But this is the first data that really confirms it,” says biologist Christian Cajochen of the University of Basel in Switzerland, lead author of the new work. “There had been numerous studies before, but many were very inconclusive.” Anecdotal evidence has long suggested that people’s sleep patterns, moods, and even aggression is linked to moon cycles. But past studies of potential lunar effects have been tainted by statistical weaknesses, biases, or inconsistent methods, Cajochen says. Between 2000 and 2003, he and his colleagues had collected detailed data on the sleep patterns of 33 healthy volunteers for an unrelated study on the effects of aging on sleep. Using electroencephalograms (EEG) that measure brain activity, they recorded how deep and how long each participant’s nightly sleep was in a controlled, laboratory setting. Years after the initial experiment, the scientists were drinking in a pub—during a full moon—and came up with the idea of going back to the data to test for correlations with moon cycles. © 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 18415 - Posted: 07.27.2013

Brain cells talk to each other in a variety of tones. Sometimes they speak loudly but other times struggle to be heard. For many years scientists have asked why and how brain cells change tones so frequently. Today National Institutes of Health researchers showed that brief bursts of chemical energy coming from rapidly moving power plants, called mitochondria, may tune brain cell communication. “We are very excited about the findings,” said Zu-Hang Sheng, Ph.D., a senior principal investigator and the chief of the Synaptic Functions Section at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). “We may have answered a long-standing, fundamental question about how brain cells communicate with each other in a variety of voice tones.” The network of nerve cells throughout the body typically controls thoughts, movements and senses by sending thousands of neurotransmitters, or brain chemicals, at communication points made between the cells called synapses. Neurotransmitters are sent from tiny protrusions found on nerve cells, called presynaptic boutons. Boutons are aligned, like beads on a string, on long, thin structures called axons. They help control the strength of the signals sent by regulating the amount and manner that nerve cells release transmitters. Mitochondria are known as the cell’s power plant because they use oxygen to convert many of the chemicals cells use as food into adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the main energy that powers cells. This energy is essential for nerve cell survival and communication. Previous studies showed that mitochondria can rapidly move along axons, dancing from one bouton to another.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18414 - Posted: 07.27.2013

By Meghan Rosen In a spacious hotel room not far from the beach in La Jolla, Calif., Kelsey Heenan gripped her fiancé’s hand. Heenan, a 20-year-old anorexic woman, couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Walter Kaye, director of the eating disorders program at the University of California, San Diego, was telling a handful of rapt patients and their family members what the latest brain imaging research suggested about their disorder. It’s not your fault, he told them. Heenan had always assumed that she was to blame for her illness. Kaye’s data told a different story. He handed out a pile of black-and-white brain scans — some showed the brains of healthy people, others were from people with anorexia nervosa. The scans didn’t look the same. “People were shocked,” Heenan says. But above all, she remembers, the group seemed to sigh in relief, breathing out years of buried guilt about the disorder. “It’s something in the way I was wired — it’s something I didn’t choose to do,” Heenan says. “It was pretty freeing to know that there could be something else going on.” Years of psychological and behavioral research have helped scientists better understand some signs and triggers of anorexia. But that knowledge hasn’t straightened out the disorder’s tangled roots, or pointed scientists to a therapy that works for everyone. “Anorexia has a high death rate, it’s expensive to treat and people are chronically ill,” says Kaye. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 18413 - Posted: 07.27.2013

Heidi Ledford A procedure increasingly used to treat obesity by reducing the size of the stomach also reprogrammes the intestines, making them burn sugar faster, a study in diabetic and obese rats has shown. If the results, published today in Science1, hold true in humans, they could explain how gastric bypass surgery improves sugar control in people with diabetes. They could also lead to less invasive ways to produce the same effects. “This opens up the idea that we could take the most effective therapy we have for obesity and diabetes and come up with ways to do it without a scalpel,” says Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, who was not involved in the work. As rates of obesity and diabetes skyrocket in many countries, physicians and patients are turning to operations that reconfigure the digestive tract so that only a small part of the stomach is used. Such procedures are intended to allow people to feel full after smaller meals, reducing the drive to consume extra calories. But clinical trials in recent years have shown that they can also reduce blood sugar levels in diabetics, even before weight is lost2, 3. “We have to think about this surgery differently,” says Seeley. “It’s not just changing the plumbing, it’s altering how the gut handles glucose.” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 18412 - Posted: 07.27.2013

Researchers have found in mice that supporting cells in the inner ear, once thought to serve only a structural role, can actively help repair damaged sensory hair cells, the functional cells that turn vibrations into the electrical signals that the brain recognizes as sound. The study in the July 25, 2013 online edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation reveals the rescuing act that supporting cells and a chemical they produce called heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) appear to play in protecting damaged hair cells from death. Finding a way to jumpstart this process in supporting cells offers a potential pathway to prevent hearing loss caused by certain drugs, and possibly by exposure to excess noise. The study was led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health. Over half a million Americans experience hearing loss every year from ototoxic drugs — drugs that can damage hair cells in the inner ear. These include some antibiotics and the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. In addition, about 15 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 69 have noise-induced hearing loss, which also results from damage to the sensory hair cells. Once destroyed or damaged by noise or drugs, sensory hair cells in the inner ears of humans don’t grow back or self-repair, unlike the sensory hair cells of other animals such as birds and amphibians. This has made exploring potential pathways to protect or regrow hair cells in humans a major focus of hearing research.

Keyword: Hearing; Glia
Link ID: 18411 - Posted: 07.27.2013

By Dina Fine Maron All eyes were on Perry Cohen when he froze at the microphone. His voice failed him. He couldn’t read his notes. Eventually, the once-powerful Parkinson’s disease speaker had to be helped off the stage halfway through his speech. That was in February 2012, but the memory of that day is emblazoned in his mind. “It was the adrenaline and the pressure of speaking — it drained all the dopamine out,” Cohen says, referring to the brain chemical that is found lacking in the neurodegenerative disorder. “That’s why my symptoms got worse.” When Cohen learned he had Parkinson’s disease 17 years ago his symptoms were subtle. In the past couple years, however, the deterioration of his nervous system has become increasingly obvious, ultimately threatening to silence one of the most prominent voices in the Parkinson’s patient community. Cohen is now first in line to try a novel treatment he hopes will halt or even reverse the symptoms of his Parkinson’s disease. Two months ago he became the inaugural patient to undergo a gene therapy treatment led by the National Institutes of Health. The trial attempts to devise an intervention for Parkinson’s disease at the root of the problem: protecting dopamine in the brain. Researchers in this trial are attempting to surgically deliver a gene into the body that will make a natural protein to protect dopaminergic neurons, the brain cells attacked by the disease. To date no Parkinson’s treatment is geared toward reversing the progression of Parkinson’s disease. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18410 - Posted: 07.27.2013

Silk has walked straight off the runway and into the lab. According to a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, silk implants placed in the brain of laboratory animals and designed to release a specific chemical, adenosine, may help stop the progression of epilepsy. The research was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), which are part of the National Institutes of Health. The epilepsies are a group of neurological disorders associated with recurring seizures that tend to become more frequent and severe over time. Adenosine decreases neuronal excitability and helps stop seizures. Earlier studies have suggested abnormally low levels of adenosine may be linked to epilepsy. Rebecca L. Williams-Karnesky, Ph.D. and her colleagues from Legacy Research Institute, Portland, Ore., Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU), Portland, and Tufts University, Boston, looked at long-term effects of an adenosine-releasing silk-implant therapy in rats and examined the role of adenosine in causing epigenetic changes that may be associated with the development of epilepsy. The investigators argue that adenosine’s beneficial effects are due to epigenetic modifications (chemical reactions that change the way genes are turned on or off without altering the DNA code, the letters that make up our genetic background). Specifically, these changes happen when a molecule known as a methyl group blocks a portion of DNA, affecting which genes are accessible and can be turned on. If methyl groups have been taken away (demethylated), genes are more likely to turn on.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 18409 - Posted: 07.27.2013

Researchers in Canada and Ireland have discovered that blood pressure drugs, known as ACE inhibitors, can improve brain function while slowing down the onset of dementia. ACE inhibitors, known by names such as ramipril and perindopril, have been already been shown in previous studies to delay the onset of dementia. What the medical community didn’t know was that these drugs may also enhance cognitive function. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, concludes that the use of ACE inhibitors could become useful in the management of dementia. The study examined 361 patients, all of whom had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia (triggered by lack of blood supply to the brain) or a mix of the two. Many Alzheimer's patients suffer dementia, which can affect memory, thinking, reasoning, planning and the ability to speak. Eighty-five of the patients were already taking the ACE inhibitors while the rest were not. Researchers also separately tested 30 patients, put on the drugs for the first time, for changes in their brain function. The average age was 77 and participants were followed for one year. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18408 - Posted: 07.27.2013

by Carl Zimmer Inside each of us is a miniature version of ourselves. The Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield discovered this little person in the 1930s, when he opened up the skulls of his patients to perform brain surgery. He would sometimes apply a little electric jolt to different spots on the surface of the brain and ask his patients–still conscious–to tell him if they felt anything. Sometimes their tongues tingled. Other times their hand twitched. Penfield drew a map of these responses. He ended up with a surreal portrait of the human body stretched out across the surface of the brain. In a 1950 book, he offered a map of this so-called homunculus. For brain surgeons, Penfield’s map was a practical boon, helping them plan out their surgeries. But for scientists interested in more basic questions about the brain, it was downright fascinating. It revealed that the brain organized the sensory information coming from the skin into a body-like form. There were differences between the homunculus and the human body, of course. It was as if the face had been removed from the head and moved just out of reach. The area that each body part took up in the brain wasn’t proportional to its actual size. The lips and index finger were gigantic, for instance, while the forearm barely took up less space than the tongue. That difference in our brains is reflected in our nerve endings. Our fingertips are far more sensitive than our backs. We simply don’t need to make fine discriminations with our backs. But we use our hands for all sorts of things–like picking up objects or using tools–that demand that sort of sensory power.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18407 - Posted: 07.25.2013

By Susan Milius When a peacock fans out the iridescent splendor of his train, more than half the time the peahen he’s displaying for isn’t even looking at him. That’s the finding of the first eye-tracking study of birds. In more than 200 short clips recorded by eye-tracking cameras, four peahens spent less than one-third of the time actually looking directly at a displaying peacock, says evolutionary biologist Jessica Yorzinski of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. When peahens did bother to watch the shimmering male, they mostly looked at the lower zone of his train feathers. The feathers’ upper zone of ornaments may intrigue human observers, but big eyespots there garnered less than 5 percent of the female’s time, Yorzinski and her colleagues report July 24 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. These data come from a system that coauthor Jason Babcock of Positive Science, an eye-tracking company in New York City, engineered to fit peahens. Small plastic helmets hold two cameras that send information to a backpack of equipment, which wirelessly transmits information to a computer. One infrared head camera focuses on an eye, tracking pupil movements. A second camera points ahead, giving the broad bird’s-eye view. The rig weighs about 25 grams and takes some getting used to. If a peahen with no experience of helmets gets the full rig, Yorzinski says, “she just droops her head to the ground.” Adding bits of technology gradually, however, let Yorzinski accustom peahens to walking around, and even mating, while cameraed up. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Vision
Link ID: 18406 - Posted: 07.25.2013