By Jason G. Goldman Among animal welfare professionals, those who work at zoos might have the toughest jobs. Keepers and curators at zoo must alternately serve as biologists, psychologists, trainers, chefs, janitors, and educators. Often, those hardworking individuals take on multiple roles at once. Another important job that keepers and curators perform at the zoo is that of gerontologist. Gerontology, or the study of aging, is a field that has only been formally defined for forty years, and is becoming a more important consideration for the welfare of captive animals. With the exception of animals raised in a specific breeding program who are destined for reintroduction, animals that are born in zoos will typically live out their lives, and ultimately die, in zoos. Zoos need to therefore adequately prepare to deliver proper care – both physical and psychological – for their aging residents. Providing that sort of proper veterinary care might involve making adjustments to an animal’s environment, routine, or social groupings. Those changes, while made in the service of an animal’s welfare, could nonetheless result in psychological distress. Like any health care provider, a zoo’s animal care staff has to balance the medical health requirements of their charges with their psychological well-being. Human doctors can simply ask their patients how they feel; veterinarians do not have this option. Instead, zoo researchers conduct detailed observations of their animals to determine what consequences might follow any major change in management procedures. Tigers are typically thought of as solitary creatures. In the wild, according to common knowledge, if you see two or more tigers together (and it isn’t mating season), you can bet its a mother and her cubs. However, the social systems of big cats may be more malleable than once thought. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17711 - Posted: 01.26.2013

By Stephen Ornes New babies eat, sleep, cry, poop — and listen. But their eavesdropping begins before birth and may include language lessons, says a new study. Scientists believe such early learning may help babies quickly understand their parents. Christine Moon is a psychologist at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. She led the new study, to be published in February. “It seems that there is some prenatal learning of speech sounds, but we do not yet know how much,” she told Science News. A prenatal event happens before birth. Scientists have known that about 10 weeks before birth, a fetus can hear sounds outside the womb. Those sounds include the volume and rhythm of a person’s voice. But Moon found evidence that fetuses may also be starting to learn language itself. Moon and her coworkers tested whether newborns could detect differences in vowel sounds. These sounds are the loudest in human speech. Her team reports that newborns responded one way when they heard sounds like those from their parents’ language. And the newborns responded another way when they heard sounds like those from a foreign language. This was true among U.S. and Swedish babies who listened to sounds similar to English vowels and Swedish vowels. These responses show that shortly after birth, babies can group together familiar speech sounds, Moon told Science News. © 2013 Copyright Science News for Kids

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17710 - Posted: 01.26.2013

By Stephen Ornes Newborns with a certain version of a gene are more likely to have a smaller medial temporal lobe (blue spots). This brain region is also smaller in adults with Alzheimer’s disease. People with the gene version are three times more likely to develop the disorder, which affects memory. Credit: R. Knickmeyer et al Illnesses like the memory disorder known as Alzheimer’s disease are linked to particular changes in the brain. This disease typically doesn’t show up until late in adulthood. But telltale hints that it may be coming can appear much, much earlier. Like at birth. A new study found brain differences linked to Alzheimer’s disease in newborns. These differences appear in a region called the medial temporal lobe. Basically, this part of the brain is smaller in people with Alzheimer’s than in those without the disease. That’s important because this region plays a role in making and keeping memories. The new study scanned the brains of 272 infants. Some of their brains had smaller medial temporal lobes too. Until now, researchers didn’t know when the size differences first show up. Now it’s clear that the key region of the brain can be smaller at birth, reports Rebecca Knickmeyer. She’s a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her team’s new study was published in January. © 2013 Copyright Science News for Kids

Keyword: Alzheimers; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17709 - Posted: 01.26.2013

Maternal inflammation during early pregnancy may be related to an increased risk of autism in children, according to new findings supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health. Researchers found this in children of mothers with elevated C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-established marker of systemic inflammation. The risk of autism among children in the study was increased by 43 percent among mothers with CRP levels in the top 20th percentile, and by 80 percent for maternal CRP in the top 10th percentile. The findings appear in the journal Molecular Psychiatry and add to mounting evidence that an overactive immune response can alter the development of the central nervous system in the fetus. “Elevated CRP is a signal that the body is undergoing a response to inflammation from, for example, a viral or bacterial infection,” said lead scientist on the study, Alan Brown, M.D., professor of clinical psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Mailman School of Public Health. “The higher the level of CRP in the mother, the greater the risk of autism in the child.” Brown cautioned that the results should be viewed in perspective since the prevalence of inflammation during pregnancy is substantially higher than the prevalence of autism. “The vast majority of mothers with increased CRP levels will not give birth to children with autism,” Brown said. “We don’t know enough yet to suggest routine testing of pregnant mothers for CRP for this reason alone; however, exercising precautionary measures to prevent infections during pregnancy may be of considerable value.”

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17708 - Posted: 01.26.2013

By Laura Sanders Electrodes implanted deep in the brain of a boy with severe autism have enabled him to live a more normal life. The treatment reduced his destructive behavior and allowed the formerly nonverbal boy to speak a few words, scientists report online January 21 in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The results are the first to use brain stimulation to alleviate symptoms of autism. Scientists caution that interpreting the results broadly is impossible without larger, systematic studies, but even so neurosurgeon Ali Rezai of the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus calls the boys’ gains “intriguing and promising.” Researchers have become increasingly interested in deep brain stimulation, a technique in which surgically implanted electrodes act as brain pacemakers. For the last two decades, deep brain stimulation has found use treating movement disorders such as the tremors that accompany Parkinson’s disease (SN: 4/11/09, p.11). More recently, scientists have begun experimenting with the technique to treat behavioral and mental problems, including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and severe anxiety. The boy in the study, who was 13 at the time of his experimental surgery, suffered from severe autism symptoms: He couldn’t talk or make eye contact, woke up screaming repeatedly during the night, and habitually injured himself so badly that His parents restrained him almost constantly to protect him. Multiple rounds of psychiatric drugs failed to stave off his worsening symptoms. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17707 - Posted: 01.26.2013

By Linda Carroll In just 10 years the number of children diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, rose dramatically, a large new study suggests. Overall, about 5 percent of nearly 843,000 kids ages 5 to 11 were diagnosed between 2001 and 2010 with the condition that can cause impulsive behavior and trouble concentrating. But during that time, rates of new ADHD diagnoses skyrocketed 24 percent – jumping from 2.5 percent in 2001 to 3.1 percent in 2010. That’s according to a comprehensive review of medical records for children who were covered by the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health plan. Rates rose most among minority kids during the study period, climbing nearly 70 percent overall in black children, and 60 percent among Hispanic youngsters, according the study published in JAMA Pediatrics. Among black girls, ADHD rates jumped 90 percent. Rates remained highest in white children, climbing from 4.7 percent to 5.6 percent during the study period. The biggest factor driving this increase may be the heightened awareness of ADHD among parents, teachers, and pediatricians, says the study’s lead author Dr. Darios Getahun, a scientist with Kaiser Permanente. For kids who need help, that’s a good thing, Getahun says. “The earlier a diagnosis is made, the earlier we can initiate treatment which leads to a better outcome for the child,” he says. © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17706 - Posted: 01.22.2013

The number of seizure patients in a northern Japanese fishing community devastated by the March 11, 2011 tsunami spiked in the weeks following the disaster, according to a Japanese study. The study, published in the journal Epilepsia, looked at 440 patient records from Kesennuma City Hospital, in a city that was devastated by the massive tsunami touched off by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Thirteen patients were admitted with seizures in the eight weeks after the disaster, but only one had been admitted in the two months before March 11. Previous research has linked stressful life-threatening disasters with an increased risk of seizures, but most case reports lacked clinical data with multiple patients. "We suggest that stress associated with life-threatening situations may enhance seizure generation," wrote lead author Ichiyo Shibahara, a staff neurosurgeon at Sendai Medical Center in northern Japan. But he added that stress itself is not a universal risk factor for seizures. "Most of the seizure patients had some sort of neurological disease before the earthquake," he said. His team examined medical records from patients admitted to the neurosurgery ward in the eight weeks before and after the March 11 disaster and compared them to the same time period each year between 2008 and 2010. In 2008, there were 11 seizure patients admitted between January 14 and May 15. In 2009, there were seven and in 2010, just four. © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Epilepsy; Stress
Link ID: 17705 - Posted: 01.22.2013

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News People who regularly take aspirin for many years, such as those with heart problems, are more likely to develop a form of blindness, researchers say. A study on 2,389 people, in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, showed aspirin takers had twice the risk of "wet" age-related macular degeneration. The disease damages the 'sweet spot' in the retina, obscuring details in the centre of a patient's field of vision. The researchers said there was not yet enough evidence to change aspirin use. Taking low doses of aspirin every day does reduce the risk of a stroke or heart attack in patients with cardiovascular disease. There are even suggestions it could prevent cancer. One in 10 people in the study, conducted at the University of Sydney, were taking aspirin at least once a week. On average the participants were in their mid-60s. Eye tests were performed after five, 10 and 15 years. By the end of the study, the researchers showed that 9.3% of patients taking aspirin developed wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared with 3.7% of patients who did not take aspirin. Their report said: "The increased risk of [wet] AMD was detected only after 10 or 15 years, suggesting that cumulative dosing is important. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17704 - Posted: 01.22.2013

By GINA KOLATA It has been one of the toughest problems in genetics. How do investigators figure out not just what genes are involved in causing a disease, but what turns those genes on or off? What makes one person with the genes get the disease and another not? Now, in a pathbreaking paper, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden report a way to evaluate one gene-regulation system: chemical tags that tell genes to be active or not. Their test case was of patients with rheumatoid arthritis, a crippling autoimmune disease that affects 1.5 million Americans. It was an investigation of epigenetics, a popular area of molecular biology that looks for modifications of genes that can help determine disease risk. “This is one of the first studies that looks for an epigenetic disease association in a really rigorous fashion,” said Dr. Bradley Bernstein of Harvard, who was not associated with the study. Kun Zhang of the University of California, San Diego, made a similar observation. “I am quite impressed with their level of rigor and sophistication,” he said. In previous genomic studies, researchers with papers in leading journals “have made major claims, but after a few months or a year they were retracted,” he said. Those investigators, Dr. Zhang added, “did not treat their data very carefully.” In the new study, researchers compared 354 newly diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis patients and 337 healthy people who served as controls. The goal was to review both groups’ white blood cells, examining their DNA for chemical tags — methyl groups — that could attach themselves to genes and turn them on or off. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epigenetics; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17703 - Posted: 01.22.2013

By Laura Sanders People with damage to a specific part of the brain entrusted unexpectedly large amounts of money to complete strangers. In an investment game played in the lab, three women with damage to a small part of the brain called the basolateral amygdala handed over nearly twice as much money as healthy people. These women didn’t expect to make a bunch of money back, an international team of researchers reports online the week of January 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Nor did they think the person they invested with was particularly trustworthy. When asked why they would invest so generously, the volunteers couldn’t provide an answer. The results suggest that normally, the basolateral amygdala enables selfishness — putting the squeeze on generosity. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17702 - Posted: 01.22.2013

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA Learning becomes more difficult as we age not because we have trouble absorbing new information, but because we fail to forget the old stuff, researchers say. Mice whose brains were genetically modified to resemble those of adult humans showed no decrease in the ability to make the strong synaptic connections that enable learning — a surprise to neuroscientists at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University, whose findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports. Yet as the modified mice entered adulthood, they were less capable of weakening connections that already existed, and that made it hard for them to form robust new long-term memories. Think of it as writing on a blank piece of white paper versus a newspaper page, said the lead author, Joe Z. Tsien. “The difference is not how dark the pen is,” he said, “but that the newspaper already has writing on it.” The researchers focused on two proteins — NR2A and NR2B — long known to play a role in the forging of new connections in the brain. Before puberty, the brain produces more NR2B than NR2A; in adulthood, the ratio reverses. By prodding mice to produce more NR2A than NR2B, effectively mimicking the postpubescent brain, scientists expected the subjects to have trouble forming strong connections. Instead, the mice showed no trouble creating new short-term memories, but brain scans showed that they struggled to weaken the connections that had formed older long-term memories. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 17701 - Posted: 01.22.2013

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.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17700 - Posted: 01.22.2013

By Laura Sanders Older people with hearing loss may suffer faster rates of mental decline. People who have hearing trouble suffered meaningful impairments in memory, attention and learning about three years earlier than people with normal hearing, a study published online January 21 in JAMA Internal Medicine reveals. The finding bolsters the idea that hearing loss can have serious consequences for the brain, says Patricia Tun of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., who studies aging. “I’m hoping it will be a real wake-up call in terms of realizing the importance of hearing.” Compared with other senses, hearing is often overlooked, Tun says. “We are made to interact with language and to listen to each other, and it can have damaging effects if we don’t.” Frank Lin of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and colleagues tested the hearing of 1,984 older adults. Most of the participants, who averaged 77 years old, showed some hearing loss — 1,162 volunteers had trouble hearing noises of less than 25 decibels, comparable to a whisper or rustling leaves. The volunteers’ deficits reflect the hearing loss in the general population: Over half of people older than 70 have trouble hearing. Over the next six years, these participants underwent mental evaluations that measured factors such as short-term memory, attention and the ability to quickly match numbers to symbols. Everybody got worse at the tasks as time wore on, but people with hearing loss had an especially sharp decline, the team found. On average, a substantial drop in performance would come about three years earlier to people with hearing loss. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Hearing; Alzheimers
Link ID: 17699 - Posted: 01.22.2013

by Douglas Heaven The learning difficulties that can result from premature birth may not be inevitable. That's the exciting conclusion of two independent but complementary studies. Together, the studies suggest that the relatively small cerebral cortex seen in many preterm babies contains a normal number of neurons despite its size – and that these neurons could be nurtured back to health with the right postnatal care. "For decades we thought of survivors of preterm birth as having a devastating permanent injury," says Stephen Back at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. The small cerebral cortex was widely assumed to reflect insufficient neurons in this part of the brain, perhaps because some of the cells are lost following the ischemia – reduced blood flow to brain tissue – often experienced by premature babies. Back and colleagues decided to look at the effects of ischemia on the developing cortex in more detail. To do so they used a fetal sheep brain, as this animal model has been shown to closely match the brain of human fetuses. In a "painstaking but very accurate" process, Back's team used microscopy techniques to count the number of neurons in samples taken from fetal sheep brains that had suffered induced ischemic injury and those that had not. Though the injured cortices had a smaller volume, Back's team was surprised to find that they had the same number of cells as uninjured cortices. "We counted the money and it was all there," says Back. "But the cells were all squished together." Neuron 'saplings' © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 17698 - Posted: 01.19.2013

by Jennifer Viegas The world’s largest archive of animal vocalizations and other nature sounds is now available online. This resource for students, filmmakers, scientists and curious wildlife aficionados took archivists a dozen years to assemble and make ready for the web. “In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary,” audio curator Greg Budney said in a press release, describing the milestone just achieved by the Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “This is one of the greatest research and conservation resources at the Cornell Lab,” added Budney. “And through its digitization, we’ve swung the doors open on it in a way that wasn’t possible 10 or 20 years ago.” The collection goes way back to 1929. It contains nearly 150,000 digital audio recordings equaling more than 10 terabytes of data with a total run time of 7,513 hours. About 9,000 species are represented. Many are birds, but the collection also includes sounds of whales, elephants, frogs, primates and more. “Our audio collection is the largest and the oldest in the world,” explained Macaulay Library director Mike Webster. “Now, it’s also the most accessible. We’re working to improve search functions and create tools people can use to collect recordings and upload them directly to the archive. Our goal is to make the Macaulay Library as useful as possible for the broadest audience possible.” © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 17697 - Posted: 01.19.2013

Search recordings by species: 135793 recordings found

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 17696 - Posted: 01.19.2013

US President Barack Obama waded directly into scientific politics yesterday when he announced a series of measures addressing gun violence in the wake of the 14 December shooting in a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 26 people dead — 20 of them children. Of the 23 actions he took under presidential authority on 16 January, Obama chose to highlight just a few in remarks he delivered at the White House. One of them was a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public-health service agencies to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it”. An accompanying White House document added: The CDC will start immediately by assessing existing strategies for preventing gun violence and identifying the most pressing research questions, with the greatest potential public health impact. And the Administration is calling on Congress to provide $10 million for the CDC to conduct further research, including investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence. The presidential move is a direct challenge to gun-rights proponents in Congress, who since 1996 have used prohibitions written into funding bills to muzzle CDC research on gun violence, as Nature noted in an August 2012 editorial (see ‘Who calls the shots?’). Congress also last year began forbidding the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to spend any money, “in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 17695 - Posted: 01.19.2013

Jordan Heller The note, which threatened to kidnap O'Leary and went on to reference myriad tortures including dismemberment, disembowelment, Drano and napalm, was published on Negotiation Is Over (NIO), a website that acts as a one-stop shop for animal rights extremists looking to gather intelligence on potential targets. In addition to labeling O'Leary—a professor at Detroit's Wayne State University whose studies on congestive heart failure involve experiments on rodents and occasionally dogs—a sadistic animal torturer, it published his photo and home address. In an email to O'Leary alerting him of the post, Camille Marino, who until last month ran NIO out of her home in Wildwood, Fla., told the professor that some of her "associates" would be paying him a visit to take pictures of his home. "Then you can join ‘NIO's most wanted,'" she wrote. "I hope you die a slow and painful death." Arson, Cracked Testicles, and Internet Death Threats: How Animal Rights Extremists Are Learning From the People Who Murdered George TillerAnimal right activist Camille Marino, who has done stints as an investment banker and law student, was convicted last year of repeatedly threatening a medical researcher. In December, a Michigan judge sentenced Marino, 48, to six months in prison and three years probation for charges related to her off- and online stalking of O'Leary, who at trial called Marino a "clearly disturbed individual, who was threatening me personally, threatening my children, threatening my home."

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 17694 - Posted: 01.19.2013

Ewen Callaway Even as home experiments go, Hopi Hoekstra’s one was peculiar: she built a giant plywood box in her garage in San Diego, California, filled it with more than a tonne of soil and then let a pet mouse dig away. “This thing was bursting at its seams and held together with duct tape,” says the evolutionary biologist, now at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “But it worked.” It allowed her to study the genetics of burrowing behaviour in a controlled setting. Armed with plastic casts of the burrows and state-of-the-art sequencing, Hoekstra’s team discovered clusters of genes that partly explain why the oldfield mouse (Peromyscus polionotus) builds elaborate two-tunnel burrows, whereas its close relative, the deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus), goes for a simple hole in the ground1. The findings highlight an underappreciated benefit of a genomics revolution that is moving at breakneck speed. Thanks to cheap and quick DNA sequencing, scientists interested in the genetics of behaviour need not limit themselves to a handful of favourite lab organisms. Instead, they can probe the genetic underpinnings of behaviours observed in the wild, and glean insights into how they evolved. “In my mind, the link between genes and behaviour in natural populations and organisms is the next great frontier in biology,” says Hoekstra. Oldfield mice are native to the southeastern United States, where they burrow in soils ranging from sandy beaches to silt-rich clays. Wherever they dig, their holes look much the same, with a long entrance tunnel and a second tunnel that stops short of the surface and allows them to escape predators. Such invariability hints that the trait is encoded in DNA, says Hoekstra. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17693 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Ashutosh Jogalekar G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) are the messengers of the human body, key proteins whose ubiquitous importance was validated by the 2012 Nobel Prize in chemistry. As I mentioned in a post written after the announcement of the prize, GPCRs are involved in virtually every physiological process you can think of, from sensing colors, flavors and smells to the action of neurotransmitters and hormones. In addition they are of enormous commercial importance, with something like 30% of marketed drugs binding to these proteins and regulating their function. These drugs include everything from antidepressants to blood-pressure lowering medications. But GPCRs are also notoriously hard to study. They are hard to isolate from their protective lipid cell membrane, hard to crystallize and hard to coax into giving up their molecular secrets. One reason the Nobel Prize was awarded was because the two researchers – Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka – perfected techniques to isolate, stabilize, crystallize and study these complex proteins. But there’s still a long way to go. There are almost 800 GPCRs, out of which ‘only’ 16 have been crystallized during the past decade or so. In addition all the studied GPCRs are from the so-called Class A family. There’s still five classes left to decipher, and these contain many important receptors including the ones involved in smell. Clearly it’s going to be a long time before we can get a handle on the majority of these important proteins. Fortunately there’s something important that GPCR researchers have realized; it’s the fact that many of these GPCRs have amino acid sequences that are similar. If you know what experimental conditions work for one protein, perhaps you can use the same conditions for another similar GPCR. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17692 - Posted: 01.17.2013