By Rebecca Cheung When it comes to male crayfish, not all claws are created equal. In these crustaceans, the left and right claws might be very different sizes — and the larger one isn’t necessarily stronger, researchers report online March 14 in Biology Letters. This deceptiveness could help crayfish bluff or trick an opponent during a fight, says study coauthor Robbie Wilson, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. What’s more, the findings suggest that within a species, “dishonesty occurs in nature more commonly than we expect,” Wilson says. During a clash, a male crayfish sizes up his opponent when deciding whether to fight or flee. Previously, scientists found that stronger, smaller-clawed crayfish would back down from weaker, larger-clawed opponents. So, it was clear that some bluffing occurred between these crustaceans. In this new work, Wilson and his colleague Michael Angilletta Jr., of Arizona State University in Tempe, compared claw size and strength in the slender male crayfish, Cherax dispar, a species native to Queensland. By having crayfish squeeze down on instruments that resembled tweezers, researchers could measure the force exerted by individual claws. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Aggression; Attention
Link ID: 16517 - Posted: 03.15.2012

By Neil Bowdler Health reporter, BBC News New evidence has linked the environment in the womb with increased body weight in later life. Scientists found changes around the DNA at birth which may result from a mother's diet or exposure to pollution or stress. They then linked these changes to a higher Body Mass Index (BMI) in children aged about nine years of age. But the researchers say more work is needed to definitively prove the link between these changes and obesity. Details are published in the journal Plos One. Childhood or adult obesity has many causes, not least childhood or adult diet, but scientists have previously linked specific genes, such as the FTO gene, with increased body weight. Others have looked at not the genes, but associated molecular changes - what are called epigenetics - which can play a role in how a gene functions in the body, switching genes on and off. These changes are thought to be caused in part by exposure to environmental factors such as diet, stress, smoking or hormones, particularly in the womb and during early childhood. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Epigenetics
Link ID: 16516 - Posted: 03.15.2012

By Tori Rodriguez Eating disorders are not just about food. That much has been clear for decades, but researchers are still working to untangle the complex psychological, cultural and physiological roots of afflictions such as binge-eating disorder (BED) and bulimia. Now a growing body of work is finding that disordered eating is connected to attention deficits and poor self-awareness. In one recent study, psychologists at Geneva University in Switzerland tested the cognitive abilities of three groups—obese individuals with BED, obese individuals without BED and a normal-weight control group. They found that obese participants had difficulties with inhibition and focusing their attention. These cognitive deficits were most severe in the BED group, which points to a “continuum of increasing inhibition and cognitive problems with increasingly disordered eating,” the authors wrote in the journal Appetite last August. A different study in the August issue of the Western Journal of Nursing Re­search found that low executive func­tion—the cognitive capacity for self-understanding and self-regulation—is correlated with both obesity and symptoms of ADHD. And several other studies have linked distraction with overeating. The study found that focusing on one’s meal was linked to eating less later in the day—although for someone with ADHD, such focus can prove challenging. Taken together, these results suggest that treatment for binge eating may need to include strengthening mental functions such as attention and self-awareness. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 16515 - Posted: 03.15.2012

Eating trans fats may increase irritability and aggression, a new study suggests. "This study provides the first evidence linking dietary trans fatty acids with behavioural irritability and aggression," concludes the study by Dr. Beatrice Golomb of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and her colleagues. In the U.S., defence lawyers have used the so-called Twinkie defence to argue a defendant's behaviour, such as switching from a health-conscious diet to scarfing down Twinkies and other junk food, to show untreated depression had diminished an accused's capacity to tell right from wrong. Golomb and her co-authors analyzed diet surveys of 945 men and women with an average age of 57 in the U.S. and did behavioural assessments on them for the study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed online publication published by the non-profit Public Library of Science (PLoS). Eating more trans fats was significantly associated with repercussions for others after taking factors including education, smoking and alcohol use into account, the researchers said. "If the association between trans fats and aggressive behaviour proves to be causal, this adds further rationale to recommendations to avoid eating trans fats, or including them in foods provided at institutions like schools and prisons, since the detrimental effects of trans fats may extend beyond the person who consumes them to affect others," Golomb said. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Aggression
Link ID: 16514 - Posted: 03.15.2012

David Wolman In the first months after her surgery, shopping for groceries was infuriating. Standing in the supermarket aisle, Vicki would look at an item on the shelf and know that she wanted to place it in her trolley — but she couldn't. “I'd reach with my right for the thing I wanted, but the left would come in and they'd kind of fight,” she says. “Almost like repelling magnets.” Picking out food for the week was a two-, sometimes three-hour ordeal. Getting dressed posed a similar challenge: Vicki couldn't reconcile what she wanted to put on with what her hands were doing. Sometimes she ended up wearing three outfits at once. “I'd have to dump all the clothes on the bed, catch my breath and start again.” In one crucial way, however, Vicki was better than her pre-surgery self. She was no longer racked by epileptic seizures that were so severe they had made her life close to unbearable. She once collapsed onto the bar of an old-fashioned oven, burning and scarring her back. “I really just couldn't function,” she says. When, in 1978, her neurologist told her about a radical but dangerous surgery that might help, she barely hesitated. If the worst were to happen, she knew that her parents would take care of her young daughter. “But of course I worried,” she says. “When you get your brain split, it doesn't grow back together.” In June 1979, in a procedure that lasted nearly 10 hours, doctors created a firebreak to contain Vicki's seizures by slicing through her corpus callosum, the bundle of neuronal fibres connecting the two sides of her brain. This drastic procedure, called a corpus callosotomy, disconnects the two sides of the neocortex, the home of language, conscious thought and movement control. Vicki's supermarket predicament was the consequence of a brain that behaved in some ways as if it were two separate minds. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Laterality; Language
Link ID: 16513 - Posted: 03.15.2012

Robert Stickgold The psychologist Stuart Sutherland wrote that it is impossible to define consciousness “except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means ... Nothing worth reading has been written about it.” It is arguable whether Christof Koch's Consciousness provides such a definition, but the book is definitely worth reading. Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, is perhaps best known for his work with the late Francis Crick, searching for the neurobiological 'correlates of consciousness'. Here, he succinctly lays out the story of that quest. Focusing on how the brain might produce the mind, Koch mixes descriptions of major experiments with self-reflection and warnings of the inherent danger of the exercise. From Koch's collaborations with Crick, whom he seems to idolize, to his struggles with religion and free will, this is an engaging mixture of personal anecdote, scientific fact and pure speculation. It is often charming: Chapter 2, for instance, is entitled, 'In which I write about the wellsprings of my inner conflict between religion and reason, why I grew up wanting to be a scientist, why I wear a lapel pin of Professor Calculus, and how I acquired a second mentor late in life'. For many, the richest parts of the book will be Koch's lucid descriptions of experiments such as his work with Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon who implanted electrodes into the hippocampi of people with epilepsy. In one patient, Fried found a single neuron that responded only to the name or pictures of Saddam Hussein; in another, he found one that responded only to pictures of the actress Jennifer Aniston. In a descriptive tour de force, Koch explains that although Fried dubbed these cells concept neurons, we can think of them as “the cellular substrate of the Platonic Ideal of Jennifer Aniston”. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 16512 - Posted: 03.15.2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 16508 - Posted: 03.13.2012

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

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 16507 - Posted: 03.13.2012

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

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

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

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16505 - Posted: 03.13.2012

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

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

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

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16503 - Posted: 03.13.2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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