By MARILYNN MARCHIONE DEERFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Baxter International Inc. says that a blood product it was testing failed to slow mental decline or to preserve physical function in a major study of 390 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. The company says that people who received 18 months of infusions with its drug, Gammagard, fared no better than others given infusions of a dummy solution. Gammagard is immune globulin, natural antibodies culled from donated blood. Researchers thought these antibodies might help remove amyloid, the sticky plaque that clogs patients’ brains, sapping memory and ability to think. Patients with moderate disease and those with a gene that raises risk of Alzheimer’s who were taking the higher of two doses in the study seemed to benefit, although the study was not big enough to say for sure. ‘‘The study missed its primary endpoints, however we remain interested by the prespecified sub-group analyses’’ in groups that seemed to benefit, Ludwig Hantson, president of Baxter’s BioScience business, said in a statement. Gammagard is already sold to treat some blood disorders, and the results of the Alzheimer’s study do not affect those uses. About 35 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5 million have Alzheimer's. Current medicines such as Aricept and Namenda just temporarily ease symptoms. There is no known cure. © 2013 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18131 - Posted: 05.08.2013

by Elizabeth Norton If you've ever cringed when your parents said "groovy," you'll know that spoken language can have a brief shelf life. But frequently used words can persist for generations, even millennia, and similar sounds and meanings often turn up in very different languages. The existence of these shared words, or cognates, has led some linguists to suggest that seemingly unrelated language families can be traced back to a common ancestor. Now, a new statistical approach suggests that peoples from Alaska to Europe may share a linguistic forebear dating as far back as the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago. "Historical linguists study language evolution using cognates the way biologists use genes," explains Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. For example, although about 50% of French and English words derive from a common ancestor (like "mere" and "mother," for example), with English and German the rate is closer to 70%—indicating that while all three languages are related, English and German have a more recent common ancestor. In the same vein, while humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas have common genes, the fact that humans share almost 99% of their DNA with chimps suggests that these two primate lineages split apart more recently. Because words don't have DNA, researchers use cognates found in different languages today to reconstruct the ancestral "protowords." Historical linguists have observed that over time, the sounds of words tend to change in regular patterns. For example, the p sound frequently changes to f, and the t sound to th—suggesting that the Latin word pater is, well, the father of the English word father. Linguists use these known rules to work backward in time, making a best guess at how the protoword sounded. They also track the rate at which words change. Using these phylogenetic principles, some researchers have dated many common words as far back as 9000 years ago. The ancestral language known as Proto-Indo-European, for example, gave rise to languages including Hindi, Russian, French, English, and Gaelic. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 18130 - Posted: 05.07.2013

Ella Pickover A “helpful” new drug which could help problem drinkers reduce the amount of alcohol they consume will today become available to UK patients. If dependent drinkers take the drug nalmefene and undergo counselling they can cut their consumption levels by 61 per cent, manufacturers said. The pill, also known as selincro, has been licensed for use by health officials and will be available for doctors to prescribe to their patients from today. The drug, which is to be taken once a day, has been licensed for "the reduction of alcohol consumption in adult patients with alcohol dependence without physical withdrawal symptoms and who do not require immediate detoxification". While current drugs help patients to become teetotal, nalmefene helps people with drinking problems to cut back on the amount they drink. The drug works by modulating the reward mechanism in the brain. A clinical trial into the drug helped patients cut the amount they consumed from 12.75 units a day to five units a day - a 61 per cent reduction. And patients who underwent counselling as well as taking the drug reduced their "heavy drinking days" from 23 days a month to nine days a month after undergoing the treatment for six months, researchers said. "The people who we saw in the study were not stereotypical alcoholics, most of them had families and jobs," said drug investigator Dr David Collier, of Barts and The London School of Medicine. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18129 - Posted: 05.07.2013

By PAM BELLUCK and BENEDICT CAREY Just weeks before the long-awaited publication of a new edition of the so-called bible of mental disorders, the federal government’s most prominent psychiatric expert has said the book suffers from a scientific “lack of validity.” The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., is the best tool now available for clinicians treating patients and should not be tossed out, he said, it does not reflect the complexity of many disorders, and its way of categorizing mental illnesses should not guide research. “As long as the research community takes the D.S.M. to be a bible, we’ll never make progress,” Dr. Insel said, adding, “People think that everything has to match D.S.M. criteria, but you know what? Biology never read that book.” The revision, known as the D.S.M.-5 and the first since 1994, has stirred unprecedented questioning from the public, patient groups and, most fundamentally, senior figures in psychiatry who have challenged not only decisions about specific diagnoses but the scientific basis of the entire enterprise. Basic research into the biology of mental disorders and treatment has stalled, they say, confounded by the labyrinth of the brain. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 18128 - Posted: 05.07.2013

by Emily Underwood The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—slated for release this month—has lost a major customer before even going to print. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), declared last week on his blog that the institution will no longer use the manual to guide its research. Instead, NIMH is working on a long-term plan to develop new diagnostic criteria and treatments based on genetic, physiologic, and cognitive data rather than symptoms alone. Insel's pronouncement is the most recent hit in a long barrage of criticism that has rained down upon the latest DSM revision process since it began over a decade ago. "While DSM has been described as a 'Bible' for the field," he wrote, "it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each." Although the manual's strength has been to standardize these labels, he wrote, "[t]he weakness is its lack of validity," and "[p]atients with mental disorders deserve better." Although Insel's blog was reported as a "bombshell," and "potentially seismic," NIMH's decision to scrap the DSM criteria has been public for several years, says Bruce Cuthbert, director of NIMH's Division of Adult Translational Research and Treatment Development. In 2010, the agency began to steer researchers away from the traditional categories of DSM by posting new guidance for grant proposals in five broad areas. Rather than grouping disorders such as schizophrenia and depression by symptom, the new categories focus on basic neural circuits and cognitive functions, such as those for reward, arousal, and attachment. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 18127 - Posted: 05.07.2013

Posted by Helen Shen More than 150 neuroscientists descended on Arlington, Virginia this week to begin planning the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative—an ambitious but still hazy proposal to understand how the brain works by recording activity from an unprecedented numbers of neurons at once. President Barack Obama announced the initiative on 2 April, which will be carried out by three federal agencies—the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—alongside a handful of private foundations. Most neuroscientists have relished the attention on their field, but have also been left wondering what it means in scientific terms to “understand” the brain, what it will take to get there, and how much will be feasible in the programme’s projected 10-year lifespan. They gathered at an inaugural NSF planning meeting taking place from 5-6 May to discuss their ideas and concerns. “The belief is we’re ready for a leap forward,” says Van Wedeen, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and one of the NSF meeting organizers. “Which leap and in which direction is still being debated.” The NSF group invited researchers representing neuroscience, computer science, and engineering — as many as would fit in the hotel conference room. Another estimated 200 or so followed the meeting by live webcast on Monday. Roughly 75 participants accepted NSF’s open invitation to submit one-page documents outlining the major © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18126 - Posted: 05.07.2013

By Gisela Telis, I’ve seen friends fret over the purported link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease and have often wondered if their fears are founded on fact. Should they give up aluminum pans or aluminum-containing antiperspirants? I’ve always heard that aluminum’s health dangers are just hype. So what’s the real deal? The connection between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease is less a myth than a longstanding scientific controversy. It began in 1965, when researchers discovered that injecting rabbits’ brains with aluminum caused them to develop neurofibrillary tangles, the twisted proteins found in brain cells of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disorder that destroys memory and cognition. The finding spurred a rush of research. Just eight years later, a Canadian group studying brain tissue from deceased Alzheimer’s patients found that certain parts of their brains had two to three times more aluminum than a normal brain. By 1980, Daniel Perl and Arnold Brody had managed to actually peer inside human tangle-bearing brain cells — and found aluminum there, too. “That really changed the whole complexion of the thing,” recalls Perl, now a professor of pathology in the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda. “I was getting called all the time, because there was so much public interest.” Despite the rise in interest, no one could figure out what this meant for human health. Part of the problem was that scientific techniques were — and still are — too imperfect to provide an answer. Whether they were studying brain cells or conducting population-wide epidemiological studies that tracked aluminum exposure and Alzheimer’s risk, researchers lacked the tools to get very precise or conclusive results. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 18125 - Posted: 05.07.2013

By Dina Fine Maron Almost a decade after manufacturers stopped using certain chemical flame retardants in furniture foam and carpet padding, many of the compounds still lurk in homes. New work to be presented today reaffirms that the chemicals may also still be hurting young children who were exposed before they were born. Researchers investigating the health impacts of prenatal exposure to flame retardants collected blood samples from 309 pregnant women early in their second trimester. Spikes in the levels of one class of flame retardant, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) correlated with behavior and cognition difficulties during early childhood. The researchers tracked children through the first five years of their lives, looking at a battery of tests for IQ and behavior. They found that children of mothers who had high PBDE levels during their second trimester showed cognition deficits when the children were five years old as well as higher rates of hyperactivity at ages two to five. If the mother’s blood had a 10-fold increase in PBDEs, the average five-year-old had about a four-point IQ deficit. “A four-point IQ difference in an individual child may not be perceivable in…ordinary life. However, in a population, if many children are affected, the social and economic impact can be huge due to the shift of IQ distribution and productivity,” says lead author Aimin Chen, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The findings, based on women and children from Cincinnati, will be presented May 6 at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Washington, D.C. The unpublished results have been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, but the paper has not yet been accepted. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 18124 - Posted: 05.07.2013

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have uncovered firm evidence for what many mothers have long suspected: women’s brains appear to be hard-wired to respond to the cries of a hungry infant. Researchers asked men and women to let their minds wander, then played a recording of white noise interspersed with the sounds of an infant crying. Brain scans showed that, in the women, patterns of brain activity abruptly switched to an attentive mode when they heard the infant cries, whereas the men’s brains remained in the resting state. “Previous studies have shown that, on an emotional level, men and women respond differently to the sound of an infant crying,” said study co-author Marc H. Bornstein, Ph.D., head of the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the institute that conducted the study. “Our findings indicate that men and women show marked differences in terms of attention as well.” The earlier studies showed that women are more likely than men to feel sympathy when they hear an infant cry, and are more likely to want to care for the infant. Their findings appear in NeuroReport. Previous studies have shown differences in patterns of brain activity between when an individual’s attention is focused and when the mind wanders. The pattern of unfocused activity is referred to as default mode, Dr. Bornstein explained. When individuals focus on something in particular, their brains disengage from the default mode and activate other brain networks.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 18123 - Posted: 05.07.2013

By Scicurious In the great novel The Great Gatsby, Daisy, one of the love interests of the book, has a beautiful voice. She’s described otherwise, but you don’t really remember what she looked like, you remember how she sounded. Fitzgerald describes her voice as musical, running up and down and the scales when she talks. And you know what he’s talking about. You hear that voice in your head: light, breathy, utterly charming. You don’t really know what she looks like, but from imagining her voice, you know she is beautiful. What is it about this, or any voice, that makes it attractive? Is it the pitch? The tone? The firmness or breathiness of voice? And what is it about that voice, or any voice, that makes you know that someone is beautiful, handsome, masculine, feminine? The authors of this study wanted to see what makes a voice a VOICE. What acoustic factors make it most attractive to women and to men? To do this, they first took 10 young men, and had them rate the attractiveness of a female voice saying “good luck on your exams”. The voice actor said the phrase without any emotion using three different sound qualities: normal, breathy, and pressed (more of a hard tone). They then took the recording of this voice and modified it up and down, to create the phrase in several different pitches and formats. Specifically, they modified it upward toward what they hypothesized to mean “small body size and happiness” or downward toward what they hypothesized to mean “large body size and anger”. They showed that while increasing the pitch (higher) did not increase the attractiveness of the voice, lowering it decreased the attractiveness. And increasing the breathiness of the sentence increased attractiveness. The authors believe that this means that lowering the voice, and presumably indicating a larger body size (larger body size in general means the normal voice will be lower), reduced how attractive the men found the voice. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 18122 - Posted: 05.06.2013

By BILL PENNINGTON BOSTON — The drumbeat of alarming stories linking concussions among football players and other athletes to brain disease has led to a new and mushrooming American phenomenon: the specialized youth sports concussion clinic, which one day may be as common as a mall at the edge of town. In the last three years, dozens of youth concussion clinics have opened in nearly 35 states — outpatient centers often connected to large hospitals that are now filled with young athletes complaining of headaches, amnesia, dizziness or problems concentrating. The proliferation of clinics, however, comes at a time when there is still no agreed-upon, established formula for treating the injuries. “It is inexact, a science in its infancy,” said Dr. Michael O’Brien of the sports concussion clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital. “We know much more than we once did, but there are lots of layers we still need to figure out.” Deep concern among parents about the effects of concussions is colliding with the imprecise understanding of the injury. To families whose anxiety has been stoked by reports of former N.F.L. players with degenerative brain disease, the new facilities are seen as the most expert care available. That has parents parading to the clinic waiting rooms. The trend is playing out vividly in Boston, where the phone hardly stops ringing at the youth sports concussion clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Parents call saying, ‘I saw a scary report about concussions on Oprah or on the ‘Doctors’ show or Katie Couric’s show,’ ” Dr. Barbara Semakula said, describing a typical day at the clinic. “Their child just hurt his head, and they’ve already leapt to the worst possible scenarios. It’s a little bit of a frenzy out there.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18121 - Posted: 05.06.2013

By John Horgan What is mental illness? Schizophrenia? Autism? Bipolar disorder? Depression? Since the 1950s, the profession of psychiatry has attempted to provide definitive answers to these questions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Often called The Bible of psychiatry, the DSM serves as the ultimate authority for diagnosis, treatment and insurance coverage of mental illness. Now, in a move sure to rock psychiatry, psychology and other fields that address mental illness, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health has announced that the federal agency–which provides grants for research on mental illness–will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Thomas Insel’s statement comes just weeks before the scheduled publication of the DSM-V, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Insel writes: “While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been ‘reliability’–each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better.” © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Autism
Link ID: 18120 - Posted: 05.06.2013

by Helen Thomson "I've been in a crowded elevator with mirrors all around, and a woman will move and I'll go to get out the way and then realise: 'oh that woman is me'." Heather Sellers has prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. "I can't remember any image of the human face. It's simply not special to me," she says. "I don't process them like I do a car or a dog. It's not a visual problem, it's a perception problem." Heather knew from a young age that something was different about the way she navigated her world, but her condition wasn't diagnosed until she was in her 30s. "I always knew something was wrong – it was impossible for me to trust my perceptions of the world. I was diagnosed as anxious. My parents thought I was crazy." The condition is estimated to affect around 2.5 per cent of the population, and it's common for those who have it not to realise that anything is wrong. "In many ways it's a subtle disorder," says Heather. "It's easy for your brain to compensate because there are so many other things you can use to identify a person: hair colour, gait or certain clothes. But meet that person out of context and it's socially devastating." As a child, she was once separated from her mum at a grocery store. Store staff reunited the pair, but it was confusing for Heather, since she didn't initially recognise her mother. "But I didn't know that I wasn't recognising her." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18119 - Posted: 05.04.2013

By TARA PARKER-POPE Suicide rates among middle-aged Americans have risen sharply in the past decade, prompting concern that a generation of baby boomers who have faced years of economic worry and easy access to prescription painkillers may be particularly vulnerable to self-inflicted harm. More people now die of suicide than in car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the findings in Friday’s issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides. Suicide has typically been viewed as a problem of teenagers and the elderly, and the surge in suicide rates among middle-aged Americans is surprising. From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives. The suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000. The most pronounced increases were seen among men in their 50s, a group in which suicide rates jumped by nearly 50 percent, to about 30 per 100,000. For women, the largest increase was seen in those ages 60 to 64, among whom rates increased by nearly 60 percent, to 7.0 per 100,000. Suicide rates can be difficult to interpret because of variations in the way local officials report causes of death. But C.D.C. and academic researchers said they were confident that the data documented an actual increase in deaths by suicide and not a statistical anomaly. While reporting of suicides is not always consistent around the country, the current numbers are, if anything, too low. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Emotions
Link ID: 18118 - Posted: 05.04.2013

by Andy Coghlan and Sara Reardon The world's biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry's "bible" – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, questioning its validity and stating that "patients with mental disorders deserve better". This bombshell comes just weeks before the publication of the fifth revision of the manual, called DSM-5. On 29 April, Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), advocated a major shift away from categorising diseases such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia according to a person's symptoms. Instead, Insel wants mental disorders to be diagnosed more objectively using genetics, brain scans that show abnormal patterns of activity and cognitive testing. This would mean abandoning the manual published by the American Psychiatric Association that has been the mainstay of psychiatric research for 60 years. The DSM has been embroiled in controversy for a number of years. Critics have said that it has outlasted its usefulness, has turned complaints that are not truly illnesses into medical conditions, and has been unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies looking for new markets for their drugs. There have also been complaints that widened definitions of several disorder have led to over-diagnosis of conditions such as bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, Insel has said in a blog post published by the NIMH that he wants a complete shift to diagnoses based on science not symptoms. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18117 - Posted: 05.04.2013

The short answer is no. But your question gets to the heart of an important problem that we have in this country: that all medications are approved by the Food and Drug Administration on the basis of relatively short-term studies, even though many are used long-term for medical and psychiatric disorders that are chronic, if not lifelong. The F.D.A. approves antidepressants like selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.’s, if the drug beats a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically last 4 to 12 weeks and involve a few hundred patients. Longer-term maintenance studies, usually lasting one to two years, indicate that S.S.R.I.’s do not cause any serious harm, though they have plenty of side effects, like weight gain and sexual dysfunction. Once a drug hits the market, we have only a voluntary system of reporting adverse effects in the United States; there are no systematic long-term studies of any drug lasting 10 or more years. Still, S.S.R.I.’s have been used since the late 1980s and given to more than 40 million Americans, so it’s reasonable to say that if these drugs caused any significant toxic effects, we would have seen many such reports. Instead, we have some anecdotal reports claiming a wide range of S.S.R.I.-related toxicity, but one cannot know from these reports whether the symptoms are related to S.S.R.I. use or to medical illnesses that happen to develop over time in people taking these drugs. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 18116 - Posted: 05.04.2013

National Institutes of Health researchers used the popular anti-wrinkle agent Botox to discover a new and important role for a group of molecules that nerve cells use to quickly send messages. This novel role for the molecules, called SNARES, may be a missing piece that scientists have been searching for to fully understand how brain cells communicate under normal and disease conditions. "The results were very surprising,” said Ling-Gang Wu, Ph.D., a scientist at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “Like many scientists we thought SNAREs were only involved in fusion." Every day almost 100 billion nerve cells throughout the body send thousands of messages through nearly 100 trillion communication points called synapses. Cell-to-cell communication at synapses controls thoughts, movements, and senses and could provide therapeutic targets for a number of neurological disorders, including epilepsy. Nerve cells use chemicals, called neurotransmitters, to rapidly send messages at synapses. Like pellets inside shotgun shells, neurotransmitters are stored inside spherical membranes, called synaptic vesicles. Messages are sent when a carrier shell fuses with the nerve cell’s own shell, called the plasma membrane, and releases the neurotransmitter “pellets” into the synapse. SNAREs (soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor attachment protein receptor) are three proteins known to be critical for fusion between carrier shells and nerve cell membranes during neurotransmitter release.

Keyword: Muscles; Emotions
Link ID: 18115 - Posted: 05.04.2013

Symmetry study deemed a fraud Eugenie Samuel Reich Few researchers have tried harder than Robert Trivers to retract one of their own papers. In 2005, Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, published an attention-grabbing finding: Jamaican teenagers with a high degree of body symmetry were more likely to be rated ‘good dancers’ by their peers than were those with less symmetrical bodies. The study, which suggested that dancing is a signal for sexual selection in humans, was featured on the cover of this journal (W. M. Brown et al. Nature 438, 1148–1150; 2005). But two years later, Trivers began to suspect that the study data had been faked by one of his co-authors, William Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the time. In seeking a retraction, Trivers self-published The Anatomy of a Fraud, a small book detailing what he saw as evidence of data fabrication. Later, Trivers had a verbal altercation over the matter with a close colleague and was temporarily banned from campus. An investigation of the case, completed by Rutgers and released publicly last month, now seems to validate Trivers’ allegations. Brown disputes the university’s finding, but it could help to clear the controversy that has clouded Trivers’ reputation as the author of several pioneering papers in the 1970s. For example, Trivers advanced an influential theory of ‘reciprocal altruism’, in which people behave unselfishly and hope that they will later be rewarded for their good deeds. He also analysed human sexuality in terms of the investments that mothers and fathers each make in child-rearing. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 18114 - Posted: 05.04.2013

By Bruce Bower Human ancestors living in East Africa 2 million years ago weren’t a steak-and-potatoes crowd. But they had a serious hankering for gazelle meat and antelope brains, fossils discovered in Kenya indicate. Three sets of butchered animal bones unearthed at Kenya’s Kanjera South site provide the earliest evidence of both long-term hunting and targeted scavenging by a member of the human evolutionary family, anthropologist Joseph Ferraro of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and his colleagues conclude. An early member of the Homo genus, perhaps Homo erectus, hunted small animals and scavenged predators’ leftovers of larger creatures, researchers report April 25 in PLOS ONE. Along with hunting relatively small game such as gazelles, these hominids scavenged the heads of antelope and wildebeests, apparently to add a side of fatty, nutrient-rich brain tissue to their diets, the scientists say. Those dietary pursuits could have provided the extra energy Homo erectus needed to support large bodies, expanded brains and extensive travel across the landscape, Ferraro says. A few East African sites dating to as early as 3.4 million years ago had previously produced small numbers of animal bones bearing butchery marks made by stone tools. Scientists think those bones indicate occasional meat eating (SN: 9/11/10, p. 8). Now Kanjera South has yielded several thousand complete and partial animal bones, representing at least 81 individual animals. A known reversal of Earth’s magnetic field preserved in an excavated soil layer allowed Ferraro’s team to determine the age of the finds, which accumulated over a few thousand years at most. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Evolution; Obesity
Link ID: 18113 - Posted: 05.04.2013

by Lizzie Wade If you were a rat living in a completely virtual world like in the movie The Matrix, could you tell? Maybe not, but scientists studying your brain might be able to. Today, researchers report that certain cells in rat brains work differently when the animals are in virtual reality than when they are in the real world. The neurons in question are known as place cells, which fire in response to specific physical locations in the outside world and reside in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial navigation and memory. As you walk out of your house every day, the same place cell fires each time you reach the shrub that's two steps away from your door. It fires again when you reach the same place on your way back home, even though you are traveling in the opposite direction. Scientists have long suspected that these place cells help the brain generate a map of the world around us. But how do the place cells know when to fire in the first place? Previous research showed that the cells rely on three different kinds of information. First, they analyze "visual cues," or what you see when you look around. Then, there are what researchers call "self-motion cues." These cues come from how your body moves in space and are the reason you can still find your way around a room with the lights out. The final type of information is the "proximal cues," which encompass everything else about the environment you're in. The smell of a bakery on your way to work, the sounds of a street jammed with traffic, and the springy texture of grass in a park are all proximal cues. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention; Robotics
Link ID: 18112 - Posted: 05.04.2013