Two pioneers of stem cell research have shared the Nobel prize for medicine or physiology. John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan were awarded to prize for transforming specialised cells into stem cells.

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 17342 - Posted: 10.08.2012

By RONI CARYN RABIN When Patrick Murphy was 6, he became obsessed with vacuum cleaners. The boy, who has autism, used to slip out of his house near Buffalo without telling his parents, running to a nearby appliance store or into strangers’ homes to marvel at vacuum cleaners. Patrick is now 14, and his parents have double bolts on the doors in their home and brackets on their windows. Still, Patrick — who is now focused on dogs — manages to sneak out. Two weeks ago, he crept from the house after his mother went to bed. When his father came home, he alerted the police. They found Patrick running barefoot in his pajamas at 2 a.m., three miles from his home. “That was very scary,” said Patrick’s father, Brian Murphy, who has now added an alarm system to the house to keep his son safe. “He has broken through brackets, windows, picked locks, you name it. It’s absolutely the most stressful part of parenting a child with autism.” The behavior, called wandering or elopement, has led to numerous deaths in autistic children by drowning and in traffic accidents. Now a new study of more than 1,200 families with autistic children suggests wandering is alarmingly common. Nearly half of parents with an autistic child age 4 or older said their children had tried to leave a safe place at least once, the study reported. One in four said their children had disappeared long enough to cause concern. Many parents said their wandering children had narrowly escaped traffic accidents or had been in danger of drowning. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17341 - Posted: 10.08.2012

By DAVID P. BARASH ZOMBIE bees? That’s right: zombie bees. First reported in California in 2008, these stranger-than-fiction creatures have spread to North Dakota and, just recently, to my home in Washington State. Of course, they’re not really zombies, although they act disquietingly like them, showing abnormal behavior like flying at night (almost unheard-of in healthy bees), moving erratically and then dying. These “zombees” are victims of a parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis. The fly lays eggs within honeybees, inducing their hosts to make a nocturnal “flight of the living dead,” after which the larval flies emerge, having consumed the bee from the inside out. These events, although bizarre, aren’t all that unusual in the animal world. Many fly and wasp species lay their eggs inside hosts. What is especially interesting, and a bit more unusual, is the way an internal parasite not only feeds on its host, but also frequently alters its behavior, in a way that favors the continued survival and reproduction of the parasite. Not all internal parasites kill their hosts, of course: pretty much every multicellular animal is home to numerous fellow travelers, each of which has its own agenda, which in some cases involves influencing, or taking control of, part or all of the body in which they temporarily reside. And this, in turn, leads to the question: who’s in charge of your own mind? Think of the morgue scene in the movie “Men in Black,” when a human corpse is revealed to be a robot, its skull inhabited by a little green man from outer space. Science fiction, but less bizarre than you might expect, or want to believe. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 17340 - Posted: 10.08.2012

By Ashutosh Jogalekar In a previous post I described the benefits and enduring value of Small Science. I emphasized the fact that in the current economy and funding environment, Small Science is likely to be consistent while Big Science happens in fits and starts. And I talked about how crowdsourcing and crowdfunding could bring great value to both Big and Small Science. Now I want to describe a crowd funded Small Science project that could prove very valuable in understanding the root causes of one of the most pernicious scourges of our time – methamphetamine addiction. Ethan Perlstein at Princeton and David Sulzer at Columbia are interested in dissecting the different ways in which meth acts in and on the brain and they have taken the bold step of pitching this as a crowdfunding project. Their project and others like it could not only help us develop new treatments for meth addition but they could address a more general and key question; how do psychotropic drugs work? It turns out that in spite of the legions of psychiatrists prescribing a record number of antidepressants and other medications every year, we still don’t have a good idea how these compounds work. The same lack of understanding permeates our efforts in tackling the addiction epidemic. From a chemical standpoint the simplicity of psychotropic drugs like meth and PCP is breathtaking. The fact that a few carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms arranged in and around a simple ring can cause such profound behavioral changes in human beings continues to beguile and fascinate us. Sadly, our knowledge of the mechanism of action of these molecules as well as legal psychotropic drugs has reached a kind of roadblock. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17339 - Posted: 10.06.2012

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. On Thursday, we challenged Well readers to try their hand at solving the case of a comatose young woman dropped off at the emergency room by her friends after attending a concert the previous night. More than 350 people wrote in, and more than 90 of you were able to figure it out. The Correct Diagnosis Is … … Ecstasy-induced hyponatremia. Over the past 20 years there have been many reports of young people, mostly young women, who have had seizures or become unconscious after taking the illegal drug Ecstasy, also known as MDMA. The cause is a dangerously low level of sodium in the bloodstream. The brain is exquisitely sensitive to the exact right balance of sodium and water, and when they are out of whack, nausea, confusion and seizures can follow. It’s a rare but dangerous side effect of the drug. Nearly one in five patients reported to have this complication died. Others had permanent brain damage. When this complication was first observed, it was thought to be because of an overconsumption of water. The drug was used widely at concerts or “raves,” and attendees were told to drink lots of water to replace what was sweated out in the crowded, hot concert and dance floors. Further research revealed that the drug actually alters the way the brain and the kidney work so that the body holds on to water and dumps sodium. This change is exaggerated by the presence of estrogen, so women are far more likely to be affected than men. Why the drug can have this effect on any given individual is not well understood, but it is clear that it is not because of an overdose or a contaminant. It appears to be a response to the drug itself. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17338 - Posted: 10.06.2012

By Jason G. Goldman When my brother and I were young, we were very careful to share the last bit of dessert equally. It’s not that we were particularly magnanimous. In their wisdom, my parents instituted a rule in our house: one of us would divide the snack in half, and the other would select his half. “You cut, I choose” was a common phrase in the Goldman household throughout the 1990s. The rule ensured that we’d each be as equitable as possible when in the role of divider. The kitchen ruler was retrieved on more than one occasion. If I thought I could have gotten away with scarfing down the last cookie without him noticing, I’m sure I would have done it. And I would not have been sorry. Imagine, however, what would have happened if my brother had decided to keep the entire last cookie for himself and run into the living room with it. Here’s one way he might have kept me from snatching my fair share of the snack: find a decent hiding spot, and if I got too close, he could run back into the kitchen. Once back in the kitchen, if I got too close to him, he could have gotten up and run back to the living room. This is called a “stimulus-response rule.” Eventually, being the bright child that I was, I would have caught onto the pattern and found a way to block his path from one room to the other, increasing the chance of getting some of the dessert. Here’s a better method that my brother could use to protect his treat: keep his eyes on me the entire time, always moving away from me so that the distance between us was, on average, fixed. If I go right, he goes left. If I move towards him, he backs up. Short of backing him into a corner, my efforts would be futile. That’s because instead of using a small set of predictable actions, my brother could call upon a wider range of behaviors. Its much harder for a thief to learn how you protect your food if your behaviors are variable than if they are predictable. This is called a “cybernetic rule.” © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 17337 - Posted: 10.06.2012

By Bruce Bower A new study suggests that present-day Europeans share more genes with now-extinct Neandertals than do living Africans, at least partly because of interbreeding that took place between 37,000 and 86,000 years ago. Cross-species mating occurred when Stone Age humans left Africa and encountered Neandertals, or possibly a close Neandertal relative, upon reaching the Middle East and Europe in the latter part of the Stone Age, says a team led by geneticist Sriram Sankararaman of Harvard Medical School. The new study, published online October 4 in PLOS Genetics, indicates that at least some interbreeding must have occurred between Homo sapiens and Neandertals, Sankararaman says. But it’s not yet possible to estimate how much of the Neandertal DNA found in modern humans comes from that interbreeding and how much derives from ancient African hominid populations ancestral to both groups. A separate analysis of gene variants in Neandertals and in people from different parts of the world also found signs of Stone Age interbreeding outside Africa. That study, published online April 18 in Molecular Biology and Evolution, was led by evolutionary geneticist Melinda Yang of the University of California, Berkeley. Results from Sankararaman and Yang’s groups “convincingly show that the finding of a higher proportion of Neandertal DNA in non-Africans compared to Africans can be best explained by gene flow from Neandertals into modern humans,” says evolutionary geneticist Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17336 - Posted: 10.06.2012

by Michael Marshall THE human brain might be the most complex object in the known universe, but a much simpler set of neurons is also proving to be a tough nut to crack. A tiny wasp has brain cells so small, physics predicts they shouldn't work at all. These miniature neurons might harbour subtle modifications, or they might work completely differently from all other known neurons - mechanically. The greenhouse whitefly parasite (Encarsia formosa) is just half a millimetre in length. It parasitises the larvae of whiteflies and so it has long been used as a natural pest-controller. To find out how its neurons have adapted to miniaturisation, Reinhold Hustert of the University of Göttingen in Germany examined the insect's brain with an electron microscope. The axons - fibres that shuttle messages between neurons - were incredibly thin. Of 528 axons measured, a third were less than 0.1 micrometre in diameter, an order of magnitude narrower than human axons. The smallest were just 0.045 μm (Arthropod Structure & Development, doi.org/jfn). That's a surprise, because according to calculations by Simon Laughlin of the University of Cambridge and colleagues, axons thinner than 0.1 μm simply shouldn't work. Axons carry messages in waves of electrical activity called action potentials, which are generated when a chemical signal causes a large number of channels in a cell's outer membrane to open and allow positively charged ions into the axon. At any given moment some of those channels may open spontaneously, but the number involved isn't enough to accidentally trigger an action potential, says Laughlin - unless the axon is very thin. An axon thinner than 0.1 μm will generate an action potential if just one channel opens spontaneously (Current Biology, doi.org/frfwpz). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Evolution
Link ID: 17335 - Posted: 10.06.2012

By Meghan Rosen David Ferrero wasn’t expecting the jaguar to pounce. When he approached the holding pens at Massachusetts’ Stone Zoo, the big cat watched but looked relaxed, lounging on her cage’s concrete floor. Two other jaguars rested in separate cages nearby. The jaguars usually prowled outside, in the grassy grounds of the zoo’s enclosure. But this afternoon, zookeepers kept the animals inside so that Ferrero and a colleague could grab a behind-the-scenes peek. Here, the jaguars slept at night — and fed. Here, only metal bars stood between the humans and the cats. As Ferrero stepped closer to the cages, the watchful female sprang up, twisting her body toward him, front paws thumping the bars. Fully extended, she was as tall as Ferrero. “I think she wanted to eat me,” he says. The zookeepers weren’t afraid, but Ferrero flinched. He wasn’t familiar with the lean, black-spotted feline. He was just there to pick up some pee. Ferrero, a neurobiologist from Harvard, was visiting the zoo to gather urine specimens for a study linking odors to instinctual behavior in rodents. Early lab results had hinted that a whiff of a chemical in carnivore pee flashed a sort of billboard message, blinking “DANGER” in neon lights — enough to make animals automatically shrink away in fear. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17334 - Posted: 10.06.2012

By Katherine Harmon A bite from the black mamba snake (Dendroaspis polylepis) can kill an adult human within 20 minutes. But mixed in with that toxic venom is a new natural class of compound that could be used to help develop new painkillers. Named “mambalgins,” these peptides block acute and inflammatory pain in mice as well as morphine does, according to a new study. Researchers, led by Sylvie Diochot, of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at Nice University, Sophia Antipolis in France, purified the peptides from the venom and profiled the compounds’ structure. They then were able to test the mambalgins in strains of mice with various genetic tweaks to their pain pathways. Diochot and her colleagues determined that the mambalgins work by blocking an as-yet untargeted set of neurological ion channels associated with pain signals. The findings were published online October 3 in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). As a bonus, mambalgins did not have the risky side effect of respiratory depression that morphine does. And the mice developed less tolerance to them over time than is typical with morphine. Experimenting with the newfound compounds should also help researchers learn more about the mechanisms that drive pain. As the researchers noted in their paper, “It is essential to understand pain better to develop new analgesics. The black mamba peptides discovered here have the potential to address both of these aims.” © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 17333 - Posted: 10.04.2012

By Anna-Marie Lever Health reporter, BBC News An aspirin a day may slow brain decline in elderly women at high risk of cardiovascular disease, research finds. Around 500 at risk women, between the ages of 70 to 92, were tracked for five years - their mental capacity was tested at the start and end of the study. Those taking aspirin for the entire period saw their test scores fall much less than those who had not. The Swedish study is reported in the journal BMJ Open. Dr Silke Kern, one of paper's authors, said: "Unlike other countries - Sweden is unique, it is not routine to treat women at high risk of heart disease and stroke with aspirin. This meant we had a good group for comparison." The women were tested using a mini mental state exam (MMSE) - this tests intellectual capacity and includes orientation questions like, "what is today's date?", "where are we today?" and visual-spatial tests like drawing two interlinking pentagons. But the report found that while aspirin may slow changes in cognitive ability in women at high risk of a heart attack or stroke, it made no difference to the rate at which the women developed dementia - which was also examined for by a neuropsychiatrist. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17332 - Posted: 10.04.2012

By ANDREW POLLACK An experimental drug preserved and even improved the walking ability of boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy in a clinical trial, raising hopes that the first effective treatment for the disease may be on the horizon. Boys with the disease who received the highest dose of the drug had a slightly improved ability to walk after 48 weeks of treatment, the drug’s developer, Sarepta Therapeutics, announced Wednesday. By contrast, the boys who received a placebo suffered a sharp decline in how well they could walk. The drug, called eteplirsen, also appeared to restore levels of the crucial protein that muscular dystrophy patients lack to about half of normal levels, Sarepta said. “I think this changes the entire playing field for muscular dystrophy,” said Dr. Jerry R. Mendell, director of the gene therapy and muscular dystrophy programs at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and the lead investigator in the trial. There are many caveats. The trial had only 12 patients, with only four receiving the high dose and four the placebo, and the data has not been reviewed by experts. It is also unclear how long the effects of the drug would last or if safety issues would arise with longer treatment. Also, eteplirsen would be appropriate for only about 13 percent to 15 percent of Duchenne patients, those with the particular genetic mutation the drug is meant to counteract. However, a similar approach might work for some other mutations. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Muscles
Link ID: 17331 - Posted: 10.04.2012

By Susan Milius A patch over a male Gouldian finch’s right eye works like beer goggles, though the bird doesn’t need booze to flirt unwisely. If limited to using his left eye when checking out possible mates, he risks making really stupid choices. Gouldian finches have caps of black, red or yellow feathers on their heads. In nature, the birds prefer to mate with partners with the same cap color. Yet black-headed males rendered temporarily left-eyed by a tiny removable eye patch flirted as readily with red-heads as with black-heads, says cognitive ecologist Jennifer Templeton of Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. That’s not smart because daughters typically fail to survive when Gouldian finches mate outside their cap color. Also the male himself “becomes less attractive,” Templeton says. When the bird’s right eye was covered, he sang, bowed and posed less during his attempts at courtship. Some left-eyed males didn’t manage to make up their minds at all, but “just hopped around randomly,” Templeton says. Moving the eye patch to the right eye, however, restored male Gouldian finches to their senses. Males then spent more time perching near same-cap-color females and flirting with them. “Beauty is in the right eye of the beholder,” Templeton and her colleagues conclude online October 3 in Biology Letters. Birds make fine subjects for comparing eye biases because many species’ eyes sit on opposite sides of their skulls with very different fields of view. A bird’s right eye connects to the left hemisphere of its brain, and the left eye to the right hemisphere. Unlike mammals, birds don’t have a high-speed connection between hemispheres. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Laterality; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17330 - Posted: 10.04.2012

by Marissa Miley A virus that may encourage the body to grow more fat cells could, paradoxically, lower diabetes risk. Nikhil Dhurandhar at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and colleagues examined the long-term effects of a common virus – adenovirus-36 (Ad-36) – on humans. The team analysed blood samples made available from 1400 volunteers in a decades-long epidemiological study. The researchers detected antibodies to Ad-36 in 14.5 per cent of the subjects when they first joined the study – a prevalence in line with studies on the US adult population. Ten years later, those individuals naturally infected with Ad-36 had a higher body mass index and body fat percentage than those who were not infected – but their blood sugar and insulin levels were healthier. Animal and cell studies offer an explanation, says Dhurandhar. They suggest that Ad-36 increases the number and size of fat cells, or adipocytes, providing additional "depots" for any fat coming from excessive calorie consumption. Under normal circumstances, the number of these fat storage cells stays constant in adulthood, no matter what dietary choices people make. The extra cells from Ad-36 may make the body more likely to store excess fat, but that means less fat is left to travel to other areas, like the liver, where it can have toxic effects. The adipocytes may also store more sugar, helping to keep blood sugar levels under control and maintaining insulin sensitivity to glucose. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17329 - Posted: 10.04.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff Is Alzheimer’s disease really a form of diabetes? Let’s call it type 3, because that’s what a Brown Medical School researcher dubbed it back in 2005 when she autopsied the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and found that they had signs of insulin resistance -- an early indicator of diabetes. Since then, however, we haven’t seen a sea-change in preventive treatments based on this idea. Those who carry the gene for hereditary Alzheimer’s aren’t given diabetes drugs to help stave off dementia. Nor are Alzheimer’s patients given insulin injections. What has been getting attention, however, is whether we should make extra efforts to eat a low glycemic diet -- which is low in processed foods, sugar, and starchy carbohydrates that cause quick spikes in blood sugar -- to help protect our brains from developing those gunky amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer’s. The September issue of the New Scientist advocates for changing our eating patterns with a frightening image of a cracked chocolate brain on its cover. (Chocolate consumption, though, hasn’t been linked to cognitive decline, much to my relief.) New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman pointed out in a recent post that the latest studies provide some persuasive evidence linking diet to the development of Alzheimer’s. I’ve covered those studies too, including this one that measured a smaller Alzheimer’s risk in people who eat a diet rich in fish, veggies, and fruit compared with those who eat a diet centered on processed foods containing trans fats. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17328 - Posted: 10.03.2012

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