Analysis by Jesse Emspak The phrase, "use your brainpower" may soon become literal. Engineers at MIT have developed a tiny prototype fuel cell that creates electricy from the body's natural sugars. The fuel cell could be used to power brain implants for treating epilepsy, Parkinson's diseases and paralysis. Currently, devices implanted in the body are typically powered by lithium-ion batteries, but they have a limited lifetime and need to be replaced. Opening up the body to replace a battery is not something doctor like to do, but doing it in the brain is even less desirable. The researchers, led by Rahul Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, built the fuel cell using a platinum catalyst at one end and a layer of carbon nanotubes at the other. It rests on a silicon chip, allowing it to be connected to electronics that would be used in brain implants. coughing robot As glucose passes over the platinum, electrons and hydrogen ions are stripped off as it is oxidized. That's what makes the current. At the other end of the cell, oxygen mixes with the hydrogen to make water when it hits the layer of single-walled carbon nanotubes. The cell produces up to 180 microwatts, enough to power a brain implant that might send signals to bypass damaged region, or stimulate part of the brain (a treatment used in disorders such as Parkinson's). © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 16982 - Posted: 06.28.2012

By MATTHEW PERRONE WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved Arena Pharmaceutical’s anti-obesity pill Belviq, the first new prescription drug for long-term weight loss to enter the U.S. market in over a decade. Despite only achieving modest weight loss in clinical studies, the drug appeared safe enough to win the FDA’s endorsement, amid calls from doctors for new weight-loss treatments. The agency cleared the pill Wednesday for adults who are obese or are overweight with at least one medical complication, such as diabetes or high cholesterol. The drug should be used in combination with a healthy diet and exercise. Obesity Society President Patrick O'Neil said he’s encouraged by the drug’s approval because it underscores the notion that lifestyle changes alone are not enough to treat obesity. ‘‘This is good news because it tells us that the FDA is indeed treating obesity seriously,’’ said O'Neil, who teaches at Medical University of South Carolina and was the lead researcher on several studies of Belviq. ‘‘On the other hand, it’s not the answer to the problem — or even a big part of the answer.’’ Even if the effects of Belviq are subtle, experts say it could be an important first step in developing new treatments that attack the underlying causes of obesity. ‘‘The way these things tend to work is you have some people who do extremely well and other people don’t lose any weight at all. But if we had 10 medicines that were all different and worked like this, we would have a real field,’’ said Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the weight loss program at Weill-Cornell Medical College. © 2012 NY Times Co

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16981 - Posted: 06.28.2012

by Sara Reardon Forget patches: gene therapy could suppress cigarette cravings by preventing the brain from receiving nicotine. The treatment is effective in mice, but with gene therapy still not fully tested in people, human trials and treatments are a long way off. For drug users who really can't quit, vaccination might one day be an option, and several groups have attempted to develop such treatments. But nicotine vaccines have mostly flopped. This is because nicotine is a very small molecule, so the immune system has difficulty recognising the drug and making antibodies that bind it. Physicians can inject antibodies directly into a patient, but this treatment quickly becomes expensive because the antibodies don't last long. Ronald Crystal of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and his team decided to bypass that problem by putting the gene for a nicotine antibody right into the body. They selected the strongest antibody against nicotine from a mouse and isolated the gene that produced it. They then placed this gene into a carrier called adeno-associated virus (AAV), which is widely used for gene therapyMovie Camera. When the researchers injected the virus and its cargo into nicotine-addicted mice, the rodents' livers took up the virus, began making antibodies and pumped them into the bloodstream. The researchers injected two cigarettes' worth of nicotine into AAV-infected mice. The antibodies were able to bind 83 per cent of the drug before it reached the brain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16980 - Posted: 06.28.2012

By Michael Shermer Where is the experience of red in your brain? The question was put to me by Deepak Chopra at his Sages and Scientists Symposium in Carlsbad, Calif., on March 3. A posse of presenters argued that the lack of a complete theory by neuroscientists regarding how neural activity translates into conscious experiences (such as redness) means that a physicalist approach is inadequate or wrong. The idea that subjective experience is a result of electrochemical activity remains a hypothesis, Chopra elaborated in an e-mail. It is as much of a speculation as the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that it causes brain activity and creates the properties and objects of the material world. Where is Aunt Millie's mind when her brain dies of Alzheimer's? I countered to Chopra. Aunt Millie was an impermanent pattern of behavior of the universe and returned to the potential she emerged from, Chopra rejoined. In the philosophic framework of Eastern traditions, ego identity is an illusion and the goal of enlightenment is to transcend to a more universal nonlocal, nonmaterial identity. The hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness, however, has vastly more evidence for it than the hypothesis that consciousness creates the brain. Damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, for example, causes face blindness, and stimulation of this same area causes people to see faces spontaneously. Stroke-caused damage to the visual cortex region called V1 leads to loss of conscious visual perception. Changes in conscious experience can be directly measured by functional MRI, electroencephalography and single-neuron recordings. Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain-scanning activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made. Using brain scans alone, neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct, on a computer screen, what someone is seeing. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 16979 - Posted: 06.28.2012

by Carrie Arnold In the world of big brains, humans have very few competitors. Dolphins come closest, with a brain to body weight ratio just below ours and just above chimpanzees. Now, a new analysis of these sharp swimmers reveals for the first time some of the genetic changes that led dolphins to evolve such large noggins. "Dolphins evolved from relatively small-brained animals like cows and hippos into this large-brained, highly specialized aquatic organism," said Caro-Beth Stewart, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York, Albany, who was not involved in the research. "This is one of the first comprehensive studies to look at rates of molecular evolution in dolphins." Nearly 50 million years ago, the ancestor of all cetaceans—a group that includes dolphins and whales—began its transition from land lubber to aquatic all-star. To do so, it had to evolve several adaptations: it lost limbs, it developed fins, and it gained the ability to hold its breath for long periods of time. Its brain also grew about three times bigger. To get a sense of how these large brains evolved, Michael McGowen, an evolutionary biologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and his colleagues compared the dolphin's genome with two of its closest land-loving, small-brained relatives, the cow and the horse, as well as the dog. Out of the roughly 10,000 protein-coding genes the researchers examined in the bottlenose dolphin genome, they identified 228 mutations that had swept through the population. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16978 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By JOHN MARKOFF MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Inside Google’s secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain. There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own. Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats. The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items. The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 16977 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter, Parkinson's is a devastating disease for those living with the condition and currently there is no cure. Diagnosis can also be slow as there are no blood tests to detect it. But now mathematician Max Little has come up with a non-invasive, cheap test which he hopes will offer a quick new way to identify the disease. He will be kicking off the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh calling for volunteers to contribute to a huge voice database. Mr Little has discovered that Parkinson's symptoms can be detected by computer algorithms that analyse voice recordings. In a blind test of voices, the system was able to spot those with Parkinson's with an accuracy of 86%. Mr Little was recently made a TED Fellow. The non-profit organisation behind the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference creates 40 such fellowships each year. The programme aims to target innovators under the age of 40 and offers them free entry to conferences and other events. Mr Little became interested in understanding voice from a mathematical perspective while he was studying for a PhD at Oxford University in 2003. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16976 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By Ferris Jabr Every September arctic ground squirrels in Alaska, Canada and Siberia retreat into burrows more than a meter beneath the tundra, curl up in nests built from grass, lichen and caribou hair, and begin to hibernate. As their lungs and hearts slow, the rivers of blood flowing through their bodies dwindle and their core body temperatures plummet, dipping below the freezing point of water. Electrical signals zipping along crisscrossing neural highways vanish in many areas of the brain. Seven months later the squirrels wake up and return to the surface—famished, eager to mate and perfectly healthy. How hibernating mammals survive for so long at such low temperatures without any food or water beyond what they have stored in their own fat fascinates scientists for many reasons. Hibernation is an amazing biological feat and an opportunity to learn new ways of pushing the human body beyond its ostensible limits, as well as healing it when it breaks down. The arctic ground squirrel's brain, in particular, seems to be incredibly resilient. When ground squirrels hibernate their neurons shrink and many connections between neurons shrivel. But their brains periodically compensate for this loss with massive growth spurts, multiplying neural links beyond what existed before hibernation. Learning how the ground squirrel's brain recuperates could not only help scientists understand the brain's plasticity, but also suggest new ways to reverse or prevent cellular damage in neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, recent research on hibernating brains is changing the way some scientists think about misshapen tau proteins, which are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. Most small hibernating mammals—hamsters, hedgehogs, bats—turn down their body's thermostat during hibernation, relinquishing one of the defining features of all mammals: warm blood. Arctic ground squirrels are the most extreme example. In August 1987 Brian Barnes of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (U.A.F.) captured 12 arctic ground squirrels and implanted tiny temperature-sensitive radio transmitters in the animals' abdomens. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16975 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By Bruce Bower Even 6-month-old babies can rapidly estimate approximate numbers of items without counting. But surprisingly, an apparently inborn sense for numbers doesn’t top out until around age 30. Number sense precision gradually declines after that, generally falling to preteen levels by about age 70, say psychologist Justin Halberda of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and his colleagues. They report the findings, based on Internet testing of more than 10,000 volunteers ages 11 to 85, online the week of June 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “I expected to see some improvement in number sense into preschool or maybe early elementary school, but not up to age 30,” Halberda says. Evidence of critical mental abilities peaking after young adulthood is rare but has been reported for face memory (SN: 1/1/11, p. 16). Participants in the new study completed a game that tested the precision of their number sense, or how accurately they could assess quantities. Volunteers saw a series of images showing mixes of blue and yellow dots and judged which color dot was more numerous. Each dot array appeared for a fraction of a second. In some dot arrays, one color greatly outnumbered the other. In other arrays, one color slightly outnumbered the other. Test-takers of the same age showed large differences in how accurately they could assess the dots, with the highest average scores coming around age 30, the researchers report. Teens and adults with a robust number sense reported doing moderately better at math in school and on the math portion of the SAT than those with a weak number sense. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Attention; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16974 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By Brian Palmer, A friend recently asked me whether black bears in Appalachia have Southern accents and whether they have trouble understanding black bears raised in Canada or Alaska. Taken literally, those are notions more fit for a Disney movie than a scientist. In a more abstract sense, however, it’s a profound inquiry that fascinates zoologists and psychologists alike. Is communication learned or innate in nonhuman animals? Can geographically distant groups of the same species develop local culture: unique ways of eating, playing and talking to each other? I posed those questions to Darcy Kelley, a Columbia University professor who studies animal communications. “In most species, communication appears to have a genetic basis,” she said. “Regional accents can only develop in the small number of species that learn their vocalizations from others.” Research suggests that the overwhelming majority of animals are born knowing how to speak their species’s language. It doesn’t really matter where those animals are born or raised, because their speech seems to be mostly imprinted in their genetic code. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Bob Seyfarth and biologist Dorothy Cheney conducted a classic experiment on this question. They switched a pair of rhesus macaques and a pair of Japanese macaques shortly after birth, so that the Japanese macaque parents raised the rhesus macaque babies, and the rhesus macaque parents raised the Japanese macaque babies. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 16973 - Posted: 06.27.2012

Mo Costandi How the brain responds to and processes images of people from different racial groups is an emerging field of investigation that could have major implications for society. Psychologist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, in New York, who in 2000 led one of the first studies in this area, tells Nature what her latest review of the field reveals about the neuroscience of race1. What does psychology tell us about race? Social psychologists differentiate between the attitudes that people express and their implicit preferences. This can be studied using the implicit association task, which measures initial, evaluative responses. It involves asking people to pair concepts such as black and white with concepts like good and bad. What you find is that most white Americans take longer to make a response that pairs black with good and white with bad than vice versa. This reveals their implicit preferences. What did your review of the neuroscience literature show? My colleagues and I found that there’s a network of brain regions that is consistently activated in neuroimaging studies of race processing. This network overlaps with the circuits involved in decision-making and emotion regulation, and includes the amygdala, fusiform face area (FFA), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). What did your previous work show? Our 2000 study was the first to link race preference to brain activity. We measured the eye-blink startle, a reflex response that people display when they hear a loud noise, for example. A lot of studies have shown that this reflex is potentiated [enhanced] when people are anxious or in the presence of something they think is negative. We found that implicit preferences were correlated with potentiated startle, and that both were correlated with the amount of amygdala activation. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 16972 - Posted: 06.27.2012

by Gisela Telis Stress really does mess with your mind. A new study has found that chronic stress can create many of the brain changes associated with mood disorders by blocking a gene called neuritin—and that boosting the gene's activity can protect the brain from those disorders. The results provide new insight into the mechanisms behind depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, and could offer researchers a novel target for drugs to treat those conditions. Research has shown that mood disorders take a toll on patients' brains as well as on their lives. Postmortem studies and brain scans have revealed that the hippocampus (the brain's memory center) can shrink and atrophy in people with a history of depression and other mood disorders. People who live with mood disorders are also known to have low levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a growth factor that keeps neurons healthy. They also have low activity in the neuritin gene, which codes for a protein of the same name that may protect the brain's plasticity: its ability to reorganize and change in response to new experiences. Ronald Duman, a neurobiologist at Yale University, and colleagues wondered if the poorly understood neuritin might play an important -- and heretofore overlooked -- role in depression and other mood disorders. They induced depression in a group of rats by subjecting them to chronic, unpredictable stress. Depriving them of food and play, isolating them, and switching around their day/night cycles for about 3 weeks left the rats with little interest in feeding or enjoying a sweetened drink. The rats also gave up and became immobile instead of swimming when placed in a tub of water—another measure of rodent depression. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 16971 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Scicurious A colleague handed me this paper, not just as an interesting aspect of Parkinson’s, but as somewhat supportive paper for the role of serotonin in depression. I have said before that I think the serotonin theory of depression (as depicted in Zoloft commercials) is probably wrong, but my views are actually a bit more nuanced than that. The serotonin theory is probably wrong, but not because it is wrong, rather, it is oversimplified. I think that low serotonin levels on their own probably don’t cause depression, but it looks like there may still be a role for serotonin in depressive symptoms, and this paper seems to agree. Science, it’s always more complicated than you think at first. Parkinson’s is something that no one wants to get. It’s a degenerative disorder of the nervous system, which results in a wide variety of symptoms. Most people think of Parkinson’s and picture a shuffling gait, severe hand tremor, slowness of movement and rigidity. But there are other symptoms as well, include depression, hallucinations, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and cognitive deficits as the disease progresses. And when most people think of potential causes for Parkinson’s, they think of a deficit in dopamine, the neurotransmitter that I usually think of with regard to reward and reinforcement, but which is extremely important in motor systems as well. In Parkinson’s patients, you see a striking loss of dopamine neurons in motor areas like the substantia nigra (it’s easy to see because the melanin in the substantia nigra, which is latin for “black substance” dyes the cells black, and when those cells die, the stubstantia nigra becomes a lot less substantia and nigra). But again, it’s not just dopamine in the substantia nigra, there are other systems involved and differences in signaling that also play a role as the disease progresses. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Parkinsons; Depression
Link ID: 16970 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Jennifer Huget One of the best-kept secrets among women over 50 is not so secret any more, thanks to a study published last week that shows eating disorders and body-image problems aren’t uncommon among that demographic. There’s been lots of concern over the years about young women’s eating disorders. But a disturbing picture of older women’s bingeing, purging and using extreme measures such as diet drugs, diuretics, laxatives and excessive exercise to promote weight loss is starting to emerge. The new study, conducted through the Eating Disorders Program at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and published June 21 in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, was based on an online survey of 1,849 women age 50 or older. Their average age was 59, and about 92 percent of respondents were white. Only 42 percent of the women were of normal weight, according guidelines set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among the others, 29 percent were overweight and 27 percent obese. (Two percent were underweight.) Fully two-thirds of the women reported being unhappy with their appearance. More than one-third — 36 percent — said they’d spent at least half of their past five years dieting. Forty percent said they weighed themselves more than once a week, and — ugh, this sounds familiar — 41 percent reported checking their body daily through such measures as pinching their belly fat or noting whether their thighs rubbed together. And almost 80 percent said their weight and shape was either moderately important to or the most important factor influencing their self-perception. © 2011 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 16969 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Nathan Seppa HOUSTON — Men with low testosterone who are given replacement doses of the hormone shed weight steadily for years, researchers in Germany reported June 23 at a meeting of the Endocrine Society. Study participants, nearly all of whom were overweight or obese at the start of the study, lost 36 pounds on average. “This was an unintended effect,” said study coauthor Farid Saad, a research endocrinologist at Bayer Pharma in Berlin. “The big surprise was that when we analyzed the data [we found] that these men had lost weight continuously...year by year.” The men didn’t diet as part of the study, and any increase in their activity was voluntary, Saad said. He and his colleagues studied 116 men, average age 61, who had low testosterone levels. Each received quarterly injections of the hormone for five years. At the start, 71 percent were obese and another 24 percent were overweight. After five years, 97 percent of the men showed a reduction in waist circumference, on average losing “three to four trouser sizes,” Saad said. Average weight dropped from 236 pounds to about 200. “This definitely offers some insight that we can apply to our clinical practices,” said Vineeth Mohan, a clinical endocrinologist at Cleveland Clinic Florida in Weston. High testosterone levels have been linked to prostate cancer risk (SN: 10/8/05, p. 238), and a small portion of men taking high doses of it experience mania (SN: 2/19/00, p. 119). But in this study, Saad said, men received testosterone in doses just high enough to bring them back to normal levels. Three men in the test group were diagnosed with prostate cancer during the study, a rate lower than the incidence found in routine screening programs for men that age, he said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16968 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK — New research from Iceland suggests kids who get early treatment for their attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder don't have as much trouble on national standardized tests as those who aren't prescribed medication until age 11 or 12. Common medications used to treat ADHD include stimulants such as Vyvanse, Ritalin and Concerta. "Their short-term efficacy in treating the core symptoms of ADHD -- the symptoms of hyperactivity and attention and impulsivity -- that has been established," said Helga Zoega, the lead author on the new study from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "With regard to more functional outcomes, for example academic performance or progress, there's not as much evidence there as to whether these drugs really help the kids academically in the long term," she told Reuters Health. To try to answer that question, Zoega and colleagues from the United States and Iceland consulted prescription drug records and test scores from Icelandic elementary and middle school students between 2003 and 2008. Out of more than 13,000 kids registered in the national school system, just over 1,000 were treated with ADHD drugs at some point between fourth and seventh grade - 317 of whom began their treatment during that span. Kids with no record of an ADHD diagnosis tended to score similarly on the standardized math and language arts tests given in fourth and seventh grade. Those who were medicated for the condition were more likely to have their scores decline over the years - especially when stimulants weren't started until later on. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 16967 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By SINDYA N. BHANOO If you’ve heard one pygmy goat kid bleating, you’ve heard them all — unless, that is, you’re a mother goat. A new study reports that mothers can recognize the calls of their kids even after more than a year of separation. In the wild, female goats tend to stay within their groups, while males disperse. For their study, researchers separated the goats after weaning, and found that the mothers remembered the calls of their offspring for 7 to 13 months. The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “Mothers responded more to their kids born the previous year than to newborn kids born to other mothers,” said Elodie F. Briefer, an evolutionary biologist at Queen Mary, University of London, and one of the study’s authors. Dr. Briefer and her colleagues recorded kids when they were 5 weeks old, and played the recordings back to the mothers through a loudspeaker later. It isn’t clear why mother goats have this ability, but it could help mothers and daughters stay bonded and prevent mothers from inbreeding with their sons, Dr. Briefer said. “These functions would happen later in life, but the mothers would need to recognize their grown-up kids,” she said. The researchers worked with nine female pygmy goats and their kids at a farm in Nottinghamshire, England. They measured how quickly the goats responded to recorded calls, how many calls they made in response to what they heard, and how long they looked at the loudspeaker. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 16966 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY Clare True had autism and periodic seizures, but nothing prepared her family for Christmas Eve in 2006, when the 26-year-old went to bed after watching a movie and stopped breathing. “I got home from a party, went to check on her just after midnight, and she was — she was gone,” said her mother, Jane True. Paramedics tried to revive the young woman, then rushed her to the hospital, and somewhere in that firestorm of activity and grief, the Trues, Jane and her husband, Jim, considered donation. “I thought of it as a gift, her brain,” she said. “To my mind, the idea that scientists would be learning from her for years to come — how can you put a price on that?” Clare True’s was one of 150 specimens stored in a Harvard brain bank that was ruined because of a freezer failure, doctors acknowledged this month. The loss, while a setback for scientists studying disorders like Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, especially mortified those working on autism, for it exposed what is emerging as the largest obstacle to progress: the shortage of high-quality autopsied brains from young people with a well-documented medical history. The malfunction reduced by a third Harvard’s frozen autism collection, the world’s largest. A bank maintained by the University of Maryland has 52, and there are smaller collections elsewhere. Altogether there are precious few, given escalating research demands. The loss at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center makes donations from parents like the Trues only more urgent. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16965 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online A simple brain trace can identify autism in children as young as two years old, scientists believe. A US team at Boston Children's Hospital say EEG traces, which record electrical brain activity using scalp electrodes, could offer a diagnostic test for this complex condition. EEG clearly distinguished children with autism from other peers in a trial involving nearly 1,000 children. Experts say more work is needed to confirm the BMC Medicine study results. Early detection There are more than 500,000 people with autism in the UK. Autism is a spectrum disorder, which means that it is not a single condition and will affect individuals in different ways. Commonly, people with autism have trouble with social interaction and can appear locked in their own worlds. It can be a difficult condition to diagnose and can go undetected for years. The latest study found 33 specific EEG patterns that appeared to be linked to autism. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16964 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Laura Sanders A dreamland ditty played softly during a nap helps people hit the right notes while awake. Soft tones during sleep creep into the napping brain and strengthen playing skills, researchers report online June 24 in Nature Neuroscience. The results don’t mean that after a nighttime Beethoven sonata, a piano novice will wake up with the ability to play it. But the results do suggest that an existing skill can be sharpened during a nap, says study coauthor Ken Paller of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Earlier work by Paller and others has found that sound and odor cues during sleep can improve a person’s memory for the locations of objects. The new study extends those results by showing that a learned skill — in this instance, playing music — can also be influenced during sleep. Although these sorts of experiments are just getting started, “the door is wide open,” Paller says. Musical ability, athletic prowess and other talents that normally require a lot of practice may be amenable to boosts during sleep. Before the easy job of having a nap, 16 right-handed participants in the study had to do some actual work. Volunteers learned two different not-very-catchy tunes, played with their left hands on the a, s, d and f keys of a computer. In an arrangement similar to that of Guitar Hero, circles that floated up the screen told participants which key to hit and when. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sleep
Link ID: 16963 - Posted: 06.25.2012