By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Konzo, a disease that comes from eating bitter cassava that has not been prepared properly — that is, soaked for days to break down its natural cyanide — has long been known to cripple children. The name, from the Yaka language of Central Africa, means “tied legs,” and victims stumble as if their knees were bound together. Now researchers have found that children who live where konzo is common but have no obvious physical symptoms may still have mental deficits from the illness. Cassava, also called manioc or tapioca, is eaten by 800 million people around the world and is a staple in Africa, where bitter varieties grow well even in arid regions. When properly soaked and dried, and especially when people have protein in their diet, bitter cassava is “pretty safe,” said Michael J. Boivin, a Michigan State psychiatry professor and lead author of a study published online by Pediatrics. “But in times of war, famine, displacement and hardship, people take shortcuts.” In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr. Boivin and colleagues gave tests of mental acuity and dexterity to three groups of children. Two groups were from a village near the Angolan border with regular konzo outbreaks: Half had leg problems; half did not but had cyanide in their urine. The third was from a village 125 miles away with a similar diet but little konzo because residents routinely detoxified cassava before cooking it. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Intelligence
Link ID: 18067 - Posted: 04.24.2013

By R. Douglas Fields Scientists have speculated that it is a mild manifestation of pain or perhaps a malfunction of overly sensitive nerve endings stuck in a feedback loop. They have even wondered whether itching is mostly psychological (just think about bed bugs for a minute). Now a study rules out these possibilities by succeeding where past attempts have failed: a group of neuroscientists have finally isolated a unique type of nerve cell that makes us itch and only itch. In previous research, neuroscientists Liang Han and Xinzhong Dong of Johns Hopkins University and their colleagues determined that some sensory neurons with nerve endings in the skin have a unique protein receptor on them called MrgprA3. They observed under a microscope that chemicals known to create itching caused these neurons to generate electrical signals but that painful stimuli such as hot water or capsaicin, the potent substance in hot peppers, did not. In the new study published in Nature Neuroscience, the researchers used genetic engineering to selectively kill the entire population of MrgprA3 neurons in mice while leaving all the other sensory neurons intact. These mice no longer scratched themselves when exposed to itchy substances or allergens, but they showed no changes at all in responding to touch or pain-producing stimulation. The mice's behavior confirms that MrgprA3-containing neurons are essential for itch, but it does not rule out the possibility that these cells might respond to other sensations as well. To find out, the neuroscientists engineered a receptor that responds to capsaicin injected into the MrgprA3 neurons, in a type of mouse that lacks the capsaicin receptor in all its other cells. Now the only neurons that would be stimulated by capsaicin were the MrgprA3 neurons. If these cells are indeed itch-specific, injecting capsaicin into a tiny spot on the mouse's skin should make the rodent scratch instead of wincing in pain—which is exactly what happened. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18066 - Posted: 04.24.2013

By Scicurious Generally, I don’t think of being tickled as a particularly pleasurable or calming activity. Most people who are ticklish go immediately on the defensive and tense up, and I always got the impression that most people prefer NOT to be tickled rather than otherwise. However, that’s just us. And we’re not rats. And it turns out, you can calm a rat with tickling. Life is stressful. Whether it’s running from predators, meeting tight deadlines, or trying to keep fed, there’s a lot that seems to bring us down. What saves us from tearing our hair out? Well, the happy things in life. Tasty food, friends, hugs, puppies. You know, the good stuff. These things elicit positive feeling, and positive feeling have been linked to protecting us from stress. Of course, in humans, it’s easy to say that a positive outlook on life makes someone resistant to stress…but is it really true? They may co-occur, but do positive feelings really decrease stress? If you want to get at causes, one of the best ways is to use an animal model. But how do you come up with an animal model for…happiness? Well, you can tickle rats. As you can see in the video above, rats like to be tickled. They even respond with “laughter”! Of course, it’s not laughter as we know it, or even something we can hear. Instead, these are ultrasonic vocalizations at a specific frequency (50 kilohertz). Scientists figured they must be pleasure-sounds because rats make them when they play with other rats. And it turns out that rats make the same noise at the same frequency when they get tickled! © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 18065 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA A cautiously worded study based on data collected in Sweden has found that “in utero exposure to both selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (S.S.R.I.’s) and nonselective monoamine reuptake inhibitors (tricyclic antidepressants) was associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders, particularly without intellectual disability.” The Swedish medical birth register (which contains data on current drug use reported by mothers early in their pregnancies), along with a system of publicly funded screenings for autism spectrum disorders and extensive national and regional registers of various health issues, make a detailed, population-based case-control study possible — one that controls for other variables like family income, parent educational level, maternal and paternal age and even maternal region of birth (all factors the authors note have been previously associated with autism). This is the second study in two years to associate antidepressant use during pregnancy with an increased incidence of autism in exposed children. An earlier, smaller study in California also found a modest increase in risk. The Sweden-based study could not (and did not) exclude the possibility that it was the severe depression, rather than the use of antidepressants, that created the association, but the smaller California study (which considered only S.S.R.I.’s) found “no increase in risk” for mothers with a history of mental health treatment in the absence of prenatal exposure to S.S.R.I.’s. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Depression
Link ID: 18064 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By GREGORY COWLES When John Elder Robison was teaching his young son, Cubby, the finer points of etiquette almost two decades ago, he noted that in addition to “please” and “thank you,” it’s nice to include a salutation while making a request. “For example,” he said, “if you wanted me to get you milk, you could say: ‘Please, wondrous Dada, may I have some milk?’ ” The salutation never caught with Cubby. But by the last page of Mr. Robison’s engaging new memoir, readers may have no problem hailing the author that way. Part parenting guide, part courtroom drama, part catalog of the travails and surprising joys of life with the high-functioning form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome, this memoir will offer all parents — but particularly fathers — a lot to think about. That its author was almost 40 when he learned he had Asperger’s (a discovery he described in his first memoir, “Look Me in the Eye”), and that he eventually learned his son had the condition as well, make their story more remarkable, but do nothing to diminish its relevance even for readers with no personal experience of autism. Indeed, it can be hard to pinpoint what in the Robisons’ relationship is shaped by Asperger’s and what stems from their own idiosyncratic personalities. Cubby’s name, for instance: Mr. Robison tells us that when his wife (now ex) was pregnant, “I sensed that the best names were not in books at all. For example, if we ended up with a girl, I favored naming her Thugwena, because I knew a girl named Thugwena would be tough and not hassled by bullies.” For boys he liked Thugwald, or else “functional choices” like Kid or Boy. Is this an example of his deadpan humor, in evidence throughout, or is it his Asperger’s blinding him to how others might perceive his actions? Just when you conclude that his tongue is firmly in his cheek, he drops a passing reference to the family cat, Small Animal. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 18063 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Canadian doctors say they have found an inventive way to treat lazy eye - playing the Tetris video game. The McGill University team discovered the popular tile-matching puzzle could train both eyes to work together. In a small study, in Current Biology with 18 adults, it worked better than conventional patching of the good eye to make the weak one work harder. The researchers now want to test if it would be a good way to treat children with the same condition. UK studies are already under way. An estimated one in 50 children has lazy eye, known medically as amblyopia. It happens when the vision in one eye does not develop properly, and is often accompanied by a squint - where the eyes do not look in the same direction. Without treatment it can lead to a permanent loss of vision in the weak eye, which is why doctors try to intervene early. Normally, the treatment is to cover the strong eye with a patch so that the child is forced to use their lazy eye. The child must wear the patch for much of the day over many months, which can be frustrating and unpleasant. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18062 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By ABBY ELLIN Marvin Tolkin was 83 when he decided that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living. Until then, it had never occurred to him that there might be emotional “issues” he wanted to explore with a counselor. “I don’t think I ever needed therapy,” said Mr. Tolkin, a retired manufacturer of women’s undergarments who lives in Manhattan and Hewlett Harbor, N.Y. Though he wasn’t clinically depressed, Mr. Tolkin did suffer from migraines and “struggled through a lot of things in my life” — the demise of a long-term business partnership, the sudden death of his first wife 18 years ago. He worried about his children and grandchildren, and his relationship with his current wife, Carole. “When I hit my 80s I thought, ‘The hell with this.’ I don’t know how long I’m going to live, I want to make it easier,” said Mr. Tolkin, now 86. “Everybody needs help, and everybody makes mistakes. I needed to reach outside my own capabilities.” So Mr. Tolkin began seeing Dr. Robert C. Abrams, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. They meet once a month for 45 minutes, exploring the problems that were weighing on Mr. Tolkin. “Dr. Abrams is giving me a perspective that I didn’t think about,” he said. “It’s been making the transition of living at this age in relation to my family very doable and very livable.” Mr. Tolkin is one of many seniors who are seeking psychological help late in life. Most never set foot near an analyst’s couch in their younger years. But now, as people are living longer, and the stigma of psychological counseling has diminished, they are recognizing that their golden years might be easier if they alleviate the problems they have been carrying around for decades. It also helps that Medicare pays for psychiatric assessments and therapy. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Depression
Link ID: 18061 - Posted: 04.23.2013

Nathan J. Winograd People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals -- indeed their "ethical treatment." Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA's front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority -- 96 percent in 2011 -- exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA's victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals. Most animal lovers find this hard to believe. But seeing is believing. And if it is true that a picture speaks a thousand words, the following images speak volumes about who and what PETA really stands for. The PETA headquarters is on the aptly named Front Street. While claiming to be an animal rights organization, PETA does not believe animals have a right to live. Instead, it believes that people have a right to kill them, as long as the killing is done "humanely," which PETA interprets to mean poisoning them with an overdose of barbiturates, even if the animals are not suffering. In 2012, 733 dogs entered this building. They killed 602 of them. Only 12 were adopted. Also in 2012, they impounded 1,110 cats. 1,045 were put to death. Seven of them were adopted. They also took in 34 other companion animals, such as rabbits, of which 28 were put to death. Only four were adopted. © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18060 - Posted: 04.23.2013

Alison Abbott Activists occupied an animal facility at the University of Milan, Italy, at the weekend, releasing mice and rabbits and mixing up cage labels to confuse experimental protocols. Researchers at the university say that it will take years to recover their work. Many of the animals at the facility are genetic models for psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. No arrests have been made following the 12-hour drama, which took place on Saturday, although the university says that it will press charges against the protesters. The activists took some of the animals and were told during negotiations that they would be permitted to come back later and take more. The attack was staged by the animal-rights group that calls itself Fermare Green Hill (or Stop Green Hill), in reference to the Green Hill dog-breeding facility near Brescia, Italy, which it targets for closure. Five activists entered laboratories in the university’s pharmacology department on Saturday morning. The lack of signs of a break-in suggests that the activists may have used an illegally acquired electronic card, says pharmacologist Francesca Guidobono-Cavalchini, who works there. They prised open the reinforced doors of the facility on the fourth floor, and two of them chained themselves by the neck to the main double doors such that any attempt to open the doors could have endangered their lives. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18059 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Breanna Draxler When you lose something important—a child, your wallet, the keys—your brain kicks into overdrive to find the missing object. But that’s not just a matter of extra concentration. Researchers have found that in these intense search situations your brain actually rallies extra visual processing troops (and even some other non-visual parts of the brain) to get the job done. It has to do with the way your brain processes images in the first place. When you see objects, your brain sorts them into broad categories—about 1,000 of them. The various elements we perceive trigger a pattern of different categorical areas in our brains. For example, if you see a woman carrying an umbrella while walking her dog in the park, your brain might catalog it as “people,” “tools” and “animals.” But when you lose something, your brain reacts a little differently. It expands the category of the object you’re looking for to include related categories and turns down the perception of other, non-related categories, to allow you to focus more intently on the object of interest. To see what this altered categorization looked like during a search, researchers at UC Berkeley used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record changes in five people’s brain activity as they looked for objects in movies. The objects they sought were categorized broadly, paralleling how our brains separate items into generalized groups like “vehicles” and “people.” During hour-long search sessions, the researchers found that regardless of whether the participants found the objects they were looking for, their brains cast a wider visual net than they would if they were watching passively.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 18058 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Kate Wong Odds are you carry DNA from a Neandertal, Denisovan or some other archaic human. Just a few years ago such a statement would have been virtually unthinkable. For decades evidence from genetics seemed to support the theory that anatomically modern humans arose as a new species in a single locale in Africa and subsequently spread out from there, replacing archaic humans throughout the Old World without mating with them. But in recent years geneticists have determined that, contrary to that conventional view, anatomically modern Homo sapiens did in fact interbreed with archaic humans, and that their DNA persists in people today. In the May issue of Scientific American, Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson examines the latest genetic findings and explores the possibility that DNA from these extinct relatives helped H. sapiens become the wildly successful species it is today. As Scientific American’s anthropology editor, I have an enduring interest in the rise of H. sapiens; and as longtime readers of this blog may know, I’m fascinated (you might even say obsessed) with Neandertals. So naturally I’ve been keen to find out how much, if any, Neandertal DNA I have in my own genome. Several consumer genetic testing companies now test for Neandertal genetic markers as part of their broader ancestry analysis, and after 23andMe lowered the price of their kit to $99 in December, I decided to take the plunge. As it happens, National Geographic’s Genographic Project had recently updated their own genetic test to look for Neandertal DNA, and they sent me a kit (retail price: $299) for editorial review, much as publishers do with new books. And so it was on a chilly Saturday in late January that I found myself spitting into a test tube for 23andMe and swabbing my cheek for the Genographic Project. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18057 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Shaunacy Ferro When David Nichols earned a Ph.D in medicinal chemistry from the University of Iowa in 1973 by studying psychedelics, he thought he would continue studying hallucinogens indefinitely. "I thought I would work on it for the rest of my life," he says. His timing was less than fortuitous. In 1970, the year after Nichols started grad school, Richard Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act, designed to clamp down on the manufacture and distribution of drugs in the U.S. The act classified hallucinogenic substances like LSD, DMT, psilocybin (the psychedelic alkaloid in mushrooms) and mescaline as Schedule I substances--the most restrictive use category, reserved for drugs with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Marijuana was also placed in this category, and 15 years later when ecstasy came onto the scene, MDMA was emergency-classified as a Schedule I substance as well. By contrast, cocaine, opium and morphine are Schedule II substances, meaning they can be prescribed by a doctor. Despite some promising results from trials of psychedelics in treating alcoholism, psychiatric conditions and modeling mental illness, by the early '70s, the government had tightened control of Schedule I substances, even for research. It's only now that we're starting to return to the notion that these drugs could be medicine. © 2012 Popular Science

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 18056 - Posted: 04.22.2013

By ELIZABETH WEIL According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, you have a happiness set point. It’s partly encoded in your genes. If something good happens, your sense of happiness rises; if something bad happens, it falls. But either way, before too long, your mood will creep back to its set point because of a really powerful and perverse phenomenon referred to in science as “hedonic adaptation.” You know, people get used to things. With her 2007 book, “The How of Happiness,” and this year’s follow-up, “The Myths of Happiness,” Dr. Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, caused ripples in her field but also drew a wider audience, cementing her place in a long chain of happiness-industry stalwarts, from M. Scott Peck with “The Road Less Traveled” to Martin E. P. Seligman and “Learned Optimism” to Daniel Gilbert and his best-selling “Stumbling on Happiness.” Dr. Lyubomirsky’s findings can be provocative and, at times, counterintuitive. Renters are happier than homeowners, she says. Interrupting positive experiences makes them more enjoyable. Acts of kindness make people feel happier, but not if you are compelled to perform the same act too frequently. (Bring your lover breakfast in bed one day, and it feels great. Bring it every day, and it feels like a chore.) Dr. Lyubomirsky — 46, Russian and expecting to give birth to her fourth child this weekend — is an unlikely mood guru. “I really hate all the smiley faces and rainbows and kittens,” she said in her office. She doesn’t often count her blessings or write gratitude letters, both of which she thinks sound hokey even though her research suggests they make people happier. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 18055 - Posted: 04.22.2013

By PAULA SPAN It was supposed to be a short stay. In 2006, Roger Anderson was to undergo surgery to relieve a painfully compressed spinal disk. His wife, Karen, figured the staff at the hospital, in Portland, Ore., would understand how to care for someone with Parkinson’s disease. It can be difficult. Parkinson’s patients like Mr. Anderson, for example, must take medications at precise intervals to replace the brain chemical dopamine, which is diminished by the disease. “You don’t have much of a window,” Mrs. Anderson said. “If you have to wait an hour, you have tremendous problems.” Without these medications, people may “freeze” and be unable to move, or develop uncontrolled movements called dyskinesia, and are prone to falls. But the nurses at the Portland hospital didn’t seem to grasp those imperatives. “You’d have to wait half an hour or an hour, and that’s not how it works for Parkinson’s patients,” Mrs. Anderson said. Nor did hospital rules, at the time, permit her to simply give her husband the Sinemet pills on her own. Surgery and anesthesia, the disrupted medications, an incision that subsequently became infected — all contributed to a tailspin that lasted nearly three months. Mr. Anderson developed delirium, rotated between rehab centers and hospitals, took a fall, lost 60 pounds. “People were telling me, ‘He’s never going to come home,’” Mrs. Anderson said. He did recover, and at 69 is doing well, his wife said, though his disease has progressed. But his wasn’t an unusual story, neurologists say. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18054 - Posted: 04.22.2013

by Scicurious Mmmmm beer! Just a sip is enough to prime the brain's dopamine addiction circuits, if reports of a new study are to be believed. Photograph: Johnny Green/PA It's been a long day at work, followed by a long workout. I'm tired, and all I really want is to relax with a beer. I grab one out of the fridge and take a sip. I feel better already. A new study tells us that this is due to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in things like motivation and reward. Drugs of abuse, such as cocaine, increase dopamine levels in areas of the brain associated with the expectation of reward, such as the ventral striatum, and this increase is part of what makes them feel so good, and do so bad. But dopamine can also signal the expectation of something that might be rewarding. This means that as we learn that some things are rewarding, like, say, beer, we begin to respond, not only to the alcohol, but to the cues that alcohol is coming: to the beer bottles, the glass, or the taste. And taste is what this study looked at. The authors took 49 male beer drinkers and divided them up into three groups: those with a family history of alcoholism, those without, and those who didn't know. They used positron emission tomography (PET) to examine how the dopamine in their brains responded to a taste of beer. The big effect? The mere taste of your favourite beer (15 millilitres – not enough to get any effects of the alcohol) produces an increase in dopamine in the ventral striatum, as well as an increased desire to … drink more beer. This suggests that a cue (the taste) produces a sign of reward expectation long before the alcohol hits your system. And the effect of the taste of beer on dopamine in the ventral striatum was larger in people who had a family history of alcohol abuse. What's not to love! It's beer! It's dopamine! It's brain scans! Of course the media got excited. © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18053 - Posted: 04.20.2013

Jo Marchant People with genes that make it tough for them to engage socially with others seem to be better than average at hypnotizing themselves. A study published today in Psychoneuroendocrinology1 concludes that such individuals are particularly good at becoming absorbed in their own internal world, and might also be more susceptible to other distortions of reality. Psychologist Richard Bryant of the University of New South Wales in Sydney and his colleagues tested the hypnotizability of volunteers with different forms of the receptor for oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust and social bonding. (Oxytocin's association with emotional attachment also earned it the nickname of 'love hormone'.) Those with gene variants linked to social detachment and autism were found to be most susceptible to hypnosis. Hypnosis has intrigued scientists since the nineteenth-century physician James Braid used it to alleviate pain in a variety of medical conditions, but it has never been fully understood. Hypnotized people can undergo a range of unusual experiences, including amnesia, anaesthesia and the loss of the ability to move their limbs. But some individuals are more affected by hypnosis than others — and no one knows why. Hormones and hypnotism How susceptible someone is to persuasion is an important factor in how easily they can be hypnotized by someone else. Bryant and his colleagues have previously shown that spraying a shot of oxytocin up people’s noses makes them more hypnotizable, and more likely to engage in potentially embarrassing activities such as swearing or dancing at a hypnotist’s suggestion. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 18052 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By Susan Milius Zola the crow is about to face a test that has baffled animals from canaries to dogs. She’s a wild New Caledonian crow, and for the first time, she’s seeing a tidbit of meat dangling on a long string tied to a stick. She perches on the stick, bends down, grabs the string with her beak and pulls. But the string is too long. The meat still hangs out of reach. In similar tests, dogs, pigeons and many other species routinely falter. Some nibble at the string or keep tugging and dropping the same segment. Some pull at a string that’s not connected to food just as readily as a string that is. Eventually many get the hang of reeling in the tidbit, but they seem to learn by trial and error. Zola, however, does not fumble. On her first attempt, she anchors the first length of string by stepping on it and immediately bends down again for the next segment. With several more pulls and steps, Zola reels in the treat. Watching the crow, says Russell Gray, one of the researchers behind the string-pulling experiment, “people say, ‘Wow, it had a flash of insight.’ ” At first glance it seems Zola mentally worked through the problem as a human might, devising a solution in an aha moment. But Gray, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has had enough of such supposed animal geniuses. Asking whether the crow solves problems in the same way a human would isn’t a useful question, he says. He warns of a roller coaster that scientists and animal lovers alike can get stuck on: first getting excited and romanticizing a clever animal’s accomplishments, then crashing into disappointment when some killjoy comes up with a mundane explanation that’s not humanlike at all. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 18051 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By STEPHEN CASTLE LONDON — British antitrust authorities on Friday accused the pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline of paying three rivals to delay the introduction of a generic version of an antidepressant drug. It is the latest so-called pay-for-delay case drawing scrutiny from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. The Office of Fair Trading in Britain contended that Glaxo had abused its dominant position in the market, kept prices artificially high and denied “significant cost savings” to Britain’s state-run health provider, the National Health Service. The British case centers on efforts by three companies, Alpharma, Generics (U.K.) and Norton Healthcare, to market an alternative to Seroxat, GlaxoSmithKline’s brand of paroxetine. The company sells it in the United States under the brand name Paxil. In recent years, regulators in Europe and the United States have paid greater attention to pay-for-delay deals, suspecting that they may allow pharmaceutical companies to make big profits by exploiting a brief but lucrative period of monopoly over the supply of a product. “These are blockbuster drugs,” said Farasat Bokhari, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of East Anglia, “so if they are on the market without generics challenging them then companies can maintain high, monopoly profits. “As soon as generic entry takes place,” Mr. Bokhari added, “prices drop significantly, sometimes by up to 70 to 80 percent.” GlaxoSmithKline, according to British authorities, warned the three companies that their generic equivalents would infringe a patent. To resolve the dispute, each of the rivals concluded one or more agreements with GlaxoSmithKline, the Office of Fair Trading said. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 18050 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By Emily Chung, CBC News Having a stressed-out mom may give baby squirrels a competitive edge, a new study suggests. Red squirrels who were stressed out during pregnancy had babies that out-competed their peers by growing significantly faster without any extra food, reported the study, published online in Science Express. "What that suggests is that they're first able to predict what sort of environment their offspring will encounter… and they're preparing them for what their offspring are going to face," said Ben Dantzer, lead author of the study he worked on while he was a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University under the supervision of Guelph University biologist Andrew McAdam. Further investigation uncovered a link between faster growth among the baby squirrels and higher levels of stress hormones in their mothers during the pregnancies. That link may explain how environmental conditions cue the animals to respond and adapt. Canadian researchers, including Stan Boutin at the University of Alberta, Murray Humphreys at McGill University in Montreal and McAdam at the University of Guelph, had been studying red squirrels near Kluane Lake, Yukon, for 22 years to find out how they are affected by changes in resources such as food over time. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18049 - Posted: 04.20.2013

by Dennis Normile A human mother rocking a baby in her arms and a cat carrying her kitten by the scruff of its neck have the same physiological effect on both young animals and probably stem from the same maternal instinct to protect their young. That's the conclusion of a new study, which for the first time has compared the physiological impact of maternal carrying behaviors across species. The findings may lead to better parenting techniques for people and possibly to new ways to detect developmental disorders early in life. It's "really fascinating" work, says Oliver Bosch, a neurobiologist at the University of Regensburg in Germany, who was not involved in the research. "No one has looked at [this aspect] of maternal behavior in such detail." Japanese neuroscientist Kumi Kuroda began the study in her own home. She noticed that carrying her newborn baby boy while walking had a rapid calming effect on him. Back in her lab at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, near Tokyo, she found that picking up mouse pups by the scruff of the neck makes them passive and easy to handle. Kuroda wondered if the same physiological processes were driving both behaviors. She and colleagues recorded pulse rates and observed the crying and squirming behavior of 12 infants, 1 to 6 months old, as each was left alone in a crib, held by its mother sitting in a chair, and carried as the mother walked around. In various durations and combinations of the three conditions, they found that the carried babies cried and squirmed the least and had the lowest pulse rates. Those left in the crib were the fussiest; holding the baby while sitting produced in-between results. What was particularly surprising, Kuroda says, was that when a mother started walking, the infant's pulse dropped, and the crying and squirming stopped within 2 to 3 seconds, not over several minutes. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18048 - Posted: 04.20.2013