By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker. The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes. What they found was reassuring. To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull. Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk. Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17739 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By BENJAMIN HOFFMAN NEW ORLEANS — It has become a staple of Super Bowl week, as much a part of the pregame to the N.F.L.’s biggest event as the annual media day: a discussion of how football is being affected by head injuries and the mounting evidence that long-term brain damage can be linked to injuries sustained on the field. Years ago, players rarely spoke about the issue and league officials dismissed suggestions that on-field injuries could lead to life-altering health problems. Now, however, the league is facing lawsuits from thousands of former players, rules are being instituted in an attempt to diminish injuries on the field and even President Obama has said that the way football is played will have to change. This week, Bernard Pollard, a hard-hitting safety for the Baltimore Ravens, created a stir by saying that the N.F.L. would not exist in 30 years because of the rules changes designed with safety in mind, but that he also believed there would be a death on the field at some point. At media day Tuesday, players reacted to the comments made by Pollard and Obama, with some agreeing with Pollard that recent rules changes would change the sport to such an extent that it would be less entertaining and lead to a loss of popularity. Pollard stood by his comments. He added, however, that while he was comfortable with the physical risk he was taking by playing football, he was not sure he would want future generations, including his 4-year-old son, to follow his example. “My whole stance right now is that I don’t want him to play football,” Pollard said. “Football has been good to me. It has been my outlet. God has blessed me with a tremendous talent to be able to play this game. But we want our kids to have things better than us.” He said he did not want his son to go through the aches and pains caused by the physicality of the game. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17738 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By Gareth Cook Michael Trimble, a British professor at the Institute of Neurology in London, begins his new book with Gana the gorilla. In the summer of 2009, 11-year-old Gana gave birth to a boy at a Muenster zoo. But one day in August, the baby suddenly and mysteriously died. Gana held up her son in front of her, staring at his limp body. She held him close, stroking him. To onlookers it appeared that Gana was trying to reawaken him, and, as the hours passed, that she was mourning his passing. Some at the zoo that day cried. But Gana did not. Humans, Trimble tells us, are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. “Why Humans Like to Cry” is an exploration of why this would be so, a neuroanatomical “where do tears come from.” It’s also a meditation on human psychology. Many distinctions have been offered between humans and the rest of the animal world, and to this list Trimble adds another: the anguished tear, the apprehension that life is tragic. Trimble answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Cook: How did you first become interested in crying? Trimble: Of course, because I cry, and some things bring tears quite easily, notably music, and opera with the power of the human voice. Crying tears, for emotional reasons, is unique to humans. There has been a game of catch me if you can, which has been played by those interested in finding attributes or behaviours which separate humans from our nearest living relatives – namely the chimpanzees and bonobos. Certainly our propositional language is very special, but primate communities have very sophisticated ways of communicating. Other contenders, such as play, using tools, or having what is called theory of mind (the sense that I know that others have a mind very like mine, with similar inclinations and intentions) have all been argued as unique to our species, but all these have been demonstrated, in some form, to be found in other primates. Emotional crying makes us human. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17737 - Posted: 01.30.2013

Some but not all antidepressant drugs known as SSRIs pose a very small but serious heart risk, say researchers. Citalopram and escitalopram, which fall into this drug group, can trigger a heart rhythm disturbance, a new study in the British Medical Journal shows. UK and US regulators have already warned doctors to be extra careful about which patients they prescribe these medicines to. And they have lowered the maximum recommended dose. The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) says people with pre-existing heart conditions should have a heart trace before going on these drugs, to check for a rhythm disturbance known as long QT interval. Experts reassure that complications are very rare and that in most cases the benefits for the patient taking the drug will outweigh the risks. Long QT QT interval is measured with an electrocardiogram (ECG) and varies with the heart rate - it gets longer when the heart beats slower and is shorter when the heart beats faster. Some variation is normal, but if it gets too long it can upset the timing of heartbeat with potentially dire consequences - dizziness, faints and, rarely, sudden death. To assess how common a problem long QT linked to SSRI use might be, US researchers decided to look at the medical records of more than 38,00 patients from New England. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17736 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By Rachel Ehrenberg A rare peek into drug company documents reveals troubling differences between publicly available information and materials the company holds close to its chest. In comparing public and private descriptions of drug trials conducted by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, researchers discovered discrepancies including changes in the number of study participants and inconsistent definitions of protocols and analyses. The researchers, led by Kay Dickersin, director of the Center for Clinical Trials at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, gained access to internal Pfizer reports after a lawsuit made them available. Dickersin and her colleagues compared the internal documents with 10 publications in peer-reviewed journals about randomized trials of Pfizer’s anti-epilepsy drug gabapentin (brand name Neurontin) that tested its effectiveness for treating other disorders. The results, the researchers say, suggest that the published trials were biased and misleading, even though they read as if standard protocols were followed. That lack of transparency could mean that clinicians prescribe drugs based on incomplete or incorrect information. We could see all of the biases right in front of us all at once,” says Dickersin, who was an expert witness in the suit, which was brought by a health insurer against Pfizer. Pfizer lost the case in 2010, and a judge ruled it should pay $142 million in damages for violating federal racketeering laws in promoting Neurontin for treating migraines and bipolar disorder. Pfizer had in 2004 settled a case and paid $430 million in civil fines and criminal penalties for promoting Neurontin for unapproved use. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 17735 - Posted: 01.30.2013

Alison Abbott & Quirin Schiermeier Two of the biggest awards ever made for research have gone to boosting studies of the wonder material graphene and an elaborate simulation of the brain. The winners of the European Commission’s two-year Future and Emerging Technologies ‘flagship’ competition, announced on 28 January, will receive €500 million (US$670 million) each for their planned work, which the commission hopes will help to improve the lives, health and prosperity of millions of Europeans. The Human Brain Project, a supercomputer simulation of the human brain conceived and led by neuroscientist Henry Markram at the Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology in Lausanne, scooped one of the prizes. The other winning team, led by Jari Kinaret at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, hopes to develop the potential of graphene — an ultrathin, flexible, electrically conducting form of carbon — in applications such as personal-communication technologies, energy storage and sensors. The size of the awards — matching funds raised by the participants are expected to bring each project’s budget up to €1 billion over ten years — have some researchers worrying that the flagship programme may draw resources from other research. And both winners have already faced criticism. Many neuroscientists have argued, for example, that the Human Brain Project’s approach to modelling the brain is too cumbersome to succeed (see Nature 482, 456–458; 2012). Markram is unfazed. He explains that the project will have three main thrusts. One will be to study the structure of the mouse brain, from the molecular to the cellular scale and up. Another will generate similar human data. A third will try to identify the brain wiring associated with particular behaviours. The long-term goals, Markram says, include improved diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases, and brain-inspired technology. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Robotics; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17734 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By Christof Koch Blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born. The sentiment expressed by the late Portuguese writer José Saramago in his famous novel Blindness may be appropriate for a person born unable to see. But what about the tens of millions of people worldwide who suffer from a variety of degenerative diseases that progressively rob them of their eyesight? The problem arises in the nerve cells that line the back of their eyes, their retinas. Fortunately, help is on the way to restore some of the lost vision using advanced neuroengineering. The hallmark of the two most common forms of adult-onset blindness in the West, age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, is that the photoreceptors responsible for converting the incoming rays of light into nervous energy gradually die off. Yet the roughly one million ganglion cells, whose output wires bundle up and leave the eyeball in the form of the optic nerve, remain intact. So visionary (pun intended) clinical ophthalmologists have paired up with technologists to bypass the defective parts of the retina by directly stimulating ganglion cells via advanced electronics. One of the most successful of such prosthetic devices, manufactured by a California company called Second Sight, uses a camera integrated into eyeglasses to convert images into electronic patterns. These patterns are sent to a small, 10- by six-pixel microelectrode array surgically positioned onto the retina. It stimulates neural processes that relay their information in the form of binary electrical pulses, so-called action potentials or spikes, to the brain proper. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 17733 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By Mark Fischetti Various scholars have tried to explain consciousness in long articles and books, but one neuroscience pioneer has just released an unusual video blog to get the point across. In the sharply filmed and edited production, Joseph LeDoux, a renowned expert on the emotional brain at New York University, interrogates his NYU colleague Ned Block on the nature of consciousness. Block is a professor of philosophy, psychology and neural science and is considered a leading thinker on the subject. The interview ends with a transition into a music video performed by LeDoux’s longstanding band, the Amygdaloids. The whole exercise is a bit quirky, yet it succeeds in explaining consciousness in simple, even entertaining terms. LeDoux intends to produce a series of these video blogs to explore other intriguing aspects of the mind and brain, and he is giving Scientific American the chance to post them first on our Web site. LeDoux has already interviewed Michael Gazzaniga at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on free will and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel at Columbia University on mapping the mind. The video is not a quick hit, like most on the Net these days. The interview runs about 10 minutes, followed by the four-minute music video. The idea is for viewers to sit back and actually think along with the expert as his or her explanation unfolds. Yet video producer Alexis Gambis has generated some compelling imagery to keep our visual attention as Block unwraps his subject. Gambis directs the Imagine Science Film Festival, is about to complete his graduate degree in film and has a doctorate in molecular biology. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 17732 - Posted: 01.29.2013

The offspring of promiscuous baboon males are more successful when they have contact with their father, scientists have found. A study by a team of European researchers has documented increased feeding success when foraging with adult male baboons. Paternity analyses allowed the scientists to determine whether the males were, in fact, the fathers. The findings are published in the journal Behavioural Ecology. Paternal care is uncommon in promiscuous mammals where it is not obvious which male actually is the father. Lead researcher, Dr Elise Huchard of the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology, told BBC Nature: "Caring for offspring can be costly in terms of time and energy for the parents." She explained that parental care increases the chances of offspring survival, as well as improving an individual's survival and reproductive performance later on in life. "Paternal care is usually observed in species where paternity certainty is high, [such as] in monogamous species," according to Dr Huchard. So when research suggested that juveniles benefitted from paternal input in promiscuous baboon troops, Dr Huchard and colleagues decided to perform field research on two troops of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) in Tsaobis Leopard Park, central Namibia. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17731 - Posted: 01.29.2013

by Michael Balter CAMBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM—Siberia may not be everyone's idea of a tourist destination, but it has been home to humans for tens of thousands of years. Now a new study of indigenous Siberian peoples presented here earlier this month at a meeting on human evolution reveals how natural selection helped people adapt to the frigid north. The findings also show that different living populations adapted in somewhat different ways. Siberia occupies nearly 10% of Earth's land mass, but today it's home to only about 0.5% of the world's population. This is perhaps not surprising, since January temperatures average as low as -25°C. Geneticists have sampled only a few of the region's nearly one dozen indigenous groups; some, such as the 2000-member Teleuts, descendants of a once powerful group of horse and cattle breeders also known for their skill in making leather goods, are in danger of disappearing. Previous research on cold adaptation included two Siberian populations and implicated a couple of related genes. For example, genes called UCP1 and UCP3 tend to be found in more active forms in populations that live in colder climes, according to work published in 2010 by University of Chicago geneticist Anna Di Rienzo and her colleagues. These genes help the body's fat stores directly produce heat rather than producing chemical energy for muscle movements or brain functions, a process called "nonshivering thermogenesis." The new study sampled Siberians much more intensely, including 10 groups that represent nearly all of the region's native populations. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 17730 - Posted: 01.29.2013

Voluntary movements involve the coordinated activation of two brain pathways that connect parts of deep brain structures called the basal ganglia, according to a study in mice by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The findings, which challenge the classical view of basal ganglia function, were published online in Nature on Jan. 23. “By improving our understanding of how the basal ganglia control movements, these findings could aid in the development of treatments for disorders in which these circuits are disrupted, such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and addiction,” says NIAAA Acting Director Kenneth R. Warren, Ph.D. The predominant model of basal ganglia function proposes that direct and indirect pathways originating in a brain region called the striatum have opposing effects on movement. Activity of neurons in the direct pathway is thought to promote movement, while activity in the indirect pathway is thought to inhibit movement. Newer models, however, suggest that co-activation of these pathways is necessary to synchronize basal ganglia circuits during movement. “Testing these models has been difficult due to the lack of methods to measure specific neurons in the direct and indirect pathways in freely moving animals,” explains first author Guohong Cui, Ph.D., of the NIAAA Laboratory for Integrated Neuroscience (LIN). To overcome these difficulties, Dr. Cui and colleagues devised a new approach for measuring the activity of neurons deep within the brain during complex behaviors. Their technique uses fiber optic probes implanted in the mouse brain striatum to measure light emissions from neurons engineered to glow when activated.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 17729 - Posted: 01.29.2013

When you eat could play an important role in weight loss, a new study suggests. Researchers looked at the role of meal timing in 420 men and women in southeast Spain participating in a 20-week weight-loss treatment following several studies in animals showing a relationship between the timing of feeding and weight regulation. Lunch was the main meal among the Mediterranean population studied.Lunch was the main meal among the Mediterranean population studied. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters) "Our results indicate that late eaters displayed a slower weight-loss rate and lost significantly less weight than early eaters, suggesting that the timing of large meals could be an important factor in a weight loss program," Frank Scheer, director of the medical chronobiology program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said in a release. Of the participants, 51 per cent were early eaters who ate their main meal, lunch, before 3 p.m. The other 49 per cent had lunch after three. The researchers found energy and nutrient intake, estimates of calories burned, appetite hormones and hours of sleep were similar between both groups. "Nevertheless, late eaters were more evening types, had less energetic breakfasts and skipped breakfast more frequently than early eaters," Scheer and his co-authors wrote in Tuesday's issue of the International Journal of Obesity. They suggested that new weight loss strategies should incorporate the timing of food as well as the classic look at calorie intake and distribution of carbohydrates, fats and protein. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Obesity; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 17728 - Posted: 01.29.2013

By Sandra G. Boodman Still clutching his discharge instructions from a suburban Maryland emergency room, Brian Harms struggled to make sense of what the neurosurgeon was saying. The ER staff had told Harms, admitted hours earlier, that his diagnoses were headache and vertigo and that he should go home and rest. A CT scan had found a benign cyst in his brain, but the staff didn’t convey any urgency about treating it. As the 29-year-old College Park resident was gathering his things, a neurosurgeon rushed in, telling Harms he would not be going home. “I need to get this information to you quickly,” Harms remembers the specialist telling him on the morning of Sept. 28, 2011. “You are in a lot of trouble, and you need surgery as soon as possible.” The neurosurgeon had been trying to arrange a transfer to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, but doctors were worried that he might die en route. “I highly suggest you trust me and let me do this procedure here,” Harms remembers the surgeon telling him, but the decision was his. For Harms, who had seen several doctors for headaches and other symptoms during the previous 18 months, the news was beyond shocking. “It felt like the floor dropped out beneath me,” he recalled. “I was scared witless.” Only later would Harms, a University of Maryland doctoral candidate in geochemistry, learn how lucky he was to have survived both a series of misdiagnoses and a test, performed hours before his emergency surgery, that could have killed him. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 17727 - Posted: 01.29.2013

By Lisa Flam A New Hampshire toddler who suffered a nightmarish injury when a pencil impaled her eye and became lodged in her head was saved by a remarkable turn of good fortune: The pencil that penetrated deep into her brain took a near-perfect path that left her virtually unscathed. The girl, 20-month-old Olivia Smith, survived not only the pencil’s pushing through her brain, but also its painstaking and dangerous, yet flawless removal at Boston Children’s Hospital, where the pencil was slowly pulled out by hand earlier this month. “It’s beyond belief how lucky she was,” said one of her doctors, Dr. Darren Orbach. “Her prognosis is great. I would expect her to be a normal kid at this point.” Olivia’s improbable tale began on Jan. 6, when she was coloring at home in New Boston, N.H., lost her balance and fell onto the pencil, said Orbach, chief of interventional and neurointerventional radiology at Children’s. When her mother picked her up to comfort her, she saw a small piece of the orange colored pencil sticking out from her right eye. “I thought the pencil had broken or something,” Olivia’s mother, Susie Smith, told NBC affiliate WHDH. “I thought there was no way that whole pencil was through her head.” © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17726 - Posted: 01.29.2013

By RONI CARYN RABIN Most sleeping pills are designed to knock you out for eight hours. When the Food and Drug Administration was evaluating a new short-acting pill for people to take when they wake up in the middle of the night, agency scientists wanted to know how much of the drug would still be in users’ systems come morning. Blood tests uncovered a gender gap: Men metabolized the drug, Intermezzo, faster than women. Ultimately the F.D.A. approved a 3.5 milligram pill for men, and a 1.75 milligram pill for women. The active ingredient in Intermezzo, zolpidem, is used in many other sleeping aids, including Ambien. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that the F.D.A. reduced doses of Ambien for women by half. Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects. “This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17725 - Posted: 01.29.2013

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News A controversial theory that the way we smell involves a quantum physics effect has received a boost, following experiments with human subjects. It challenges the notion that our sense of smell depends only on the shapes of molecules we sniff in the air. Instead, it suggests that the molecules' vibrations are responsible. A way to test it is with two molecules of the same shape, but with different vibrations. A report in PLOS ONE shows that humans can distinguish the two. Tantalisingly, the idea hints at quantum effects occurring in biological systems - an idea that is itself driving a new field of science, as the BBC feature article Are birds hijacking quantum physics? points out. But the theory - first put forward by Luca Turin, now of the Fleming Biomedical Research Sciences Centre in Greece - remains contested and divisive. The idea that molecules' shapes are the only link to their smell is well entrenched, but Dr Turin said there were holes in the idea. He gave the example of molecules that include sulphur and hydrogen atoms bonded together - they may take a wide range of shapes, but all of them smell of rotten eggs. "If you look from the [traditional] standpoint... it's really hard to explain," Dr Turin told BBC News. "If you look from the standpoint of an alternative theory - that what determines the smell of a molecule is the vibrations - the sulphur-hydrogen mystery becomes absolutely clear." BBC © 2013

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17724 - Posted: 01.28.2013

Mo Costandi Deterioration of a specific brain region impairs sleep quality as people age, leading to poorer memory retention, according to research published today in Nature Neuroscience1. Ageing is associated with the gradual loss of brain cells, sleep disturbances and declining memory function, but how these factors are related to each other has been unclear. Neuroscientist Bryce Mander at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues recruited 33 healthy adults — 18 around the age of 20, and 15 ranging from late sixties to late seventies — all with normal mental function, and asked them to memorize a list of word pairs. The participants were asked to recall some of the word pairs ten minutes later, then left to sleep overnight while the researchers recorded the electrical activity of their brains. The next morning, volunteers were asked to recall selected words from the list again while having their brains scanned. In keeping with earlier studies, the older adults performed less well than the younger ones on the memory test, and showed significant reductions in the slow brain waves associated with deep sleep. The extent of deep-sleep disruption was related to the degree of memory impairment, with those exhibiting the least slow-wave activity performing the worst. These differences were also associated with a reduction of grey matter in a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17723 - Posted: 01.28.2013

By ISABEL KERSHNER JERUSALEM — A brain scan performed on Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister who had a devastating stroke seven years ago and is presumed to be in a vegetative state, revealed significant brain activity in response to external stimuli, raising the chances that he is able to hear and understand, a scientist involved in the test said Sunday. Scientists showed Mr. Sharon, 84, pictures of his family, had him listen to a recording of the voice of one of his sons and used tactile stimulation to assess the extent of his brain’s response. “We were surprised that there was activity in the proper parts of the brain,” said Prof. Alon Friedman, a neuroscientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a member of the team that carried out the test. “It raises the chances that he hears and understands, but we cannot be sure. The test did not prove that.” The activity in specific regions of the brain indicated appropriate processing of the stimulations, according to a statement from Ben-Gurion University, but additional tests to assess Mr. Sharon’s level of consciousness were less conclusive. “While there were some encouraging signs, these were subtle and not as strong,” the statement added. The test was carried out last week at the Soroka University Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba using a state-of-the-art M.R.I. machine and methods recently developed by Prof. Martin M. Monti of the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Monti took part in the test, which lasted approximately two hours. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 17722 - Posted: 01.28.2013

By BRETT MICHAEL DYKES JEFFERSON, La. — “He liked to hit people,” Carlene Dempsey said flatly. “He didn’t care if he got his bell rung.” She was referring to her Falstaffian husband, Tom Dempsey, the former N.F.L. kicker born without toes on his right foot who in November 1970 — after a long night of drinking and debauchery in the French Quarter of New Orleans — set the league record for the longest field goal in a regular-season game. The 63-yard kick lifted the New Orleans Saints to a 19-17 victory over the Detroit Lions, and in the process helped transform Dempsey into a folk hero in the city hosting the Super Bowl on Sunday, the rare Saints player to hold a prominent N.F.L. record before the Sean Payton era. Now 66, Dempsey sat recently with his wife at the dining room table in the modest 1,500-square-foot home they share with their daughter, Ashley, and their grandson, Dylan, in this New Orleans suburb. It quickly became apparent that when reflecting upon his football career, Dempsey seemed to take more delight discussing the hits he had delivered than the kicks he had made. He wistfully recalled how, in high school and college, if his coaches wanted someone on the opposing team knocked out, they usually called on him to deliver a teeth-rattling hit. And his eyes twinkled with glee when he talked about how the coaches he played for over the course of his 10-year N.F.L. career with the Saints, the Eagles, the Rams, the Oilers and the Bills would sometimes call on him to be the wedge buster — football’s version of a kamikaze pilot — on kickoffs. “I would hit anybody,” Dempsey boasted, echoing the sentiment of Carlene, his wife of more than 40 years. “I didn’t care.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17721 - Posted: 01.28.2013

By Erin Wayman Photographer Bill Wallauer was following a group of chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park one March day when a young female caught his eye. She had climbed a tree, inserted a thin, peeled branch into a hole and was fishing out carpenter ants. Wallauer, of the Jane Goodall Institute, took out his video camera and filmed the chimp as she slurped up insects for several minutes. What Wallauer witnessed wasn’t supposed to happen. Though chimps in other areas use tools to collect carpenter ants, scientists studying the Kasekela chimp community at Gombe had rarely seen the behavior since Jane Goodall began her fieldwork there in 1960. Before Wallauer’s 1994 observation, researchers had seen only one other instance of the behavior, in 1978. This type of tool use was considered a fluke. But when Robert O’Malley, a primatologist now at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, went to Gombe in the late 2000s, he noticed many of the Kasekela chimps regularly fishing for ants. He wondered why, after decades with only a couple of sporadic sightings, ant probing had become a widespread habit. Because of meticulous record keeping at Gombe, O’Malley and his colleagues had a rare opportunity to reconstruct the origin of this behavior. An adult female immigrant who joined the Kasekela group in the early 1990s, the team concluded, introduced ant fishing, a common practice in her previous community. The finding, reported late last year in Current Anthropology, marks the first time in the more than 50-year history of chimp field studies that anyone has documented the transfer of a cultural tradition from one wild chimp group to another. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 17720 - Posted: 01.28.2013