by Nicholas St. Fleur A house fly couple settles down on the ceiling of a manure-filled cowshed for a romantic night of courtship and copulation. Unbeknownst to the infatuated insects, their antics have attracted the acute ears of a lurking Natterer's bat. But this eavesdropper is no pervert—he's a predator set on a two-for-one dinner special. As a new study reveals, the hungry bat swoops in on the unsuspecting flies, guided by the sound of their precoital "clicks." Previous studies of freshwater amphipods, water striders, and locusts have shown that mating can make animals more vulnerable to predators, but these studies did not determine why. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, led by the late Björn Siemers, found that the bat-fly interactions in the cowshed provided clues for understanding what tips off a predator to a mating couple. The researchers observed a teenage horror film-like scene as Natterer's bats (Myotis nattereri)preyed on mating house flies (Musca domestica). Bats find prey primarily through two methods: echolocation and passive acoustics. For most bats, echolocation is the go-to tracking tool. They send out a series of high frequency calls and listen for the echoes produced when the waves hit something. The researchers found that by using echolocation, bats could easily find and catch house flies midflight, yet they had difficulty hunting stationary house flies. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17085 - Posted: 07.24.2012

by Michael Marshall If you believe the Manic Street Preachers, there is no true love – just a finely-tuned jealousy. Once we've decided that another person is our special someone, we can become dangerously possessive and murderously unwilling to share them with others. Such all-consuming jealousy has a major downside: it's just so much effort. What if you can't be bothered? That seems to be how Hoffmann's two-toed sloths treat their sexual partners. Males do defend territories from rivals, but their slothful natures mean they aren't much good at holding onto females. Slow, so slow All sloths have a reputation for being lazy. This is sometimes exaggerated – they don't sleep much more than humans do – but basically correct. Sloths have unusually low metabolic rates and spend hours each day doing nothing. Hoffmann's two-toed sloth is a case in point. It spends the day hanging upside-down from branches high in trees, often hidden away within tangles of vines. During the night the sloths move around and feed, often for 7 or even 11 hours. But they're not exactly athletes, moving along branches at just 14 centimetres per second. They are also completely and utterly antisocial. Unless they're mating or caring for a youngster, you hardly ever see more than one sloth in a tree. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 17084 - Posted: 07.24.2012

By ANDREW POLLACK The most closely watched experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease proved ineffective in its first large clinical trial, dealing a blow to the field, to a theory about the cause of the disease, and to the three companies behind the drug. Pfizer, which is one of those companies, announced late Monday that the drug, bapineuzumab, did not improve either cognition or daily functioning of patients compared to a placebo in the Phase 3 trial. The company did not provide detailed results, saying they would be presented at a medical meeting in September. But one of the principal investigators in the study, Dr. Reisa Sperling, said in an interview that there was no sign of any effect. “There was absolutely no evidence at all of a clinical benefit of treatment on either of the primary measures, one cognitive and one functional,” said Dr. Sperling, director of the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. To be sure, most doctors and Wall Street analysts had been expecting the drug not to succeed, since an earlier phase 2 trial had not shown a statistically significant effect. Moreover, the patients in the new trial — 1,100 Americans with mild to moderate disease — all had a gene called ApoE4, which raises the risk a person will get Alzheimer’s disease and can make the disease worse. Based on the phase 2 data, bapineuzumab has a somewhat better chance of working in patients who do not have that gene. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17083 - Posted: 07.24.2012

Most children exposed to high levels of alcohol in the womb do not develop the distinct facial features seen in fetal alcohol syndrome, but instead show signs of abnormal intellectual or behavioral development, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and researchers in Chile. These abnormalities of the nervous system involved language delays, hyperactivity, attention deficits or intellectual delays. The researchers used the term s functional neurologic impairment to describe these abnormalities. The study authors documented an abnormality in one of these areas in about 44 percent of children whose mothers drank four or more drinks per day during pregnancy. In contrast, abnormal facial features were present in about 17 percent of alcohol exposed children. Fetal alcohol syndrome refers to a pattern of birth defects found in children of mothers who consumed alcohol during pregnancy. These involve a characteristic pattern of facial abnormalities, growth retardation, and brain damage. Neurological and physical differences seen in children exposed to alcohol prenatally — but who do not have the full pattern of birth defects seen in fetal alcohol syndrome — are classified as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. “Our concern is that in the absence of the distinctive facial features, health care providers evaluating children with any of these functional neurological impairments might miss their history of fetal alcohol exposure,” said Devon Kuehn, M.D., of the Epidemiology Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute involved in the study. “As a result, children might not be referred for appropriate treatment and services.” Their findings appear online in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17082 - Posted: 07.24.2012

Analysis by Emily Sohn Have a birthday in September, October, or November? Lucky you. You may have above-average chances of living an extra-long life. In a recent study, researchers from the University of Chicago looked at data from more than 1,500 people who were born between 1880 and 1895 and who lived to be 100 or older. The researchers compared that data with the birth months and life spans of nearly 12,000 of the centenarians’ siblings and spouses. The majority of people who lived an extra-long life were born between September and November, the researchers reported in the Journal of Aging Research http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3236478/. Birthdays in March, May, and July produced 40 percent fewer centenarians. The findings support a growing body of evidence that the conditions we experience extremely early in life may influence our health and survival many decades later, the researchers say. By comparing centenarians to their siblings, the study aimed to take into account living conditions early in life. By comparing spouses, the idea was to consider living conditions later in life. The study didn’t offer a definitive explanation for the birth and death patterns, though the researchers offered some theories. It’s possible, for example, that pregnant mothers had access to different levels of nutrition at different times of year in the late 1800s. Seasonal rates of infection may have also influenced fetuses in the womb, with vulnerability peaking during certain developmental periods. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17081 - Posted: 07.24.2012

By Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde As both the midget in the country of Brobdingnag and the giant on the island of Lilliput, Lemuel Gulliver—the protagonist of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels—experienced firsthand that size is relative. As we cast a neuroscientific light on this classic book, it seems clear to us that Swift, a satirist, essayist and poet, knew a few things about the mind, too. Absolute size is meaningless to our brain: we gauge size by context. The same medium-sized circle will appear smaller when surrounded by large circles and bigger when surrounded by tiny ones, a phenomenon discovered by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Social and psychological context also causes us to misperceive size. Recent research shows that spiders appear larger to people who suffer from arachnophobia than to those who are unafraid of bugs and that men holding weapons seem taller and stronger than men who are holding tools. In this article, we present a collection of illusions that will expand your horizons and shrink your confidence in what is real. Try them out for size! Do you see tiny objects photographed with a macro lens? Look again. This remarkable illusion combines tilt-shift photography—in which the photographer uses selective focus and a special lens or tilted shot angle to make regular objects look toy-sized—with the strategic placement of a giant coin. Art designers Theo Tveterås and Lars Marcus Vedeler, from the Skrekkøgle group, created the enormous 50-cent euro coin from painted and lacquered wood at a 20:1 scale. At first sight, they look like real-life scenes from the television show Hoarders, precleanup. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17080 - Posted: 07.24.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams To escape a hungry wolf, a sheep doesn't have to outrun the wolf, just the other sheep in its flock. Many researchers think that such selfish behavior, not cooperation for the benefit of the whole crowd, shapes the movements of groups of animals. But the decades-old "selfish herd theory" has been hard to back up with data. Now, a detailed analysis of how a flock of sheep moves to avoid a sheepdog has found that the theory holds true. Each sheep heads to safety in the center of the flock, rather than running directly away from the dog. "It's really difficult to measure 2D spatial information on large animals in the wild," says biologist Theodore Stankowich of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved in the new work. "They've taken advantage of a unique opportunity to work with the sheep to answer these types of questions in a controlled environment." Studies on seals, crabs, and pigeons have shown that those animals seem to herd for selfish reasons, but the data have often been crude. Biologist Andrew King and colleagues at the Royal Veterinary College of the University of London attached GPS backpacks to 46 sheep and to a trained Australian Kelpie dog. When they released the dog to herd the sheep, they recorded the location of each animal every second. Then, they analyzed the data to determine what factors influenced each sheep's path. The movements of the sheep, the researchers reveal today online in Current Biology, could be best predicted by the center of the flock. Rather than run in a line away from the dog, scatter in all directions, or follow their nearest neighbors, the sheep all hurried toward the flock's center. The sheep began to converge when the dog was 70 meters away. Even as the flock as a whole moved, each sheep continuously competed to be as near the middle as possible. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 17079 - Posted: 07.24.2012

By Scicurious Ah, coffee, the beautiful stimulant without which about 90% of science and medicine would instantly retreat to the dark ages. Seriously, who hasn’t needed that extra cup of joe (or two, or three) to make it through another 14 hour experimental day, a 10 hour surgery, or, you know, both? But our favorite adenosine antagonist has a downside. Too much caffeine and you can get a racing heartbeat, nerves, and a certain amount of palm sweat, not to mention problems when you try to sleep at night. But all of that is just yourself. Does caffeine affect the way you view other people? Well, if you’re getting a little anxious, yes, it does. Caffeine does act the way other stimulants do. Instead of acting on neurotransmitters like dopamine or norepinephrine, caffeine acts on adenosine. Adenosine is another neurotransmitter, this one associated with things like sleepiness. High levels of adenosine promote sleepiness, and low levels promote wakefulness. Caffeine acts on the adenosine receptor as an antagonist, meaning that it blocks the effects of adenosine, promoting wakefulness. But wakefulness and sleepiness are not all that adenosine does. Adenosine and adenosine receptors have been implicated in things like anxiety disorders. This could be particularly important when these receptors are expressed in the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and periaqueductal grey, areas of the brain associated with things like fear processing and anxiety. And of course, if adenosine receptors are there, and caffeine is there, too, you might be getting some effects of caffeine on processing in these areas. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 17078 - Posted: 07.24.2012

By Janice Lynch Schuster, It was early May, a hot and humid Friday night for the under-11 boys soccer game. My 10-year-old son collapsed on the field, unable to breathe. The coach grabbed another child’s inhaler and administered it to Ian, who, after six puffs (instead of the usual two) was able to catch his breath and stand. I wasn’t at the game, so I heard about the incident from my husband, who is unruffled at even the most dramatic moments. “Oh, yeah,” he said that night as we were headed to bed. “Ian had an asthma attack during the game, but he was fine.” It was only later that I heard the full, scary story from the coach. A few years earlier, on the heels of an upper-respiratory infection, Ian had been given a diagnosis of asthma. For a few months, he occasionally used an inhaler, but then the attacks stopped and we eventually stopped carrying it with us. Now, we were afraid, we were back to the asthma diagnosis. On Saturday morning, we took him to the nurse practitioner at the pediatrician’s office. She diagnosed a sports-induced bronchiospasm and sent Ian on his way with an inhaler (two puffs before every practice and game) along with antihistamines to counter any allergies he might be experiencing. She didn’t think it was anything serious — it seemed like a situation that millions of children and adults live with each day. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Emotions; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 17077 - Posted: 07.24.2012

By Maria Konnikova Daniel Smith has discovered the perfect cure for battling overwhelming sweat—the kind of sweat that soaks through the shirt, leaves nasty residue, and makes you want to avoid the company of fellow human beings for the foreseeable future. The kind, in other words, that is caused by a bout of anxiety (which can be provoked, naturally, by basically anything – typing at your computer, choosing a salad dressing, sitting on a bench in Boston Common). The magical solution? Place pads on the underside of your shirt, under your armpits. As in, feminine menstrual pads. When Daniel’s wife comes home one day with a jumbo pack of Always Ultra Thins™, he has “one of those Archimedes-in-the-bathtub moments.” His very own epiphany. “From then on,” he writes, “whenever I have had to leave the house to meet someone it behooves me not to repulse, I have worn beneath my arms a product expertly designed by a multinational corporation to absorb eighty milliliters of menstrual blood at a wearing.” And in that single image, the grown man with pads proudly under his arms, we see the scope of Smith’s new book, Monkey Mind: a balance of the devastating and the devastatingly hilarious. As Smith traces his ongoing battle with clinical anxiety, we learn just how disruptive and downright crippling the struggle can be—and how difficult it can be to acknowledge and diagnose, let alone begin to understand and treat. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17076 - Posted: 07.24.2012

by Joseph Bennington-Castro Whether we realize it or not, most of us have a knee-jerk reaction when we see someone with a facial disfigurement, such as psoriasis, a cleft lip, or a birthmark. We may sit away from them on the bus, hesitate to shake their hand, or even give a barely masked look of revulsion. A new study suggests these disgust reactions stem from an ancient disease-avoidance system that normally prevents us from catching illnesses. Essentially, we treat facial disfigurements like infectious diseases. Psychologists have recently begun to uncover where disgust comes from, with some researchers believing the emotion is similar to fear. "Fear evolved to keep you away from large animals that want to eat you from the outside," says Valerie Curtis, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who wasn't involved in the study. "Disgust evolved to keep you away from smaller animals that kill you from the inside." Our subconscious minds constantly scan the environment for signs of potential diseases, she says. If we see one, disgust kicks in and we avoid that object or person like the plague. But it seems our disease-avoidance system sometimes gets it wrong. Previous studies suggested these mistakes underlie the aversion people have to various disfigurements. For this to be true, our responses to people with facial disfigurements, which aren't contagious, would have to be the same as our responses to people with infectious diseases. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 17075 - Posted: 07.21.2012

By Jessica Gross An amiable joke can be much more effective than darker humor at improving mood, according to recent research from Stanford University. In the study, led by psychologist Andrea Samson and James Gross and published in February in Cognition & Emotion, 40 people in Switzerland and 37 people in the U.S. looked at photographs of upsetting things such as car accidents, corpses and dangerous animals. They were instructed to either say nothing about the images, use good-natured humor focusing on the absurdity of life or the human condition, or use mean-spirited humor. The experimenters offered examples of each type of response to help coach the subjects; given a picture of a snake with its prey, for instance, “Looks like someone's bitten off more than they can chew” exhibits positive humor, whereas “Nourishing my future handbag” has a negative spin. In both countries, those who made benevolent jokes about the images had more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions afterward than those who laughed mockingly at the pictures, although both groups who used humor fared better than those who simply looked silently. The upshot: when something upsets you, humor can help. The next time you try to laugh off a grim situation, reflect on whether your jokes skew negative (“My boss isn't just dumb; he has terrible body odor, too!”) or positive (“No matter what happens at work, I've got it better than a politician these days …”). You might find tweaking your comedic style could give more of a boost. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 17074 - Posted: 07.21.2012

by Nicola Guttridge Whether a tree branch or a computer mouse is the target, reaching for objects is fundamental primate behaviour. Neurons in the brain prepare for such movements, and this neural activity can now be deciphered, allowing researchers to predict what movements will occur. This discovery could help us develop prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by thought alone. To find out what goes on in the brain when we reach for things, biomedical engineers Daniel Moran and Thomas Pearce at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, trained two rhesus macaques to participate in a series of exercises. When the monkeys reached for items, electrodes measured the activity of neurons in their dorsal premotor cortex, a region of the brain that is involved in the perception of movement. The monkeys were trained to reach for a virtual object on a screen to receive a reward. In some tasks the monkeys had to reach directly for an object, in others they had to reach around an obstacle to get to the target. Impulsive grab Moran and Pearce managed to identify the neural activity corresponding with several aspects of the planned movement, such as angle of reach, hand position and the final target location. The findings could one day allow the design of prosthetic limbs that can be controlled with thought alone, which is "one of the reasons we did the study", says Moran. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 17073 - Posted: 07.21.2012

By Larry Greenemeier Shortly after moviegoers had settled in to watch a midnight premier of The Dark Night Rises on Friday morning, a heavily armed gunman entered the Aurora, Colo., theater through an emergency exit and opened fire. In just a few minutes the assailant shot more than 60 children and adults—killing at least a dozen—before police arrested him outside the theater. This massacre was the only latest in a string of eerily similar incidents in recent years involving the mass murder of civilians, spectators and bystanders by an individual with a firearm and a frightening lack of regard over its use. In April 2007 32 people were shot to death and 17 injured on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va., by a former student. In January 2011, former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by an assailant who killed six people during an attack outside a Tucson supermarket. Just a few months ago a gunman killed seven people at Oikos University in Oakland, Calif. In each of these and other similar cases, the lone assailant who was either captured or found dead at the scene of the crime matched a particular profile—a disgruntled loner with grievances against societal institutions and who displayed an abhorrent inability or unwillingness to exercise control over violent impulses. Following the attempted assassination of Giffords, Scientific American spoke with Marco Iacoboni, a University of California, Los Angeles, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and director of the school’s Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Laboratory, about why some individuals act on their violent thoughts whereas others do not. Although details about the life of University of Colorado neuroscience Ph.D. student James Holmes, arrested for the Aurora shootings, are still being uncovered, several of Iacoboni’s observations about accused Giffords gunman Jared Lee Loughner seem apt to shed some light on the violence that recent took place Friday morning. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 17072 - Posted: 07.21.2012

A simple insole could help people who've survived a stroke to regain their balance. When someone suffers a stroke, one side of the body can be weakened, which raises the possibility of unstable walking and debilitating falls. Physiotherapists try to help patients learn to shift their body weight slightly to the weaker side that's been affected by the stroke to regain their balance, but it doesn't always work well. When the lower extremities and muscles are weakened after a stroke, people often learn how not to use that side of the body, even after they've recovered a bit, said Alexander Aruin, a physical therapy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Aruin, who has a background in engineering, invented an insole that when fitted into a patient's shoe slightly lifts and tilts the body toward the stroke-affected side to restore balance. Physical therapy for stroke aims to help patients learn to shift their body weight slightly to the weaker side.Physical therapy for stroke aims to help patients learn to shift their body weight slightly to the weaker side. (Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters) The device is used in conjunction with physical therapy to help people learn to bear weight equally through both legs and improve their strength and maintain balance. In a study, Aruin's team gave the insoles to individuals with stroke for six weeks and compared them to a control group who did not receive the insoles but did do physiotherapy. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 17071 - Posted: 07.21.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff The approval this week of a new weight loss pill called Qsymia means that doctors will soon be able to prescribe two new drugs to help overweight people shed pounds. Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the pill Belviq, the first drug approved for obesity in 13 years. Both drugs will hit pharmacies later this year and their cost, yet to be determined, will probably be about $100 to $200 a month. I asked Dr. Richard Siegel, co-director of the Diabetes Center at Tufts Medical Center, to sort out the pros and cons of these new medications and who might be appropriate candidates for drug therapy. Here are edited excerpts from our interview. Which people are most likely to benefit from these drugs? Both drugs were approved for those who are obese -- defined as a body mass index of 30 or above -- or overweight with a BMI of at least 27 and a weight-related complication such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol. (Note: A 5’5” person who is 163 pounds has a BMI of 27, and at 180 pounds has a BMI of 30.) How much weight can people expect to lose? It’s variable but the clinical trials performed by the drug manufacturers found that Belviq leads to an average drop in body weight of about 5 percent, while Qsymia leads to an average decline of 10 percent. I tell patients that the more effort they put into it, the more results they can get from weight-loss drugs. Yes, they can lose a few pounds if they just take a pill and do nothing else, but if they join a support group, meet with a nutritionist to map out a new eating plan, and start exercising, they might exceed those average weight losses seen in study participants. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17070 - Posted: 07.21.2012

By Ferris Jabr Between October and June they shuffle out of auditoriums, gymnasiums and classrooms, their eyes adjusting to the sunlight as their fingers fumble to awaken cell phones that have been silent for four consecutive hours. Some raise a hand to their foreheads, as though trying to rub away a headache. Others linger in front of the parking lot, unsure of what to do next. They are absolutely exhausted, but not because of any strenuous physical activity. Rather, these high school students have just taken the SAT. "I was fast asleep as soon as I got home," Ikra Ahmad told The Local, a New York Times blog, when she was interviewed for a story on "SAT hangover." Temporary mental exhaustion is a genuine and common phenomenon, which, it is important to note, differs from chronic mental fatigue associated with regular sleep deprivation and some medical disorders. Everyday mental weariness makes sense, intuitively. Surely complex thought and intense concentration require more energy than routine mental processes. Just as vigorous exercise tires our bodies, intellectual exertion should drain the brain. What the latest science reveals, however, is that the popular notion of mental exhaustion is too simplistic. The brain continuously slurps up huge amounts of energy for an organ of its size, regardless of whether we are tackling integral calculus or clicking through the week's top 10 LOLcats. Although firing neurons summon extra blood, oxygen and glucose, any local increases in energy consumption are tiny compared with the brain's gluttonous baseline intake. So, in most cases, short periods of additional mental effort require a little more brainpower than usual, but not much more. Most laboratory experiments, however, have not subjected volunteers to several hours' worth of challenging mental acrobatics. And something must explain the feeling of mental exhaustion, even if its physiology differs from physical fatigue. Simply believing that our brains have expended a lot of effort might be enough to make us lethargic. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention; Sleep
Link ID: 17069 - Posted: 07.19.2012

by Gisela Telis During mating season, a moss needs a little help from its friends—and it uses smell to recruit them. A new study has found that mosses, which were long thought to require only water or wind to reproduce, release an aroma that entices tiny animals such as mites and little bugs called springtails to help fertilize the plants. The discovery challenges current ideas about plant evolution, but experts say it raises more questions than it answers. For mosses, sex can be tricky. They can reproduce asexually, or they can develop male and female sex organs and wait for their fragile sperm to travel from one to the other. If the latter occurs, they rely on the elements—wind or splashing rain—to help with transport. In 2006, researchers discovered a third means of delivery. They found that tiny arthropods, a group of creepy-crawlies that includes mites and springtails, seemed to help disperse moss sperm. But the study didn't pinpoint how they did it or whether this kind of fertilization was critical to the moss life cycle. In hopes of answering those lingering questions, biologist Sarah Eppley of Portland State University in Oregon and colleagues gathered and grew moss samples from local forests and tested reproductive outcomes with and without rain and springtails. They found that water alone and springtails alone were equally effective at fertilizing mosses, but putting the two together made the mosses more than twice as successful at reproducing. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17068 - Posted: 07.19.2012

Matt Kaplan Neanderthals have long been viewed as meat-eaters. The vision of them as inflexible carnivores has even been used to suggest that they went extinct around 25,000 years ago as a result of food scarcity, whereas omnivorous humans were able to survive. But evidence is mounting that plants were important to Neanderthal diets — and now a study reveals that those plants were roasted, and may have been used medicinally. The finding comes from the El Sidrón Cave in northern Spain, where the roughly 50,000-year-old skeletal remains of at least 13 Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) have been discovered. Many of these individuals had calcified layers of plaque on their teeth. Karen Hardy, an anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, wondered whether it might be possible to use this plaque to take a closer look at the Neanderthal menu. Using plaque to work out the diets of ancient animals is not entirely new, but Hardy has gone further by looking for organic compounds in the plaque. To do this she and a team including Stephen Buckley, an archaeological chemist at the University of York, UK, used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyse the plaque collected from ten teeth belonging to five Neanderthal individuals from the cave. The plaque contained a range of carbohydrates and starch granules, hinting that the Neanderthals had consumed a variety of plant species. By contrast, there were few lipids or proteins from meat. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17067 - Posted: 07.19.2012

By Gary Stix The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has always looked for an anomaly in the persistent cosmic background chatter—a change perhaps in the intensity of a signal that can be taken as a sign that a transmission might be a message to us earthlings from other intelligent beings. Each year, medical researchers who gather at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference search for something similar as they weigh reports of the complex biology of the human brain for some sign that a drug might actually change the relentless course of the disease. Unlike many other major diseases that afflict millions of people, Alzheimer’s lacks a medicine that can send a patient into remission or maybe even effect a cure. On Tuesday, in Vancouver, the pharmaceutical company Baxter International reported to conference attendees on a weak but enticing signal, a drug that, if it works in larger clinical trials now under way, might actually stabilize patients and stop disease progression. Gammagard, or intravenous immunoglobulin, a soup of antibodies extracted from blood donors and already approved for some immune disorders, stopped for three years any decline in cognition and ability to go about the chores of daily living for four patients who received the highest dose. Four patients? True, it may be nothing. Too few patients, for sure, to make any predictions about whether, as so often in the past, the drug may falter and go by the wayside as it makes its way through the clinical trials pipeline . But the results still intrigued some in the research community who are normally circumspect about early reports. ‘‘It’s tantalizing. If you were to pick out four people with Alzheimer’s disease, the likelihood that they would perform the same on standardized tests three years later is very, very tiny,’’ William Thies, the scientific director for the Alzheimer’s Association, told the Associated Press. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17066 - Posted: 07.19.2012