by Nora Schultz Actions speak louder than words. Baby chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans – our four closest living relatives – quickly learn to use visual gestures to get their message across, providing the latest evidence that hand waving may have been a vital first step in the development of human language. After a long search for the origins of language in animal vocalisations, some evolutionary biologists have begun to change tack. The emerging "gesture theory" of language evolution has it that our ancestors' linguistic abilities may have begun with their hands rather than their vocal cords. Katja Liebal and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have found new evidence for the theory by studying how communication develops in our closest living relatives. They discovered that all four great apes – chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans – develop a complex repertoire of gestures during the first 20 months of life. Look at me Those gestures included the tactile pokes and nudges that are expected to effectively capture another's attention in any situation, but they also included visual gestures such as extending the arms towards another ape or head shaking. To be effective communication tools, these visual gestures require that a young ape be aware that another individual is paying attention before using them, if they want to get their message across. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16016 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By Jason G. Goldman You might have more in common with the chicken on your plate than you realize. Sure, you’ve also got two thighs, two legs, two breasts, and two wings (sort of). But new research suggests that chickens might like to rock out to the same tunes you’ve got on your iPod. The kinds of sounds that humans tend to find pleasant is called consonant, which are different from from unpleasant sounds, which are called dissonant. Think of the difference between a Mozart sonata and fingernails on a chalkboard, and you’re on the right track. Consonant notes sound – to the untrained ear – as if they were a single tone, while a you can identify multiple tones within a dissonant note. This might be related to the human preference for harmonics, since in humans, the preference for consonant sounds are associated with preferences for harmonic spectra (harmonic relationships between frequencies), while dissonant sounds are not. It might be easiest to understand by listening to these melodies. The melodies are the same, but the first one is consonant (composed of minor and major thirds) and the second one is dissonant (composed of minor seconds). Turn your speakers up: Two-month-old human babies prefer to listen to consonant music rather than dissonant music. As early as one to three days after birth, human infant brains can distinguish between consonant and dissonant music – though it is unclear if there is a preference at that early age. Songbirds like Java sparrows (Padda oryzivora) and European starlings (Sternus vulgaris) can distinguish consonant from dissonant music as well, though, like day-old human infants, it is unclear if there is a preference. Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) can distinguish the two types of tones, though no preference has been observed in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). There was one human-raised chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) that preferred consonant music. Taken together, the evidence for the musical preferences of humans and non-human animals is a bit…dissonant. No harmony to be found here. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16015 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Researchers have grown a mouse pituitary gland for the first time from embryonic stem cells. Or rather, the pituitary gland grew itself, after Japanese researchers coaxed embryonic stem cells to form the type of tissues that normally surround the gland. The accomplishment, reported online November 9 in Nature, could be the first step toward replacement pituitary glands for people. Self-made glands growing in lab dishes may also help researchers learn how the organs develop inside the body. “There’s a lot in it to be excited about, whether you’re a developmental biologist or interested in clinical applications,” says Sally Camper, a developmental geneticist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Camper has tried, and failed, to coax embryonic stem cells to form pituitary glands. “It’s a gorgeous piece of work, and it’s just really, really exciting,” she says. Scientists have persuaded stem cells to form particular types of tissues before, but growing a whole organ in a lab dish has been an elusive goal, says pediatric endocrinologist Mehul Dattani of the University College London Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. What allowed Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and colleagues to succeed where others have failed is that the group recreated conditions that exist in the part of the brain where the pituitary normally grows. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16014 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By Nick Bascom Primates may have evolved from living the lonely life to forming complex societies in two major steps, a new study of more than 200 species suggests. Understanding when and why the ancestors of Homo sapiens and its closest cousins adopted different social structures could help reveal more about the evolution of human society. About 52 million years ago, primates — an order of animals that includes, among others, humans and great apes — might have stopped foraging alone and banded together in large, loosely formed, same-sex groups to search for food, anthropologist Susanne Shultz of the University of Oxford and colleagues report in the Nov. 10 Nature. Then around 16 million years ago, primates began forming more stable social groups, such as male-female pairs and harems dominated by one male, the researchers suggest. Teaming up this way may have been prompted by a switch from a nocturnal lifestyle to moving about in the sunshine. “Being active during the day would have allowed primates to travel across larger spaces and exploit their environment more effectively, but it would have also exposed them to a huge predation risk,” says Shultz. To make it through the day, primates would have needed a new defense strategy to deal with both a greater number of predators and also new kinds of hunters. “What’s going to nail you at night is different than what’s going to nail you during the day,” says primatologist Anthony Di Fiore of the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16013 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By Bruce Bower People with schizophrenia rapidly and intensely perceive phony replicas of hands as their own, possibly contributing to this mental ailment’s signature hallucinations, a new study suggests. In a series of tests, people with schizophrenia believed a rubber hand placed in front of them was theirs if the visible fake hand and the patient’s hidden, corresponding hand were simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush. Mentally healthy people took longer to experience a less dramatic version of this rubber-hand illusion than schizophrenia patients did, but the effect’s vividness increased among healthy volunteers who reported magical beliefs, severe social anxiety and other characteristics linked to a tendency to psychosis, psychologist Sohee Park of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and her colleagues report online October 31 in PLoS ONE. “Schizophrenia patients may have a more flexible internal representation of their bodies and a weakened sense of self,” Park says. “Even without psychosis, the rubber-hand illusion can be more pronounced in certain personality types.” Mental health clinicians have written for several decades about a disturbed sense of self in schizophrenia. A team led by psychiatrist Avi Peled of Sha’ar Menashe Mental Health Center in Hadera, Israel, first reported a powerful rubber-hand illusion in the illness in 2000. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Attention
Link ID: 16012 - Posted: 11.11.2011

Having a mini-stroke can reduce a person's life expectancy by up to 20 per cent, a new study suggests. In a mini-stroke — known in the medical world as a transient ischemic attack (TIA) — the blood flow to part of the brain is temporarily blocked or reduced. With a mini-stroke, the initial symptoms of blurred vision, numbness, sudden headache, and difficulty speaking or walking (similar to stroke symptoms) soon disappear. In a stroke, the brain incurs permanent damage because the blood flow stays blocked. Having a history of TIA has long been known as a risk factor for strokes. This new study suggests there are also serious impacts on life expectancy. Researchers identified more than 22,000 people hospitalized in Australia because of a mini-stroke between 2000 and 2007 and tracked their medical records for at least two years. Using death registry data from 2009, they then compared this population to those in the general population. Their findings were startling. For those patients who'd had a mini-stroke in 2000, their survival rate nine years later was 20 per cent lower than the population as a whole. Survival rates at the one-year and five year marks were also lower. A year after a mini-stroke, 91.5 per cent of the TIA patients were still alive, versus 95 per cent survival among the general population. Five years after a mini-stroke, 67.2 per cent of the TIA group was alive, compared to 77.4 per cent of the general population. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16011 - Posted: 11.11.2011

Children with autism have more brain cells and heavier brains compared to typically developing children, according to researchers partly funded by the National Institutes of Health. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Nov. 9, 2011, the small, preliminary study provides direct evidence for possible prenatal causes of autism. "Earlier studies of head circumference and early brain overgrowth have pointed us in this direction, but there have been few quantitative neuroanatomical studies due to the lack of post-mortem tissue from children with autism," said Thomas R. Insel, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of NIH. "These new results, along with an earlier study[1] reporting altered wiring of the prefrontal cortex, focus our attention on this critical area of the brain in autism." The prefrontal cortex is involved in various higher order functions such as language and communication, social behavior, mood, and attention. Children who have autism tend to show deficits in such functions. Eric Courchesne, Ph.D., of the University of San Diego School of Medicine Autism Center of Excellence, and colleagues conducted direct counts of brain cells in specific regions of the prefrontal cortex in postmortem brains of seven boys who had autism and six typically developing males, ranging in age from 2-16 years. Most participants had died in accidents, but the researchers did not base their selection on causes of death.

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16010 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By Bruce Bower SEATTLE — Good listeners inadvertently turn a deaf ear to unexpected sounds. Attending closely to a conversation creates a situation in which unusual, clearly audible background utterances frequently go totally unheard, says psychologist Polly Dalton of the University of London. This finding takes the famous “invisible gorilla effect” from vision into the realm of hearing, Dalton reported November 4 at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. More than a decade ago, researchers observed that about half of volunteers watching a videotape of people passing a basketball fail to see a gorilla-suited person walking through the group if the viewers are instructed to focus on counting how many times the ball gets passed (SN: 5/21/11, p. 16). An ability to prioritize what sounds and sights to monitor supports daily activities, but it can also wipe out perceptions of obvious peripheral happenings. “We’re not aware of as much in the world as we think we are,” Dalton said. Dalton and her colleagues created a 69-second recording of two men talking as they prepared food for a party and two women chatting as they wrapped a party gift. Headphones delivered one conversation to each ear of 41 volunteers, creating a sense of the four characters moving around a room as they talked. Partway into the recording, a man dubbed “gorilla man” by the researchers appears in the acoustic scene for 19 seconds saying “I’m a gorilla” over and over. Participants were assigned to pay attention either to the men’s or the women’s conversation. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 16009 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By JANE E. BRODY The eyes may be windows to the soul, but the retina is the brain’s window to the world. When the retina is injured, vision is seriously threatened and may be lost entirely if the problem is not quickly addressed. The retina is a layer of tissue at the back of the eye that collects light relayed through the lens. Special photoreceptor cells in the retina convert light into nerve impulses, which are transmitted to the brain. At the retina’s center is an especially critical area called the macula, which enables you to see anything directly in front of you, like words on a page, a person’s face, the road ahead or the image on a screen. When blood flow through the retina is blocked or when the retina pulls away from the wall of the eye, getting the problem properly diagnosed can be an emergency. Modern treatments can do wonders if they are begun before the damage is irreversible. But a delay in getting to a retinal specialist can diminish the ability of even the best therapy to preserve or restore normal vision. As with all living tissue, the retina is highly dependent on a constant supply of oxygen-carrying blood. Should anything disrupt that, vision is at risk. Two retinal mishaps, retinal-vein occlusion and retinal detachment, can occur at any age, but both are more common among older people. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16008 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By RITCHIE S. KING As plain-tailed wrens dart through Chusquea bamboo in the Andes, they can be heard singing a kind of song that no other bird is known to sing: a cooperative duet. New research shows that male-female pairs take turns producing notes, at a combined rate of three to six per second, to create what sounds like a single bird’s song. Each member of the duo reacts to what the other one does, adjusting the timing and pitch as needed to maintain the melody the two are trying to play together. The duet is like humans dancing, said Eric Fortune, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study, which appeared in the journal Science. The cues between the birds are “continuous and subtle,” and brain scans show that each bird learns the entire duet — as a pair of ballroom dancers learns choreography — instead of only memorizing its individual part. In the world of plain-tailed wrens, it appears that females always lead, singing a simple backbone melody that the males fill in with something more variable, like a guitar solo. The research team suspects that a female engages in cooperative singing to put a male’s chirping prowess to the test and thereby determine his suitability as a mate. While alone, a female wren practices her section of a duet at full volume. But males make more mistakes during cooperative singing, so they tweet much more timidly when they rehearse their part. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16007 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By SAM ROBERTS Election Day is seldom associated with raging hormones. But three professors from Israel, where all politics is vocal, suggest that the very act of voting generates stress levels that could affect the outcome. In an experiment conducted in a small Israeli town during the fiercely contested 2009 national election, the researchers took saliva samples from people who were about to vote. They found higher levels of glucocorticoid hormones, including cortisol, which are secreted by the adrenal glands and are associated with stress. Not only that, but people who planned to vote for the underdog tended to exhibit even more stress — affirming a study from the United States that found Obama voters’ cortisol levels remained steadier than those of McCain voters as the 2008 election results rolled in. “This is the first study to explore the psychological well-being of actual voters through an endocrinal measure at the ballot,” the professors — Israel Waismel-Manor of the University of Haifa and Gal Ifergane and Hagit Cohen of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev — write in a recent edition of the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology. They conducted their experiment in Omer, a small town 70 miles south of Tel Aviv, and hope to replicate it in the United States a year from now, when Americans choose a president. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16006 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By DENISE GRADY An operation that doctors hoped would prevent strokes in people with poor circulation to the brain does not work, researchers are reporting. A $20 million study, paid for by the government, was cut short when it became apparent that the surgery was not helping patients who had complete blockages in one of their two carotid arteries, which run up either side of the neck and feed 80 percent of the brain. The surgery was a bypass that connected a scalp artery to a deeper vessel to improve blood flow to the brain. The new study, published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the second in recent months to find that a costly treatment, one that doctors had high hopes for, did not prevent strokes. In September, researchers reported that stents being used to prop open blocked arteries deep in the brain were actually causing strokes. That study was also cut short. Both the stents and the bypass operation seemed to make sense medically, and doctors thought they should work. Their failure highlights the peril of assuming that an apparent improvement on a lab test or X-ray, like better blood flow or a wider artery, will translate into something that actually helps patients, warned an editorial that accompanied the new findings. Only rigorous studies can tell for sure. The editorial writer, Dr. Joseph P. Broderick, chairman of neurology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, also cautioned that other stroke treatments were being used without sufficient study, particularly devices to remove clots. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16005 - Posted: 11.09.2011

Researchers have found a possible link between heavy use of methamphetamines and schizophrenia. Increased risk of the mental illness was discovered in meth users in a study of California hospital records for patients admitted between 1990 and 2000 with a diagnosis of drug dependence or abuse. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health compared the drug users to a control group of patients with appendicitis and no drug use. A drug addict prepares a combination of heroin and crystal meth. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health say people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia.A drug addict prepares a combination of heroin and crystal meth. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health say people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Guillermo Arias/Associated Press The hospital records were studied for readmissions for up to 10 years after the initial admission. Co-author Russell Callaghan says people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms at the start of the study period had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia, compared with groups of patients who used cocaine, alcohol or opioid drugs. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16004 - Posted: 11.09.2011

by Jennifer Barone Language seems to set humans apart from other animals, but scientists cannot just hand monkeys and birds an interspecies SAT to determine which linguistic abilities are singularly those of Homo sapiens and which we share with other animals. In August neuroscientists Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University announced that they had devised the next-best thing, a systematic test of birds’ grammatical prowess. The results suggest that Bengalese finches have strict rules of syntax: The order of their chirps matters. “It’s the first experiment to show that any animal has perceived the especially complex patterns that supposedly make human language unique,” says Timothy Gentner, who studies animal cognition and communication at the University of California, San Diego, and was not involved in the study. Finches cry out whenever they hear a new tune, so Abe and Watanabe started by having individual birds listen to an unfamiliar finch’s song. At first the listeners called out in reply, but after 200 playbacks, their responses died down. Then the researchers created three remixes by changing the order of the song’s component syllables. The birds reacted indifferently to two of the revised tunes; apparently the gist of the message remained the same. But one remix elicited a burst of calls, as if the birds had detected something wrong. Abe and Watanabe concluded that the birds were reacting like grumpy middle-school English teachers to a violation of their rules of syntax. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing C

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16003 - Posted: 11.09.2011

BRAIN not needed: the muscles controlling the slit-like pupil of a cat's eye do not require nerve signals to drive their movement. A light-sensitive pigment in the iris can do the job instead. Mammals were thought to rely on signalling between the eye and brain to resize the pupil and control the amount of light reaching the retina, but King-Wai Yau and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, discovered that eyeballs isolated from animals that are active at night or at dusk and dawn - including cats, dogs and hamsters - continued to respond to light. They traced the effect to melanopsin, a light-sensitive pigment in the iris muscle. Eye tissue from mice lacking the gene for this pigment was unable to respond to light in the same way (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10567). The pigment is already known to play a similar role in birds, fish and amphibians. Stuart Peirson at the University of Oxford, who was not involved with the study, thinks it might provide dark-loving mammals with an additional pupil-shrinking tool that helps them avoid being dazzled if suddenly exposed to light. The findings also hint at clinical uses of melanopsin in humans. Some forms of blindness result from the loss of light-sensitive rod and cone cells from the retina. Peirson says it might be possible to use melanopsin to make other cells in the retina light-sensitive instead. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16002 - Posted: 11.09.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou How well can you control your thoughts? Mind-control training could improve symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Deep brain stimulation, which involves implanting electrodes in the brain, helps to alleviate problems with movement experienced by people with Parkinson's disease. "If putting in an electrode works, we thought training brains to self-regulate might work as well," says David Linden at Cardiff University, UK. To find out, Linden's team asked 10 people with Parkinson's to think about moving while having their brains scanned by fMRI for 45 minutes. Five were given real-time neurofeedback showing how well they activated a brain region that controls movement. Each participant was then told to practice such thoughts at home. Two months later, movement problems including rigidity and tremor had improved by 37 per cent in the group that received feedback compared with no change in the rest. "Sending signals to brain areas normally deprived of input could be reshaping neural networks," says Linden. Roger Barker, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, points out that the treatment would not work for everyone with Parkinson's disease. "If the person has a bad tremor then it would be difficult to get an image, while others don't like being inside the scanners," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16001 - Posted: 11.09.2011

by Michael Marshall Gliding over a bed of reeds in south-west France, a male western marsh harrier circles his nest. Scanning the surrounding area, he spots a second male on a nest just 400 metres away from his own. Ordinarily this would be the start of a fight. Male marsh harriers are territorial, and don't like another male to set up home within 700 metres of the nest. Yet the new neighbour merits nothing more than a long look. That's because the interloper is a cross-dresser. Ever since he reached sexual maturity, his feathers have been coloured like a female's. Marsh harriers are one of only two bird species – and the only bird of prey – where some of the males mimic females. Male marsh harriers are mostly grey, with yellow eyes, while females are brown with white heads and shoulders, and brown eyes. Females are also about 30 per cent bigger than males. Not all males obey the gender rules, though. Up to 40 per cent of them have mainly brown feathers with no greys at all, though they do still have the yellow eyes that mark them as male, and are no bigger than expected for their gender. These female-like males acquire their unusual colour in their second year, and keep it for the rest of their lives. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16000 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By Christian Torres, Army Spec. David Hunt made it through a year of deployment in central Iraq largely unscathed. But two years after returning to the United States, he faces medical retirement from the military. As Hunt, 37, describes it, there’s “really not any place” for him in the Army because of chronic migraine, the condition that has plagued him ever since an off-duty auto accident in 2006. He has fought the symptoms — nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light — through deployments to the Arizona-Mexico border as well as Iraq. He recalls one particularly bad migraine hitting while he was alone and on guard in Arizona, and he vomited while seeking shelter from the harsh sun. “I did everything I could to just sit up and keep watch,” he said. Hunt isn’t alone in his struggle. Over the past decade, migraine and headache have become a significant problem for U.S. armed forces. A 2008 Defense Department report said diagnoses of migraine increased across all branches of the military between 2001 and 2007. Another, more recent study found that, among nearly 1,000 soldiers evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan because of some form of headache between 2004 and 2009, two-thirds did not return to duty. “Headaches represent a significant cause of unit attrition in personnel deployed in military operations,” the study concluded. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Stress
Link ID: 15999 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By PAMELA PAUL THE indiscriminate worries and ruminations that churn through the mind of Cheryl Downs McCoy are matters most working mothers have rifled through at some point: “I need to call that guy about fixing the car. I think I’ve run out my daughter’s favorite snack. Should I change the batteries in the smoke alarm?” These are entirely acceptable matters to ponder. But not at 3 in the morning. Yet that is when Ms. McCoy, a 45-year-old museum exhibit writer in Oakland, Calif., lies awake, debating and categorizing the details of working motherhood. “Most of the time I get stuck mulling over the logistics of how everything’s going to get done — my brain really digs down the minutiae,” said Ms. McCoy, who has consulted a sleep therapist and has tried every prescription and over-the-counter soporific, from Ambien to low-dose anti-depressants, to assuage her maternal unrest. For some women, the drug of choice is Lunesta; for others, melatonin. Ms. McCoy knows a mother of two who takes Xanax a few times a week, “but she worries about addiction so some nights she just doesn’t sleep at all rather than take it,” she said. “I think she saw the irony in not sleeping because she was anxious about taking an anti-anxiety medicine in order to sleep.” Mother’s little helper of the new millennium may in fact be the sleeping pill — a prescription not likely to inspire a jaunty pop song anytime soon. Nearly 3 in 10 American women fess up to using some kind of sleep aid at least a few nights a week, according to “Women and Sleep,” a 2007 study by the National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit research group. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15997 - Posted: 11.07.2011

By ANDREW JACOBS BEIJING — Big Red Belly, his thick limbs nourished by a strict liver-tofu-ginger diet, should have been a contender. Instead, as his trainer watched in dismay, the young fighter nervously circled his more menacing adversary and then skittered to a corner of the ring, prompting jeers from a half-dozen spectators. “Worthless,” his patron, Chang Hongwei, a retired mechanical engineer, growled as he yanked Big Red Belly from the arena and unceremoniously ended his brief fighting career. “Next!” Countless members of the Gryllus bimaculatus clan, also known as field crickets, have faced off in the capital’s narrow alleys this fall in a uniquely Chinese blood sport whose provenance extends back more than 1,000 years. Nurtured by Tang Dynasty emperors and later popularized by commoners outside the palace gates, cricket fighting was banned as a bourgeois predilection during the decade-long Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976. But like many once-suppressed traditions, among them Confucianism, mah-jongg and pigeon raising, cricket fighting is undergoing a revival here, spurred on by a younger generation — well, mostly young men — eager to embrace genuinely Chinese pastimes. Cricket-fighting associations have sprung up across the country, as have more than 20 Web sites devoted to the minutiae of raising critters whose daily needs can rival those of an Arabian steed. Last year, more than 400 million renminbi, or about $63 million, were spent on cricket sales and upkeep, according to the Ningyang Cricket Research Institute in Shandong Province. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 15996 - Posted: 11.08.2011