By BRIDGET O'SHEA The sounds of chaos bounce off the dim yellow walls. Everywhere there are prisoners wearing orange, red and khaki jumpsuits. An officer barks out orders as a thin woman tries to sleep on a hard bench in a holding cell. This is a harsh scene of daily life inside what has become the state’s largest de facto mental institution: the Cook County Jail. About 11,000 prisoners, a mix of suspects awaiting trial and those convicted of minor crimes, are housed at the jail at any one time, which is like stuffing the population of Palos Heights into an eight-block area on Chicago’s South Side. The Cook County sheriff, Tom Dart, estimated that about 2,000 of them suffer from some form of serious mental illness, far more than at the big state-owned Elgin Mental Health Center, which has 582 beds. Mr. Dart said the system “is so screwed up that I’ve become the largest mental health provider in the state of Illinois.” The situation is about to get worse, according to Mr. Dart and other criminal justice experts. The city plans to shut down 6 of its 12 mental health centers by the end of April, to save an estimated $2 million, potentially leaving many patients without adequate treatment — some of them likely to engage in conduct that will lead to arrests. “It will definitely have a negative impact on jail populations,” said Mr. Dart, who noted that the number of people coming into the jail with mental health problems was already increasing. “It will have direct consequences for us in my general jail population and some of the problems I have here, because a lot of the people with these issues act out more, as you would expect, so that’s a direct consequence.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16402 - Posted: 02.20.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey Scientists have built a better mouse. But rest easy — these mice don’t require improved traps. The new mice may give scientists an advantage in tracing genetic sources of common diseases and investigating interactions between genes and environmental factors. In a series of 15 papers published in the February issues of Genetics and G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics, researchers describe the creation of the new-and-improved mice, known as the Collaborative Cross strains, and some of the ways scientists may use the mice in medical studies. Biomedical researchers use inbred strains of mice to mimic human diseases and probe the genetics involved. Every mouse in an inbred strain is a genetic clone. That’s useful because the mice all generally respond in the same way to a drug or to infection with a virus. And altering the function of a single gene and seeing what happens in these mice can help scientists decipher the role of that gene in disease processes. But because all the mice react so uniformly, they don’t reflect the range of responses humans may have. With conventional laboratory mice, it is also difficult to determine how multiple genes interact with each other or how disease-associated genes are influenced by the environment. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16401 - Posted: 02.20.2012

By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature Pygmy goats can develop "accents" as they grow older, according to scientists. The young animals, known as "kids", are raised in groups or "creches" with goats of a similar age. Researchers found that when young goats mixed in these social groups their calls became more similar. The animals join an elite group of mammals known to adapt a vocal sound in response to the environment that includes humans, bats and whales. Dr Elodie Briefer and Dr Alan McElligott from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at the University of London, UK published their results in the journal Animal Behaviour. In order to test the goats' vocal repertoire they recorded calls at one-week-old and again when they were aged five weeks. "Five weeks corresponds to the time when, in the wild, they join their social group after spending some time hidden in vegetation to avoid predators," Dr Briefer explained. "We found that genetically-related kids produced similar calls... but the calls of kids raised in the same social groups were also similar to each other, and became more similar as the kids grew older." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16400 - Posted: 02.20.2012

By Laura Sanders VANCOUVER — Living in harsh conditions in an orphanage early in life has long-lasting consequences for a child’s social skills, a new study finds. Children who spent their first two years in a Romanian orphanage behaved abnormally in social interactions with other children, even years after leaving the institution. Life in the orphanage was also linked to brain abnormalities, Charles Nelson of Harvard Medical School reported February 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “I think this work nails the really important issues in trying to understand the effects of early life experiences,” said psychologist Janet Werker of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Since 1999, Nelson and colleagues have followed 136 children who were abandoned at birth and placed in an orphanage in Bucharest, Romania — a Spartan environment where the children spent hours staring at a white wall and followed a highly regimented schedule of activities. The kids received very little attention from caregivers. Nelson and his team arranged for half of these children to move into individual homes for foster care. (A bias against foster care in Romania made the situation unusual.) Called the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, the experiment offered a way to test the importance of a good environment. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stress
Link ID: 16399 - Posted: 02.20.2012

New research provides evidence that wiring in the brains of children with autism differs from typically developing children as early as six months of age, according to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on Friday. "This is the earliest study of brain development using neuro-imaging," says Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D. "By six months of age, even before the symptoms [of autism] emerge, the brain networks that connect different brain regions do not develop correctly." Dawson is not only one of the study authors, she's also the Chief Science Officer of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, which, along with the National Institutes of Health and the Simons Foundation, funded the research. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with researchers from other locations of the Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) network, studied 92 babies who were all considered to be at high-risk for developing autism because they had older siblings with the neurodevelopmental disorder. Currently, about one in 110 children in the United States has autism, according to the latest CDC statistics. All 92 infants underwent a type of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan called diffusion tensor imaging. MRIs do not use radiation and therefore are safe to use on babies. © 2010 Cable News Network.

Keyword: Autism; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16398 - Posted: 02.18.2012

By Gary Stix One of brain researchers’ closest brushes with science fiction in the last 10 years came with the discovery of a chemical that could completely wipe out memory, a molecule that evoked a real-life version of the scenario depicted in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a couple undertakes a procedure to erase their memory of each other when the relationship falls apart. Fortunately, the artificial amnesia occurred only in laboratory rats. But the experiment raised an obvious question: What would anyone do with a drug that essentially reformats your mental hard drive? Who would be interested besides a neurotic Woody Allen trying to reboot his life, or a sadistic Josef Mengele type attempting to conduct the kind of scientific experiment that would be judged a war crime at The Hague? A group of researchers have now come up with a more pragmatic answer to this question than incorporating the memory-erasing agent as a plot device in a cyberpunk novel Neuroscientists at McGill University and collaborators have just reported in Molecular Pain that the chemical with the evocative acronym ZIP can selectively wipe out the nervous system’s “memory” of the chronic aches and pains that plague about one in four North Americans, apparently leaving other memories intact. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16397 - Posted: 02.18.2012

By CARL ZIMMER Fruit flies may seem as if they lead an uneventful life. They look for old fruit to lay their eggs. The maggots then hatch and graze on the yeast and bacteria that make the fruit rot. In reality, however, these flies have to do battle with horrifying enemies. Tiny wasps seek out the maggots and lay eggs inside them. The wasps develop inside the still living flies, feeding on their tissues. When the wasps reach adult size, they crawl out of the dying bodies of their hosts. The flies are not helpless victims, however. In the journal Current Biology, Todd Schlenke, an Emory University biologist, and his colleagues report a remarkable defense the insects use: To kill their parasites, the flies get drunk. Dr. Schlenke discovered this tactic while studying the common fruit fly species Drosophila melanogaster. As they eat yeast, they also eat the alcohol that the yeast produce while breaking down sugar. Their fermentation can leave a rotting banana with an alcohol concentration higher than that of a bottle of beer. This boozy environment can be toxic to animals. The only reason Drosophila melanogaster thrives on rotting fruit is that it has evolved special enzymes that quickly detoxify alcohol. Dr. Schlenke was well aware that many insects gain defenses from their food. Monarch butterflies, for example, are protected from birds by the toxic compounds they get from the milkweed plants they eat. To see how alcohol influences the enemies of the flies, Dr. Schlenke unleashed a parasitic wasp, Leptopilina heterotoma. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 16396 - Posted: 02.18.2012

An Ontario First Nations leader says a catastrophe is looming with the decision to stop manufacturing the drug OxyContin. Nishnawbe Aski Nation Chief Stan Beardy says thousands of residents of Ontario reserves are addicted to the drug, which is up to twice as strong as morphine. The organization, which represents 49 First Nation communities in northern Ontario, estimates close to half its members are addicted to OxyContin. Health Canada says when the pill is chewed or crushed, then injected or inhaled, it produces a "heroin-like euphoria." The company that produces OxyContin will stop manufacturing the drug in Canada at the end of the month. Purdue Pharma Canada will replace OxyContin with a new formulation called OxyNEO, which is formulated to make abuse more difficult. Beardy says addicts will go into withdrawal, and that scares him. Benedikt Fischer of the Centre for Applied Mental Health and Addictions at B.C.'s Simon Fraser University says there will be a lot of sick people. He says without treatment to help deal with the addiction, a public-health catastrophe is imminent. Copyright © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16395 - Posted: 02.18.2012

By Rachel Ehrenberg When it comes to feeling good vibrations, the eyes have it. Experiments in mice and humans show that a protein important for eye development also plays a role in sensing vibrations. An international team has found that mice lacking a protein called c-Maf have deformed Pacinian corpuscles (shown here in a mouse’s leg), the vibration-detectors that surround mouse bones. People have Pacinian corpuscles in their palms and fingertips. When the researchers tested four people with eye cataracts due to malfunctioning c-Maf, those individuals had a hard time detecting high-frequency vibrations, the scientists report online February 16 in Science. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 16394 - Posted: 02.18.2012

By ANDREW POLLACK LOS OSOS, Calif. — Next week, advisers to the Food and Drug Administration will recommend whether the agency should approve the first new prescription diet pill in 13 years. The F.D.A. rejected the drug under review, Qnexa, in 2010, amid safety concerns, and the drug’s manufacturer is now presenting additional data to argue its case. But thousands of people here in central California, where Qnexa’s inventor ran a weight-loss clinic, and others across the country have not had to wait for the drug’s approval. Through a regulatory loophole of sorts, many obesity doctors prescribe two separate drugs that, when taken together, are essentially the same medicine. The widespread use of the unsanctioned combination reflects the often desperate desire for a medicine to help overcome the nation’s epidemic of obesity, doctors and patients say. The experience in this idyllic coastal community about midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles also provides a look at what might happen if Qnexa were approved. Use of the close substitute grew as word spread that some patients had experienced substantial weight loss. Some people here regained weight after stopping the treatment, and some experienced unpleasant side effects such as memory loss. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16393 - Posted: 02.18.2012

Caitlin Stier, video intern In this video game clip, it looks like Mario is jumping vertically while an enemy tortoise slides by underneath him. But keep watching when the background stops moving and you'll see that their movement is not quite what it seems. The animation, developed by cognitive psychologist Sebastiaan Mathôt from VU University in Amsterdam, is a variation of a common illusion where our perception of an object's motion is affected by a moving background. In a previous Friday Illusion post, we shared a video that exploits the same brain trick. Can you identify it? Let us know your choice by posting the headline in the Comments section below and the first correct answer will receive a New Scientist goodie bag. Good luck! © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16392 - Posted: 02.18.2012

by Wendy Zukerman ZAPPING the brain with a weak magnetic pulse can wipe out unwanted neural connections in mice at least. The discovery could be turned into a treatment for conditions associated with abnormal neural circuitry, such as schizophrenia. In transcranial magnetic stimulation a magnetic coil induces electric currents in the brain that can strengthen or suppress neural connections. This technique has been shown to improve symptoms in people with brain disorders such as autism and depression. Now, Jennifer Rodger from the University of Western Australia in Crawley and colleagues have found that stimulating the brain at intensities lower than would make a neuron fire can remove unwanted neural connections in mice. As children, our brains produce too many connections between cells. As we develop, some connections are pruned away while others are strengthened. Inept pruning has been implicated in schizophrenia. Rodger's team used genetically modified mice with abnormal connections in an area of the brain called the superior colliculus (SC), which is involved in motion detection. In these mice, 90 per cent of the axons in the SC had extended into the wrong areas. These bad connections make it difficult for the rodents to follow moving objects in their line of sight. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16391 - Posted: 02.18.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News The time of the day could be an important factor in the risk of getting an infection, according to researchers in the US. They showed how a protein in the immune system was affected by changes in the chemistry of the body through the day. The findings, published in the journal Immunity, showed the time of an infection changed its severity. An expert said drugs were likely to take advantage of the body clock in the near future. Plants, animals and even bacteria go through a daily 24-hour routine, known as a circadian rhythm. Jet lag is what happens when the body gets out of sync with its surroundings after crossing time zones. It has been known that there are variations in the immune system throughout the day. Researchers are now drilling down into the details. The immune system needs to detect an infection before it can begin to fight it off. Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine were investigating one of the proteins involved in the detection process - Toll-like receptor nine (TLR9), which can spot DNA from bacteria and viruses. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 16390 - Posted: 02.18.2012

By Fred H. Gage and Alysson R. Muotri Your brain is special. So is mine. Differences arise at every level of the organ’s astonishingly intricate architecture; the human brain contains 100 billion neurons, which come in thousands of types and collectively form an estimate of more than 100 trillion interconnections. These differences, in turn, lead to variances in the ways we think, learn and behave and in our propensity for mental illness. How does diversity in brain wiring and function arise? Variations in the genes we inherit from our parents can play a role. Yet even identical twins raised by the same parents can differ markedly in their mental functioning, behavioral traits, and risk of mental illness or neurodegenerative disease. In fact, mice bred to be genetically identical that are then handled in exactly the same way in the laboratory display differences in learning ability, fear avoidance and responses to stress even when age, gender and care are held constant. Something more has to be going on. Certainly the experiences we have in life matter as well; they can, for instance, influence the strength of the connections between particular sets of neurons. But researchers are increasingly finding tantalizing indications that other factors are at work—for instance, processes that mutate genes or affect gene behavior early in an embryo’s development or later in life. Such phenomena include alternative splicing, in which a single gene can give rise to two or more different proteins. Proteins carry out most of the operations in cells, and thus which proteins are made in cells will affect the functioning of the tissues those cells compose. Many researchers are also exploring the role of epigenetic changes—DNA modifications that alter gene activity (increasing or decreasing the synthesis of specific proteins) without changing the information in genes. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16389 - Posted: 02.16.2012

Bijal P. Trivedi On a frigid winter's morning in 1992, Susan Lindquist, then a biologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, trudged through the snow to the campus's intellectual-property office to share an unconventional idea for a cancer drug. A protein that she had been working on, Hsp90, guides misfolded proteins into their proper conformation. But it also applies its talents to misfolded mutant proteins in tumour cells, activating them and helping cancer to advance. Lindquist suspected that blocking Hsp90 would thwart the disease. The intellectual-property project manager she met with disagreed, calling Lindquist's idea “ridiculous” because it stemmed from experiments in yeast. His “sneering tone”, she says, left an indelible mark. “It was actually one of the most insulting conversations I've had in my professional life.” It led her to abandon her cancer research on Hsp90 for a decade. Today, more than a dozen drug companies are developing inhibitors of the protein as cancer treatments. Lindquist seems able to shrug off such injustices, now. Her work over the past 20 years has consistently challenged standard thinking on evolution, inheritance and the humble yeast. She has helped to show how misfolded infectious proteins called prions can override the rules of inheritance in yeast, and how this can be used to model human disease. She has also proposed a mechanism by which organisms can unleash hidden variation and evolve by leaps and bounds. She was the first female director of the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has received more than a dozen awards and honours in the past five years. In a paper being published this week in Nature, she and her colleagues show that in wild yeast, prions provide tangible advantages, such as survival in harsh conditions and drug resistance1. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 16388 - Posted: 02.16.2012

By ROBERT LELEUX Seven years ago, when my grandmother JoAnn was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the news sent me into a tailspin of fear and sadness. In my splintered Southern family, JoAnn had been more than my grandmother. The Auntie Mame of my Texas childhood, she taught me that happiness requires a great deal of thumbing one’s nose at convention. When I was 4, during an afternoon trip to the art museum, she told me to run my fingers along the brushstrokes of a particularly stunning Van Gogh: “They may kick us out of here, darlin,’ ” she drawled into my impressionable little ear, “but you’ll never not have touched that painting.” It was a life-affirming, if inappropriate, lesson. Without JoAnn’s outrageous example, I’m not sure I’d have had the courage to move to Manhattan, to come out of the closet, or ironically, to accompany her through the final years of her life. Little did I know that even after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, my grandmother had only begun to educate me. “The wonderful thing about Alzheimer’s,” she once quipped after her diagnosis, “is that you always live in the moment.” This was a zinger intended to conceal her frustration at having forgotten the punch line to one of her signature anecdotes. But it was, nevertheless, quite true. Through the haze of our grief, my grandfather Alfred and I began noticing that, along with her memories, JoAnn’s grudges, hurt feelings, worries and regrets were disappearing. In fact, within a year, she seemed happier than ever, more present and at peace. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16387 - Posted: 02.16.2012

by Carl Zimmer There was no way the blind mice could see, yet somehow, they could. The year was 1923, and a Harvard grad student named Clyde Keeler had set out to compare eyes from different animals, starting with mice that he bred in his dorm room. Keeler cut open one mouse’s eye and put it under a microscope. Immediately he realized something was wrong. Missing from the eye was the layer of rods and cones, the photoreceptors that catch light. Turning back to his colony, Keeler realized that half of his animals were blind. Somehow a mutation had arisen, wiping out their rods and cones. The mutation had blinded those mice with surgical precision, yet for reasons lost to history, Keeler got the strange idea to shine a light in their eyes anyway. Based on everything that scientists knew about mammalian eyes, nothing should have happened. After all, the mice had no way to capture light and relay it to the retinal ganglion cells, the neurons that normally pass visual signals on to the brain. And yet something did happen: The mouse pupils shrank. Keeler struggled to find an explanation. “We may suppose that a rodless mouse will not see in the ordinary sense,” he wrote in one journal article. But for pupils to shrink, such mice had to have some kind of cell besides rods and cones—one that scientists knew nothing about—that could also capture light and send a signal to the brain. Most vision experts scoffed at the notion that the eyes contained hidden sensory cells and ignored Keeler’s findings. It took nearly eight decades for scientists to investigate his claim and prove him right: The eye really does contain a third type of photoreceptor cells that sense light intensity without detecting images. Kalmbach Publishing Co. Copyright © 2012,

Keyword: Vision; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 16386 - Posted: 02.16.2012

The speed someone walks may predict the likelihood of developing dementia later in life, according to researchers in the US. They also told a conference that grip strength in middle-age was linked to the chance of a stroke. The scientists said more studies were needed to understand what was happening. Experts said the findings raised important questions, but more research was needed. Suggestions of a link between slow walking speed and poor health have been made before. A study, published in the British Medical Journal in 2009, said there was a "strong association" between slow walking speed and death from heart attacks and other heart problems. A Journal of the American Medical Association study suggested a link between walking faster over the age of 65 and a longer life. Dr Erica Camargo, who conducted the latest study at the Boston Medical Centre, said: "While frailty and lower physical performance in elderly people have been associated with an increased risk of dementia, we weren't sure until now how it impacted people of middle age." Brain scans, walking speed and grip strength were recorded for 2,410 people who were, on average, 62 years old. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16385 - Posted: 02.16.2012

Kerry Grens Reuters NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A series of group activities designed to stimulate thought, conversation and memory appears to improve the mental functioning of people with mild or moderate dementia, according to a new review of the evidence. "This is good news for the industry," said Robert Winningham, a professor at the University of Western Oregon, who was not involved in this study. "This is showing the people who work in memory care communities and nursing homes and assisted living facilities that they can improve cognitive function, and they need to be providing these kinds of interventions." Cognitive stimulation, as the therapy is called, involves structured activities in a group setting, usually one or more times a week for at least a month. The sessions might include a discussion of current events, a sort of show-and-tell with objects, baking, drawing or other activities that get the participants to engage their minds. Bob Woods, a professor at Bangor University in the UK who led the study, said that researchers in this field had considered cognitive stimulation to be helpful for people with dementia, based on earlier work. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Af8nyY Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, February 2012. Copyright © 2012, Reuters

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16384 - Posted: 02.16.2012

By Laura Sanders Sleep deprivation makes the brain groggy, but as waking hours mount nerve cells grow increasingly jumpy, a new study shows. This amped-up state may explain why seizures and hallucinations can accompany an all-nighter. More generally, the results help clarify what goes wrong in a brain deprived of shut-eye. “It’s an important finding,” says neuroscientist Christopher Colwell of UCLA. “Sleep deprivation is an area of huge interest because most of us do not get enough sleep.” By subjecting six people to a night of sleep deprivation and measuring their brain responses, Marcello Massimini of the University of Milan and colleagues found that people’s brains become more reactive as hours awake accumulate. To look for signs of altered brain function, the team delivered a jolt of magnetic current to the participants’ skulls that kicked off an electrical response in the nerve cells (an effect like the noise made when a hammer strikes a bell). With electrodes on the scalp, the team measured the strength of this electrical response in the frontal cortex, a brain region that’s involved in making executive decisions. After a night of sleep deprivation, participants’ electrical responses were stronger than they were the previous day, the scientists report online February 7 in Cerebral Cortex. This overreaction disappeared after a night’s sleep. The results offer support for a theory of why people sleep: During waking hours, the brain accumulates connections between nerve cells as new things are learned. Sleep, the theory says, sweeps the brain of extraneous clutter, leaving behind only the most important connections. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sleep; Epilepsy
Link ID: 16383 - Posted: 02.16.2012