By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS For most people, exercise elevates mood. Repeated studies with humans and animals have shown that regular workouts can increase stress resistance, decrease anxiety, lessen symptoms of depression and generally leave people cheerful. But what if someone sincerely dislikes exercise and works out only under a kind of emotional duress, deeming that he or she must do so, perhaps because a doctor or worried spouse has ordered it? In that case, which is hardly uncommon, does the stress of being, in effect, forced to exercise reduce or cancel out the otherwise sturdy emotional benefits of physical activity? That issue has been of considerable interest to exercise scientists for some time, particularly those who work with animals, since in some experiments, animals are required to exercise at intensities or for durations that they don’t control. Such intense exercise greatly increases their stress, as measured by certain behaviors and by physiological markers like increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol. But no study had directly compared the emotional effects of forced and voluntary exercise on anxiety and emotional resilience. So scientists at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder recently decided to conduct one. They began by gathering a group of healthy adult male rats of a type that generally enjoys running. Then they gave some of the animals access to unlocked running wheels and let them exercise whenever and for as long as they liked. The exercise was fully under the animals’ control. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17899 - Posted: 03.13.2013

By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham Dwayne Godwin is a neuroscientist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Jorge Cham draws the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper at www.phdcomics.com. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Laterality; Language
Link ID: 17898 - Posted: 03.13.2013

by Jennifer Viegas Polly may want a cracker, but when a parrot wants a better deal, it will trade a so-so nut for an even better snack, a new study has found. The discovery, published in the journal Biology Letters, demonstrates that birds can do business in their own way, wheeling and dealing with nuts. It also shows that they can exhibit remarkable self restraint, even performing better than some children. In studies from the 1970s, kids were presented with a marshmallow and were told that they could either eat it now, or wait and receive a second one if they could hold out for a time delay of some minutes. Kids that were able to wait have been more successful now as adults than the other kids (who gulped down the first marshmallow). The ability to strategically wait therefore is very important in the course of human development. Now we can say that it’s important to bird development too. For the new study, Alice Auersperg of the University of Vienna’s Department of Cognitive Biology and colleagues presented an Indonesian cockatoo species, the Goffin’s cockatoo, with food snack options. The best of that bunch, from the bird’s perspective, were pecan nuts. Mirroring the kid-marshmallow experiment, the researchers next offered the birds an even better deal. If the birds did not eat the pecan, they could trade it for a cashew. (Who knew that cockatoos loved cashews so much? Apparently they are the yummiest nut of all, for at least this particular avian species.) © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 17897 - Posted: 03.13.2013

by Michael Marshall Neanderthals may have had bigger eyes than modern humans, but while this helped them see better, it may have meant that they did not have brainpower to spare for complex social lives. If true, this may have been a disadvantage when the ice age reduced access to food, as they would not have had the skills to procure help from beyond their normal social group, speculates Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford. Neanderthals' brains were roughly the same size as modern humans, but may have been organised differently. To find out, a team led by Dunbar studied the skulls of 13 Neanderthals and 32 anatomically modern humans. The Neanderthals had larger eye sockets. There are no Neanderthal brains to examine, but primates with larger eyes tend to have larger visual systems in their brains, suggesting Neanderthals did too. Their large bodies would also have required extra brain power to manage. Together, their larger eyes and bodies would have left them with less grey matter to dedicate to other tasks. Neanderthals may have evolved enhanced visual systems to help them see in the gloom of the northern hemisphere, Dunbar says. "It makes them better at detecting things in grim, grey conditions." As a by-product of larger eyes, they may not have been able to expand their frontal lobes – a brain area vital for social interaction – as much as modern humans. As a result, Dunbar estimates they could only maintain a social group size of around 115 individuals, rather than the 150 that we manage. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution; Vision
Link ID: 17896 - Posted: 03.13.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Insomnia may be linked to an increased risk of heart failure, according to a large new study, and the more insomnia symptoms, the greater the risk. The study, published last week in The European Heart Journal, used questionnaires to gather data on difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, and waking unrefreshed among more than 54,000 Norwegian adults in a population-wide health survey. All were free of heart disease at the start of the study; there were 1,412 cases of heart failure over an average of 11 years of follow-up. After controlling for numerous health, behavioral and demographic factors, the researchers found that having one symptom of insomnia was associated with a 17 percent increase in the risk of developing heart failure. Having two symptoms increased the chances by 92 percent, and having all three nearly tripled the risk. Insomnia was a risk independent of other cardiovascular risks, and the authors suggest that chronic insomnia leads to higher blood pressure and higher heart rate, known risk factors for heart failure. “We cannot claim that insomnia is causing heart failure,” said the lead author, Lars E. Laugsand, a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “But observational studies are all going more or less in the same direction — showing that insomnia may play a role in heart problems.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17895 - Posted: 03.12.2013

By David Robson, The dreams of Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein,” involved a pale student kneeling beside a corpse that was jerking back to life. Paul McCartney’s contained the melody of “Yesterday,” while director James Cameron’s inspired the “Terminator” films. With their eerie mixture of the familiar and the bizarre, it is easy to look for meaning in these nightly wanderings. But why do our brains take these journeys, and why do they contain such outlandish twists and turns? Unfortunately for armchair psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud’s attempts to interpret dreams remain hotly disputed. Nevertheless, neuroscientists and psychologists have recently made big strides in understanding the way the brain builds our dreams and the factors that shape those curious stories. Along the way, they have found startling hints that our use of technology may be permanently changing the nature of this fundamental human experience. Anyone who has ever awakened feeling amazed by a dream, only to forget its contents before reaching the shower will understand the difficulties of studying such an ephemeral state of mind. Some of the best attempts to catalogue dream features either asked participants to jot them down as soon as they woke up or had volunteers sleep in a lab where they were awakened and immediately questioned at intervals in the night. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17894 - Posted: 03.12.2013

By Jan Brogan Paula Driscoll had a hard time sitting still as a kid, doodled a lot, and often wrestled with the feeling that she should be accomplishing more. But she made it through high school and college and became an elementary school teacher. With three small children at home, she did not feel she had trouble managing her life. But when her youngest child went to school, she found herself with what felt like too much time on her hands. “I couldn’t get anything done,” she said. “I had one room I started to paint, another I was going to reorganize, and I could never complete a task. I couldn’t stay in the house. I went out on one errand after the next.” Driscoll was 45 when she was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. ADHD, a neurobiological disorder that makes it difficult to focus and can also include hyperactivity and impulsivity, has historically been viewed as a childhood disease. Over the last couple decades, research has shown that many of those afflicted carry symptoms into adulthood. The latest study, led by a Boston Children’s Hospital researcher and published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, suggests that nearly 30 percent of those with childhood ADHD still have the condition as adults ­— often after discontinuing treatment. The researchers followed hundreds of children with ADHD into adulthood and reported that the majority had mental health problems such as alcohol or drug dependence, anxiety, depression, or a personality disorder. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 17893 - Posted: 03.12.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Some studies have suggested that the risk factors for violence by people with mental illness are the same as those in the general population. But a new study finds that anger, coupled with psychotic delusions, may be the most significant factor in violence committed by people with mental illness. British researchers, writing online last week in JAMA Psychiatry, studied 458 patients ages 18 to 64 who had had a first episode of psychosis. Most patients were nonviolent, 26.4 percent were involved in minor violence, and 11.8 percent in violent acts using weapons or resulting in injury. Those who were violent were more likely to be younger men and to use illicit drugs, but they did not differ from the nonviolent in social class, unemployment or alcohol use. The researchers found no difference between violent and nonviolent patients with regard to feelings of elation, fear or anxiety. People with depression were less violent. But after adjusting for other health and socioeconomic variables, the researchers found that delusions accompanied by anger were present far more often among the violent patients. “If patients are not angry, the delusions themselves don’t cause a problem,” said the lead author, Dr. Jeremy W. Coid, a professor of psychiatry at Queen Mary University of London. “An area for future research is, ‘What do you need to do to make your patient safe again? Do you treat the delusions, the anger or both?’ ” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17892 - Posted: 03.12.2013

By Rachel Ehrenberg Surgeons have replaced 75 percent of a man’s skull with a custom-designed polymer cranium constructed with a 3-D printer. The surgery took place on March 4 and is the first U.S. case following the FDA’s approval of the implants last month. The patient’s reason for needing such extensive replacement surgery has not been revealed. Similar surgeries may follow in other cases where sections of the skull are removed because the brain has swollen during a surgery or after an accident, says Scott DeFelice, president of Connecticut-based Oxford Performance Materials, the company that created the prosthetic. Technicians used CT scans to get images of the part of the skull that needed replacing. Then, with computer software and input from surgeons, engineers designed the replacement part. A machine that uses lasers to fuse granules of material built the prosthetic layer by layer out of a special plastic called PEKK. While inert like titanium, PEKK is riddled on its surface with pocks and ridges that promote bone cell growth, DeFelice says. Such implants have value as a brain-protecting material, says Jeremy Mao, a biomedical engineer and codirector of Columbia University’s center for craniofacial regeneration. But doctors will need to keep an eye out for long-term problems; The skull isn’t just a box for the brain but a complicated piece of anatomy linked to connective and soft tissues. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17891 - Posted: 03.12.2013

by John Bohannon Every day, millions of people click on Facebook "Like" buttons, boldly declaring their preferences for a variety of things, such as books, movies, and cat videos. But those "likes" may reveal more than they intend, such as sexual orientation, drug use, and religious affiliation, according to a study that analyzed the online behavior of thousands of volunteers. Your preferences define you. Researchers have known for decades that people's personal attributes—gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, and personality type—correlate with their choice of products, concepts, and activities. Just consider the different populations at an opera and a NASCAR race. This is why companies are so eager to gather personal information about their consumers: Advertising is far more effective when it is targeted to groups of people who are more likely to be interested in a product. The only aspect that has changed is the increasing proportion of personal information that is available as digital data on the Internet. And Facebook has become a major hub for such data through its like button. A team led by Michal Kosinski, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom as well as at Microsoft Research, wondered just how much people's likes reveal about them. The Likes data are public information. The hard part was getting the data on intelligence and other such attributes to compare with the likes. For that, Kosinski and his Cambridge colleague David Stillwell created a Facebook app called myPersonality. After agreeing to volunteer as a research subject, users of the myPersonality app answer survey questions and take a series of psychological tests that measure things such as intelligence, competitiveness, extraversion versus introversion, and general satisfaction with life. Kosinski and Stillwell not only get those data but also data from the user's Facebook profile and friends network. In return, users get a peek at their own information. More than 4 million people have volunteered already. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17890 - Posted: 03.12.2013

British researchers have developed a test to detect Alzheimer's disease in its earliest stages. It works by looking for a combination of "markers" in the blood which are different in healthy people and those with the disease. Delegates at the Alzheimer's Research UK Conference heard that the University of Nottingham is now developing a quick and easy test to do in clinics. It could mean much earlier diagnosis and better treatments, they said. The test uses some proteins that have been strongly linked with Alzheimer's disease, such as amyloid and APOE. But through careful analysis of blood from people with the disease, as well as those with early-stage memory problems, the researchers detected some other markers that were suggestive of the disease. Most notably, some proteins related to inflammation seem to have been added to increase the power of the test. Prof Kevin Morgan from the University of Nottingham said they still had to validate the test and it could be a decade before it was used in patients. But he added that the combination of markers they had found was looking very promising. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17889 - Posted: 03.11.2013

By Scicurious We humans love us some caffeine. The mild stimulant have saved many a student, parent, and hard working adult from nodding over their desks. And it’s a natural product of plants like the coffee plant and the tea bush. But the question is, why do these plants have it in the first place? It turns out that there are two answers to that question. First, caffeine is a natural pesticide, which can paralyze and kill insects that want to chomp on the leaves, berries, or other parts of the plant. It’s good for keeping a bug off your back. But these plants also produce flowers, and these flowers need bees. So it’s somewhat surprising to realize that the coffee plant, as well as plants from the Citrus genus (yup, that means oranges), have caffeine in their nectar. After all, if caffeine is a poison to some bugs, you don’t want to be poisoning your pollinators! But it turns out that bees aren’t like other bugs, and may enjoy themselves a jolt like humans do! Whether they enjoy it or not, they certainly remember it! The authors started out by examining exactly HOW much caffeine was in the nectar of various coffee and citrus plants. And the concentrations of caffeine in the nectar could get up to that of one cup of coffee (though, obviously, in a much smaller volume total). I’m starting to wonder if there’s a “honeyed nectar” energy drink in the future. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 17888 - Posted: 03.11.2013

By Meghan Rosen Alcohol may give heavy drinkers more than just a buzz. It can also fuel their brains, a new study suggests. Long-term booze use boosts brain levels of acetate, an energy-rich by-product of alcohol metabolism, researchers report online March 8 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. In the study, people who downed at least eight drinks per week also sucked more energy from acetate than their light-drinking counterparts. The extra energy may give heavy drinkers more incentive to imbibe, says study coauthor Graeme Mason of Yale University. And the caloric perk might help explain why alcohol withdrawal is so hard. “I think it's a very good hypothesis,” says biochemical geneticist Ting-Kai Li of Duke University. Scientists had suspected that heavy drinkers absorb and burn more acetate, but, he adds, “Graeme Mason showed that this is actually happening.” Acetate is best known as a chemical in vinegar. But when people drink a glass of wine or drain a can of beer, their liver breaks down the alcohol and pumps out acetate as leftovers. The bloodstream then delivers acetate throughout the body, including to the brain. Human brains typically run on sugar. But with enough acetate in the blood, Mason thought, brains might crank up their ability to burn it too. To find out if his suspicion was correct, Mason and his colleagues peered into the brains of seven heavy drinkers and seven light drinkers, who quaffed fewer than two drinks per week. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17887 - Posted: 03.11.2013

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The future is unclear for a heart device aimed at preventing strokes in people at high risk of them because of an irregular heartbeat. Early results from a key study of the device, Boston Scientific’s Watchman, suggested it is safer than previous testing found, but may not be better than a drug that is used to prevent strokes, heart-related deaths and blood clots in people with atrial fibrillation in the long term. Atrial fibrillation, a common heart arrhythmia that affects millions of Americans, causes blood to pool in a small pouch. Clots can form and travel to the brain, causing a stroke. The usual treatment is blood thinners like warfarin, sold as Coumadin and other brands. But they have their own problems and some are very expensive. The Watchman is intended to be a permanent solution that would not require people to take medication for the rest of their lives. It is a tiny expandable umbrella that plugs the pouch of blood, and is inserted without surgery, via a tube pushed into a vein. A study four years ago indicated the device was at least as good at preventing strokes as warfarin, but the procedure to implant it led to strokes in some patients. The Food and Drug Administration required another test of its safety and effectiveness. The new study was led by Dr. David Holmes Jr. of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. He and the clinic have a financial stake in the device. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 17886 - Posted: 03.11.2013

By Neuroskeptic “Layered Voice Analysis” (LVA) is a controversial technology promoted as a tool for helping detect stress and other emotions by analysis of the human voice. According to the company behind the method, Nemesysco: LVA technology enables better understanding of your suspect’s mental state and emotional makeup at a given moment by detecting the emotional cues in his or her speech. The technology identifies various types of stress levels, cognitive processes, and emotional reactions that are reflected in different properties of the voice… it provides the professional user easy access to truth verification in real time or from recorded data, during face to face and over the phone, during a free or structured investigation session. Long-term Neuroskeptic readers will remember LVA and Nemesysco from way back in 2009. That was when I blogged about the company’s legal moves against two Swedish academics who had published a paper critical of LVA. That contentious article is still available online. Now, a newly published study evaluated whether LVA is an effective truth verifying tool: The Accuracy of Auditors’ and Layered Voice Analysis (LVA) Operators’ Judgments of Truth and Deception During Police Questioning. The authors, led by Michigan Professor Frank Horvath, studied 74 suspects who were interviewed by the Michigan State Police. Audio recordings of the interviews were made. Which of the suspects were being deceptive? Two investigators used LVA (after receiving the manufacturer’s recommended 40 hours of training) to try to judge deception from the records. Three other investigators just listened to the recordings, and formed an opinion based on their own intuition and experience.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17885 - Posted: 03.11.2013

By Marilynn Marchione, Associated Press Stress does bad things to the heart. New studies have found higher rates of cardiac problems in veterans with PTSD, New Orleans residents six years after Hurricane Katrina and Greeks struggling through that country's financial turmoil. Disasters and prolonged stress can raise "fight or flight" hormones that affect blood pressure, blood sugar and other things in ways that make heart trouble more likely, doctors say. They also provoke anger and helplessness and spur heart-harming behaviors like eating or drinking too much. "We're starting to connect emotions with cardiovascular risk markers" and the new research adds evidence of a link, said Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center and an American Heart Association spokeswoman. She had no role in the studies, which were discussed Sunday at an American College of Cardiology conference in San Francisco. The largest, involving 207,954 veterans in California and Nevada ages 46 to 74, compared those with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, to those without it. They were free of major heart disease and diabetes when researchers checked their Veterans Administration medical records from 2009 and 2010. Checked again about two years later, 35 percent of those with PTSD but only 19 percent of those without it had developed insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes and hardening of the arteries. © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17884 - Posted: 03.11.2013

by Moheb Costandi Mice transplanted with a once-discounted class of human brain cells have better memories and learning abilities than normal counterparts, according to a new study. Far from a way to engineer smarter rodents, the work suggests that human brain evolution involved a major upgrade to cells called astrocytes. Astrocytes are one of several types of glia, the other cells found alongside neurons in the nervous system. Although long thought to merely provide support and nourishment for neurons, it's now clear that astrocytes are vital for proper brain function. They are produced during development from stem cells called glial progenitors. In 2009, Steven Goldman of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York and his colleagues reported that human astrocytes are bigger, and have about 10 times as many fingerlike projections that contact other brain cells and blood vessels, than those of mice. To further investigate these differences, they have more recently grafted fluorescently labeled human glial progenitors into the brains of newborn mice and examined the animals when they reached adulthood. Most of the grafted cells remained as progenitors, but some matured into typical human-looking astrocytes. They connected to their mouse counterparts to form astrocyte networks that transmitted electrical signals. Furthermore, they propagated internal signals about three times faster than the mouse astrocytes and improved the strengthening of connections between neurons in the hippocampus, a process thought to be critical for learning and memory. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Glia; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17883 - Posted: 03.09.2013

By JAN HOFFMAN Physically active children generally report happier moods and fewer symptoms of depression than children who are less active. Now researchers may have found a reason: by one measure, exercise seems to help children cope with stress. Finnish researchers had 258 children wear accelerometers on their wrists for at least four days that registered the quality and quantity of their physical activity. Their parents used cotton swabs to take saliva samples at various times throughout a single day, which the researchers used to assess levels of cortisol, a hormone typically induced by physical or mental stress. There was no difference in the cortisol levels at home between children who were active and those who were less active. But when the researchers gave the children a standard psychosocial stress test at a clinic involving arithmetic and storytelling challenges, they found that those who had not engaged in physical activity had raised cortisol levels. The children who had moderate or vigorous physical activity showed relatively no rise in cortisol levels. Those results indicate a more positive physiological response to stress by children who were more active, the researchers said in a study that was published this week in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. The children who were least active had the highest levels. “This study shows that children who are more active throughout their day have a better hormonal response to an acute stressful situation,” said Disa Hatfield, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17882 - Posted: 03.09.2013

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff No doubt, the biggest appeal of exercise is to build biceps, heart muscle, and perhaps some definition in those abdominal muscles, but how about using exercise to build your brain? It’s been known for some time that exercise can lift your mood, ward off depression, and help the brain age more gracefully -- free of memory loss and dementia. But now researchers have found that even just one bout of exercise can -- even better than a cup of coffee -- improve your mental focus and cognitive performance for any challenging task you face that day. A new analysis of 19 studies involving 586 kids, teens, and young adults that was published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal found that short 10 to 40 minutes bursts of exercise led to an immediate boost in concentration and mental focus, likely by improving blood flow to the brain. “These results provide further evidence that doing about 20 minutes of exercise just before taking a test or giving a speech can improve performance,” said Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Ratey, who wrote the best-selling book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Another piece of proof can be seen in the brain scan above -- from a 2009 University of Illinois study also included in the new analysis -- which compares the brain activity of 9-year-olds who took a brisk walk and those who didn’t take a walk. The walkers had far more activity in brain regions involved with focused attention and filtering out noisy distractions while they were taking a challenging test compared to the non-walkers. © 2013 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17881 - Posted: 03.09.2013

Jennifer Raymond I have a bias against women in science. Please don't hold this against me. I am a woman scientist, mentor and advocate for women in science, and an associate dean in my school's Office of Diversity, with a budding field biologist as a daughter. Yet my performance on the Implicit Association Test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo), which measures unconscious associations between concepts, revealed that I have a tendency to associate men with science and career, and women with liberal arts and family. I didn't even need to wait for my score; I could feel that my responses were slower and that I made more mistakes when I had to group science words such as 'astronomy' with female words such as 'wife' rather than male words such as 'uncle'. The results from hundreds of thousands of people indicate that I am not an outlier — 70% of men and women across 34 countries view science as more male than female1. Gender bias is not just a problem in science. A host of studies shows that people tend to rate women as less competent than men across many domains, from musical abilities to leadership2, and that many individuals hold biases about competency on the basis of other irrelevant attributes, such as skin colour, body weight, religion, sexual orientation and parental status. Such biases have important consequences in the workplace. One study showed that mothers are 79% less likely to be hired and are offered US$11,000 less salary than women with no children3. By contrast, the same study shows that parenthood confers an advantage to men in the workplace. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Attention; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17880 - Posted: 03.09.2013