By PAUL CHRISTOPHER, M.D. “I’m addicted to painkillers,” J., a thickset construction worker, told me on a recent afternoon in the emergency room, his wife at his side. Two years before, after months of pain, stiffness and swelling in his hands and neck, his primary physician had diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis and had prescribed three medications: two to slow the disease and one, oxycodone, for pain. Bolstered by the painkiller, J. had felt more limber and energetic than he had in years. “I could finally keep up with the other guys,” he told me. He worked harder, and his pain worsened. His primary physician increased the oxycodone dose. Soon, J. was looking forward more to the buzz than to the relief the pills brought. He went to see two other physicians who, unaware that he was double-dipping, prescribed similar medications. When a co-worker offered to sell him painkillers directly, J.’s use spiraled out of control. By the time I saw him, he was taking dozens of pills a day, often crushing and snorting them to speed the onset of his high. With remarkable candor, he described how the drugs had marred every facet of his life — from days of missed work to increasing debt, deteriorating health and marital strain. But when I listed the treatment options that might help, J. shook his head, looked from me to his wife, and got up. “I’m all set,” he said, holding up his hands. Then he walked out of the room. Despair fell on his wife’s face. “Please,” she said, grabbing my arm, “you can’t let him leave.” Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 17327 - Posted: 10.03.2012

By Jennifer Viegas Bats may have more in common with the fictional Batman than previously believed, since both successfully combine work with courting sexy potential mates -- a lot of them. A new study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals that bat echolocation calls, primarily used for orientation and foraging, also contain information about sex, which helps the flying mammals to acquire and keep mates. The info is especially helpful to certain male bats with harems of adoring females that are actually huskier than the males. This holds true for the greater sac-winged bat (Saccopteryx bilineata), which was the focus of the study. Lead author Mirjam Knörnschild told Discovery News that "male S. bilineata court females whenever the opportunity arises. The social information in echolocation calls about the sex of the calling bat benefits listening harem males because they can distinguish between females and male rivals. It might also benefit calling females because they are greeted friendly." athletes Knörnschild, a researcher at the University of Ulm's Institute of Experimental Ecology, and her team analyzed greater sac-winged bat echolocation calls. The scientists discovered that the calls contain "pronounced vocal signatures encoding sex and individual identity." This can include species identity, age, sex, group affiliation, and other more specific information about the individual. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 17326 - Posted: 10.03.2012

By Ferris Jabr In the 1970s biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues began preserving tiny hermaphroditic roundworms known as Caenorhabditis elegans in agar and osmium fixative, slicing up their bodies like pepperoni and photographing their cells through a powerful electron microscope. The goal was to create a wiring diagram—a map of all 302 neurons in the C. elegans nervous system as well as all the 7,000 connections, or synapses, between those neurons. In 1986 the scientists published a near complete draft of the diagram. More than 20 years later, Dmitri Chklovskii of Janelia Farm Research Campus and his collaborators published an even more comprehensive version. Today, scientists call such diagrams "connectomes." So far, C. elegans is the only organism that boasts a complete connectome. Researchers are also working on connectomes for the fruit fly nervous system and the mouse brain. In recent years some neuroscientists have proposed creating a connectome for the entire human brain—or at least big chunks of it. Perhaps the most famous proponent of connectomics is Sebastian Seung of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose impressive credentials, TED talk, popular book, charisma and distinctive fashion sense (he is known to wear gold sneakers) have made him a veritable neuroscience rock star. Other neuroscientists think that connectomics at such a large scale—the human brain contains around 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses—is not the best use of limited resources. It would take far too long to produce such a massive map, they argue, and, even if we had one, we would not really know how to interpret it. To bolster their argument, some critics point out that the C. elegans connectome has not provided many insights into the worm's behavior. In a debate* with Seung at Columbia University earlier this year, Anthony Movshon of New York University said, "I think it's fair to say…that our understanding of the worm has not been materially enhanced by having that connectome available to us. We don't have a comprehensive model of how the worm's nervous system actually produces the behaviors. What we have is a sort of a bed on which we can build experiments—and many people have built many elegant experiments on that bed. But that connectome by itself has not explained anything." © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17325 - Posted: 10.03.2012

by Elizabeth Norton Baboons, like people, really do get by with a little help from their friends. Humans with strong social ties live longer, healthier lives, whereas hostility and "loner" tendencies can set the stage for disease and early death. In animals, too, strong social networks contribute to longer lives and healthier offspring—and now it seems that personality may be just as big a factor in other primates' longevity status. A new study found that female baboons that had the most stable relationships with other females weren't always the highest up in the dominance hierarchy or the ones with close kin around—but they were the nicest. Scientists are increasingly seeing personality as a key factor in an animal's ability to survive, adapt, and thrive in its environment. But this topic isn't an easy one to study scientifically, says primatologist Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania. "Research in mammals, birds, fish, and insects shows individual patterns of behavior that can't be easily explained. But the many studies of personality are based on human traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, or neuroticism. It isn't clear how to apply those traits to animals," Cheney says. Along with a group of scientists—including co-authors Robert Seyfarth, also at the University of Pennsylvania, and primatologist Joan Silk of Arizona State University, Tempe—Cheney has studied wild baboons at the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana for almost 20 years. Besides providing detailed, long-term observations of behavior in several generations of baboons, the research has yielded a wealth of biological and genetic information. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Emotions
Link ID: 17323 - Posted: 10.02.2012

Zoë Corbyn Conventional wisdom says that most retractions of papers in scientific journals are triggered by unintentional errors. Not so, according to one of the largest-ever studies of retractions. A survey1 published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that two-thirds of retracted life-sciences papers were stricken from the scientific record because of misconduct such as fraud or suspected fraud — and that journals sometimes soft-pedal the reason. The survey examined all 2,047 articles in the PubMed database that had been marked as retracted by 3 May this year. But rather than taking journals’ retraction notices at face value, as previous analyses have done, the study used secondary sources to pin down the reasons for retraction if the notices were incomplete or vague. These sources included investigations by the US Office of Research Integrity, and evidence reported by the blog Retraction Watch. The analysis revealed that fraud or suspected fraud was responsible for 43% of the retractions. Other types of misconduct — duplicate publication and plagiarism — accounted for 14% and 10% of retractions, respectively. Only 21% of the papers were retracted because of error (see ‘Bad copy’). Earlier studies had found that the percentage of retractions attributable to error was 1.5–3 times higher2–4. “The secondary sources give a very different picture,” says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Yeshiva University in New York, and a co-author of the latest study. “Retraction notices are often not accurate.” © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17322 - Posted: 10.02.2012

By AMANDA SCHAFFER For years, researchers have investigated how the body loses the ability to produce enough insulin, a hallmark of diabetes. Now an intriguing theory is emerging, and it suggests a potential treatment that few scientists had considered. The hormone insulin helps shuttle glucose, or blood sugar, from the bloodstream into individual cells to be used as energy. But the body can become resistant to insulin, and the beta cells of the pancreas, which produce the hormone, must work harder to compensate. Eventually, the thinking goes, they lose the ability to keep up. “We used to say that the beta cells poop out,” said Alan Saltiel, director of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. In reality, he added, this shorthand meant “we have no idea what’s going on.” Some evidence suggested that large numbers of these cells died through a process of programmed cell death called apoptosis. But that was at best a partial explanation. Now, researchers at Columbia University have put forth a surprising alternative. In mice with Type 2 diabetes, the researchers showed that beta cells that had lost function were not dead at all. Most remained alive, but in a changed form. They reverted to an earlier developmental, “progenitor,” state. It’s as if these cells are “stepping back in time to a point where they look like they might have looked during their development,” said Dr. Domenico Accili, director of the Columbia University Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, who led the new work. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Obesity
Link ID: 17321 - Posted: 10.02.2012

By Gregory Thomas, During an introductory psychology course at Britain’s University of Essex in 2009, Arnold Wilkins asked his class to participate in a quick experiment. Wilkins projected two images on a wall and asked students to write down whether they found either of them disturbing. One was a photograph of a woody landscape. The other was a close-up of a lotus-flower seedpod — a flat-faced pod pocked with small holes. Most of the students were unmoved, but one, freshman An Le, recalls being both transfixed and revolted by the lotus image. “It felt like I was in shock,” he says. Le is far from alone in his response. Thousands of people claim to suffer trypophobia, a term derived from the Greek “trypo,” which means punching, drilling or boring holes. It refers to an irrational fear of clusters of small holes, such as beehives, ant holes and even bubbles in a pancake on the griddle or air pockets in a chocolate bar. On Web sites and blogs, self-diagnosed trypophobes share tales of vomiting, sleep loss and anxiety attacks at the sight of such objects as honeycombs and rotting wood. They say the fears are haunting and disruptive of their daily lives. But the medical world hasn’t yet embraced the phobia as real. Trypophobia isn’t listed in any major dictionary or in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Attempts to add trypophobia to the Oxford English Dictionary and even to establish a Wikipedia page have been rebuffed because there hasn’t been any research published on the subject. A Wikipedia editor who deleted an entry on trypophobia in 2009 noted that trypophobia is “likely hoax and borderline patent nonsense.” © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17320 - Posted: 10.02.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY Proposed changes to the official diagnosis of autism will not reduce the proportion of children found to have it as steeply as many have feared, scientists reported on Tuesday, in an analysis that contradicts several previous studies. Earlier research had estimated that 45 percent or more of children currently on the “autism spectrum” would not qualify under a new definition now being refined by psychiatric researchers — a finding that generated widespread anxiety among parents who rely on state-financed services for their children. The new report, posted online Tuesday by The American Journal of Psychiatry, concluded that the number who would be excluded is closer to 10 percent. The finding may soothe the anxieties of some parents, but will not likely settle the debate over the effect of the new diagnosis. All sides agree that the proposed criteria are narrower and will likely result in fewer diagnoses of autism, but until doctors begin using the new definition widely, the predictions of its effect are just that: predictions. The debate has simmered over the past year as an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association has updated its proposals for the association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, scheduled to take effect in May 2013. The manual is the field’s standard reference, and several recent studies suggested that the amended autism definition was far narrower than intended. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17319 - Posted: 10.02.2012

By Simon J Makin Humans are born to a longer period of total dependence than any other animal we know of, and we also know that mistreatment or neglect during this time often leads to social, emotional, cognitive and mental health problems in later life. It’s not hard to imagine how a lack of proper stimulation in our earliest years – everything from rich sensory experiences and language exposure to love and care – might adversely affect our development, but scientists have only recently started to pull back the curtain on the genetic, molecular and cellular mechanisms that might explain how these effects arise in the brain. You’ll often hear it said that human beings are “social animals”. What biologists tend to mean by that phrase is behaviour like long-lasting relationships or some kind society, whether that’s the social hierarchy of gorillas or the extreme organisation of bees and ants. But, to an extent, most animals are social. A mother usually bonds with its offspring in any species of bird or mammal you care to mention, and almost all animals indulge in some kind of social behaviour when they mate. But there is another sense in which most animals seem to be fundamentally social. There is an emerging scientific understanding of the way social experience moulds the biochemistry of the brain and it looks like most species don’t just prefer the company of others – they need it to develop properly. Take that staple of genetics research, drosophila – aka the fruit fly. While they are not as social as primates or bees, they are more social than you might think, and there have been studies showing that social isolation can disrupt their mating behaviour or even reduce their lifespan. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Glia
Link ID: 17318 - Posted: 10.02.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A small study has found that obese children are more likely than others to have a weak sense of taste. German researchers tested tasting ability in 99 obese and 94 normal-weight children, whose average age was 13, by having them try to identify tastes on strips of filter paper and asking them to distinguish among sweet, sour, salty, umami (savory) and bitter. The children also were asked to rate the taste’s intensity on a five-point scale. Girls were better than boys at distinguishing tastes, and older children scored higher than younger; there were no differences by ethnicity. Obese children scored an average of 12.6 out of a possible 20, while the normal-weight children averaged 14.1, a statistically significant difference. On the intensity scale, obese children rated all flavor concentrations lower than did those in the normal-weight group. “We think it’s important, especially for young children, to get different tastes so that they can improve their taste sensitivity,” said the lead author, Dr. Johanna Overberg, a pediatrician at Charité Children’s Hospital in Berlin. “If you taste more and different things at younger ages, you can do this.” The authors, writing online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, say the reason for the association is unclear, but they suggest that the hormone leptin may affect both body weight and the sensitivity of taste buds. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17317 - Posted: 10.02.2012

by Jessica Hamzelou California has become the first US state to ban unfounded therapies that attempt to turn gay teenagers straight. "These practices have no basis in science or medicine and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery," said state governor Jerry Brown in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle. He signed a bill outlawing the therapies on 29 September. Brown's conclusions are in line with those reached a few years ago by a task force of psychologists who were commissioned by the American Psychological Association to assess all published research on the therapies. The group, led by Judith Glassgold, found no evidence that the treatment was effective. "The scientific evidence does not support such therapies," says Clinton Anderson, director of the APA's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns office. "They were not helpful and could be harmful," says Glassgold, who is based in Washington DC. "Most people became more depressed and anxious, and could become suicidal." "Usually these talk therapies are based on the assumption that homosexuality is a mental illness caused by poor parenting and confused gender roles," she adds. "They attempt to explain that to the patient, and try to get them to act and behave in a heterosexual manner." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17316 - Posted: 10.02.2012

By Tori Rodriguez A common complaint about wrinkle-masking Botox is that recipients have difficulty displaying emotions on their faces. That side effect might be a good thing, however, for people with treatment-resistant depression. In the first randomized, controlled study on the effect of botulinum toxin—known commercially as Botox—on depression, researchers investigated whether it might aid patients with major depressive disorder who had not responded to antidepressant medications. Participants in the treatment group were given a single dose (consisting of five injections) of botulinum toxin in the area of the face between and just above the eyebrows, whereas the control group was given placebo injections. Depressive symptoms in the treatment group decreased 47 percent after six weeks, an improvement that remained through the 16-week study period. The placebo group had a 9 percent reduction in symptoms. The findings appeared in May in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. Study author M. Axel Wollmer, a psychiatrist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, believes the treatment “interrupts feedback from the facial musculature to the brain, which may be involved in the development and maintenance of negative emotions.” Past studies have shown that Botox impairs people's ability to identify others' feelings, and the new finding adds more evidence: the muscles of the face are instrumental for identifying and experiencing emotions, not just communicating them. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Emotions
Link ID: 17315 - Posted: 10.02.2012

by Melissa Lee Phillips  Giving a whole new meaning to "pregnancy brain," a new study shows that male DNA—likely left over from pregnancy with a male fetus—can persist in a woman's brain throughout her life. Although the biological impact of this foreign DNA is unclear, the study also found that women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease—hinting that the male DNA could help protect the mothers from the disease, the researchers say. During mammalian pregnancy, the mother and fetus exchange DNA and cells. Previous work has shown that fetal cells can linger in the mother's blood and bone for decades, a condition researchers call fetal microchimerism. The lingering of the fetal DNA, research suggests, may be a mixed blessing for a mom: The cells may benefit the mother's health—by promoting tissue repair and improving the immune system—but may also cause adverse effects, such as autoimmune reactions. One question is how leftover fetal cells affect the brain. Researchers have shown that fetal microchimerism occurs in mouse brains, but they had not shown this in humans. So a team led by autoimmunity researcher and rheumatologist J. Lee Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, took samples from autopsied brains of 59 women who died between the ages of 32 and 101. By testing for a gene specific to the Y chromosome, they found evidence of male DNA in the brains of 63% of the women. (The researchers did not have the history of the women's pregnancies.) The male DNA was scattered across multiple brain regions, the team reports online today in PLoS ONE. Because some studies have suggested that the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) increases with an increasing number of pregnancies, the team also examined the brains for signs of the disease, allowing them to determine whether AD correlated with the observed microchimerism. Of the 59 women, 33 had AD—but contrary to the team's expectation, the women with AD had significantly less male DNA in their brains than did the 26 women who did not have AD. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Stem Cells
Link ID: 17314 - Posted: 09.29.2012

  By Jason G. Goldman In 1976, psychologists John and Sandra Condry of Cornell University had 204 human adults view videotaped footage of an infant boy named David and infant girl named Dana, and asked them to describe the infants’ facial expressions and dispositions. They described their findings in an article in the journal Child Development. In the video, infants were shown responding to various stimuli, which were not visible to the viewer. For example, they’d be shown a teddy bear, so that their reaction could be recorded. They were also videotaped responding to a loud buzzer and to a jack-in-the-box. Participants described David’s response to the jack-in-the-box, for example, as “anger,” while they described Dana’s response to the same toy as “fear.” Participants rated David’s emotional responses to all three stimuli as more “intense” than Dana’s. Here’s the catch: David and Dana were the same infant. Each of the experiment participants were shown the same video of the same infant. Half of them were told the infant was a nine-month-old boy named David, and half were told the infant was a nine-month-old girl named Dana. That they described the “two” infants in such different ways was evidence that the participants’ perceptions were at least based in part upon pre-existing biases and preconceptions about the different ways in which boys and girls experience the world. Now, a group of researchers from Tokyo and Berlin have published a new finding about the relationship between personality and genetics in captive elephants. They collected genetic information from the blood, feces, tissues, cheek swabs, or hair of 196 Asian (Elephas maximus) and African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in Japanese, American, and Canadian zoos, and sanctuaries in Thailand. Personality information was collected for a seventy-five of those elephants by distributing to questionnaires to their keepers. Each elephant was assessed by more than one keeper. An improved understanding of elephant personality would be not only extremely interesting from a basic science perspective, but also extremely useful for more effectively maintaining captive elephant populations in zoos and sanctuaries. The better that zookeepers and curators understand the psychology of the animals in their collections, the better the quality of care can be, which directly impacts animal welfare. © 2012 Scientific American  

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17313 - Posted: 09.29.2012

  Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Think an object can't be in two places at once? This animation shows how the perceived location of a dot is influenced by what's happening around it. In this video, a flashing dot is surrounded by two diamonds that shift across the screen. When they move horizontally, the dot seems to shift sideways and slightly upwards. In a second version, in which the corners of the diamonds are obscured, the dot appears to move diagonally. In fact, the dot never changes place. The illusion is the work of Peter Kohler from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and his team. Kohler has been trying to determine if the dot's perceived shift in position is caused by the overall motion of the diamonds or that of its components. For example, although the shapes as a whole are moving sideways, viewing the edges in isolation shows that segments of the diamonds are moving upwards. "Our results show that global motion does influence the shift," he says. "But the fact that even the unoccluded diamond does not yield a purely horizontal shift indicates that local signals are also very important." The team now plans to investigate how quickly our brain perceives the shift. "Integration of local and global motion is known to take about 150 milliseconds," says Kohler. "It would be interesting to see if the effect takes a similar amount of time to kick in." By presenting the illusion for very short amounts of time, the researchers will be able to determine if different versions are initially perceived in the same way. "We also have fMRI work under way to identify brain areas that represent the perceived shifted location rather than the actual location," says Kohler. The illusion was recently presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Alghero, Italy. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.  

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17312 - Posted: 09.29.2012

By Gary Stix 14 inSharHuntington’ disease, which killed folk singer Woody Guthrie, seems to put into overdrive the main chemical that turns on brain cells, ultimately leading to their death. The normal function of the neurotransmitter glutamate, the chemical overproduced in Huntington’s, is also intimately involved with learning. Researchers from Ruhr University and the University of Dortmund in Germany have been intrigued by the question of whether the neurodegeneration initiated by glutamate in this genetic disorder is all bad. Is it simply  burning out brain circuits? Or might an excess of the chemical also help presymptomatic carriers of the Huntington’s gene or even patients with the disease itself,  learn some things faster or better? “Neurotransmission causes cell death but we know from the vast amount of literature that learning processes very much depend on glutamate neurotransmission; so there may be two effects of one and the same process,” says Christian Beste of Ruhr University. “On the one hand this process may lead to neurodegeneration. But on the other hand, it may augment a cognitive process that depends on glutamate transmission.” Beste is the lead author on a paper published this month in Current Biology that found that those who have the genetic mutation for Huntington’s but who have yet to develop inevitable symptoms of the disease perform better on a learning task than a control group that lacks the mutation. The 29 Huntington’s gene carriers learned to detect twice as fast as the 45 controls a change in brightness of a small bar as its orientation on a computer screen altered. In fact, the Huntington’s carriers with the most pronounced mutations—the number of repetitions of a short DNA segment determines how early disease onset occurs—logged the best performance. © 2012 Scientific American,  

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 17311 - Posted: 09.29.2012

by Melissa Lee Phillips Giving a whole new meaning to "pregnancy brain," a new study shows that male DNA—likely left over from pregnancy with a male fetus—can persist in a woman's brain throughout her life. Although the biological impact of this foreign DNA is unclear, the study also found that women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease—hinting that the male DNA could help protect the mothers from the disease, the researchers say. During mammalian pregnancy, the mother and fetus exchange DNA and cells. Previous work has shown that fetal cells can linger in the mother's blood and bone for decades, a condition researchers call fetal microchimerism. The lingering of the fetal DNA, research suggests, may be a mixed blessing for a mom: The cells may benefit the mother's health—by promoting tissue repair and improving the immune system—but may also cause adverse effects, such as autoimmune reactions. One question is how leftover fetal cells affect the brain. Researchers have shown that fetal microchimerism occurs in mouse brains, but they had not shown this in humans. So a team led by autoimmunity researcher and rheumatologist J. Lee Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, took samples from autopsied brains of 59 women who died between the ages of 32 and 101. By testing for a gene specific to the Y chromosome, they found evidence of male DNA in the brains of 63% of the women. (The researchers did not have the history of the women's pregnancies.) The male DNA was scattered across multiple brain regions, the team reports online today in PLoS ONE. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17310 - Posted: 09.27.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Too many people may be damaging their health by self-medicating with sleeping pills, according to the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. It said half of people with insomnia diagnosed themselves and took medication without seeking medical advice. However, the society said insomnia was often part of other physical or mental health problems which needed treating. The warning was based on the findings of a survey of 2,077 people. Insomnia is difficulty in getting to sleep, staying asleep or getting enough good quality sleep night after night. One in three people in the UK are thought to have bouts of insomnia. It can be caused by psychiatric problems such as depression, anxiety disorders and schizophrenia. Other illnesses including heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and hormonal problems can also disturb the normal pattern of sleep. In the survey, 30% of people said they had taken sleeping pills for more than a month without getting advice while 14% had gone six months. One pharmacist, Paul Johnson, said: "It's worrying that so many people are overusing sleeping remedies. "They can be effective for short-term treatment of mild insomnia but should not be taken for long periods without advice because they can hide a serious health problem which could get worse if it remains untreated. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17309 - Posted: 09.27.2012

FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press BERLIN (AP) — More than half the cases of severe intellectual disability caused by genetic defects are the result of random mutations, not inherited, a European study published Thursday suggests. The findings of the small-scale study give hope to parents of children born with a severe intellectual disabilities who are worried about having another baby with the same condition, said Anita Rauch, a researcher at the Institute of Medical Genetics in Zurich who was one of the study's lead authors. It examined the genetic makeup of 51 children, both of their parents and a control group. The study concluded that in at least 55 percent of cases there was no evidence that parents carried faulty genes responsible for the disability. "The average chances of having another child with the same disability are usually estimated at eight percent, but if we know that it was caused by a random mutation the chances of recurrence drop dramatically," Rauch said. Hans-Hilger Ropers, the director of Berlin's Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, who was not involved in the study, said the basic science appeared sound but noted that it excluded children whose parents were blood relatives and so the results could be biased toward random mutations. Ropers said a larger study that included subjects from parts of the world where marriage between blood relatives is more common could produce different results. © 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17308 - Posted: 09.27.2012

Clint Witchalls James R. Flynn is Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Flynn researches intelligence and is best known for the discovery that, over the past century, IQs have been rising at a rate of about 3 points per decade (the Flynn-effect). In advance of his new book on the subject, Clint Witchalls asked him about this and some of Professor Flynn's more recent research findings: Clint Witchalls: How has our way of thinking and of solving problems changed over the past century? James R. Flynn: Today we take it for granted that using logic on the abstract is an ability we want to cultivate and we are interested in the hypothetical. People from 1900 were not scientifically oriented but utilitarian and they used logic, but to use it on the hypothetical or on abstractions was foreign to them. Alexander Luria [a Soviet psychologist] went to talk to headmen in villages in rural Russia and he said to them: "Where there is always snow, bears are white. At the North Pole there is always snow, what colour are the bears there?" And they said: "I've only seen brown bears." And he said: "What do my words convey?" And they said: "Such a thing as not to be settled by words but by testimony." They didn't settle questions of fact by logic, they settled them by experience. Your research found that we have gained 30 points on IQ tests in a century. What is the reason? The ultimate cause of why IQs are rising is the industrial revolution. The proximate cause is how our minds differ from people in 1900 when in the test room. And the intermediate causes, of course, are more cognitively demanding work roles, more cognitively demanding leisure, more formal schooling, and smaller families. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17307 - Posted: 09.27.2012