by Traci Watson Parrots have neither lips nor teeth, but that doesn't stop them from producing dead-on imitations of human speech. Now researchers have learned part of the reason: like humans, parrots use their tongues to form sounds. As they report today in The Journal of Experimental Biology, scientists took x-ray movies of monk parakeets, Myiopsitta monachus, South American natives that can be trained to speak but aren't star talkers. The parakeets lowered their tongues during loud, squeaky "contact calls" made when the birds can't see each other and during longer, trilling "greeting calls" made to show a social connection. As seen in the video, the parakeets also moved their tongues up and down while chattering. No other type of bird is known to move its tongue to vocalize. Parrots use their mobile, muscular tongues to explore their environment and manipulate food. Those capable organs, just by coincidence, also help parrots utter greetings in words that even humans can understand. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16125 - Posted: 12.08.2011

by Greg Miller Connectivity is a hot topic in neuroscience these days. Instead of trying to figure out what individual brain regions do, researchers are focusing more on how regions work together as a network to enable memory, language, and decision-making. Now, a study of more than 100 children finds that interconnected brain regions develop in concert through childhood and adolescence. The researchers say their work could have implications for understanding various puzzles in neuroscience, such as what goes wrong in autism or why adolescent boys are prone to risky behavior. To look for evidence of coordinated development across brain regions, Armin Raznahan, a child psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues tapped into a long-running NIMH project that has been collecting magnetic resonance imaging scans of brain anatomy in children at different ages. They analyzed scans from 108 healthy children who'd had at least three scans taken between the ages of 9 and 22. The researchers calculated the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the brain's outermost layer of tissue, which is involved in virtually every aspect of cognition and behavior. In general, the cortex thickens in early childhood and thins in adolescence or adulthood, Raznahan says. He and his colleagues hypothesized that these changes might happen simultaneously in interconnected brain regions. That's exactly what they found. For example, the team will report tomorrow in Neuron, they saw this pattern in the so-called default mode network, which becomes active when people let their minds wander. "These regions are firing together for a lot of one's life," Raznahan says. "What we've shown is that these regions also seem to mature in close synchrony with each other." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16123 - Posted: 12.08.2011

by Andy Coghlan The brains of children from violent homes function like those of soldiers when it comes to detecting threats. Eamon McCrory at University College London used fMRI to scan the brains of 20 outwardly healthy children who had been maltreated and 23 "controls" from safe environments. During the scans, the children, aged 12 on average, viewed a mixture of sad, neutral and angry faces. When they saw angry faces, the maltreated children showed extra activity in the amygdala and the anterior insula, known to be involved in threat detection and anticipation of pain. Combat soldiers show similar heightened activity (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.10.015). "Our belief is that these changes could reflect neural adaption," says McCrory. "Maltreated kids and active soldiers are adapting to survive in a threatening or dangerous environment." Although this could help children survive their early years, it may predispose them to mental health problems in adulthood, such as depression or anxiety, says McCrory. A related study, published this week by Hilary Blumberg of Yale University School of Medicine and colleagues, demonstrates that areas of the brain important for emotional processing are deficient in grey matter in adolescents who suffered from maltreatment as children (Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, DOI: 10.1001/archpediatrics.2011.565). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16122 - Posted: 12.08.2011

Prenatal steroids — given to pregnant women at risk for giving birth prematurely — appear to improve survival and limit brain injury among infants born as early as the 23rd week of pregnancy, according to a study by a National Institutes of Health research network. Current guidelines recommend giving prenatal steroids to women at risk of delivering between the 24th and 34th weeks of pregnancy. "These findings provide strong evidence that prenatal steroids can benefit infants born as early as the 23rd week of pregnancy," said study author Rosemary D. Higgins, M.D., of the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The study was conducted by researchers participating in the NICHD Neonatal Research Network and led by Waldemar A. Carlo, director of the Division of Neonatology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The findings appear in the Dec. 7 Journal of the American Medical Association. When given to pregnant woman at risk for preterm delivery, steroid hormones help the fetus's lungs to mature. For infants born preterm, increased lung development improves the chances for survival and may decrease the risk of brain injury. Infants born in the 22nd through the 25th week of pregnancy — far earlier than the 40 weeks of a full term pregnancy — are the smallest, most frail category of newborns. Many die soon after birth, despite the best attempts to save them, including the most sophisticated newborn intensive care available. Some survive, and reach adulthood relatively unaffected. The rest will experience some degree of lifelong disability, including minor hearing loss, cerebral palsy, and intellectual disability.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16121 - Posted: 12.08.2011

by Michael Marshall If you believe European folklore, malevolent fairies are lurking outside family homes. Each one hopes to steal a baby and leave her own child in their place: a changeling. If you are a songbird, there is some truth to the story. Cuckoos dump their eggs in the nests of other species, often killing the rightful offspring. Such brood parasites can get pretty savage themselves: greater honeyguide chicks kill their hosts' offspringMovie Camera. Not always, though. The shiny cowbird does kill some of the host's chicks, but not all of them – and sometimes having a cowbird egg lurking in your nest can even be a good idea. As a group, cowbirds get their name because they follow herds of hoofed mammals such as buffalo, feeding on insects kicked up by the animals' hoofs. This may explain why they lay their eggs in other birds' nests: they can't stay in the same place long enough to raise their own young. Shiny cowbirds aren't fussy about who they exploit. Their eggs have been found in the nests of more than 250 species, although they do tend to go for hosts larger than themselves, and individual females can be fairly consistent. Perhaps because they use so many different hosts, cowbird eggs come in a range of colours and patterns. The female lays her eggs around the same time as the host, so that all the eggs in the nest hatch together. She does so when the parents are out foraging – although they sometimes catch her in the act and attack her. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 16120 - Posted: 12.08.2011

by Rowan Hooper WHAT was the basis for the earliest friendships? If wild chimps are any guide: support in a fight, borrowing a valued tool, and a bite to eat now and then. Quite similar to our friendships today, in fact. Indeed, some chimps are so modern they have relationships that we would classify as friends with benefits. Primatologists are reassessing the complexity of chimpanzee society in the light of new findings that also suggest answers to a long-standing question: why share things with non-relatives? For the first time wild chimps in Senegal have been observed taking plant foods and tools from other chimps, who don't react to the intrusion. The chimps donating their stuff don't get paid, but neither do they protest. Instead, the trade appears to help build social cohesion. What's more, in another west African study, this time in Ivory Coast, a "market" has been described where chimps exchange commodities in the shape of both social behaviours including grooming and sex, and resources such as meat. Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says we have only recently begun to appreciate the time and energy chimps invest in reciprocal relationships, and he compares chimp relationships to friendship. "These findings have prompted primatologists to use some terms that have in the past been reserved for humans." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution; Aggression
Link ID: 16119 - Posted: 12.08.2011

By Ed Yong of Nature magazine It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife. But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people's sense of self. Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has convinced me that I am floating a few meters behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph. Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson's repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person1, gained a third arm2, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions3. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls' heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer's basement. "The other neuroscientists think we're a little crazy," Ehrsson admits. But Ehrsson's unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it -- and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 16118 - Posted: 12.08.2011

By Joseph Brownstein and MyHealthNewsDaily In the struggle against widespread obesity that begins in early childhood, new research indicates that schools may be the best place to start a solution. Australian researchers examined 55 interventions in previous studies and concluded that school-based programs were key in getting kids to healthy weights, and there was little evidence that these programs would have a negative effect on young students' self-images. "Obesity prevention programs in general are not harming children," said lead author Elizabeth Waters, chair of child public health at the Melbourne School of Population Health. However, "programs that don't make a commitment to preventing body image issues might hurt children by stigmatizing overweight children or send unhealthy messages about body image," she said. "We looked for information about harms in our review and, while many studies did not report this information, of those that did, there was no evidence of harm with these programs," Waters said. The study is published online today (Dec. 6) in the Cochrane Library, a journal that publishes studies compiled by evaluating previous research in the field. In developing programs for schools, Waters said that adding lessons on healthy eating, physical activity and body image to the curriculum, along with improving school lunches, making students more active during the day and supporting parents to make similar changes at home would improve children's health. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16117 - Posted: 12.08.2011

By JOHN BRANCH THROUGH THE NIGHT and into the next day, as the scrolls across the bottom of television screens spread the news of Derek Boogaard’s death last May, the calls of condolences came, one after another. Among them was a call from a stranger, first to Joanne Boogaard in Regina, Saskatchewan, then to Len Boogaard in Ottawa. It was a researcher asking for the brain of their son. An examination of the brain could unlock answers to Boogaard’s life and death. It could save other lives. But there was not much time to make a decision. Boogaard, the N.H.L.’s fiercest fighter, dead of a drug and alcohol overdose at 28, was going to be cremated. There was little discussion. The brain was carved out of his skull by a coroner in Minneapolis. It was placed in a plastic bucket and inside a series of plastic bags, then put in a cooler filled with a slurry of icy water. It was driven to the airport and placed in the cargo hold of a plane to Boston. When it arrived at a laboratory at the Bedford V.A. Medical Center in Bedford, Mass., the brain was vibrantly pink and weighed 1,580 grams, or about 3 ½ pounds. On a stainless-steel table in the basement morgue, Dr. Ann McKee cleaved it in half, front to back, with a large knife. Much of one half was sliced into sheets about the width of sandwich bread. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Aggression
Link ID: 16116 - Posted: 12.06.2011

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer Scientists at Stanford and UCSF are recruiting patients for two clinical trials to test the use of ultrasound waves, as an alternative to traditional radiation therapy, to ease pain in people whose cancer has spread to their bones. Earlier studies of the ultrasound treatment have been promising, and a study recently completed at Stanford and 16 other U.S. research sites found that most patients saw substantial improvement in pain control after radiation therapy had failed to work. The treatment is still considered experimental and is not available outside of clinical trials. It is being studied only as a treatment for the pain associated with metastatic bone cancer, and not for treating the cancer itself. "Radiation is very effective for most patients. But there is still a significant percentage that it doesn't work for," said Dr. Pejman Ghanouni, a Stanford radiologist who is leading ultrasound clinical trials there. "I don't view ultrasound as something that would replace radiation. It's another tool in the toolbox." Doctors have had such success in treating cancer that people are now living years longer after a diagnosis than they did decades ago, Ghanouni said. But as survival rates have increased, so have rates of metastatic disease, which occurs when the cancer has spread beyond the initial site, commonly into the bones. © 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16115 - Posted: 12.06.2011

by Catherine de Lange Chimpanzee brains may be hard-wired to evolve language even though they can't talk. That is the suggestion of a study which found chimps link sounds and levels of brightness, something akin to synaesthesia in people. Such an association could help explain how our early ancestors took the first vital step from ape-like grunts to a proper vocabulary. Synaesthetes make unusual connections between different senses – they might sense certain tastes when they hear music, or "see" numbers as colours. This is less unusual than you might think: "The synaesthetic experience is a continuum," explains Roi Cohen Kadosh of University College London. "Most people have it at an implicit level, and some people have a stronger connection." Now, Vera Ludwig from the Charite University of Medicine in Berlin, Germany, and colleagues have shown for the first time that chimpanzees also make cross-sensory associations, suggesting they evolved early on. The team repeatedly flashed either black or white squares for 200 milliseconds at a time on screens in front of six chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 33 humans. The subjects had to indicate whether the square was black or white by touching a button of the right colour. A high or low-pitched sound was randomly played in the background during each test. Chimps and humans were better at identifying white squares when they heard a high-pitched sound, and more likely to correctly identify dark squares when played a low-pitched sound. But performance was poor when the sounds were swapped: humans were slower to identify a white square paired with a low-pitched noise, or a black square with a high-pitched noise, and the chimps' responses became significantly less accurate. © Copyright Reed Bus

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16114 - Posted: 12.06.2011

“Aging is not a mild form of dementia,” says cellular neurobiologist John Morrison, who specializes in aging. Until recently, many scientists thought brain cells died as we aged, shrinking our brains and shedding bits of information that were gone forever. Newer findings indicate that cells in disease-free brains stay put; it’s the connections between them that break. With this new perspective has come an explosion of research into how we can keep those connections, and our brain function, intact for longer. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16113 - Posted: 12.06.2011

Female Ecstasy users show long-lasting signs of toxicity in their brains, an imaging study shows. The neurotransmitter serotonin, a critical signaling molecule, has roles in regulating mood, appetite, sleep, learning and memory. In Monday's issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, U.S. researchers used PET scans to look at levels of certain serotonin receptors in different regions of the brain in 15 women who had used Ecstasy compared with 10 who never taken it. The study is important, said study author Dr. Ronald Cowan, a psychiatry professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, because the drug is now being tested as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety associated with cancer. "Our studies suggest that if you use Ecstasy recreationally, the more you use, the more brain changes you get,” Cowan said. Investigators will need to know the dose at which Ecstasy becomes toxic before it is used as a treatment, the study’s authors cautioned. In the study, they found Ecstasy use produces chronic serotonin neurotoxicity in humans. Since previous studies suggest that the use of birth control, estrogen level and age affect serotonin receptors, the researchers took those factors were taken into consideration in the analysis. But the authors acknowledged they may not have fully accounted for those variables. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16112 - Posted: 12.06.2011

By Brian Alexander “Laughing seizures” have long been one of the mysteries surrounding epilepsy. During an event, an epileptic suffering a laughing seizure can guffaw, sometimes hysterically, but certainly not because he or she finds anything funny. Now a new study published in the journal Brain, from a team led by Josef Parvizi of Stanford University, has helped clear up some of the mystery. Earlier research traced these events, more formally called gelastic seizures, to abnormal clumps of neurons in the hypothalamus called hamartomas. “The hamartomas start firing on their own and cause the seizures,” Parvizi explained. But exactly where in the hypothalamus are gelastic seizure-related hamartomas located? That answer’s important because the hypothalamus has several regions, or nuclei, that manage input and create output related to a variety of body functions like temperature regulation, sexual behavior and hormone release. Parvizi likens it to a college campus. “Just like a campus, you have different buildings and every department has its own students and own connections,” he said. In looking at 100 cases of children with gelastic seizures who’ve had their brains imaged, Parvizi and his colleagues were able to show that in every case the hamartoma lesions were located in a region known as the mammillary bodies. (They don’t have anything to do with breasts. They just sort of look like breasts and the neuroscientists who first described them were men, so there you go.) © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Epilepsy; Emotions
Link ID: 16111 - Posted: 12.06.2011

By ALVA NOë What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience. “Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals. Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn’t been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything. Leif Parsons What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 16110 - Posted: 12.06.2011

People who like a lie-in may now have an excuse - it is at least partly down to their genes, according to experts. Experts, who studied more than 10,000 people across Europe, found those with the gene ABCC9 need around 30 minutes more sleep per night than those without the gene. The gene is carried by one in five Europeans, they say in their study, published in Molecular Psychiatry. The researchers said the finding could help explain "sleep behaviour". Over 10,000 people took part, each reporting how long they slept and providing a blood sample for DNA analysis. People's sleep needs can differ significantly. At the extreme, Margaret Thatcher managed on four hours of sleep a night while Albert Einstein needed 11. People from the Orkney Isles, Croatia, the Netherlands, Italy, Estonia and Germany took part in the study. All were asked about their sleep patterns on "free" days, when people did not need to get up for work the next day, take sleeping pills or work shifts. When the researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich compared these figures with the results of the genetic analysis, they found those with a variation of a gene known as ABCC9 needed more sleep than the eight-hour average. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16109 - Posted: 12.06.2011

By Tim Wall A review of 142 studies on the effects of the herbicide atrazine had bad news for testes. "Essentially, atrazine chemically castrates animals. When you look at a male exposed to atrazine, the testes are missing sperm," Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley told Discovery News. The effects of atrazine on male development are consistent across all examined animals, found a study published by a team of 22 researchers from more than 60 nations in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Mammals, reptiles, and fish were all affected, but amphibians caught the worst of it. In a study by Hayes, male African clawed frogs turned into females after exposure to atrazine, which kills weeds around the world in everything from corn fields to orchards. "And this is not at extremely high concentrations" said co-author of the review Val Beasley of the University of Illinois in a press release. "These are at concentrations that are found in the environment." Humans aren't spared the effects of atrazine, the world's second most common herbicide after glyphosate, Hayes said. Hayes pointed to studies correlating atrazine exposure to low sperm quality, birth defects, miscarriage, and breast cancer © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16108 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Nearly everybody knows that Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater, the house in Pennsylvania that sits above and appears to cascade into a waterfall. I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris is similarly famous. And Frank Gehry is widely known for the curvi­linear shining steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. But most people couldn’t name the contractors and subcontractors responsible for translating those great architects’ blueprints into solid structures. Geneticists have the same problem. Details for erecting an organism’s structure are encoded within DNA, written in chemical subunits designated by the letters A, T, C and G. But it has been hard to say exactly who takes those details and oversees the construction of the organism from proteins and other molecular materials. Only now have scientists begun identifying the previously invisible contractors who make sure that materials get where they are supposed to be and in the right order to build a human being or any other creature. Some of these little-known workers belong to a class of molecules called long intergenic noncoding RNAs. Scientists used to think that these “linc­RNAs” were worthless. As their name suggests, these molecules — at least 200 chemical letters long — do not encode information that the body’s manufacturing machinery can use to cobble together proteins. And the lincRNAs originate in what scientists used to view as barren wastelands between protein-coding genes. But new research is showing that these formerly underappreciated workers have important roles in projects both large and microscopic. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16107 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By Devin Powell Science fiction fans know what a 3-D display ought to look like. The film Forbidden Planet showed them more than half a century ago. On a distant world once inhabited by an advanced alien civilization, human scientist Dr. Morbius discovers a table that can create holographic videos. He calls up a ghostly projection of his daughter that’s smaller than but other­wise identical to the girl herself. “Aladdin’s lamp in a physics laboratory,” says an awed spacefarer peering over Morbius’ shoulder. Compared with this Krell technology, the magic of today’s 3-D televisions and movie screens are a bit lacking. Just ask moviegoers whose eyes felt strained as they watched Avatar from behind a pair of goofy glasses. Or move your head side to side while playing Nintendo’s latest portable gaming device, the 3DS: You will see that Mario’s world just doesn’t rotate like the real world would. But a handful of research teams are hoping to create a 3-D experience that’s glasses-free, comfortable and as in-your-face as watching the Super Bowl from the front row at the stadium. By combining existing techniques with a few new tricks, the researchers are finding better ways to fool the brain into thinking the action is right there in the room. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16106 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By Ferris Jabr Losing weight is not always about anticipating swimsuit season or squeezing into skinny jeans—for the clinically obese, losing weight is about fighting serious illness and reclaiming health. But the primal part of the brain that regulates appetite will not place a moratorium on hunger just because someone and their doctor acknowledge the need to lose weight. Researchers at Syracuse University are working toward a unique solution: a stick of chewing gum that suppresses appetite. There are many appetite-suppressing drugs on the market, a large number of which are based on stimulating amphetamines that carry the risk of serious side effects such as high blood pressure and heart failure. Syracuse Chemist Robert Doyle's research focuses on a hormone called human peptide YY (hPYY), which is released from cells that line the intestine whenever you eat and exercise. The more calories consumed, the more hPYY travels from intestinal cells into the bloodstream, eventually reaching the hypothalamus—an almond-size, evolutionarily ancient part of the brain that helps to regulate hunger, thirst, body temperature and sleep cycles. Previous studies have shown that injections of hPYY suppress appetite in rodents, monkeys and people. In one study, both obese and lean people consumed about 30 percent fewer calories than usual at a buffet lunch only two hours after receiving a dose of hPYY. Doyle wanted to know if hPYY still works when taken orally because pills and tablets are easy and painless compared with injections. The problem is that if you ingest pure hPYY, the caustic soup of acids and digestive enzymes in your stomach and intestine will destroy the hormone before it reaches your blood. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16105 - Posted: 12.03.2011