By JoNel Aleccia Steve and Dawn Thomas rarely saw their son Brandon blush, and if they did, it wasn’t a worry. Brandon was blond and fair, like his twin brother, Devin, and an occasional flush of color didn’t seem concerning. “We wouldn’t have witnessed it,” said Steve Thomas. “It wasn’t even happening here at home. I think this was his place of comfort.” So they were stunned last fall when Brandon, a friendly, well-liked University of Washington student, confessed to his mother he’d been struggling with crippling, chronic blushing for four years. Steve and Dawn Thomas are speaking out about their son Brandon's death to raise awareness of the little-known disorder estimated to affect between 5 percent and 7 percent of the population. And they were devastated on May 29, when Brandon jumped from the 11th floor balcony of his Seattle dormitory, leaving behind a five-page note blaming his suicide on despair caused by the little-known disorder. “When Brandon finally let us in to his secret life of torment, we were obviously way behind,” his mother said. Six weeks later, the Thomases are speaking out about Brandon’s death to honor his last wish. In the letter, the young man who hid the problem from his friends, his family -- even his twin -- wanted the world to know that there’s nothing trivial about turning red. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17031 - Posted: 07.12.2012

By Laura Sanders In a paradoxical twist, people with amnesia can get bogged down by too many memories. Unwanted, irrelevant information crowds in and prevent amnesiac patients from recognizing objects, scientists report in the July 12 Neuron. The finding suggests that amnesia isn’t strictly a memory problem, and it may even point out ways to help people with the disorder live more normally. Most people consider amnesia a breakdown of memory that leaves people unable to recall a conversation they had minutes earlier, says study coauthor Morgan Barense of the University of Toronto. While it’s true that people with amnesia have striking memory deficits, “the real picture is more complicated,” she says. People with amnesia caused by damage to a brain region near the ears called the perirhinal cortex also have problems recognizing objects, Barense and colleagues found. In the study, two people with this form of amnesia assessed a series of pictures of two objects — squiggly blobs with distinctive patterns of lines. The objects, shown at different rotations, were either identical or slightly different. At first, people with amnesia were just as good as people with functioning recall at deciding whether the two objects were the same. But as the experiment wore on, participants’ performance started to crash. “They’re doing fine, they’re doing fine — and then all of a sudden, it was like a switch flipped,” says Barense. After ruling out other possibilities, the researchers landed on what Barense calls a “wildly paradoxical conclusion” to explain the crash: too many memories. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17030 - Posted: 07.12.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Much has been studied and reported, particularly in this newspaper, about the short-term effects of concussions on young athletes, as well as the potential longer-term outcomes for professional athletes who engage in high-level contact sports like football and ice hockey for many years, putting themselves at risk for multiple concussions and the lesser but still consequential subconcussive injuries. But until recently, far less has been understood about the long-term implications, if any, of concussions experienced years ago by recreational athletes. Does a 55-year-old man who played high school football in the ’70s and perhaps grew dizzy or “had his bell rung” after a tackle or two need to worry about the state of his brain today, even if he never had a formal diagnosis of concussion? Or do I, because I bounced my head hard against the slopes several times while learning to snowboard 10 years ago? The emerging answer, according to recent research, would seem to be a cautious “probably not,” although there may be reason to monitor how easily names and places come to mind. For a study published in May in the journal Cerebral Cortex, researchers at the University of Montreal examined the brains of a group of healthy, middle-aged former athletes, all of whom had played contact sports in college about 30 years ago and some of whom had sustained concussions while doing so. In the years since, the athletes had stopped competing but had remained physically active. None complained of failing memories or other symptoms of cognitive impairment — or at least, not more so than any group of 50- and 60-year-olds would be expected to complain. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17029 - Posted: 07.12.2012

Many people who abused the painkiller OxyContin by inhaling or injecting it switched to heroin after the prescription's formula changed, U.S. researchers say. OxyContin was designed to slowly release the opioid drug oxycodone. After people started abusing it by crushing the pills and inhaling the powder or dissolving the pills in water and injecting it to get a rush, the drug maker introduced a new formula in the U.S. in 2010 to make inhaling and injecting more difficult. The new pills are harder to crush and dissolve more slowly. In Wednesday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, investigators in the U.S. said use of OxyContin by inhalation and injection has dropped significantly since the abuse-deterrent form went on the market. "In that sense, the new formulation was very successful," said author and principal investigator Theodore Cicero, a professor of neuropharmacology in psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo. "The most unexpected, and probably detrimental, effect of the abuse-deterrent formulation was that it contributed to a huge surge in the use of heroin," he added in a release. OxyContin was a popular drug in suburban and urban areas, where drug abusers have now shifted either to more potent opioids if they can find them or to heroin, he said. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17028 - Posted: 07.12.2012

By Kara Rogers The honeybee brain is dynamic and full of surprises. For instance, much like the human brain, its neurons not only modulate their activity in response to sensory stimuli but also alter their gene and protein expression patterns—changes that in bees are so dramatic as to essentially rewire the brain. And even more remarkable is that this plasticity is strongly influenced by social environment, a feature that was underscored recently by the discovery that bees who changed social roles effectively reversed the aging of their brains. The reversal, described in terms of recovery of learning ability, occurred when older honeybees reverted from foraging tasks to caring for newborn bees and was linked to increased brain levels of stress response and antioxidant proteins, which serve important cellular maintenance and repair functions. One of the proteins was similar to the mammalian enzyme peroxiredoxin-6 (Prx6). In humans, Prx6 defends against oxidative stress and inflammation associated with Alzheimer disease and Huntington disease, indicating that a better understanding of the molecules involved in brain plasticity and cognitive recovery in honeybees could inform research on dementia and related conditions. The new findings are especially intriguing for what they suggest about the influence of social environment on cognitive function. Studies in humans have linked strong social relationships with increased likelihood for survival and declining social engagement in mid- to late-life with increasing risk of dementia. However, relatively little is known about the significance of social environment in the context of human cognitive function and aging. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17027 - Posted: 07.12.2012

by Elizabeth Pennisi OTTAWA—With big brains comes big intelligence, or so the hypothesis goes. But there may be trade-offs as well. Humans and other creatures with large brains relative to their body size tend to have smaller guts and possibly fewer offspring. Scientists have debated for decades whether the two phenomena are related. Now a team of researchers says that they are—and that big brains do indeed make us smart. The finding comes thanks to an unusual experiment reported here yesterday at the Evolution Ottawa evolutionary biology meeting in which scientists shrank and grew the brains of guppies over several generations. "This is a real experimental result," says David Reznick, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the study. "The earlier results were just correlations." Researchers first began to gather evidence that big brains were advantageous after 19th century U.S. biologist Hermon Bumpus examined the brains of sparrows, some of whom had succumbed in a blizzard and some of whom survived. The survivors had relatively larger brains. More recently, evolutionary biologist Alexei Maklakov from Uppsala University in Sweden found evidence that songbirds that colonize cities tend to have larger brains relative to their body size than species still confined to the countryside. The challenge of urban life might require bigger brains, he and his colleagues concluded last year in Biology Letters. Yet in humans and in certain electric fish, larger brain size seems to have trade-offs: smaller guts and fewer offspring. That's led some scientists to suggest there are constraints on how big brains can become because they are expensive to build and maintain. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 17026 - Posted: 07.11.2012

By Susan Milius OTTAWA — Larval fruit flies, supposedly relentless devourers of rotting fruit, at times leave their regular laboratory food to stalk, kill and group-cannibalize some of their older, fatter fellows, scientists report. This predatory cannibalism shows up in Drosophila melanogaster, the fly species that generations of biologists have grown in untold numbers, Roshan Vijendravarma of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland reported July 6 at the Evolution Ottawa scientific congress. He and Lausanne colleagues documented the behavior in both Canton S fruit flies, a strain raised in labs for more than six decades, and the Valais strain, brought into culture only in the last two years. Because fruit fly genetics is known in such detail, Vijendravarma said his discovery may allow researchers to study the evolution of predatory cannibalism at the DNA level. The closest reports Vijendravarma has found to what he’s witnessed describe larva of a different fruit fly, Drosophila hydei, dining on an already dead youngster of its own kind. What Vijendravarma reported is not just feeding on a happenstance free lunch, but hunting as well. He showed close-up videos of the dark, pronged mouthparts of a smaller larva scraping again and again against the wide, cream-colored body of a larger one. Finally the big larva’s body rips open, exposing softer flesh. Vijendravarma also showed photographs of clusters of small larvae side-by-side with their mouths against the flesh of a much larger one. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 17025 - Posted: 07.11.2012

by Krystnell A. Storr For California ground squirrels, survival against rattlesnakes often comes down to one basic question: Are you willing to "shake it?" By holding their tails upright and thrashing them from side to side, the animals notify predators that any attempt to turn them into a meal is likely to end in failure. Now researchers have discovered that this tail-waving behavior has a dual purpose. Not only does it ward off predators, but it also warns other squirrels of potential danger, forcing rattlesnakes to find new hunting grounds. Pacific rattlesnakes (Crotalus oreganus oreganus) are patient hunters. They wait for hours in or around the burrows of California ground squirrels (Otospermophilus beecheyi). When an unsuspecting squirrel gets close enough, the snake delivers a venomous bite, releases the animal, and hunts for the dead body later. Scientists knew that some squirrels avoid attack by shaking their tails after seeing a snake, but sometimes squirrels did this even when they didn't detect a predator. Were they clued into some sort of alarm call or just waving at random? Matthew Barbour and Rulon Clark decided to investigate things from a snake's perspective. Armed with snake tongs and bags, the San Diego State University ecologists trekked into the California wilderness and captured and anesthetized 22 rattlesnakes, surgically implanting them with small tracking devices. As soon as the snakes recovered, the duo released them back into the wild, keeping tabs on them with the tracking devices and security cameras set up around several squirrel burrows. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 17024 - Posted: 07.11.2012

By Kai MacDonald What do a chilly reception, a cold-blooded murder, and an icy stare have in common? Each plumbs the bulb of what could be called your social thermometer, exposing our reflexive tendency to conflate social judgments—estimations of another’s trust and intent — with the perception of temperature. Decades of fascinating cross-disciplinary studies have illuminated the surprising speed, pervasiveness and neurobiology of this unconscious mingling of the personal and the thermal. The blurring of ‘heat’ and ‘greet’ is highlighted in a recent experiment by Ohio University’s Matthew Vess, who asked whether this tendency is influenced by an individual’s sensitivity to relational distress. They found that people high in the psychological attribute called attachment anxiety (a tendency to worry about the proximity and availability of a romantic partner) responded to memories of a relationship breakup with an increased preference for warm-temperature foods over cooler ones: soup over crackers. Subjects low in attachment anxiety — those more temperamentally secure — did not show this “comfort food” effect. In a related part of the same experiment, subjects were asked to reconstruct jumbled words into sentences that had either cold or warm evocations. (Sentence reconstruction tasks involving specific themes are known to unconsciously influence subsequent behavior.) After being temperature-primed, Vess’s subjects rated their perceptions of their current romantic relationship. As in the first condition, subjects higher in attachment anxiety rated their relationship satisfaction higher when prompted with balmier phrases than with frosty ones. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17023 - Posted: 07.11.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR For Lisa Hanson, a stay-at-home mother in San Francisco, the alarm that used to rouse her out of sleep most mornings was the sound of her toddler. “He wakes up at 5:30 screaming sometimes,” she said. “It would jolt me awake, and then I’d be miserable and groggy all morning because I’d be woken up when I’m in my deepest sleep.” But last month, Ms. Hanson started using a new program, the Renew SleepClock, an iPhone app that keeps track of her sleep. Its makers, GEAR4, say that the app uses radio sensors to detect breathing patterns and movements at night, then uses that information to wake a person at the lightest point of sleep, the optimal time to wake up. The theory is that awaking from light sleep, as opposed to the deep stages of sleep, helps reduce so-called sleep inertia, the cloud of grogginess and impaired alertness that makes people desperately want to crawl back into bed. The app also acts as a sort of sleep adviser, giving Ms. Hanson guidance about the amount of shut-eye to shoot for and ways to get there. “Since I’ve been using it, I do feel better,” Ms. Hanson said. “It’s waking me up in a more ideal stage of sleep and helping me have that much better of a day.” The Renew SleepClock, which costs $199, is the latest addition to a new generation of smartphone apps designed to analyze and improve sleep patterns. While experts have warned for years that gadgets like smartphones are increasingly disrupting sleep by keeping us connected 24/7, these programs claim to do the opposite. Two other products that have gained followings are the WakeMate ($59.99), a wristband worn at night that wirelessly transmits data to the user’s smartphone, and the Zeo Sleep Manager-Mobile ($99), which uses a sensor-equipped headband to collect data about the user’s sleep habits. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17022 - Posted: 07.11.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams After spending 3 years at sea and traveling up to 300 kilometers away from home, a rainbow trout can swim straight back to its original hatching ground, following freshwater streams inland and rarely heading in the wrong direction. This remarkable feat of navigation likely relies on many senses; the fish have superb eyesight and smell. But the trout also seem to rely on Earth's magnetic fields, which point them in the right direction. Now, for the first time in any animal, scientists have isolated magnetic cells in the fish that respond to these fields. The advance may help researchers get to the root of magnetic sensing in a variety of creatures, including birds. "We think this will really be a game changer," says Michael Winklhofer, an earth scientist at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in Germany who led the new study. "To study magnetic sensory cells, you have to be able to get hold of them first, and that's what we've finally developed a way to do." Previous research has shown that many species of fish, as well as migratory birds, have the ability to detect differences in magnetic field strengths, which vary around the globe. Scientists think that the key to this ability is magnetite, the most magnetic of all minerals, which they've found embedded in bird and fish tissues. They've even narrowed down which tissues in these animals could contain magnetite by using dyes that bind to the mineral. But they've never been able to isolate individual cells that contain magnetite, and some of the staining methods have led to false positives and controversy in the field. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 17021 - Posted: 07.10.2012

By GINA KOLATA Is a calorie really just a calorie? Do calories from a soda have the same effect on your waistline as an equivalent number from an apple or a piece of chicken? For decades the question has percolated among researchers — not to mention dieters. It gained new momentum with a study published last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that after losing weight, people on a high-fat, high-protein diet burned more calories than those eating more carbohydrates. We asked Dr. Jules Hirsch, emeritus professor and emeritus physician in chief at Rockefeller University, who has been researching obesity for nearly 60 years, about the state of the research. Dr. Hirsch, who receives no money from pharmaceutical companies or the diet industry, wrote some of the classic papers describing why it is so hard to lose weight and why it usually comes back. The JAMA study has gotten a lot of attention. Should people stay on diets that are high in fat and protein if they want to keep the weight off? What they did in that study is they took 21 people and fed them a diet that made them lose about 10 to 20 percent of their weight. Then, after their weight had leveled off, they put the subjects on one of three different maintenance diets. One is very, very low in carbohydrates and high in fat, essentially the Atkins diet. Another is the opposite — high in carbohydrates, low in fat. The third is in between. Then they measured total energy expenditure — in calories burned — and resting energy expenditure. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17020 - Posted: 07.10.2012

By KATE YANDELL When Nancy Mulhearn learned she had Parkinson’s disease seven years ago, she kept the diagnosis mostly to herself, hiding it from friends, colleagues — even, at first, her mother, sister and teenage children. After seven months, she decided she had to tell her family, and they settled into an unspoken agreement not to talk about the disease. She also realized her colleagues already suspected the truth: One asked why she had trouble applying her lipstick. She sometimes could not control her shaking hands. Still, it was years before Ms. Mulhearn, now 51, of Bethlehem Township, N.J., felt she could talk freely about her condition. Ms. Mulhearn, a school secretary, regrets having waited so long. “I didn’t want anybody to feel sorry for me,” she said. “To have people look at you and start crying — that’s not what anyone wants.” In that, Ms. Mulhearn is hardly alone. Doctors and researchers say it’s not uncommon for people with Parkinson’s to conceal their diagnoses, often for years. But the secrecy is not just stressful to maintain; experts fear that it also may be slowing down the research needed to find new treatments. Parkinson’s disease progresses over many years as brain cells that produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter, slowly waste away. Without dopamine, nerves have trouble sending messages; muscle movement becomes erratic and difficult to control. Some patients, though not all, experience memory problems, altered speech, cognitive difficulty, insomnia and depression. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 17019 - Posted: 07.10.2012

by Liz Else THOUSANDS of people may soon be making a very important three-minute phone call - to a computer. It could tell them whether or not they have Parkinson's disease. Technology has long promised a revolution in "smart medicine", allowing painful pokes and prods to be replaced with faster, more accurate and non-invasive ways of diagnosing a range of diseases. That vision took a big step forward last week, when Max Little of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab appealed for people worldwide to test a voice-based system he helped develop for diagnosing Parkinson's. The software uses a speech-processing algorithm to identify telltale changes in the voice of a person with the disease. Parkinson's affects some 6 million people worldwide. Although surgery and drugs can hold back its progression, there is no cure. Diagnosing it and tracking its course usually relies on an assessment of someone's symptoms using the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale, which involves tests of motor skills, for example. The process is time-consuming, expensive and requires people to attend a clinic for the tests to be carried out. It is partly because of this that it is thought that around a fifth of cases of Parkinson's are never diagnosed. But the disease often manifests early on in the voice, as it affects the ability to control the vocal cords and soft palate. Common signs include a quaver in the voice, softer speech and breathiness or hoarseness, though they can be subtle at first. This makes Parkinson's a perfect candidate for diagnosis over the phone. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 17018 - Posted: 07.10.2012

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. Americans with mental illness had good reason to celebrate when the Supreme Court upheld President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The law promises to give them something they have never had before: near-universal health insurance, not just for their medical problems but for psychiatric disorders as well. Until now, people with mental illness and substance disorders have faced stingy annual and lifetime caps on coverage, higher deductibles or simply no coverage at all. This was supposed to be fixed in part by the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which mandated that psychiatric illness be covered just the same as other medical illnesses. But the law applied only to larger employers (50 or more workers) that offered a health plan with benefits for mental health and substance abuse. Since it did not mandate universal psychiatric benefits, it had a limited effect on the disparity between the treatment of psychiatric and nonpsychiatric medical diseases. Now comes the Affordable Care Act combining parity with the individual mandate for health insurance. As Dr. Dilip V. Jeste, president of the American Psychiatric Association, told me, “This law has the potential to change the course of life for psychiatric patients for the better, and in that sense it is both humane and right.” To get a sense of the magnitude of the potential benefit, consider that about half of Americans will experience a major psychiatric or substance disorder at some point, according to an authoritative 2005 survey. Yet because of the stigma surrounding mental illness, poor access to care and inadequate insurance coverage, only a fraction of those with mental illness receive treatment. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17017 - Posted: 07.10.2012

By Eric Michael Johnson What would it take for you to give your life to save another? The answer of course is two siblings or eight cousins, that is, if you’re thinking like a geneticist. This famous quip, attributed to the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane, is based on the premise that you share on average 50% of your genes with a brother or sister and 12.5% with a cousin. For altruism to be worth the cost it should ensure that you break even, genetically speaking. This basic idea was later formalized by the evolutionary theorist William Hamilton as “inclusive fitness theory” that extended Darwin’s definition of fitness–the total number of offspring produced–to also include the offspring of close relatives. Hamilton’s model has been highly influential, particularly for Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who spent considerable time discussing its implications in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. But in the last few years an academic turf war has developed pitting the supporters of inclusive fitness theory (better known as kin selection) against a handful of upstarts advocating what is known as group selection, the idea that evolutionary pressures act not only on individual organisms but also at the level of the social group. The latest row was sparked by the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, which followed up on his 2010 paper in the journal Nature written with theoretical biologists Martin Nowak and Corina Tarniţă. In both cases Wilson opposes kin selection theory in favor of the group selection model. For a revered scientist like Wilson–a Harvard biologist, recipient of the Crafoord Prize (the Nobel of the biosciences) and two-time Pulitzer prizewinner–to adopt a marginal and widely disputed concept has received a lot of attention and caused other prominent scientists to step forward and defend the mainstream point of view. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution; Emotions
Link ID: 17016 - Posted: 07.10.2012

Ewen Callaway A genetic test could help to determine whether a multiple sclerosis patient would benefit from a promising therapy. Like diabetes, most forms of cancer and other common diseases, there is no single gene that causes the autoimmune condition multiple sclerosis (MS). Dozens of genetic variations act in concert with environmental factors to cause the debilitating neurological disease. Yet a single genetic variant may explain why drugs that treat other autoimmune diseases tend to make MS symptoms worse, and could identify other MS patients who might benefit from the therapies. Researchers say that the findings, which are published online in Nature1, also highlight how genome-wide association studies (GWAS) can yield useful medical insights. GWAS compare thousands of people who have a particular disease, detailing hundreds of thousands of genetic variations between them. The goal is to identify variations that are more common in people with the condition than in healthy people. Most such studies uncover scores of genetic variants associated with the disease in question, each increasing a person’s chances of developing the condition by a small percentage. Such is the case for a DNA letter in the gene that encodes the protein called tumour necrosis factor receptor 1 (TNFR1). The protein senses a potent immune molecule called tumour necrosis factor (TNF) that destroys cancerous cells but that is also implicated in autoimmune disease. People of European ancestry who have two ‘A’s at that particular spot on the genome are 12% more likely to develop MS than those with two ‘G’s at that spot. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17015 - Posted: 07.10.2012

By Ruth Williams If a child you know refuses to share his toys, chances are he knows he is doing wrong but cannot help it. New research published in March in Neuron reveals that underdevelopment of an impulse control center in the brain is, at least in part, the reason children who fully understand the concept of fairness fail to act accordingly. As babies, we are inherently selfish, but as we grow, we become better at social strategy—that is, satisfying our own needs while behaving in a manner acceptable to others. Nikolaus Steinbeis of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, wondered how this skill develops. Steinbeis and his team examined kids aged six to 14 performing two similar decision-making tasks that involved sharing poker chips with an anonymous recipient (the chips were redeemable for prizes). In task one, the size of a child's offering carried no consequences, but in the second task, the anonymous youngster could reject the offer, if he or she considered it unfair, and both children would get nothing. Task two thus required social strategy; task one did not. In task one, older and younger children behaved similarly. But in task two, younger children both made worse offers and were more willing to accept bad offers even though they understood that these offers were unfair. Imaging the kids' brains while they performed the tasks revealed less activity in the younger kids' impulse-control regions in their prefrontal cortex, the seat of decision making and self-control in the brain. In addition, independent of age, less activity in this region paralleled less social strategy. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Emotions
Link ID: 17014 - Posted: 07.09.2012

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature, Ottawa, Canada Male fireflies, known for attracting mates with a flash of light, also seduce with a gift, say scientists. This gifts comes in the form of a spermatophore: a package containing sperm and nourishment for the female. Researchers from Tufts University in Boston, US, found that females preferred males that had the largest, most nourishing gift. The team presented their findings at the First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Ottawa, Canada. With supervision from his colleague Sara Lewis, who has been studying fireflies for 20 years, Dr Adam South used LED lights to mimic the flashes of amorous male fireflies. They showed one group of females artificial male flashes in patterns and durations that had been proven attractive in previous studies. Another group of females saw "unattractive" flashes. In the wild, females are very picky about what males they reveal themselves to during this part of the courtship routine. Females will only "flash back" to males they are attracted to. But in this experimental set-up, after several minutes of the courtship flashing, males and females were paired together in miniature chambers. The Tufts biologists filmed the encounters under infrared illumination to see what was happening when the lights went out. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 17013 - Posted: 07.09.2012

By Laura Hambleton, Maureen Michael likes food. Most days, she has three or four meals, and on occasion she eats yet another in the middle of the night. But she rarely worries about her weight, and at 5-foot-8 and 155 pounds, she looks quite trim. “I eat anything, and I eat a lot,” the 51-year-old District resident said. “I like large portions. I have one of those metabolisms, I guess.” Just the other day, Michael ate a salad and two large helpings of spaghetti and meatballs for dinner — after having a hearty bowl of ice cream. For breakfast the next morning, she ate two scrambled eggs, half a package of Polish sausage, English muffins and orange juice. For lunch, she consumed a 12-inch seafood sub and some Doritos, and that night’s dinner featured two pork chops, potatoes and broccoli. That Michael’s weight remains steady even though she eats whatever she wants and does not exercise interests scientists studying the nation’s obesity epidemic. By looking at people who are near their ideal body weight, these reseachers at the National Institutes of Health’s Metabolic Clinical Research Unit in Bethesda hope to figure out what causes so many others to be overweight or uncontrollably fat. Michael is among the one-third of American adults who are at a good weight relative to their height and build. Another third are overweight, and the rest are obese. Unlike Michael, very few people keep their weight in check without paying attention to what they eat and being conscientious about physical activity. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17012 - Posted: 07.09.2012