Smoking marijuana a couple of hours before you drive almost doubles your chances of having a serious car crash, say Canadian researchers. The study led by Associate Professor Mark Asbridge from Dalhousie University in Halifax, is the first to review of data from drivers who had been treated for serious injuries or died in car accidents. "To our knowledge this meta-analysis is the first to examine the association between acute cannabis use and the risk of motor vehicle collisions in real life," the researchers write in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal. The researchers reviewed nine observational studies with a total sample of 49,411 accident victims. To rule out the effects of alcohol or other drugs the researchers calculated the odds for cases where cannabis — but no alcohol or other drugs — was detected in blood test or the driver had reported smoking three hours before crash. They found that smoking cannabis three hours before driving nearly doubled a driver's risk of having a motor vehicle accident. But the level of tetrahydrocannabionol (THC) — the active compound in marijauna — in the blood that leads to impairment is unclear as most of the studies just measured for the presence of THC in the blood. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16369 - Posted: 02.11.2012

By Nathan Seppa Twice-a-week tai chi lessons can help people with Parkinson’s disease maintain their footing and lessen the risk of falls, a new study finds. Training in the Chinese martial art seems to improve ankle stability, posture control and walking ability in these patients. Tai chi includes exercises and posture changes by which the body flows slowly from one position into another, with heightened awareness of balance, coordination and weight shifting. “We’re hoping that physical therapy will pick up some of these movements” for Parkinson’s patients, says study coauthor Fuzhong Li, a behavioral researcher at the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene. “They are very easy to incorporate into PT sessions.” The study appears in the Feb. 9 New England Journal of Medicine. Parkinson’s disease gradually destroys brain cells that produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter essential for delivering brain signals that control muscle movement. People with the disease risk falling every day as they struggle to maintain balance in walking and performing common tasks. Many Parkinson’s patients improve with medication or brain surgery (SN: 9/2/2006, p. 149). But those benefits have limits. “Surgical treatment and drugs make a person more mobile but don’t improve the ability to control balance,” says Lee Dibble, a physical therapist and Parkinson’s researcher at the University of Utah. The new report suggests that tai chi and to some extent resistance training do aid balance and limit falls. “You really need an intervention like this to improve and maintain function,” Dibble says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16368 - Posted: 02.11.2012

By Gary Stix A nearly 13-year-old skin cancer drug rapidly alleviates molecular signs of Alzheimer's disease and improves brain function, according to the results of a new mouse study being hailed as extremely promising. Early-stage human clinical trials could begin within months. In the study, published online February 9 by Science, researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and colleagues used mice genetically engineered to exhibit some of the symptoms of Alzheimer's. Most notably, the mice produced amyloid beta peptides—toxic protein fragments that gum up neurons and lead to cell death—and showed signs of forgetfulness. The Case Western team, led by Gary Landreth, decided to try the drug bexarotene (Targretin), approved in 1999 for cutaneous T cell lymphomas. The team chose this drug because of its long experience working with proteins in the nucleus of brain cells that can induce biochemical processes that affect amyloid beta. Landreth and his colleagues fed bexarotene to the demented mice, and with just a single dose it lowered the most toxic form of the amyloid beta peptide by 25 percent within six hours, an effect that lasted for up to three days. Mice that were cognitively impaired by the amyloid buildup resumed normal behaviors after 72 hours: They began to crinkle toilet paper placed nearby to make nests, a skill lost as amyloid increased in their brains. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16367 - Posted: 02.11.2012

By Laura Sanders In one of science’s most iconic moments, Isaac Newton’s eye caught the red glint of an apple as it plunged toward the ground. He heard the leaves rustle in the light breeze and felt the warmth of the tea he was drinking at the time. These sensory inputs streamed into his brain, where they met his vast stores of knowledge, his internal musings, his peculiar brand of curiosity and perhaps even a fond recollection of escaping the ground’s hold while climbing a tree as a boy. All at once, sights, sounds, emotions and memories converged to form a whole, rich experience in the garden that day. It was this fortuitous experience — perfectly ripe for a big idea — that (legend has it) caused Newton to wonder why the apple fell not sideways or even upward, but straight down. Inspiration struck, ushering in a new understanding of gravity. Newton gets the glory for figuring out that the same mysterious force pulls planets toward the sun and apples toward Earth, but how he did it hinges on an even deeper mystery: How his brain created a single, seamless experience from a chaotic flux of internal and external messages. And that mystery isn’t confined to brains like Newton’s. In all conscious people, the brain somehow gives meaning to the external environment, allowing for thought, self-reflection and discovery. “It’s not that conscious experience is one little interesting phenomenon,” says neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs of Caltech. “It’s literally the whole world.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 16366 - Posted: 02.11.2012

Christian Keysers Every time my 18-month-old daughter sees me using a tool, she tries to copy me. She steals my pen to write, and excitedly brushes the few teeth she has when I brush mine. Such a capacity for connecting with and learning from other minds also manifests itself in the empathy we feel with other people's emotions, and in our ability to understand others' goals and help them. Through that ability, we can create and manage the complex social world that is arguably the key to our species' dominance. Ten years ago, human minds were thought to be unique in their ability to connect. But as The Primate Mind shows, there has been a revolution in our understanding. This collection of essays, the result of a 2009 conference organized by primatologist Frans de Waal and ethologist Pier Francesco Ferrari, presents an authoritative, surprising and enriching picture of our monkey and ape cousins. We now know that they have remarkably sophisticated social minds, and that their poor performance in social tasks set by humans was more a result of researchers asking the wrong questions than deficiencies in their experimental subjects. For example, a chapter by psychologists April Ruiz and Laurie Santos explores whether non-human primates can monitor where others are looking and use that information in their own decision-making — a test of whether the animal understands what another perceives. Primatologists first tested this by seeing whether monkeys followed an experimenter's gaze to find a box containing food. The animals performed unexpectedly poorly. But changing the task from cooperation to competition unleashed the primates' true potential: macaques readily stole food from humans who looked away, but refrained from doing so when watched. Placing the task in a setting more relevant to macaque social life, which is less cooperative than our own, emphasized the continuity between our social mind and that of our primate ancestors. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution; Attention
Link ID: 16365 - Posted: 02.11.2012

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL THE word “dyslexia” evokes painful struggles with reading, and indeed this learning disability causes much difficulty for the estimated 15 percent of Americans affected by it. Since the phenomenon of “word blindness” was first documented more than a century ago, scientists have searched for the causes of dyslexia, and for therapies to treat it. In recent years, however, dyslexia research has taken a surprising turn: identifying the ways in which people with dyslexia have skills that are superior to those of typical readers. The latest findings on dyslexia are leading to a new way of looking at the condition: not just as an impediment, but as an advantage, especially in certain artistic and scientific fields. Dyslexia is a complex disorder, and there is much that is still not understood about it. But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin, cognitive scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used a mechanical shutter, called a tachistoscope, to briefly flash a row of letters extending from the center of a subject’s field of vision out to its perimeter. Typical readers identified the letters in the middle of the row with greater accuracy. Those with dyslexia triumphed, however, when asked to identify letters located in the row’s outer reaches. Mr. Geiger and Mr. Lettvin’s findings, which have been confirmed in several subsequent studies, provide a striking demonstration of the fact that the brain separately processes information that streams from the central and the peripheral areas of the visual field. Moreover, these capacities appear to trade off: if you’re adept at focusing on details located in the center of the visual field, which is key to reading, you’re likely to be less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the broad regions of the periphery. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Dyslexia; Attention
Link ID: 16364 - Posted: 02.11.2012

by Gisela Telis The right turn of phrase can activate the brain's sensory centers, a new study suggests. Researchers have found that textural metaphors—phrases such as "soft-hearted"—turn on a part of the brain that's important to the sense of touch. The result may help resolve a long-standing controversy over how the brain understands metaphors and may offer scientists a new way to study how different brain regions communicate. Scientists have disagreed for decades about how the brain processes metaphors, those figures of speech that liken one thing to another without using "like" or "as." One camp claims that when we hear a metaphor—a friend tells us she's had a rough day—we understand the expression only because we've heard it so many times. The brain learns that "rough" means both "abrasive" and "bad," this camp says, and it toggles from one definition to the other. The other camp claims the brain calls on sensory experiences, such as what roughness feels like, to comprehend the metaphor. Researchers from both camps have scanned the brain for signs of sensory activity triggered by metaphors, but these past studies, which tested a variety of metaphors without targeting specific senses or regions of the brain, have come up dry. Neurologist Krish Sathian of Emory University in Atlanta wondered whether using metaphors specific to only one of the senses might be a better strategy. He and his colleagues settled on touch and asked seven college students to distinguish between different textures while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This enabled them to map the brain regions each subject used to feel and classify textures. Then they scanned the subjects' brains again as they listened to a torrent of textural metaphors and their literal counterparts: "he is wet behind the ears" versus "he is naïve," for example, or "it was a hairy situation" versus "it was a precarious situation." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Language; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16363 - Posted: 02.09.2012

By Sarah Estes Graham and Jesse Graham Disability advocates were seeing red after two elderly women with medical conditions were allegedly strip-searched by TSA agents at New York’s JFK airport last December. You’d have to have a pretty thick skin not to empathize with an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman having her colostomy bag frisked. But the notion of one passenger being an unlikely terrorist also belies a discomfiting flipside: another passenger being a more likely candidate. For the last few decades, social scientists have been teasing out the mental and physiological systems involved in profiling and social bias. Taken at face value, the biases look like simple prejudice, like assuming that black people are criminals, or that people from the Middle East are terrorists. But research on social cognition is revealing much more subtle and unconscious mechanisms behind these social biases. Case in point: objects can ‘grab’ properties from nearby objects, in a phenomenon scientists call illusory conjunction. For instance, a red circle next to a white triangle might make the triangle seem red. This same effect can also apply to social targets: a neutral face can ‘grab’ the emotion of the angry person next to it, causing the neutral person to be remembered as angry. In a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers at Arizona State demonstrated that male faces are more likely than female faces to “grab” the anger from an adjacent face, while female faces are more likely to “grab” happiness. Using both photos of actual people and artificial images morphed to appear angry or happy, the scientists presented students with side-by-side images of faces (either male or female, happy or angry), along with two numbers they had to add in order to distract their conscious minds. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 16362 - Posted: 02.09.2012

by Zoë Corbyn A tarsier could be screaming its head off and you would never know it. Uniquely among primates, some of the diminutive mammal's calls are made up of pure ultrasound. Marissa Ramsier of Humboldt State University in California and her colleagues were puzzled to sometimes hear no sound when Philippine tarsiers (Tarsius syrichta) opened their mouths as if to call. Placing 35 wild animals in front of an ultrasound detector revealed that what they assumed to be yawns were high-pitched screams beyond the range of human hearing. While some primates can emit and respond to calls with ultrasonic components, none are known to use only ultrasonic frequencies in a call. The dominant frequency of the Philippine tarsier's ultrasonic call was 70 kilohertz, amongst the highest recorded for any terrestrial mammal. They can hear up to 91 kHz, well beyond the 20 kHz limit of human hearing. Whales, dolphins, domestic cats and some bats and rodents are the only other mammals known to communicate in this way. Having the equivalent of a private communication channel could help tarsiers warn others of predators such as lizards, snakes and birds which can't detect such frequencies, says Ramsier. Eavesdropping on insects could also help them locate their prey. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 16361 - Posted: 02.09.2012

by Helen Fields Scientists have long wondered whether propeller and engine noises from big ships stress whales out. Now, thanks to a poop-sniffing dog and an accidental experiment born of a national tragedy, they may finally have their answer. Baleen whales use low-frequency sounds to communicate in the ocean. "They're in an environment where there's not a lot of light; they're underwater. They can't rely on eyesight like we do," says veterinarian Roz Rolland of the New England Aquarium in Boston. Some studies have found that whales alter their behavior and vocalizations when noise increases, and it stands to reason, she says, that noise pollution would hinder their ability to communicate and cause them stress. But because scientists can't control the amount of noise in the sea, that's been very hard to prove. Researchers couldn't stop traffic, but the September 2001 terrorist attacks did. At the time, Rolland was collecting feces of right whales in the Bay of Fundy in Canada so she could try to develop pregnancy tests and other ways to study the animals' reproduction. Animals break up their hormones and get rid of the leftovers in their poop, so feces can show whether an animal is pregnant and reveal its levels of stress. Blood samples would do the same, but feces are much easier to collect. In the first few days after the terrorist attacks, ship traffic in the region decreased dramatically. "There was nobody else there. It was like being on the primal ocean," Rolland says. The whales seem to have noticed the difference, too. The levels of stress hormones in their feces went down, suggesting that ship noise places whales chronically under strain. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Stress
Link ID: 16360 - Posted: 02.09.2012

by Anil Ananthaswamy GOVERNMENT spooks want cyborg insects to snoop on their enemies. Biologists want to tap into the nervous systems of insects to understand how they fly. A probe that can be implanted into moths to control their flight could help satisfy both parties. One day, it could even help rehabilitate people who have had strokes. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been running a programme to develop machine-insect interfaces for years but electrodes implanted to stimulate the brains or wing muscles of insects were not precise enough. Now Joel Voldman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have designed a unique, flexible neural probe that can be attached directly to an insect's ventral nerve cord (VNC), which, along with the brain, makes up the central nervous system in insects. Another reason previous attempts have not been entirely successful was because the impedance of the electrodes did not match that of the insect's tissue. This probe is made of a polyimide polymer coated with gold and carbon nanotubes, and its impedance is much closer to that of nerve tissue. One end of the probe is a ring that clamps around the VNC. The inside of the ring has five electrodes which stimulate distinct nerve bundles within the VNC. Attached to the probe is a wireless stimulator, which contains a radio receiver, as well as a battery and a device to generate electrical pulses. The team implanted the device in the abdomen of a tobacco hawkmoth (Manduca sexta). As it weighs less than half a gram, it is easy for the moth to carry. "Their wingspan is the width of your hand," says Voldman. "These are big guys." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 16359 - Posted: 02.09.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY Scientists have for the first time improved memory by applying direct electrical stimulation to a key area in the brain as it learns its way around a new environment. The study included delivery of electrical currents to the entorhinal cortex of the brain. The stimulation, delivered through electrodes inserted into the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, sharply improved performance on a virtual driving game that tests spatial memory, the neural mapping ability that allows people to navigate a new city without a GPS. Experts said that the new study, appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, was tantalizing but not yet conclusive, because the number of patients tested — six — was small, and the biological effects of electrical stimulation are still poorly understood. But it comes at a time of growing excitement in the study of memory and its disorders; only last week, researchers reported strong evidence that damage associated with Alzheimer’s disease spreads through the brain — beginning in the same area targeted in the new study. “People should run to replicate this study, because the implications are incredibly exciting, both for understanding the mechanism for encoding new memories, and ultimately for the treatment of neurological diseases” like dementias, said Michael J. Kahana, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16358 - Posted: 02.09.2012

By Juliet Eilperin, Humpback whales on different sides of the southern Indian Ocean are singing different songs, according to a new study conducted by American and Australian researchers. The report challenges the past assumption that whales in the same ocean basin sing songs with similar themes. The humpback songs were recorded during the 2006 breeding season along the coasts of western Australia and Madagascar. The analysis was published in the January edition of the journal Marine Mammal Science. “Songs from Madagascar and western Australia only shared one similar theme; the rest of the themes were completely different,” said lead author Anita Murray, who is pursuing her doctorate at the University of Queensland in Australia. “The reason for this anomaly remains a mystery. It could be the influence of singing whales from other ocean basins, such as the South Pacific or Atlantic, indicating an exchange of individuals between oceans which is unique to the Southern Hemisphere.” The findings could provide new insight into how whale culture spreads. Male humpback whales are generally the ones that sing. The songs include rising and falling wails, moans and shrieks that repeat in cycles lasting up to half an hour. Researchers suspect that individuals from different humpback populations could transmit songs to one another when they are share feeding grounds or cross paths during migration. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 16357 - Posted: 02.07.2012

By DAVID TULLER When scientists reported in 2009 that a little-known mouse retrovirus was present in a large number of people with chronic fatigue syndrome, suggesting a possible cause of the condition, the news made international headlines. For patients desperate for answers, many of them severely disabled for years, the finding from an obscure research center, the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nev., seemed a godsend. “I remember reading it and going, ‘Bingo, this is it!’ ” said Heidi Bauer, 42, a mother of triplets in Huntington, Md., who has had chronic fatigue syndrome since her 20s. “I thought it was going to mean treatment, that I was going to be able to play with my kids and be the kind of mom I wanted to be.” Patients showered praise on the lead researcher, Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute. They sent donations large and small to the institute, founded by Harvey and Annette Whittemore, a wealthy and politically well-connected Nevada couple seeking to help their daughter, who had the illness. In hopes of treating their condition, some patients even began taking antiretroviral drugs used to treat H.I.V., a retrovirus related to the murine leukemia viruses suddenly suspected of involvement in chronic fatigue syndrome. More recently, however, the hopes of these patients have suffered an extraordinary battering. In a scientific reversal as dramatic and strange as any in recent memory, the finding has been officially discredited; a string of subsequent studies failed to confirm it, and most scientists have attributed the initial results to laboratory contamination. In late December, the original paper, published in the journal Science, and one other study that appeared to support it were retracted within days of each other. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16356 - Posted: 02.07.2012

by Lisa Grossman Clint Eastwood might sound an unlikely candidate to help investigate the evolution of the brain, but he has lent a helping hand to researchers doing just that. It turns out that brain regions that do the same job in monkeys and humans aren't always found in the same part of the skull. Previous studies comparing brains across species tended to assume that human brains were just blown-up versions of monkey brains and that functions are carried out by anatomically similar areas. To test this idea, Wim Vanduffel of Harvard Medical School in Boston and the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium, and colleagues scanned the brains of 24 people and four rhesus monkeys while they watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. They compared the brain responses of each individual to the same sensory stimulation, and identified which brain areas had similar functions. The majority of the human and monkey brain maps lined up, but some areas with a similar function were in completely different places. The team say the discovery is crucial to building more accurate models of our evolution. "You can't assume that because A and B are close together in the monkey brain, they need to be close together in the human brain," Vanduffel says. Journal reference: Nature Methods, DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.1868 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution; Attention
Link ID: 16355 - Posted: 02.07.2012

by Sally Adee Whether you want to smash a forehand like Federer, or just be an Xbox hero, there is a shocking short cut to getting the brain of an expert I'm close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I'm clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle. My salvation lies in the fact that my attackers are only a video, projected on screens to the front and sides. It's the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault. But I am failing miserably. In fact, I'm so demoralised that I'm tempted to put down the rifle and leave. Then they put the electrodes on me. I am in a lab in Carlsbad, California, in pursuit of an elusive mental state known as "flow" - that feeling of effortless concentration that characterises outstanding performance in all kinds of skills. Flow has been maddeningly difficult to pin down, let alone harness, but a wealth of new technologies could soon allow us all to conjure up this state. The plan is to provide a short cut to virtuosity, slashing the amount of time it takes to master a new skill - be it tennis, playing the piano or marksmanship. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16354 - Posted: 02.07.2012

By Gary Stix What if a drug could improve learning and cognition and had no untoward medical consequences? Wouldn’t it be justified to make it widely available? A group of scientists concluded three years ago that it would be. No such drug exists, but the question arises anew because of a brain-stimulation technique that appears on paper to fit the bill. The technology, transcranial direct-current stimulation, involves applying weak electrical currents to the scalp through electrodes. It appears to alter brain activity in a long-lasting way that can enhance cognition. Electrical therapies for the nervous system have a lengthy history. In about 45 AD, the Roman physician Scribonius Largus helped relieve pain by applying electric fish to a patient’s skin. Simple electric stimulation to the scalp appears to have myriad effects, possibly improving motor skills, vision, decision-making, problem-solving attention and mathematical reasoning in healthy individuals. “Where can I get one?” you might ask. Take your choice. You might buy one for less than $1,000. Or you could make your own: it’s really just a 9-volt battery with a few electrodes, seemingly the perfect high-school science project. Seems too good to be true. Let’s go now to the ethicists. “Is anything wrong with this picture?” asks an article in press in Current Biology. [Accessible as a PDF through an Oxford University science blog.] The authors, Roi Cohen Kadosh and a group of scientists and ethicists mostly from Oxford University, note that the electrical brain stimulator really does appear to be pretty safe in healthy adults: there are no reports of seizures, one of the first concerns for any intervention that turns up the volume on neural circuits. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16353 - Posted: 02.07.2012

By Scicurious There are many different factors which go into whether animals (or humans) develop obesity and diabetes. Different sensitivity to different chemicals, in different areas of the body and brain, can cause major differences in feeding behavior, body weight, fat, and insulin sensitivity. And now we’ve learned that changes in one circuit of the hypothalamus could make a big difference in a certain kind of obesity in mice. We’ll start with the db/db mouse, pictured above (on the left). This mouse is genetically designed to develop severe morbid obesity and diabetes soon after birth. This is because it lacks a receptor for a hormone called leptin. Leptin is a hormone that plays a major role in appetite and metabolism. Decreasing your sensitivity to leptin, by decreasing leptin receptors, say (as in the the db/db mouse), produces striking obesity and type 2 diabetes in humans and mice. Increasing your sensitivity to leptin, by, say, increasing your leptin receptors, can rescue this, resulting in lower body weight and more sensitivity to insulin. But these are global changes, throughout the body. The question is, where in the body do these leptin receptor changes really make a difference? Recent papers have suggested that the hypothalamus could play a major role. The hypothalamus, an area of your brain right above your pituitary gland, is a big connection between the brain and the endocrine system, an area where sensitivity to hormones could have a major impact on behavior and body regulation. And the hypothalamus regulates things like sleep, thirst, body temperature, and hunger. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16352 - Posted: 02.07.2012

By Bruce Bower A chimpanzee in need gets help indeed, on two conditions. Another chimp must both see his or her predicament and receive a blatant help request from the needy animal, a new study finds. Observations in the wild and in previous experiments indicate that chimps seldom help others (SN: 8/27/11, p. 10), but that’s not because the chimps don’t understand their peers’ motivations, as some researchers suspect, says primatologist Shinya Yamamoto of Kyoto University in Japan. In a series of lab tests, chimps who saw one of their relatives unsuccessfully reach for a juice box and then request help picked out a useful tool and passed it to their kin, Yamamoto and colleagues report online February 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Chimpanzees can understand others’ goals from obvious cues and then provide help,” Yamamoto says. This ability to grasp that another individual has a goal in mind based on his or her behavior represents one element of what psychologists call theory of mind — an ability to attribute beliefs, desires, pretending and other mental states to oneself and others. Until now, scientists had studied chimps’ understanding of other chimps’ goals only in competitive situations, such as clashes over food and mates. That fueled suspicion that chimps discern others’ goals only in the heat of such struggles. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Evolution; Consciousness
Link ID: 16351 - Posted: 02.07.2012

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature Night-time in the Jurassic forest was punctuated by the unmistakable sound of chirping bush crickets. This is according to scientists who have reconstructed the song of a cricket that chirped 165 million years ago. A remarkably complete fossil of the prehistoric insect enabled the team to see the structures in its wings that rubbed together to make the sound. The international team report their findings in the journal PNAS. Scientists from the US and China discovered the tiny fossil and named their newly discovered species Archaboilus musicus , because the music-making structures in its body were so clearly visible. When insect expert Dr Fernando Montealegre Zapata, from the University of Bristol, found out that his colleagues had such a remarkable fossil, he was keen to see it. "I was very surprised," he told BBC Nature, "because those [structures] are very very small - at the microscopic level." Dr Zapata studies sound production and communication in living insects, working out how the musical instruments contained in many insects' bodies produce a particular sound, and exactly how that sound is made. He immediately asked the question: "Could we reproduce the sounds [this insect made] from that fossil?" BBC © 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 16350 - Posted: 02.07.2012