By GINA KOLATA BALTIMORE — The patient founded a totalitarian state known for its “merciless terror,” Dr. Victoria Giffi told a rapt audience of doctors and medical students on Friday afternoon. He died suddenly at 6:50 p.m. on Jan. 21, 1924, a few months before his 54th birthday. The cause of death: a massive stroke. Experts differ on the likely causes of the stroke that killed Lenin at 53. The man’s cerebral arteries, Dr. Giffi added, were “so calcified that when tapped with tweezers they sounded like stone.” The occasion was a so-called clinicopathological conference, a mainstay of medical schools in which a mysterious medical case is presented to an audience of doctors and medical students. In the end, a pathologist solves the mystery with a diagnosis. But this was a conference with a twist. The patient was long dead — he was, in fact, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The questions posed to the conference speakers: Why did he have a fatal stroke at such a young age? Was there something more to his death than history has acknowledged? At the University of Maryland, an clinicopathological conference focused on historical figures has been an annual event for the past 19 years; attending doctors have reviewed the case records of Florence Nightingale, Alexander the Great, Mozart, Beethoven and Edgar Allan Poe. The pathologists’ conclusion that Poe died of rabies even became a final question on the “Jeopardy!” game show. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16762 - Posted: 05.08.2012

by Zuberoa Marcos Yawn next to your dog, and she may do the same. Though it seems simple, this contagious behavior is actually quite remarkable: Only a few animals do it, and only dogs cross the species barrier. Now a new study finds that dogs yawn even when they only hear the sound of us yawning, the strongest evidence yet that canines may be able to empathize with us. Besides people and dogs, contagious yawning has been observed in gelada baboons, stump-tail macaques, and chimpanzees. Humans tend to yawn more with friends and acquaintances, suggesting that "catching" someone's yawn may be tied to feelings of empathy. Similarly, some studies have found that dogs tend to yawn more after watching familiar people yawning. But it is unclear whether the canine behavior is linked to empathy as it is in people. One clue might be if even the mere sound of a human yawn elicited yawning in dogs. To that end, scientists at the University of Porto in Portugal recruited 29 dogs, all of whom had lived for at least 6 months with their owners. To reduce anxiety, the study was performed in familiar rooms in the dogs' homes and in the presence of a known person but with no visual contact with their owners. The team, led by behavioral biologist Karine Silva, recorded yawning sounds of the dogs' owners and an unfamiliar woman as well as an artificial control sound consisting of a computer-reversed yawn. (To help induce natural yawning, volunteers listened to an audio loop of prerecorded yawns over headphones.) Each dog heard all of the sounds in two sessions, each carried out 7 days apart. During the sessions, the researchers measured the number of elicited yawns in dogs in response to sounds from known and unknown people. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 16761 - Posted: 05.08.2012

By Jeanna Bryner Managing editor Fido's expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy's head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends. The researchers, who detailed their findings May 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, were interested in understanding the human-dog relationship from the four-legged perspective. "When we saw those first (brain) images, it was unlike anything else," said lead researcher Gregory Berns in a video interview posted online. "Nobody, as far as I know, had ever captured images of a dog's brain that wasn't sedated. This was (a) fully awake, unrestrained dog, here we have a picture for the first time ever of her brain," added Berns, who is director of the Emory University Center for Neuropolicy. He added, "Now we can really begin to understand what dogs are thinking. We hope this opens a whole new door into canine cognition, social cognition of other species." Berns realized dogs could be trained to sit still in a brain-scanning machine after hearing that a U.S. Navy dog had been a member of the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. "I realized that if dogs can be trained to jump out of helicopters and airplanes, we could certainly train them to go into an fMRI to see what they're thinking," Berns said. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16760 - Posted: 05.08.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News The tantalising prospect of treating a range of brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, all with the same drug, has been raised by UK researchers. In a study, published in Nature, they prevented brain cells dying in mice with prion disease. It is hoped the same method for preventing brain cell death could apply in other diseases. The findings are at an early stage, but have been heralded as "fascinating". Many neuro-degenerative diseases result in the build-up of proteins which are not put together correctly - known as misfolded proteins. This happens in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's as well as in prion diseases, such as the human form of mad cow disease. Turn off Researchers at the University of Leicester uncovered how the build-up of proteins in mice with prion disease resulted in brain cells dying. They showed that as misfolded protein levels rise in the brain, cells respond by trying to shut down the production of all new proteins. It is the same trick cells use when infected with a virus. Stopping production of proteins stops the virus spreading. However, shutting down the factory for a long period of time ends up killing the brain cells as they do not produce the proteins they actually need to function. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Prions; Alzheimers
Link ID: 16759 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By Bruce Bower It’s prime time in social psychology for studying primes, a term for cues that go unnoticed but still sway people’s attitudes and behavior. Primes have been reported to influence nearly every facet of social life, at least in lab experiments. Subtle references to old age can cause healthy college students to slow their walking pace without realizing it. Cunningly presented cues about money nudge people to become more self-oriented and less helpful to others. And people holding a hot cup of coffee are more apt to judge strangers as having warm personalities. Over the last 15 years, many social psychologists have come to regard the triggering of personal tendencies by unnoticed cues as an established phenomenon. Priming may even inspire innovative mental health treatments, some argue. Yale University psychologist John Bargh likens primes to whistles that only mental butlers can hear. Once roused by primes, these silent inner servants dutifully act on a person’s preexisting tendencies and preferences without making a conscious commotion. Many animals reflexively take appropriate actions in response to fleeting smells and sounds associated with predators or potential mates, suggesting an ancient evolutionary heritage for priming, Bargh says. People can pursue actions on their own initiative, but mental butlers strive to ease the burden on the conscious lord of the manor. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16758 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By Tori Rodriguez Early birds, save your creative challenges for just before bed. Your least productive time of day may be the perfect opportunity for a moment of insight, according to a study from a recent issue of Thinking & Reasoning. Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological science at Albion College, and her colleagues divided study participants into morning types and evening types based on their answers on the Morningness Eveningness Question­naire (those who scored in the neutral range—about half of initial respondents—were excluded). Wieth instructed them to solve three analytic problems and three insight-oriented ones. No time-of-day effect was found for analytic problem solving, but subjects’ performance on tasks requiring creative insight was consistently better during their nonoptimal times of day. Wieth believes this effect is the result of a reduction in inhibitory attentional control—the ability to filter information that is irrelevant to the task at hand. “This less focused cognitive state makes people more susceptible to think about other, seemingly unrelated information—like things they experienced earlier or their to-do list,” she explains. “This additional information floating around in your mind during your nonoptimal time of day ultimately helps you reach that creative aha! moment.” © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 16757 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By DENISE GRADY He threw away tax documents, got a ticket for trying to pass an ambulance and bought stock in companies that were obviously in trouble. Once a good cook, he burned every pot in the house. He became withdrawn and silent, and no longer spoke to his wife over dinner. That same failure to communicate got him fired from his job at a consulting firm. By 2006, Michael French — a smart, good-natured, hardworking man — had become someone his wife, Ruth, felt she hardly knew. Infuriated, she considered divorce. But in 2007, she found out what was wrong. “I cried,” Mrs. French said. “I can’t tell you how much I cried, and how much I apologized to him for every perceived wrong or misunderstanding.” Mr. French, now 71, has frontotemporal dementia — a little-known, poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed group of brain diseases that eat away at personality and language. Although it was first recognized more than 100 years ago, there is still no cure or treatment, and patients survive an average of only eight years after the diagnosis. But recently, researchers have been making important discoveries about the biochemical and genetic defects that cause some forms of the disease. And for the first time, they have identified drugs that may be able to treat one of those defects, the buildup of abnormal proteins in the brain. Tests in people, the first ever such drug trials in this disease, could begin as soon as early next year at the University of California, San Francisco. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Attention
Link ID: 16756 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By ANNE EISENBERG DIGITAL hearing aids can do wonders for faded hearing. But other devices can help, too, as audio technology adds new options to help people converse at a noisy restaurant, or talk quietly with a pharmacist at a crowded drugstore counter. Richard Einhorn, a composer who suddenly lost much of his hearing two years ago, relies on his hearing aid, of course, for general use. But when he is meeting friends at a busy coffee shop — where his hearing aid is not always good at distinguishing their voices amid the clatter — he removes it. He has a better solution. He pops on a pair of in-ear earphones and snaps a directional mike on his iPhone, which has an app to amplify and process sound. “I put the iPhone on the table,” he said. “I point it at whoever’s talking, and I can have conversations with them. Soon we forget the iPhone is sitting there.” Mr. Einhorn’s ad hoc solution to restaurant racket is a feasible one, said Jay T. Rubinstein, a professor of bioengineering and otolaryngology at the University of Washington. “It makes sense when you need to capture a speaker’s voice in a noisy environment,” he said. “A system that gives you a high-quality directional mike and good earphones can help people hear in a complex setting.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 16755 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By Gary Stix “Superwoman has been rumbled,” declared a Daily Telegraph article in 2001 that chronicled how the human brain’s inability to “multitask” undercuts the prospects for a woman to juggle career and family with any measure of success. The brain as media icon has emerged repeatedly in recent years as new imaging techniques have proliferated—and, as a symbol, it seems to confuse as much as enlighten. The steady flow of new studies that purport to reduce human nature to a series of illuminated blobs on scanner images have fostered the illusion that a nouveau biological determinism has arrived. More often than not, a “neurobiological correlate”— tying together brain activity with a behavioral attribute (love, pain, aggression)—supplies the basis for a journal publication that translates instantly into a newspaper headline. The link between blob and behavior conveys an aura of versimilitude that often proves overly seductive to the reporter hard up to fill a health or science quota. A community of neuroscience bloggers, meanwhile, has taken on the responsibility of rectifying some of these misinterpretations. A study published last week by University College of London researchers—“Neuroscience in the Public Sphere”—tried to imbue this trend with more substance by quantifying and formally characterizing it. “Brain-based information possesses rhetorical power,” the investigators note. “Logically irrelevant neuroscience information [the result of the multitude of correlations that turn up] imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16754 - Posted: 05.05.2012

Ewen Callaway Humans walk on two feet and (mostly) lack hair-covered bodies, but the feature that sets us furthest apart from other apes is a brain capable of language, art, science, and other trappings of civilisation. Now, two studies published online today in Cell1, 2 suggest that DNA duplication errors that happened millions of years ago might have had a pivotal role in the evolution of the complexity of the human brain. The duplications — which created new versions of a gene active in the brains of other mammals — may have endowed humans with brains that could create more neuronal connections, perhaps leading to greater computational power. The enzymes that copy DNA sometimes slip extra copies of a gene into a chromosome, and scientists estimate that such genetic replicas make up about 5% of the human genome. However, gene duplications are notoriously difficult to study because the new genes differ little from their forebears, and tend to be overlooked. Evan Eichler, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and lead author of one of the Cell papers, previously found that humans have four copies of a gene called SRGAP2, and he and his colleagues decided to investigate. In their new paper, they report that the three duplicated versions of SRGAP2 sit on chromosome 1, along with the original ancestral gene, but they are not exact copies. All of the duplications are missing a small part of the ancestral form of the gene, and at least one duplicate, SRGAP2C, seems to make a working protein. Eichler’s team has also found SRGAP2C in every individual human genome his team has examined – more than 2,000 so far – underscoring its significance. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16753 - Posted: 05.05.2012

By Bruce Bower Feeling peppy may lead older adults to settle for less. In a new study, seniors in a good mood compared fewer options and made worse choices than did those in a bad mood or younger participants. “Positive emotions may have costs for older adults’ decision making,” says study coauthor Bettina von Helversen, a psychologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. A bright mood makes it harder to select a quality option from a series of choices, such as finding a bargain on a new computer offered at different prices by various online sites, say von Helversen and University of Basel colleague Rui Mata. Though the study looked at comparing prices on products, picking from a series of choices, what psychologists call sequential decision making, especially comes into play in situations such as choosing an apartment, hiring a caretaker or selecting a mate. Previous research has found that people’s moods generally become increasingly upbeat as they age. It’s this good mood, perhaps more than intellectual declines, that undermine seniors’ sequential decisions by promoting a limited search of available options, the researchers report in an upcoming Psychology and Aging. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 16752 - Posted: 05.05.2012

by Sara Reardon Their dads may be up with the sun, but it takes more than that to wake up a chick still in its egg. Unhatched chicks aren't roused from slumber by random noise, but they do wake up if they hear a chicken danger call. Evan Balaban of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, says we still don't know when fetuses begin to experience sleep cycles the way adults do. It makes sense for the developing brain to stay in a state of suspended animation, similar to that of someone in a coma, to conserve oxygen. If the fetus brain is too active, it runs the risk of running out of oxygen and damaging itself. To find out more, Balaban and colleagues looked at developing chicks still in their eggs. Unlike mice, the chicks in their eggs are separated from any influence by the mother's hormones, making them easier to study. The researchers labelled sugar molecules with radioactive tracers and injected the sugar into the chick embryos. When the brain is active, it uses the sugar and lights up with the radioactive tracer. Using this method, the researchers found that the chicks' brains were fairly inactive until 80 per cent of the way through their development inside the egg. At that point, the brains began to take up the sugar in a regular cycle, suggesting they were passing through phases of sleep and wakefulness. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16751 - Posted: 05.05.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Seeing an object move doesn't actually mean that it's moving. In this video, the psychedelic patterns might look like they're rotating, but pause the video and you'll see that they are actually static images. This striking illusion, created by visual perception researcher Akiyoshi Kitaoka from Ritsumeikan University in Japan, is commonly known as the 'rotating snakes' and exploits a peripheral vision effect where motion is perceived in one direction due to gradual changes in brightness of segments in the pattern. Rounded edges also seem to enhance the illusion. The brain trick was thought to occur when our eyes slowly move across the image. But now a new study by Susana Martinez-Conde from Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and colleagues is uncovering that superfast eye movements are responsible for the phantom motion. Since the effect isn't perceived continuously, the team tracked eye movements of volunteers just before they started to see rotation. They found that people usually blinked, or moved their eyes so quickly they didn't realise it, right before their brain was tricked. Conversely, their eyes were stable when they didn't perceive motion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16750 - Posted: 05.05.2012

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. On Thursday I challenged Well readers to figure out a medical mystery involving a middle-aged woman who learned she had an unusual disease after visiting an ophthalmologist. The case was surprising because the woman didn’t feel sick, yet the doctor made the diagnosis just by looking at her and asking her a few simple questions that confirmed his diagnostic suspicions. The first reader to figure it out completely was Dr. Eric Gierke, a neurologist at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. He said he recognized the condition because he had a patient who had acromegaly and only a few very subtle physical changes. In submitting his answer, Dr. Gierke also guessed one of the questions that the diagnosing physician asked the patient — “Has your shoe size changed recently?” — making him the clear winner. A few other readers also guessed both the questions and the diagnosis, but Dr. Gierke was first and the most specific. In all, 16 readers figured out the correct diagnosis. Well done! Acromegaly is a disease caused by a tumor, usually found in the pituitary gland, that secretes an excess of growth hormone, the blood chemical that tells our bodies to grow. Children with acromegaly can grow to extraordinary stature. André the Giant, the French professional wrestler and actor whose height was billed at 7 feet 4 inches, and Richard Kiel, the 7-foot-2 actor who played the villain Jaws in two James Bond movies, both had acromegaly from childhood. Their distinctive faces reveal some of the characteristic acromegalic changes: Their brows are prominent, and they have wide, square chins and large noses. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16749 - Posted: 05.05.2012

By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service Up to 90% of school leavers in major Asian cities are suffering from myopia - short-sightedness - a study suggests. Researchers say the "extraordinary rise" in the problem is being caused by students working very hard in school and missing out on outdoor light. The scientists told the Lancet that up to one in five of these students could experience severe visual impairment and even blindness. In the UK, the average level of myopia is between 20% and 30%. According to Professor Ian Morgan, who led this study and is from the Australian National University, 20-30% was once the average among people in South East Asia as well. "What we've done is written a review of all the evidence which suggests that something extraordinary has happened in east Asia in the last two generations," he told BBC News. "They've gone from something like 20% myopia in the population to well over 80%, heading for 90% in young adults, and as they get adult it will just spread through the population. It certainly poses a major health problem." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16748 - Posted: 05.05.2012

Tom Lawrence The first UK clinical trials of an electronic eye implant designed to restore the sight of blind people have proved successful and "exceeded expectations", scientists said today. Eye experts developing the pioneering new technology said the first group of British patients to receive the electronic microchips were regaining "useful vision" just weeks after undergoing surgery. The news will offer fresh hope for people suffering from retinitis pigmentosa (RP) - a genetic eye condition that leads to incurable blindness. Retina Implant AG, a leading developer of subretinal implants, fitted two RP sufferers with the wireless device in mid-April as part of its UK trial. The patients were able to detect light immediately after the microchip was activated, while further testing revealed there were also able to locate white objects on a dark background, Retina Implant said. Ten more British sufferers will be fitted with the devices as part of the British trial, which is being led by Tim Jackson, a consultant retinal surgeon at King's College Hospital and Robert MacLaren, a professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Oxford and a consultant retinal surgeon at the Oxford Eye Hospital. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 16747 - Posted: 05.03.2012

By Scicurious Only a few weeks ago I looked at a study on fast food consumption and depression, and only a few days ago I talked about a brand new study looking at high fat diets and protection from heart attack damage. And today, we’ve got another study on high fat diet, this time in mice, and depressive-like behavior. What is the effect of a high fat diet? Well, it appears to be getting more complicated with each new study. But it this study, at least, it looks like diet-induced obesity might produce depressive-like effects in mice. But how the diet is doing that is not so well defined. Several studies in humans have found a correlation between obesity and the development of depression. But it’s important to keep in mind that correlation is not causation. Many people who become obese also have other things going on (socioeconomic status, family history, comorbid disorders) which can influence the development of depression. In order to determine if obesity itself is causing depression, you first have to deliberately cause obesity in a controlled population. And this is where mice come in. Using a specialty high fat and high sugar diet, Sharma and Fulton fed up a set of mice for 12 weeks, until they were significantly fatter than control mice. They then looked at behavioral tests for anxiety and depression. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 16746 - Posted: 05.03.2012

By Laura Sanders Scientists have caught tiny amounts of a strangely shaped protein — a relative of a well-known suspect in Alzheimer’s disease —spreading destruction throughout the brains of mice. If a similar process happens in the human brain, it could help explain how Alzheimer’s starts, and even suggest new ways to stop the dangerous molecule’s spread. Many Alzheimer’s researchers believe the abundance of a molecule called A-beta in the brain is one of the key steps in developing the disease. A-beta commonly takes the form of a chain of 42 protein building blocks called amino acids. The new study chronicles the dangers of a modified A-beta that lacks the first two amino acids in the chain. Capping this stub is a rare, circular amino acid called pyroglutamate. Until recently, this form “has been largely ignored as some minor mysterious form of amyloid-beta,” says study coauthor George Bloom of the University of Virginia. Yet even trace amounts of this version, called pyroglutamylated A-beta, or pE A-beta, are devastating to mouse nerve cells, he and colleagues report online May 2 in Nature. “This opens up a whole new view of the disease,” says neurogeneticist Rudy Tanzi of Harvard Medical School. Instead of focusing just on the amount of A-beta in the brain, scientists need to pay attention to modifications of the molecule, too, he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16745 - Posted: 05.03.2012

By Gary Stix NFL legend Junior Seau died today after reportedly shooting himself in the chest, according to various news reports. What prompted the apparent suicide is still unknown. But Seau’s taking of his own life will inevitably raise questions about a possible role of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disorder that results from repeated concussions and that can produce dementia and other forms of cognitive dysfunction. The NFL has had to contend with a growing incidence of this disorder. Dave Duerson, an NFL safety, committed suicide in 2011 by shooting himself in the chest and directed that his brain be used for research on CTE. Any player in the NFL, and in other contact sports like hockey, probably leaves a long career with some traces of brain injury. But tests will be needed to determine whether Seau merited a clinical diagnosis. No reports have emerged so far that Seau suffered from dementia-like symptoms. An SUV that Seau was driving in 2010 near his home in Oceanside, Calif., went over a cliff that fronted on a beach, according to The Los Angeles Times. The incident occurred following his arrest that year related to suspicion of domestic violence. Seau, a 12-time NFL Pro linebacker following a career as an All-American at University of Southern California, registered 13 seasons with the San Diego Chargers, three seasons with the Miami Dolphins and ended his career with the New England Patriots. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Depression
Link ID: 16744 - Posted: 05.03.2012

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent Two research papers published this week throw further light on the health risks of the Taser stun gun. This striking image shows the central issue examined in one of the papers: what happens when one of the two barbed darts fired by a police Taser struck a 27-year-old man on the side of the head. Although Isabel Le Blanc-Louvry and colleagues at the department of forensic medicine at Rouen University Hospital in France do not reveal when or where this occured, they say the victim had been drunk and resisted police requests for his ID. The police fired the pneumatically powered Taser to incapacitate and subdue him - but somehow nobody noticed a dart remained stuck in his head, until he later went to hospital complaining of a persistent headache. In the ER, the dart was found to "have penetrated the frontal part of the skull and damaged the underlying frontal lobe", the team report in Forensic Science International. "We observed that the length of the Taser dart is sufficient to allow brain penetration," they write. The man made a full recovery. The controversial weapon's woes continued in the journal Circulation this week, where cardiologist Douglas Zipes at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis reports that Taser strikes near the heart can kill. In a study of eight cases where cardiac arrest was induced after tasings by US police departments, seven victims died. "Electronic control device stimulation can cause cardiac arrest" due to ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation, he concludes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16743 - Posted: 05.03.2012