By JAMES GORMAN The extremes of animal behavior can be a source of endless astonishment. Books have been written about insect sex. The antics of dogs and cats are sometimes hard to believe. And birds, those amazing birds: They build elaborate nests, learn lyrical songs, migrate impossibly long distances. But “Gifts of the Crow,” by John N. Marzluff and Tony Angell, includes a description of one behavior that even Aesop never imagined. “On Kinkazan Island in northern Japan,” the authors write, “jungle crows pick up deer feces — dry pellets of dung — and deftly wedge them in the deer’s ears.” What!? I checked the notes at the back of the book, and this account comes from another book, written in Japanese. So I can’t give any more information on this astonishing claim, other than to say that Dr. Marzluff, of the University of Washington, and Mr. Angell, an artist and observer of birds, think that the crows do it in the spirit of fun. Deer droppings, it must be said, are only one of the crows’ gifts. The authors’ real focus is on the way that crows can give us “the ephemeral and profound connection to nature that many people crave.” To that end, however, they tell some wild anecdotes and make some surprising assertions. Many of the behaviors they describe — crows drinking beer and coffee, whistling and calling dogs and presenting gifts to people who feed them — are based on personal testimony and would seem to fall into the category of anecdote rather than science. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 16902 - Posted: 06.12.2012

by Jon White David Nutt, former adviser to the UK government, says the ban on drugs like ecstasy is hampering neuroscience How do the drug laws in most countries affect scientific research? One of the things I find very disturbing about the current approach to drugs, which is simply prohibition without necessarily any full understanding of harms, is that we lose sight of the fact that these drugs may well give us insights into areas of science that need to be explored and may give us new opportunities for treatment. In what way? Almost all the drugs of interest in terms of understanding brain phenomena such as consciousness, perception, mood and psychosis are illegal. And so there is almost no work done in this field. How bad is the impact? The effects these laws have had on research is greater than those caused by the US government hindering stem cell research. No one has done an imaging neuroscience study of smoking cannabis. I can show you 150 papers telling you how the brain reacts to an angry face, but I can't show you a single paper that tells you what cannabis does. Any examples of missed opportunities? There were six trials of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism, the last one in 1965. The evidence is it's as good as anything we've got, maybe better. But no one is using it for this. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16901 - Posted: 06.12.2012

By JoNel Aleccia Attention, busy middle-aged folks. You may be healthy and thin, but if you habitually sleep less than six hours a night, you still could be boosting your risk of a stroke. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new study being presented Monday at SLEEP 2012, the annual meeting of the nation’s sleep experts. Getting too little shut-eye appeared to more than quadruple the risk of stroke symptoms among healthy, normal-weight people aged 45 and older, according to a study of some 5,600 people followed for up to three years. “The really important take-home message is this: Don’t blow it off. Sleep is just as important as diet and exercise,” said Megan Ruiter, the University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher who led the study. Experts recommend that healthy adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. But about one in three U.S. workers regularly gets less than seven hours of snooze time, according to a recent government health report. Ruiter and her colleagues reviewed data from some 30,239 people participating in the REGARDS study – Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke – sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Of those, they teased out some 5,666 people who were healthy at the start of the study – no history of stroke, stroke symptoms, so-called “mini-stroke” or transient ischemic attack, or elevated risk for sleep apnea and other sleep-disordered breathing problems. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sleep; Stroke
Link ID: 16900 - Posted: 06.12.2012

Content provided by Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Night owls often wake up for work or school with a scowl on their faces and wishing for an IV drip of coffee, while morning people come skipping in 15 minutes early. However, morning people aren't chipper just as the sun is coming up; they are happier and more satisfied with life overall, a new study suggests. Teenagers' night owl tendencies fade as they age, and the study says this switch to a morning-focused schedule could be why older adults are happier than younger ones. "Past research has suggested that morning-type people report feeling happier than evening-type people, and this research was only on young adults," study researcher Renee Biss, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, told LiveScience. The new study looked across the lifespan to see if the morning habits of older individuals contributed to their overall life outlook. The researchers studied two populations: a group of 435 adults ages 17 to 38, and a group of 297 older adults, ages 59 to 79. Both groups filled out questionnaires about their emotional state, how healthy they feel and their preferred "time of day." [Life's Extremes: Early Birds vs. Night Owls] By age 60, most people are morning types, the researchers found. Only about 7 percent of young adults are morning larks, but as the population ages, this switches — in the older years only about 7 percent of the population are still night owls. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Emotions
Link ID: 16899 - Posted: 06.12.2012

By Scicurious When I first saw the coverage of the article appear on Jezebel saying that exercise doesn’t help depression, I didn’t believe it. I read the press release, and really didn’t believe it. And then, I read the article. Do I believe the article? Yes, I believe that the data are as they say they are. But do I believe that exercise doesn’t help depression? Nope. Not a chance. Because that’s not what this study says. And in a truly massive failure” of press release and media coverage (some of which was elegantly skewered by Martin Robbins and Tom Chivers), everyone is going to get the wrong idea. Contrary to some of the statements in the introduction of the paper, there are several meta-analyses which support the effects of exercise in treating symptoms of depression. However, they authors are right, many of the studies have small numbers of people and have extensive exercise interventions. The authors of this study were interested in a milder intervention in a larger group of people: could moderate increases in physical activity buttress depression treatment? To look at this, they recruited around 360 people who were experiencing a new episode of depression. They assigned half of them to an exercise intervention, and half to control. ALL of them got “normal” treatment, meaning some additionally got talk therapy, some additionally got antidepressants of various types, etc. In the exercise intervention, the group received three meetings with a trained facilitator and 10 phone calls during the year, encouraging them to exercise for 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity in bouts of at least 10 minutes. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16898 - Posted: 06.12.2012

By Ferris Jabr The human body is a tireless gardener, growing new cells throughout life in many organs—in the skin, blood, bones and intestines. Until the 1980s most scientists thought that brain cells were the exception: the neurons you are born with are the neurons you have for life. In the past three decades, however, researchers have discovered hints that the human brain produces new neurons after birth in two places: the hippocampus—a region important for memory—and the walls of fluid-filled cavities called ventricles, from which stem cells migrate to the olfactory bulb, a knob of brain tissue behind the eyes that processes smell. Studies have clearly demonstrated that such migration happens in mice long after birth and that human infants generate new neurons. But the evidence that similar neurogenesis persists in the adult human brain is mixed and highly contested. A new study relying on a unique form of carbon dating suggests that neurons born during adulthood rarely if ever weave themselves into the olfactory bulb's circuitry. In other words, people—unlike other mammals—do not replenish their olfactory bulb neurons, which might be explained by how little most of us rely on our sense of smell. Although the new research casts doubt on the renewal of olfactory bulb neurons in the adult human brain, many neuroscientists are far from ready to end the debate. In preparation for the new study, Olaf Bergmann and Jonas Frisén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and their colleagues acquired 14 frozen olfactory bulbs from autopsies performed between 2005 and 2011 at the institute's Department of Forensic Medicine. To determine whether the neurons were younger than the people they came from—which would mean the cells were generated after birth—the researchers needed to isolate the cells' DNA. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 16897 - Posted: 06.11.2012

By ALAN SCHWARZ He steered into the high school parking lot, clicked off the ignition and scanned the scraps of his recent weeks. Crinkled chip bags on the dashboard. Soda cups at his feet. And on the passenger seat, a rumpled SAT practice book whose owner had been told since fourth grade he was headed to the Ivy League. Pencils up in 20 minutes. The boy exhaled. Before opening the car door, he recalled recently, he twisted open a capsule of orange powder and arranged it in a neat line on the armrest. He leaned over, closed one nostril and snorted it. Throughout the parking lot, he said, eight of his friends did the same thing. The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications. “Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; ADHD
Link ID: 16896 - Posted: 06.11.2012

by Dan Hurley Marilyn 
Monroe and Jane Russell appeared 
outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre 
to write their names and leave imprints 
of their hands and high heels in the 
wet concrete. Down on their knees, 
supported by a velvet-covered pillow for their elbows, they wrote “Gentlemen 
Prefer Blondes” in looping script, followed by their signatures and the date, 6-26-53. But how did those watching the 
events of that day manage to imprint a memory trace of it, etching the details with neurons and synapses in the soft cement of the brain? Where and how are those memories written, and what is the molecular alphabet that spells out the 
rich recollections of color, smell, and sound? After more than a century of searching, an answer was recently found, strangely enough, just eight miles from Grauman’s. Although not located on any tourist map, the scene of the discovery can be reached easily from Hollywood Boulevard by heading west on Sunset to the campus of UCLA. There, amid one of the densest clusters of neuroscience research facilities in the world, stands the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. And sitting at a table in the building’s first-floor restaurant, the Café Synapse, is the neuroscientist who has come closer than anyone ever thought possible to finding the place where memories are written in the brain. That spot, the physical substrate of a particular memory, has long been known in brain research as an engram. Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16895 - Posted: 06.11.2012

By Karen Weintraub A freezer malfunction at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital has severely damaged one-third of the world’s largest collection of autism brain samples, potentially setting back research on the disorder by years, scientists say. An official at the renowned brain bank in Belmont discovered that the freezer had shut down in late May, without triggering two alarms. Inside, they found 150 thawed brains that had turned dark from decay; about a third of them were part of a collection of autism brains. “This was a priceless collection,’’ said Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, where the brains were housed. “You can’t express its value in dollar amounts,’’ said Benes, who is leading one of two internal investigations into the freezer failure. The damage to these brains could slow autism research by a decade as the collection is restored, said Carlos Pardo, a neuropathologist and associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University. The collection, owned by the advocacy and research organization Autism Speaks, “yields very, very important information that allows us to have a better understanding of what autism is, as well as the contribution of environmental and immune factors,’’ said Pardo, whose 2004 study of brains stored in the bank was the first to find that autism involves the immune system. “The benefit has been great.’’ © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16894 - Posted: 06.11.2012

by Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor Intense and lasting stress may deliver a blow to a kid's noggin, say researchers who found that a brain area linked to memory was smaller in children who had experienced chronic stress compared with their less-strained counterparts. The brain differences also bore out in cognitive ability, with those children with highly stressful lives performing poorer than other kids on spatial memory tests. The highly stressed children also had more trouble with tests of short-term memory, including tasks such as finding a token in a series of boxes, the researchers said. "All families experience some stress, so it is important to note that effects were found for high levels of stress," study researcher Jamie Hanson, a psychology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told LiveScience, adding that some extreme examples would include family members falling victim to violent crimes or the chronic illness of a child or other family member. The research, detailed in the June 6 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, adds to other evidence of the impacts of stress, with one recent study showing that children exposed to multiple instances of violence age faster on a cellular level. Another past study suggested childhood stress could actually take years off an individual's life. The team was inspired by work in animals that has found a link between stress and brain changes, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in working memory, or the part of your memory that's available for quick recall. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16893 - Posted: 06.09.2012

by Linda Geddes They might share the same DNA and cramped living space, but as these images reveal, life is anything but identical for unborn twins. This unprecedented glimpse into their inner world is afforded through a recently developed form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is being turned on twins for the first time. Whereas conventional MRI takes snapshots of thin slices of the body as it penetrates through it, so-called cinematic-MRI takes repeated images of the same slice, then stitches them together to create a videoMovie Camera. This means that a moving structure such as a fetus – or several fetuses – can be visualised in unprecedented detail. "A lot of the so-called videos in the womb are very processed, so they do a lot of reconstructing and computer work afterwards. These are the raw images that are acquired immediately," says Marisa Taylor-Clarke of the Robert Steiner MR Unit at Imperial College London, who recorded the images. She has been using the technique to study twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a relatively common complication in which the blood supplies of twins sharing the same placenta become connected. As the twin receiving its sibling's blood grows larger, the growth of the donor twin becomes stunted. In the worst cases it can prove fatal to both twins. Fortunately, an operation that involves blocking the shared blood vessels usually saves them, but its impact on brain development is relatively unknown. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16892 - Posted: 06.09.2012

By GINA KOLATA It seemed as if it would be a perfectly ordinary occasion, that hot August day in 1959. Three generations of a large Oklahoma family gathered at a studio in nearby Perryton, Tex., to have a photo taken of the elders, 14 siblings ranging in age from 29 to 52. Afterward, everyone went to a nearby park for a picnic. Among the group were two cousins, Doug Whitney, who was 10, and Gary Reiswig, who was 19. Doug’s mother and Gary’s father were brother and sister. Doug does not remember any details of that day, but Gary says he can never forget it. His father, and some of his aunts and uncles, just did not seem right. They stared blankly. They were confused, smiling and nodding, even though it seemed as if they weren’t really following the conversation. Seeing them like that reminded Gary of what his grandfather had been like years before. In 1936, at the age of 53, his grandfather was driving with his grandmother and inexplicably steered into the path of a train. He survived, but his wife did not. Over the next decade, he grew more and more confused. By the time he died at 63, he was unable to speak, unable to care for himself, unable to find his way around his house. Now here were the first signs of what looked like the same condition in several of his children. “We were looking at the grimness face to face,” Gary says. “After that, we gradually stopped getting together.” It was the start of a long decline for Gary’s father and his siblings. Their memories became worse, their judgment faltered, they were disoriented. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16891 - Posted: 06.09.2012

The merest interaction with a member of the opposite sex can bring a glow to a woman's face, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of St Andrews found even non-sexual contact with men caused a noticeable rise in the temperature of a woman's face. The team used thermal imaging to detect changes in heterosexual women during their meetings with other people. They found that even without noticing, a woman's face would heat up in the company of the opposite sex. The team behind the discovery said the findings could be used in the development of thermal imaging to monitor levels of stress and emotion in future, for example in lie detection tests. Lead author of the study, Amanda Hahn, said researchers measured skin temperature on a woman's hand, arm, face and chest when they interacted with men. They found the most dramatic increase occurred in a woman's face, where temperatures rose by an entire degree in some cases. She said: "This thermal change was in response to simple social interaction, without any experimental change to emotion or arousal. Indeed our participants did not report feeling embarrassment or discomfort during the interaction." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16890 - Posted: 06.09.2012

Ewen Callaway Trespassers on the mating grounds of male bumphead parrotfish soon learn a hard lesson. The reef-munching fish fend off competing males using aggressive headbutting — a form of behaviour that has never previously been seen in the species. A team of US researchers reveals the surprising finding in the journal PLoS ONE this week1. Growing to a weight of more than 75 kilograms and up to 1.5 metres in length, the giant bumphead parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum) is one of the heftiest reef fish in the world — but also one of the most shy around humans. “These really are underwater buffalos, gentle giants that play a critical role in coral reef ecology. But when reproduction is involved, it is time to fight,” says David Bellwood, a marine ecologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, who was not involved in the study. The fish are named for their prominent forehead ridge, which in the males is reinforced by a thick bony plate. Scientists thought that bumpheads used this armour to ram coral reefs and break them up for feeding — but no one had ever seen them do it. With one bumphead eating as much as 5 tonnes of reef in a year, Bellwood and other bumphead experts had their doubts; the bony bit isn’t very large and the fish have powerful jaws for biting the coral anyway. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 16889 - Posted: 06.09.2012

A brain training technique which helps people control activity in a specific part of the brain could help treat depression, a study suggests. Cardiff University researchers used MRI scanners to show eight people how their brains reacted to positive imagery. After four sessions of the therapy the participants had seen significant improvements in their depression. Another eight who were asked to think positively but did not see brain images as they did so showed no change. The researchers said they believed the MRI scans allowed participants to work out, through trial and error, which sort of positive emotional imagery was most effective. The technique - known as neurofeedback - has already had some success in helping people with Parkinson's disease. But the team acknowledge that further research, involving a larger number of people, is needed to ascertain how effective the therapy is, particularly in the long term. Prof David Linden, who led the study which was published in the PLoS One journal, said it had the potential to become part of the "treatment package" for depression. About a fifth of people will develop depression at some point in their lives and a third of those will not respond to standard treatments. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Depression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16888 - Posted: 06.09.2012

Removing alcohol abuse from psychiatry's diagnostic bible is drawing fire. Proposed changes for the DSM-5 include merging alcohol dependence and abuse categories into a single diagnosis: substance abuse disorder. Doctors, insurers, scientists, and those in the legal system turn to the manual when drawing the line between what psychiatrists consider normal and not normal. June's issue of the Journal of Studies of Alcohol and Drugs includes a critique of the changes and a defence. "Our goal was to try to make the criteria easier for the usual clinician to use, and so we're no longer asking them to remember one criteria set for abuse and a separate set for dependence," said Dr. Marc Schuckit, the journal's editor. While Schuckit served on the DSM-5's substance use committee, he said the views in the editorial reflect his own opinions and experience with the group's consensus approach. Abolishing the abuse category was done because there wasn't enough data to support an inbetween state, Dr. Griffith Edwards of the National Addiction Centre in London, UK said in a critical letter appearing in the same issue. "This decision goes against clinical experience, which suggests that people can develop destructive and disruptive drinking behaviour without clinical symptoms of dependence," Edwards wrote. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16887 - Posted: 06.09.2012

By Nathan Seppa By delving into the components of protective nerve coatings that get damaged in multiple sclerosis, scientists have identified a handful of lipid molecules that appear to be attacked by an immune system run amok. Bolstering the supply of these lipids might help preserve these nerve coatings and, in the process, knock back the inflammation that contributes to their destruction, researchers report in the June 6 Science Translational Medicine. In MS patients, rogue antibodies assault myelin, the fatty sheath that insulates nerves and facilitates signaling. Inflammation exacerbates the attack on myelin and the cells that make it. But other details of MS, including the roles of myelin lipids, have been less clearly understood. “I think this is a very good study,” says Francisco Quintana, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School. “Overall, there are not many papers on lipids in MS. Technically, they are challenging and require a lot of expertise.” To explore the role of lipids, the researchers studied spinal fluid from people with MS, healthy people and patients with other neurological disorders. Tests on the fluid showed that antibodies targeted four lipids more often in MS patients than in the other groups. Examination of autopsied brains from MS patients and people without MS revealed that, in the MS patients, these four lipids were depleted at the sites where the nerve coatings were damaged. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 16886 - Posted: 06.07.2012

by Sara Reardon Low levels of antidepressants and other psychoactive drugs in water supplies can trigger the expression of genes associated with autism – in fish at least. The use of antidepressants has increased dramatically over the past 25 years, says Michael Thomas of Idaho State University in Pocatello. Around 80 per cent of each drug passes straight through the human body without being broken down, and so they are present in waste water. In most communities, water purification systems cannot filter out these pharmaceuticals. "They just fly right through," says Thomas, which means they ultimately find their way into the water supply. The concentration of these drugs in drinking water is very low – at most, they are present at levels 100 times lower than the prescription doses. But since the drugs are specifically designed to act on the nervous system, Thomas hypothesised that even a small dose could affect a developing fetus. Thomas's group created a cocktail of the anti-epileptic drug carbamazepine and two selective serotonin uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants, fluoxetine and venlafaxine, at this low concentration. They exposed fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas) to the drugs for 18 days, then analysed the genes that were being expressed in the fishes' brains. Although the researchers had expected the drugs might activate genes involved in all kinds of neurological disorders, only 324 genes associated with autism in humans appeared to be significantly altered. Most of these genes are involved in early brain development and wiring. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism; Depression
Link ID: 16885 - Posted: 06.07.2012

By Laura Sanders New details about how some drugs for schizophrenia accumulate in the brain may help explain why patients often must wait for weeks for the medications to work. Because many commonly used antipsychotics such as haloperidol and clozapine quickly latch onto their targets, it would seem that the drugs should bring fast relief. “But there’s always a side story,” says neuroscientist Michael Cousin of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “There’s another layer of complexity.” Researchers led by Teja Groemer of Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany illuminate this process in the June 7 Neuron by describing how the buildup of certain drugs in the brain may have underappreciated consequences for their effectiveness. The idea that drugs accumulate in the brain isn’t totally new; other scientists have suggested that antipsychotic drugs can pile up in certain places, Groemer says. But most people have assumed such accumulation is inconsequential. Not so, Groemer and his team found. Stockpiled drugs may actually squelch nerve cells’ behavior in a highly selective way by being released only when needed most. Using a proxy compound that could be seen with a microscope (because making the drugs themselves visible would have changed their behavior), the researchers watched the chemical build up in small pockets, called synaptic vesicles, inside nerve cells that were growing in a dish. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16884 - Posted: 06.07.2012

By Jane Dreaper Health correspondent, BBC News Multiple CT scans in childhood can triple the risk of developing brain cancer or leukaemia, a study suggests. The Newcastle University-led team examined the NHS medical records of almost 180,000 young patients. But writing in The Lancet the authors emphasised that the benefits of the scans usually outweighed the risks. They said the study underlined the fact the scans should only be used when necessary and that ways of cutting their radiation should be pursued. During a CT (computerised tomography) scan, an X-ray tube rotates around the patient's body to produce detailed images of internal organs and other parts of the body. In the first long-term study of its kind, the researchers looked at the records of patients aged under 21 who had CT scans at a range of British hospitals between 1985 and 2002. Because radiation-related cancer takes time to develop, they examined data on cancer cases and mortality up until 2009. The study estimated that the increased risk translated into one extra case of leukaemia and one extra brain tumour among 10,000 CT head scans of children aged under ten. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16883 - Posted: 06.07.2012