By GINIA BELLAFANTE Under the category “Summer Rentals That Have Gone Terribly Wrong,” there are perhaps few parallels to the experience of Charles Henry Warren, a Manhattan banker who, in 1906, took a house in Oyster Bay on Long Island’s North Shore. By the end of the season, Mr. Warren’s young daughter had developed typhoid. She was soon followed in illness by Mr. Warren’s wife, a second daughter, two maids and a gardener. At the time, typhoid, a bacterial illness spread through contaminated food and water, was largely a disease of the urban poor. The property’s owner, George Thompson, concerned that the house, on which he relied for rental income, would become associated with tenement filth in the minds of wealthy New Yorkers, invited a sanitary engineer to determine the source of the outbreak. What the medical investigator, George Soper, discovered was that the Warrens’ cook, Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant, had left an imprint of malady in other quarters of upper-class Manhattan and its summer enclaves. Typhoid, he wrote, had erupted in every household in which Mallon had worked over the previous decade. An asymptomatic carrier of the disease, Ms. Mallon would be known to history as Typhoid Mary and spend most of the remainder of her life quarantined on North Brother Island in the East River, having failed to abide by a promise to cease working in the city’s kitchens. The events supply the narrative of “Fever,” a new novel by Mary Beth Keane, which arrives at a time when we are once again debating the parameters of public health policy’s encroachments on our behaviors. Last week, a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan used the words “arbitrary and capricious” in striking down the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to limit the size of sugary drinks (which pertained to certain sweetened beverages but not others, and some retail environments but not all). The phrase, though, could have been similarly applied a century ago to the city’s treatment of Ms. Mallon, given that officials were not in the habit of isolating other healthy carriers whom they had identified as ignoring ordinances against the spread of the disease. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17907 - Posted: 03.18.2013

By Charles Q. Choi and Txchnologist Scientists scanning the human brain can now tell whom a person is thinking of, the first time researchers have been able to identify what people are imagining from imaging technologies. Work to visualize thought is starting to pile up successes. Recently, scientists have used brain scans to decode imagery directly from the brain, such as what number people have just seen and what memory a person is recalling. They can now even reconstruct videos of what a person has watched based on their brain activity alone. Cornell University cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Spreng and his colleagues wanted to carry this research one step further by seeing if they could deduce the mental pictures of people that subjects conjure up in their heads. “We are trying to understand the physical mechanisms that allow us to have an inner world, and a part of that is how we represent other people in our mind,” Spreng says. His team first gave 19 volunteers descriptions of four imaginary people they were told were real. Each of these characters had different personalities. Half the personalities were agreeable, described as liking to cooperate with others; the other half were less agreeable, depicted as cold and aloof or having similar traits. In addition, half these characters were described as outgoing and sociable extroverts, while the others were less so, depicted as sometimes shy and inhibited. The scientists matched the genders of these characters to each volunteer and gave them popular names like Mike, Chris, Dave or Nick, or Ashley, Sarah, Nicole or Jenny. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 17906 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By Christie Aschwanden, A lawyer contacted Beatrice Golomb, a physician at the VA San Diego Healthcare Center, because he could no longer follow a normal conversation with his clients. A radiologist told Golomb that he found himself suddenly unable to distinguish left from right. A third person told her he had grown so forgetful that his doctor assumed he had Alzheimer’s. All three had developed their memory problems after taking a cholesterol-lowering statin drug, and the symptoms improved after they stopped the medication. The statin revolution began in 1987, when lovastatin was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Since then, this class of drugs has transformed cardiac medicine, says Allen Taylor, chief of cardiology at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. “Cardiovascular disease affects one in two people. This is the one drug that works.” But these drugs are not without risks. Golomb has amassed thousands of reports at her Web site Statineffects.com, detailing adverse reactions from statins. She says that cognitive problems are the second-most-common side effect reported in her database, after muscle pain. In a 2009 report in the journal Pharmacotherapy, Golomb described 171 patients who’d reported cognitive problems after taking statins. The idea that a cholesterol-lowering drug could make your brain fuzzy might sound crazy, and Golomb says the notion was greeted with suspicion at first. But eventually the FDA received enough such reports that last February it ordered drug companies to add a new warning label about possible memory problems. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17905 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By GINA KOLATA The Food and Drug Administration plans to loosen the rules for approving new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Drugs in clinical trial would qualify for approval if people at very early stages of the disease subtly improved their performance on memory or reasoning tests, even before they developed any obvious impairments. Companies would not have to show that the drugs improved daily, real-world functioning. For more than a decade, the only way to get Alzheimer’s drugs to market was with studies showing that they improved the ability of patients not only to think and remember, but also to function day to day at activities like feeding, dressing or bathing themselves. The proposal, published online Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, could help millions of people at risk of developing the disease by speeding the development and approval of drugs that might slow or prevent it. The proposed policy could also be a boon for the pharmaceutical industry and researchers. They have often felt stymied by regulations that left them uncertain of how to get drugs tested and approved for marketing to people early in the course of Alzheimer’s, when the medications are most likely to be useful. Several studies are being planned for people at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s, and the proposed regulations should lead to even more clinical trials, said Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, an Alzheimer’s researcher and professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17904 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By Scicurious I think we can all say that we prefer praise. I’d much rather be told that I was peerless and perspicacious than that I was a pathetic peripatetic. But whether we get praise or censure, as social humans we receive a lot of social feedback. People are always telling us, either directly or indirectly, how we are ‘doing’ socially, and how we are perceived. But getting that information, and what you do with it, are very different things indeed. And while we all like to think that we see our own good and bad points for what they are and take in criticism as well as praise….well, it turns out we’re a little biased in our own favor. When most studies want to look at things like social feedback or social processing, they often do fMRI studies with “games” that you play with other “people” (who aren’t real people, just a computer, but you don’t know that). But this has several disadvantages. First, you can’t rate people on various personality traits, you only know if you get socially accepted or rejected. And secondly, you can’t really get good social feedback from a computer. So to look at social feedback, the authors of this study had people meet each other in PERSON. On the first day, a group of five people who had never met before met in the lab to play an hour or so of Monopoly (hopefully if you’re only in the first hour you avoid a lot of the social rancor that I associate with my family’s Monopoly games). © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17903 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Compared with the rest of the population, people with mental illness may be at sharply increased risk of dying by homicide, a new study has found. Researchers used Swedish government registries to determine psychiatric diagnoses and causes of death among the entire adult population of 7.2 million from 2001 to 2008. There were 615 murders in the period, 141 of them of people with mental disorders. (The homicide rate in Sweden is about one-fifth that of the United States.) After controlling for age, education level, income and other factors, they found that people with mental illness were almost five times as likely to be a victim of murder as a person without a psychiatric diagnosis. The study appeared online last week in the journal BMJ. The risk was highest among those with substance use disorders — nine times that of the general population. Those with personality disorders had three times the risk, people with depression two and a half times, and those with anxiety or schizophrenia about twice the risk of being murdered, compared with people without mental illness. The lead author, Dr. Casey Crump, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, said the findings were consistent with those from smaller studies done in the United States. Interestingly, he said, “these results extended to all the most common mental disorders.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 17902 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By Jon Lieff Traditionally, we have understood the immune system and the nervous system as two distinct and unrelated entities. The former fights disease by responding to pathogens and stimulating inflammation and other responses. The latter directs sensation, movement, cognition and the functions of the internal organs. For some, therefore, the recent discovery that left-sided brain lesions correlate with an increased rate of hospital infections is difficult to understand. However, other recent research into the extremely close relationship between these two systems makes this finding comprehensible. A study, published in the March 2013 issue of Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, looked at more than 2,000 hospital patients with brain lesions from either stroke or traumatic brain injury. They looked at how many of these brain-injured patients contracted infections within 2 to 3 days of admission. Of those patients who developed infections, 60% had left-sided lesions. The authors concluded that an unknown left-sided brain/immune network might influence infections. But why would the left side of the brain affect immunity? The nervous and immune systems are quite different in their speed and mode of action. The two major immune systems, innate and adaptive, are both wireless—they communicate through cell-to-cell contact, secreted signals, and antigen-antibody reactions. The innate system is the first responder, followed by the slower adaptive response. The nervous system, on the other hand, is wired for much more rapid communication throughout the body. It turns out that the two work surprisingly closely together. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Stroke
Link ID: 17901 - Posted: 03.15.2013

by Lizzie Wade Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Earth's seas teemed with trilobites, hard-shelled critters that resembled spiny aquatic cockroaches. Because their exoskeletons lent themselves to fossilization, scientists know a lot about what the outside of their bodies looked like. Their inner workings, however, have remained mysterious. Now, a new study has revealed the structure of the trilobite eye, bringing researchers one step closer to understanding the evolution of vision. Like today's insects and crustaceans, trilobites had compound eyes, with many different lenses focusing light onto clusters of sensory cells lying below them. The resulting image was put together a lot like a picture on your computer screen, with each lens producing one "pixel" of the whole. Because the lenses themselves were made of the mineral calcite, they often fossilized along with the rest of the trilobite's tough exoskeleton. The sensory cells underneath the lenses, however, were ephemeral, and scientists had always assumed that they had decayed without a trace. So imagine Brigitte Schoenemann's surprise when she spotted fossilized versions of these delicate sensory cells while x-raying a long dead trilobite with a computed tomography (CT) scanner. "I expected that we would see [something] in the lens of trilobites, but then suddenly we saw structures of cells below the lens," recalls Schoenemann, a physiologist at the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne, both in Germany. Inspired, she applied to take more fossils to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, where she could use a particle accelerator's high energy x-rays to peer deeper into the trilobites' eyes. Now, she says, she's created images of the extinct animal's entire visual system, down to the level of fossilized individual cells. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 17900 - Posted: 03.15.2013

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

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17899 - Posted: 03.13.2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17895 - Posted: 03.12.2013

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

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17894 - Posted: 03.12.2013

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17891 - Posted: 03.12.2013

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

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17890 - Posted: 03.12.2013

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

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17889 - Posted: 03.11.2013

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

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