By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Just when it seems long past time for the age of memoir to be over — just when it seems impossible that any ailing person with literary inclinations could find anything new to say about illness, and the list of not-to-be-missed “patients are people too” books should be closed and locked — yet another book comes along. And despite all the above, no one with even a passing interest in the experience of illness should miss Robert C. Samuels’s “Blue Water, White Water,” a memoir drafted about 30 years ago and published without fanfare a few months ago; it stands head and shoulders above the crowd. The details are slightly obsolete, to be sure: Mr. Samuels endured his many months of dire illness tethered to a respirator back in the 1980s, the Stone Age of modern intensive-care treatment. Nonetheless, his story from the wrong end of the tubes is timeless; the technology may evolve briskly, but the experience changes glacially, if at all. A former beat reporter for The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Mr. Samuels covers his own story like a pro. He was healthy, 44, just returned from a trip around the world in December 1981, when he got out of bed one morning with a weak left leg. He wandered into the local emergency room half convinced he was imagining things. By the next day he was completely paralyzed with a respirator breathing for him: Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease, was rapidly and efficiently stripping his motor nerves of their myelin sheathing, short-circuiting them all. Only his eyes still moved a little, from left to right. Nothing was wrong with his brain. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 16511 - Posted: 03.13.2012

By Jason G. Goldman The more scientists discover about desert ants, the more impressive they seem. Decades of research have established that ants use path integration – an innate form of mental trigonometry – in order to navigate the visually featureless environments that are the salt pans of Tunisia. They do this by calibrating a mental clock based on the motion of the sun, which they combine with a “mental chronometer,” a step counter. Together, this allows a desert ant to estimate both the distance and direction they must travel to make it back home. It also turns out that they represent their location in three dimensions; they account for hills and valleys in their mental calculations. But desert ants are able to use other cues as well to help them get home. Variations in soil composition, breaks in the salt, and dead plants, all contribute to the creation of an odor gradient across the landscape. Ants who have had one or both of their antennae removed were less successful in some navigation tasks, suggesting that they are able to use smell in guiding their navigation as well. And since they needed both antennae to perform optimally, it seems as if ants smell in stereo. New research just published in the journal PLoS ONE has added ground vibrations and magnetic fields to the list of cues desert ants can possibly use as aids to navigation. For this experiment, rather than using Cataglyphis fortis, the ants of Tunisia, they used a related species, Cataglyphis noda, of Cirali, Turkey. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Animal Migration
Link ID: 16510 - Posted: 03.13.2012

Prescribing heroin instead of methadone is more effective and less costly in treating street drug addiction relapses, a new analysis suggests. It was a collaboration with UBC, the University of Montreal and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. "We gave them option of trying methadone or diacetylmorphine [heroin] under medically supervised conditions, and we found people who were getting diacetylmorphine were retained in treatment much, much longer, so they had a much better outcome," said study head Dr. Aslam Anis, director of the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. Chronic addicts who were prescribed heroin stayed in treatment better than those prescribed methadone, researchers found.Chronic addicts who were prescribed heroin stayed in treatment better than those prescribed methadone, researchers found. (CBC) Most of the savings in the mathematical model were attributed to how those prescribed heroin stayed in treatment longer and spent less time in relapse than those randomly assigned to receive methadone. By staying in treatment, health-care costs were lower when the cost of the drugs, counselling and social supports were added up. "Our model indicated that diacetylmorphine would decrease societal costs, largely by reducing costs associated with crime, and would increase both the duration and quality of life of treatment recipients," the study's authors concluded. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16509 - Posted: 03.13.2012

By Scicurious I just came back from an 11 mile run. The wind wasn’t awful like it usually is, the sun was out, and I was at peace with the world, and right now, I still am. Later, I know my knees will be yelling at me and my body will want nothing more than to lie down. But right now? Right now I feel FANTASTIC. What I am in the happy, zen-like, yet curiously energetic throes of is what is popularly known as the “runner’s high”. The runner’s high is a state of bliss achieved by athletes (not just runners) during and immediately following prolonged and intense exercise. It can be an extremely powerful, emotional experience. Many athletes will say they get it (and indeed, some would say we MUST get it, because otherwise why would we keep running 26.2 miles at a stretch?), but what IS it exactly? For some people it’s highly emotional, for some it’s peaceful, and for some it’s a burst of energy. And there are plenty of other people who don’t appear to get it at all. What causes it? Why do some people get it and others don’t? Well, the short answer is that we don’t know. As I was coming back from my run, blissful and emotive enough that the sight of a small puppy could make me weepy with joy, I began to wonder myself…what is up with me? As I re-hydrated and and began to sift through the literature, I found…well, not much. But what I did find suggests two competing hypothesis: the endogenous opioid hypothesis and the cannabinoid hypothesis. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 16508 - Posted: 03.13.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Surgery for epilepsy is usually seen as a last resort for patients when medications do not work, and it is often delayed for many years after the failure of drug treatment. Now a randomized, controlled trial suggests that surgery as soon as possible after the failure of two antiepileptic drugs is a significantly better approach than continued medical care. Previous studies have shown that patients referred for surgery have had epilepsy for an average of 22 years, and are referred on average more than 10 years after the use of two drugs has failed to stop the seizures. People with continued seizures are at increased risk for drowning and other accidents, depression, progressive loss of memory, and, in younger people, a failure to develop vocational and social skills. Their risk of death is 10 times as high as that of the general population. Researchers studied a group of 38 epilepsy patients, randomly assigning 15 to brain surgery and 23 to continued medical treatment. The surgery involves the removal of a piece of tissue about the size of a walnut from the temporal lobe, the part of the brain just above the ear. The surgery has been performed for many years, but the institution of high-resolution M.R.I. and microsurgical techniques have greatly improved its safety and efficacy. The patients in both groups were similar in age, duration of epilepsy, the number of antiepileptic drugs used and the number of seizures they had had. All had been taking drugs for one to two years without relief. The participants were seen at the study site every three months for two years after the start of the study. A group of specialists who did not know which patients had had surgery evaluated them for seizure type and severity as recorded in patient diaries. The study appears in the March 7 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 16507 - Posted: 03.13.2012

Ewen Callaway Many meat-eating animals have lost their ability to taste sugars over the course of evolution. Sea mammals, spotted hyenas and other carnivores have all shed a working copy of a gene that encodes a ‘taste receptor’ that senses sugars, finds a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. An animal with a diet devoid of vegetables may have little need to detect sugars, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the lead author of the study. He sees parallels with cave-dwelling fish that have lost their sense of sight. Most mammals, including humans, are equipped with taste receptors that detect salty, sour, sweet, bitter and savoury foods. But past studies suggest that some animals lack certain taste receptors. Felines such as house cats, tigers and cheetahs do not favour sugar water over plain water, for example, and they all possess an identical mutation in a gene called Tas1r2 that renders the sweet-taste receptor inactive2. To see whether other carnivores also lack sweet receptors, Beauchamp and his team collected DNA from 12 members of the order Carnivora, including spotted hyenas, a cat-like creature from Madagascar called a fossa, a civet called a banded linsang and several species of sea mammal. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Evolution
Link ID: 16506 - Posted: 03.13.2012

By RONI CARYN RABIN Talk about sleepless nights. Patients taking prescription sleep aids on a regular basis were nearly five times as likely as non-users to die over a period of two and a half years, according to a recent study. Even those prescribed fewer than 20 pills a year were at risk, the researchers found; heavy users also were more likely to develop cancer. Unsurprisingly, the findings, published online in the journal BMJ, have caused a quite a stir. Americans filled some 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills last year, up from 47 million in 2006, according to IMS Health, a health care services company. Panicked patients have been calling doctors’ offices seeking reassurance; some others simply quit the pills cold turkey. Some experts were quick to point out the study’s shortcomings. The analysis did not prove that sleeping pills cause death, critics noted, only that there may be a correlation between the two. And while the authors suggested the sleeping pills were a factor in the deaths, those who use sleep aids tend as a group to be sicker than those who don’t use them. The deaths may simply be a reflection of poorer health. Still, the findings underscore concern about the exploding use of sleeping pills. Experts say that many patients, especially the elderly, should exercise more caution when using sleep medications, including the non-benzodiazepine hypnotics so popular today, like zolpidem (brand name Ambien), eszopiclone (Lunesta) and zaleplon (Sonata). © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16505 - Posted: 03.13.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, Adriane Fugh-Berman was stunned by the question: Two graduate students who had no symptoms of mental illness wondered if she thought they should take a powerful schizophrenia drug each had been prescribed to treat insomnia. “It’s a total outrage,” said Fugh-Berman, a physician who is an associate professor of pharmacology at Georgetown University. “These kids needed some basic sleep [advice], like reducing their intake of caffeine and alcohol, not a highly sedating drug.” Those Georgetown students exemplify a trend that alarms medical experts, policymakers and patient advocates: the skyrocketing increase in the off-label use of an expensive class of drugs called atypical antipsychotics. Until the past decade these 11 drugs, most approved in the 1990s, had been reserved for the approximately 3 percent of Americans with the most disabling mental illnesses, chiefly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; more recently a few have been approved to treat severe depression. But these days atypical antipsychotics — the most popular are Seroquel, Zyprexa and Abilify — are being prescribed by psychiatrists and primary-care doctors to treat a panoply of conditions for which they have not been approved, including anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, sleep difficulties, behavioral problems in toddlers and dementia. These new drugs account for more than 90 percent of the market and have eclipsed an older generation of antipsychotics. Two recent reports have found that youths in foster care, some less than a year old, are taking more psychotropic drugs than other children, including those with the severest forms of mental illness. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Sleep
Link ID: 16504 - Posted: 03.13.2012

Greg Gage is on a mission to get kids excited about neuroscience by helping them understand how the brain works — in ways that are extremely memorable. He sells $100 kits that teach how neurons work by putting electricity through cockroach limbs and living cockroaches. One of the most amazing and unexpected experiences I had at the TED conference a couple weeks ago was getting to do one of Gage’s experiments myself. I tracked him down after reading that he was one of 25 invited TED fellows, and before I knew it, I was in a random hallway in the bowels of the convention center, wrestling a squirmy cockroach into my own experiment. First, Gage had me anesthetize a cockroach by dousing it in a glass of ice water, then sever one of its legs (they grow back), plug in a couple of electrodes, and then listen and watch neurons through an app on his iPad. There’s actually a really great video of this same experiment, taken from when Gage performed it for an audience of kids. TED just released it today, as part of its new education initiative. In the video, Gage shows how the living neurons in the cockroach leg can be pulsed with bass from music, and then brings out a live beatboxer on stage to show the cockroach leg dancing to the beat. Read that last sentence again, or just watch the video. It’s pretty crazy. © 2005-2012 Dow Jones & Company Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16503 - Posted: 03.13.2012

By JESSE McKINLEY SAN FRANCISCO — With a couple of old desks, a beat-up couch and an off-white white board, the office space at 149 Turk Street, in this city’s seedy Tenderloin district, is hardly remarkable. A collection of worn detective novels sits on the bookshelf, a couple of American flags hang limply from the wall and a coffee machine constantly percolates in the back kitchen. It is the tenants who set 149 Turk apart: a ragtag group of current and former drug users who make no apologies about their fondness for illegal narcotics, intravenous experiences and the undeniable rush of getting high. “If you pass a drug test,” joked Gary West, a member, “you’re outta here.” But the group, the San Francisco Drug Users’ Union, has more on its mind than simply turning on, tuning in and dropping out. The union is one of several groups in the United States and Canada that advocate for the rights of drug users, following the lead of older European drug user organizations. Their goals are often varied, but carry a common refrain: to represent the political interests — and practical needs — of chronic drug abusers, a sometimes grim agenda that includes everything from providing clean needles to finding safe places to nod out. It is a job, members say, that requires firsthand experience to connect with a population that is often wary of law enforcement and social service agencies. “People don’t trust them,” said Isaac Jackson, who helped found the group and is, with Mr. West, one of two so-called peer organizers. “So someone being a drug user here is somewhat desirable, because who knows best about drugs than those that use them?” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16502 - Posted: 03.12.2012

By Melissa Dahl One of the less-talked-about side effects of being blind: fielding many (many!) questions from us sighted folks -- enough questions, apparently, to program a YouTube channel. Tommy Edison, who is blind, hosts the popular YouTube series "The Tommy Edison Experience," where he answers viewer questions: How do blind people use an ATM? How do blind people use paper money? In one of his latest videos, he posts his answer to a fascinating question: How do blind people dream? Edison explains that he's been blind since birth, so, no, he doesn't "see" in his dreams. "I think because I’ve never seen in real life, that my sub-conscious doesn’t know what it’d be like to see, either, so, no. I don’t see in my dreams,” Edison explains in the video. “I mean, the way it works for me, is just the way my life occurs, right? So it’s all smell, sound, taste and touch," he continues. "That’s all there is. Just like your life works. I mean, you see in your life, so, obviously, you’d see in your dreams." To someone who's always been able to see, though, that description might be surprising. (Edison dreams in Smell-O-Vision?) Most sighted people remember the images and emotions from a dream -- but smells, sounds, tastes and touches, maybe not so much. "You guys, you’re visually driven," Edison said to me in a phone interview. "I don’t know, 'cause I’ve never seen, but I would think if there was something very prevalent -- like if there was a fire in your dream -- I would think you would remember the smell of it. Or take a bite of the hamburger, and it tastes like lobster -- that’s going to be a funny thing you'd remember." © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sleep; Vision
Link ID: 16501 - Posted: 03.12.2012

By Eric Michael Johnson Americans take their rights seriously. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about what actually constitutes a ‘right.’ Religious believers are correct that they have a right to freely express their beliefs. This right is protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution that prohibits Congress from making any “law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” However, as a result, devout believers feel it is a violation of their rights when intelligent design creationism is forbidden in the classroom or when prayer during school sporting events is banned. After all, shouldn’t the First Amendment prohibit the government from interfering with this basic right? The answer is no and represents an important distinction when understanding what a right actually is. Because public schools are government-run institutions, allowing prayer during school activities or promoting religious doctrines in the classroom is a direct violation of the First Amendment. These activities infringe on the rights of those who do not share the same religious beliefs (or any at all). The key point is that rights are obligations that require governments to act in certain ways and refrain from acting in others. The First Amendment obligates the government to protect the rights of all citizens from an establishment of religion. You may have the right to freely exercise your beliefs, but that doesn’t give you the right to impose your views on others in public school. It was just this understanding of rights as obligations that governments must obey that formed the basis for a declaration of rights for cetaceans (whales and dolphins) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Vancouver, Canada last month. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 16500 - Posted: 03.12.2012

By SUSAN DOMINUS Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question after question, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollably and her face was contracting into spasms. She was still twitching a few weeks later when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of one of the school’s cheerleading squads, awoke from a nap stuttering and then later started twitching, her arms flailing and head jerking. Two weeks after that, Lydia Parker, also a senior, erupted in tics and arm swings and hums. Then word got around that Chelsey Dumars, another cheerleader, who recently moved to town, was making the same strange noises, the same strange movements, leaving school early on the days she could make it to class at all. The numbers grew — 12, then 16, then 18, in a school of 600 — and as they swelled, the ranks of the sufferers came to include a wider swath of the Le Roy high-school hierarchy: girls who weren’t cheerleaders, girls who kept to themselves and had studs in their lips. There was even one boy and an older woman, age 36. Parents wept as their daughters stuttered at the dinner table. Teachers shut their classroom doors when they heard a din of outbursts, one cry triggering another, sending the increasingly familiar sounds ricocheting through the halls. Within a few months, as the camera crews continued to descend, the community barely seemed to recognize itself. One expert after another arrived to pontificate about what was wrong in Le Roy, a town of 7,500 in Western New York that had long prided itself on the things it got right. The kids here were wholesome and happy, their parents insisted — “cheerleaders and honor students,” as one father said — products of a place that, while not perfect, was made up more of what was good about small-town America than what was bad. Now, though, the girls’ writhing and stuttering suggested something troubling, either arising from within the community or being perpetrated on it, a mystery that proved irresistible for onlookers, whose attention would soon become part of the story itself. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Tourettes
Link ID: 16499 - Posted: 03.10.2012

by Jane J. Lee Like a football player who just scored a touchdown, male white-flippered penguins (Eudyptula minor albosignata) perform triumph displays after defeating an opponent. Now, researchers in New Zealand have found that those victory dances, complete with a braying, donkeylike call and flipper waving, make it less likely that nearby penguins will challenge the winner. "Scientists have spent a lot of time studying antagonistic interactions, but quite often, they turn the camera off after the fight, so they miss a lot," says Tom Sherratt, an evolutionary ecologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, who was not involved in the current study. Researchers have investigated the effects of triumph displays on the loser, but because this is a fairly recent field of study, the new research is probably the first published account of its effects on nearby birds, he added. Explanations for the function of triumph displays include browbeating an opponent so that he doesn't forget who beat him and signaling to an audience not to mess with you. Researchers at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, wanted to know whether penguins near a fight picked up on those signals. So they studied the effects of triumph displays on nesting white-flippered penguins in a colony at Flea Bay in New Zealand. These penguins were ideal study subjects because they're really aggressive and squabble frequently, says Joseph Waas, a behavioral ecologist and a co-author on the study. Only about 5% to 10% of their aggressive encounters lead to a full-fledged fight, complete with slashing bill hooks and flipper bashing, he says. But it's not unusual to see male penguins that are missing an eye. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Animal Communication
Link ID: 16498 - Posted: 03.10.2012

By Ferris Jabr As a baby bird develops, its body contorts to fit within the confines of its egg. The bird's neck twists so that one side of its head is tucked against its chest. In this position, the bird's left eye remains nestled among sprouting feathers—where it does not receive much light from the outside world—whereas the right eye is pressed up against the eggshell, glimpsing flickers of light and shadow through a veil of calcium carbonate. Even though this uneven stimulation of the eyes lasts only one or two days before the chick hatches, it seems to be crucial for typical brain development. Pigeons incubated in the dark have a much harder time solving puzzles as adults than pigeons exposed to light before hatching. The reason, some researchers think, is that the brain's two hemispheres cannot properly integrate information if they miss a critical window period of learning in the egg. Martina Manns of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany has been studying pigeon brains for the past 20 years. For a new study published in the February issue of Nature Communications, Manns and her colleague Juliane Römling focused on 14 domestic pigeons raised in normal lighting conditions by local breeders and another eight pigeons raised in dark incubators in their lab. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Through various memory tests and logic puzzles, Manns and Römling compared the problem-solving abilities of the two groups of birds. One by one, Manns and Römling presented each pigeon with different pairs of plastic cups filled with colorful aquarium gravel, only one of which concealed a kernel of corn. There were four pairings: red and blue, blue/green, green/yellow and yellow/violet. Through trial and error the pigeons learned to prefer one color in each pair, because gravel of that color always contained the tasty snack. Given a choice between blue and green gravel, for instance, blue was always the right answer; green gravel always contained the reward when matched with yellow, etcetera. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 16497 - Posted: 03.10.2012

By JESSE McKINLEY Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader — including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing — his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate. “I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.” Mr. Robertson’s remarks echoed statements he made last week on “The 700 Club,” the signature program of his Christian Broadcasting Network, and other comments he made in 2010. While those earlier remarks were largely dismissed by his followers, Mr. Robertson has now apparently fully embraced the idea of legalizing marijuana, arguing that it is a way to bring down soaring rates of incarceration and reduce the social and financial costs. “I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up,” he said. Mr. Robertson’s remarks were hailed by pro-legalization groups, who called them a potentially important endorsement in their efforts to roll back marijuana penalties and prohibitions, which residents of Colorado and Washington will vote on this fall. “I love him, man, I really do,” said Neill Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of current and former law enforcement officials who oppose the drug war. “He’s singing my song.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16496 - Posted: 03.10.2012

Arran Frood The powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The study1, by neuroscientist Teri Krebs and clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, is the first-ever quantitative meta-analysis of LSD–alcoholism clinical trials. The researchers sifted through thousands of records to collect data from randomized, double-blind trials that compared one dose of LSD to a placebo. Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who received a placebo. “We were surprised that the effect was so clear and consistent,” says Krebs. She says that the problem with most studies done at that time was that there were too few participants, which limited statistical power. “But when you combine the data in a meta-analysis, we have more than 500 patients and there is definitely an effect,” she says. In general, the reported benefits lasted three to six months. Their findings are published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Psychedelics were promoted by psychiatrists in the 1950s as having a range of medical uses — to treat conditions such as schizophrenia, for example — before political pressures in the United States and elsewhere largely ended the work. “Alcoholism was considered one of the most promising clinical applications for LSD,” says Johansen. Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson is said to have espoused the benefits of LSD in the book Pass It On: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the AA Message Reached the World. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16495 - Posted: 03.10.2012

Powerful but misleading marketing that for years pushed the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin has left potentially tens of thousands of Canadians with the burden of addiction, critics claim. OxyContin helped transform the medical landscape after it was introduced in the late 1990s, touted by doctors and pitched as a less addictive alternative to other opioids. Cancer patients and others suffering from chronic pain considered the pill — twice as strong as morphine — to be a godsend. But the CBC's The Fifth Estate found that as soon as several provinces dropped OxyContin this year as a publicly funded medication and it vanished from shelves, the drug once praised as a blessing became a curse for some addicts. Watch The Fifth Estate Unknown to some doctors and pharmacists when OxyContin debuted were its extremely addictive properties, a fact that may have contributed to its becoming an international best-selling painkiller. OxyContin was taken off the Canadian market this month. To replace the drug, Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin, began manufacturing a new formulation called OxyNeo. The replacement pill can't be crushed or liquefied and has thus been promoted as less prone to abuse. There are otherwise no clinical differences between the two brand names. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16494 - Posted: 03.10.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV It seems like it would be hard to miss the face of an actress morphing into another. But a new animation by psychologist Sebastiaan Mathôt from VU University in Amsterdam shows that Natalie Portman can turn into Leighton Meester right before your eyes and you won't notice when there's motion in the scene. In the first clip, fix your eyes on the cross in the centre of the video. As the changing faces rotate, you probably won't notice that they're morphing. But when they stop turning, the transformation becomes apparent. A second example shows that the faces themselves don't need to move to trick your brain. As you stare at a green dot in the centre, a rapidly-changing background makes you blind to the shifting face. When the motion stops, the creepy metamorphosis is obvious once again. The illusion is a version of a novel brain trick, devised last year by Jordan Suchow and George Alvarez from Harvard University, which won first place at the Best Illusion of the Year contest. It occurs due to a phenomenon called change blindness, where you can completely miss an obvious change when looking at a busy scene. When nothing much is happening, your visual system is more sensitive to change, but as the action increases, a transformation needs to be more dramatic to be detected. "In a sense, we protect ourselves from being overwhelmed by too much change," says Mathôt. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16493 - Posted: 03.10.2012

By Rachel Ehrenberg That honeybee lazily probing a flower may actually be a stealth explorer, genetically destined to seek adventure from birth. Bees who consistently explore new environments for food have different genetic activity in their brains than their less-adventurous hive mates, scientists report in the March 9 Science. This genetic activity relates to making particular chemical signals, some of which are linked to behaviors such as thrill-seeking in people. “This is an exciting paper that raises a lot of interesting questions,” says neurobiologist Alison Mercer of the University of Otago in New Zealand. To test the notion of whether bees have personality, scientists led by entomologist Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign focused on scout bees that embark on reconnaissance missions for food. The team, which included bee expert Tom Seeley of Cornell University, placed a hive in an enclosure with a brightly colored feeder full of sugar water and marked the bees that visited. A few days later, the researchers added a new feeder to the enclosure, while keeping the original one full of fresh sugar water. Some of the bees discovered the new feeder and were also marked. Then the researchers removed the new feeder and added a different one in a new place. Again, some of the bees discovered this new feeder. The bees that found the new feeder both times were considered scouts, while the bees that ate only at the same old feeder were considered nonscouts. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 16492 - Posted: 03.10.2012