By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature Female yellow-bellied marmots that have many male litter-mates become "tom boys", according to a study of these big, playful rodents. Developing males produce testosterone, which circulates in the mother's uterus; this male sex hormone "masculinises" the females. The phenomenon has been seen in many species, but this study shows its long-term impact on animal behaviour. The findings are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Lead researcher Raquel Monclus explained that the results emerged from a 50-year study of the marmots in the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Colorado. "We have data from generations of these animals that the lab has gathered," Dr Monclus told BBC Nature. She carried out the study while at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is now based at the UAM (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid) in Spain. The physical effects of testosterone were apparent early in this ongoing study, as it was much more difficult for the researchers to correctly identify the sex of newborn females from litters that were mostly male. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15747 - Posted: 09.01.2011

RandyeKaye, a former radio personality in Connecticut, has just written a book, “Ben Behind His Voices: One family’s journey from the chaos of schizophrenia to hope,’’ about life with her son. A. I had always wanted to share our family’s story. One of the things that was so hard for us is I felt so alone - like nobody else’s kid had a mental illness, what’s wrong with my son, what did I do wrong? I wanted to spread the message of exactly what families go through and that recovery is possible, and some of the ways to deal with things. Q. Your son wasn’t diagnosed until years after he started acting oddly and had psychotic episodes that potentially damaged his brain. Do you resent the fact that he wasn’t diagnosed sooner? A. A lot of symptoms of mental illnesses overlap. I look back now [at the] typical pattern of gradual onset schizophrenia, and my son hit every single point: from extreme brightness, to being slightly anxious as a child, to having difficulty organizing his thoughts, to mood swings, and then to isolation from his peers. But if you look at any of those symptoms, it could be plain old adolescence, it could be drug use. There’s no way to test [for] it. Q. Mental illness can also be a financial catastrophe as well as an emotional one for a family. Did you experience that? A. My son’s college fund went to cure symptoms of an illness I didn’t know was there. A lot of families [facing mental illness] say you either have no money and the system can help you, or you have money and the system will help you when you’re out of money. Medications alone can be $6,000 a month. © 2011 NY Times Co

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 15746 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Sandra G. Boodman, Right away the obstetrician knew that something was very wrong. Morgan McElhinney weighed just over five pounds and had a head that was abnormally long and narrow. Her muscle tone was worrisomely floppy, and her cry unusually weak. Doctors at Frederick Memorial Hospital let Lisa Simonson McElhinney hold her newborn briefly before whisking her off to the neonatal intensive care unit. “I didn’t see her much for a few days,” recalled McElhinney of the period immediately following the birth of her fourth child, in June 2002. After nearly a week in the hospital the baby was sent home, although no one could say what was wrong. Initial tests found no obvious cause, such as a metabolic disorder. “We were scared,” said McElhinney, who manages apartment buildings in Frederick. “You try to be optimistic and say, ‘Maybe she’s not that bad, maybe she’s just really early and will grow out of it.’ Even the professionals tried to be optimistic” at first, she said. More than five years would elapse before McElhinney and her husband, Brad, learned the reason for their daughter’s problems. That knowledge brought a fresh wave of grief that rocked McElhinney and drew her to a new endeavor aimed at helping other families. The first sign something was amiss, said McElhinney, now 46, came just before she went into labor, when the baby turned from the foot-first breech position to the proper head-down position. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15745 - Posted: 08.30.2011

PERTH, Australia — Dolphins in one western Australian population have been observed holding a large conch shell in their beaks and using it to shake a fish into their mouths — and the behavior may be spreading. Researchers from Murdoch University in Perth were not quite sure what they were seeing when they first photographed the activity, in 2007, in which dolphins would shake conch shells at the surface of the ocean. "It's a fleeting glimpse — you look at it and think, that's kind of weird," said Simon Allen, a researcher at the university's Cetacean Research Unit. "Maybe they're playing, maybe they're socializing, maybe males are presenting a gift to a female or something like that, maybe the animals are actually eating the animal inside," he added. But researchers were more intrigued when they studied the photos and found the back of a fish hanging out of the shell, realizing that the shaking drained the water out of the shells and caused the fish that was sheltering inside to fall into the dolphins' mouths. A search through records for dolphins in the eastern part of Shark Bay, a population that has been studied for nearly 30 years, found roughly half a dozen sightings of similar behavior over some two decades. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15744 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Jennifer Viegas Years of either running from or running after animals left its mark in the human brain -- even just looking at a photo of an animal jolts our brains into action. No matter how high tech and urban we may become, animals continue to affect our brains like no other person, place or thing, shows new research in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience. Co-author Ralph Adolphs explained to Discovery News "that it is important for the brain to be able to rapidly detect animals. The reasons for this are probably several, but would likely include the need to avoid predators and catch prey." "These abilities are at once critically important to survival and yet very difficult to do," added Adolphs, a professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology at the California Institute of Technology. "Both predator and prey detection requires fast, real-time detection of shapes that are often camouflaged in a cluttered environment." Adolphs, project leader Florian Mormann, and their colleagues recorded how the brains of 41 neurosurgical patients undergoing epilepsy monitoring responded to images of people, landmarks, animals, or objects. During 111 experimental sessions, the researchers monitored the subjects' brain activity as they sat in bed while viewing about 100 images per session. The monitoring was quite precise, showing how even individual neurons reacted. athletes © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 15743 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Friendly intestinal bacteria not only keep the gut happy, they may help keep their host happy, too, a new study in mice finds. Mice fed broth fortified with a type of friendly intestinal bacteria called Lactobacillus rhamnosus behaved less anxiously than mice fed broth without bacteria. Those behavior changes were accompanied by differences in levels of a brain-chemical sensor and stress hormones. The bacteria telegraph these brain-chemical and behavior-changing messages via the vagus nerve, which connects the brain stem to various internal organs, researchers report online August 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Some studies have suggested that changing the mix of bacteria in the intestines could influence behavior (SN: 6/18/11, p. 26). The new research goes a step further to investigate how those changes come about, says Paul Patterson, a neuroimmunologist at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif. “Most people haven’t gone that far to look at what’s happening in the brain,” he says. The research team — led by John Bienenstock of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and John Cryan of the University College Cork in Ireland — looked at the mice’s brains to examine levels of the GABA receptor, a protein that senses and responds to an important brain chemical messenger called GABA. Alterations in the way GABA and other brain chemical systems work influence behavior. Mice fed bacteria-containing broth had higher levels of the receptor protein in some parts of the brain and lower levels in other parts than did mice fed sterile broth. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 15742 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Bruce Bower Culture may hold a spatial place in thought. Social forces profoundly influence people’s ability to think about three-dimensional objects, a new study suggests. In tests of spatial ability, men traditionally outperform women. But men’s spatial superiority disappears among Northeast India’s Khasi villagers, say economist Moshe Hoffman of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues. In Khasi society, youngest daughters inherit property, men forward earnings to wives or sisters, and females get as much schooling as males. Among neighboring Karbi villagers, men display spatial-thinking advantages over women, similar to those in many Western societies, Hoffman’s team reports in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In Karbi society, males inherit and own land and receive more education than females. “These results show that nurture plays an important role in the gender gap in spatial abilities,” Hoffman says. But some researchers who study sex differences in thinking view the study skeptically. It’s not clear that the study in fact measured spatial ability, remarks psychologist Richard Lippa of California State University, Fullerton. Hoffman and colleagues measured spatial ability as the time taken to solve a four-piece jigsaw puzzle. But they didn’t assess volunteers’ accuracy at mentally rotating 3D figures and performing other spatial tasks, Lippa notes. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 15741 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By AMANDA SCHAFFER Ever since the New York Yankees Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig benched himself in 1939, never to return to the game, the ailment that now bears his name has stoked dread in the American imagination. Lou Gehrig’s disease — also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. — has afflicted well-known figures like the jazz great Charles Mingus, the physicist Stephen Hawking and the historian Tony Judt. The disease stems from the progressive deterioration of nerve cells, leading to a loss of control over voluntary muscles, difficulty breathing and swallowing, creeping paralysis and eventually death. There is no cure and no good treatment. Scientists are still unsure exactly what causes most cases. But in the journal Nature last week, researchers at Northwestern University identified a possible culprit: a cellular housekeeping agent that normally helps cells to clear away proteins that are damaged or misfolded. When the housekeeper fails, proteins seem to aggregate inside nerve cells, which may be contributing to their destruction. The finding has been hailed as a breakthrough by patient groups and scientists. The new work is “fueling great enthusiasm and interest,” said Dr. Amelie Gubitz of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which helped finance the new work. Still, it is far from clear that this is the wellspring of A.L.S. There are at least a dozen processes that also might contribute to the demise of motor nerve cells, Dr. Gubitz noted. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 15740 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By ALIYAH BARUCHIN FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — On a sweltering morning on a red-earth lane a few blocks from the largest mosque in this West African capital, Jeneba Kabba stands up. A tall, striking woman with a serious manner, Mrs. Kabba has been sitting under an awning in the outdoor classroom of a vocational training program for people with epilepsy. Every weekday, some 20 Sierra Leoneans, from teenagers to adults in middle age, gather here to learn skills like tailoring, weaving, tie-dyeing and soap-making, as well as reading — skills that, in this society, will give them a chance to earn a living. Mrs. Kabba, 30, a graduate of the program, is now a tutor. Her composure belies what she has survived. As a teenager she was taken to a traditional healer, who boiled herbs and made her inhale the fumes from a steam tent for hours. The treatment was supposed to drive out the demons thought to cause epilepsy; she nearly fainted and could have been burned. But worse was yet to come: She was forced to drink a two-liter bottle of kerosene. “Mi ches don cook,” she says in the Krio language, her voice faltering even now: “My chest started to boil.” Only a panicked trip to the hospital saved her life. Mrs. Kabba not only survived, but has been seizure-free for 10 years with the help of phenobarbital, one of the oldest anti-epileptic drugs and virtually the only one available here. And in a country where people with epilepsy are often considered uneducable, unemployable and unmarriageable, Mrs. Kabba teaches, is happily married and has a child. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 15739 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Nicole Gray A mother's age is often considered a genetic risk factor for offspring, but research is now pointing the finger at fathers, too—particularly when it comes to the mental health of their progeny. Males may have the advantage of lifelong fertility, but as they grow older, the rate of genetic mutations passed on via their sperm cells increases significantly—putting their children at increased risk for psychiatric disorders, especially autism and schizophrenia. Two recent studies support this link at least associatively, but experts remain uncertain if age is the cause of these problems. The Malaysian Mental Health Survey (MMHS) results, which were published online in March 2011, for instance, revealed that people with older parents as well as those whose fathers were at least 11 years older than their mothers, were at increased risk for certain mental health disorders, including anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobias. Offspring whose fathers were 19 or younger when the child was born had just a 9 percent prevalence of mental health disorders. Regardless of paternal age, however, if the father was 11 years or older than the mother, that rate jumped to 24 percent. The greatest risk of mental health disorders—42 percent—was seen in the children of fathers aged 50 and older, with wives at least 11 years younger than their husbands. The link between paternal age and increased risk of mental illness has long been recognized by practitioners, but researchers are beginning to unravel more details: "We have known that the children of older men have higher susceptibility to sporadic disease since the 1970s, but there has been an explosion of research in this area," says Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry and environmental medicine at New York University and a leader in the field of paternal age-related schizophrenia (PARS). © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Autism
Link ID: 15738 - Posted: 08.30.2011

by Patti Neighmond We've all heard the theory that some students are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. And still other kids learn best when lessons involve movement. But should teachers target instruction based on perceptions of students' strengths? Several psychologists say education could use some "evidence-based" teaching techniques, not unlike the way doctors try to use "evidence-based medicine." Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we're on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it's a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it's presented. For example, if a teacher believes a student to be a visual learner, he or she might introduce the concept of addition using pictures or groups of objects, assuming that child will learn better with the pictures than by simply "listening" to a lesson about addition. In fact, an entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles. There are workshops for teachers, products targeted at different learning styles and some schools that even evaluate students based on this theory. This prompted Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, to look more closely at the learning style theory. When he reviewed studies of learning styles, he found no scientific evidence backing up the idea.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15737 - Posted: 08.30.2011

by Brooke Borei Just one encounter with an aroma can sear the scent into your memory for years. The same thing happens in rats, and researchers from the University of Bordeaux in France have exploited this to gain important insight into memory formation. When the brain encounters an odor, it temporarily saves the data in the banana-shaped hippocampus. But it is the frontal cortex that eventually encodes the memory into long-term storage. To decipher how that process unfolds, neurobiologist Bruno Bontempi and colleagues took advantage of a rather rude behavior in rats: The rodents often smell the breath of their fellow creatures to determine whether a new food is safe to eat. A single encounter can generate a lasting memory of the agreeable meal. In their study, Bontempi’s team fed cumin-spiced food to a set of rats and then introduced them to another group, whose frontal cortex had been temporarily cut off from communication with the hippocampus. One week later, the altered rats still enjoyed grub flavored with the spice, as expected. A month out, however, their preference for cumin had vanished—confirmation that long-term memories cannot form without a link between the hippocampus and the frontal cortex. Bontempi proposes that the hippo­campus tags cells in the cortex at the moment of a memory-generating experience. Breaking communication between the brain regions may interfere with tagging and subsequently handicap long-term memory. For rats, that means forgetting a morsel is safe. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15736 - Posted: 08.29.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News People with psoriasis have nearly three times the normal risk of stroke and abnormal heart rhythm, according to scientists in Denmark. A study of 4.5 million people, published in the European Heart Journal, showed the highest risk was in young patients with severe psoriasis. Researchers believe this may be because the skin and blood vessels may share similar sources of inflammation. The Stroke Association said this should not be an immediate cause for concern. Skin cells are normally replaced every three to four weeks but, in patients with psoriasis, that process can be greatly speeded up. It can take between just two and six days, resulting in red, flaky, crusty patches on the skin. The condition affects 2% of people in the UK and the cause is unknown. Researchers analysed data from everyone in Denmark between 1997 and 2006 - 36,765 had mild psoriasis and 2,793 had the severe form of the condition. In patients under 50 with mild psoriasis, the risk of abnormal heart rhythm - atrial fibrillation - increased by 50%. The risk of ischaemic stroke increased by 97%. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Stress; Stroke
Link ID: 15735 - Posted: 08.29.2011

By Bruce Bower LAS VEGAS — Recent economic woes in the United States may have triggered a temporary upturn in the use of harsh parenting methods by mothers carrying a particular gene variant. Mothers who inherited either one or two copies of a particular form of the dopamine D2 receptor gene, dubbed DRD2, cited sharp rises in spanking, yelling and other aggressive parenting methods for six to seven months after the onset of the economic recession in December 2007, sociologist Dohoon Lee of New York University reported August 22 at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. Hard-line child-rearing approaches then declined for a few months and remained stable until a second drop to pre-recession levels started around June 2009, the research showed. Mothers who didn’t inherit the gene variant displayed no upsurge in aggressive parenting styles after the recession started, Lee and his colleagues found. As the recession progressed, mothers with the critical DRD2 variant apparently adjusted to tougher economic times enough to allow for a return to pre-recession parenting practices, Lee proposes. Economic uncertainty may prompt harsh parenting in genetically predisposed individuals as much as economic hardship and poverty do, Lee said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15734 - Posted: 08.29.2011

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff My three kids have been slacking off all summer -- on their regular bedtime that is. My 11-year-old’s bedtime shifted from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. over the past two months, while my 13-year-old heads to bed well after 10:30, instead of his usual 9 p.m. bedtime. And I don’t even know when my 15-year-old powers down her laptop since it’s well after I’m asleep. Like many parents, I’m wondering what I should do to get my kids back to their earlier schedules during the days before the school year starts. Dr. Dennis Rosen, associate medical director of the center for pediatric sleep disorders at Children’s Hospital Boston, gave me some helpful advice. First off, he told me, I have to progressively march back their wake-up time rather than howling at them to go to bed earlier. “Give it at least a day for every hour that their bedtime is off,” Rosen advised. “If they’ve been waking up at 9 a.m. on a regular basis and they need to wake up at 6 a.m. for school, you’ll need three days to get them back on track,” waking them an hour earlier each morning for three consecutive days. Kids will be less cranky if you shift them even more gently, by 15- to 30-minute increments each day -- if you have the time before the school year starts. “Consistency is really important,” said Rosen. “Don’t want to fall into the trap of letting teens go to bed late and sleep in on the weekends” either or after the school year starts. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15733 - Posted: 08.29.2011

by Greg Miller The amygdala is a brain region best known for regulating emotion. But a new study reveals a previously unknown talent: recognizing animals. Researchers asked 41 epilepsy patients who'd had electrodes implanted in their brains in preparation for surgery to watch a computer monitor as 100 photos of people, animals, landmarks, and objects flashed onscreen. After analyzing the responses of 1445 neurons in the amygdala and neighboring regions, the team reports today in Nature Neuroscience that the right amygdala (but no other region) contains neurons that respond specifically to photos of animals. These neurons fired in response to animals but not people (not even a young Brad Pitt, as shown above), regardless of the angle or distance from which the shot was taken, and as a group they showed no preference for any particular category of animal, be it bird or mammal, dangerous, or potentially delicious. The researchers speculate that these responses reflect the importance of animals as both predators and prey in our evolutionary past. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 15732 - Posted: 08.29.2011

Erika Check Hayden Vaccines are largely safe, and do not cause autism or diabetes, the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) said in a report issued today. This conclusion followed a review of more than 1,000 published research studies. "We looked very hard and found very little evidence of serious adverse harms from vaccines," says Ellen Wright Clayton, chairwoman of the reporting committee and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "The message I would want parents to have is one of reassurance." The report, commissioned in 2009 by the US Health Resources and Services Administration, covers the eight vaccines that comprise the majority of claims filed with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which compensates people for adverse health effects from any of 11 vaccines. The eight vaccines under review were those for chickenpox; influenza; hepatitis B; human papillomavirus; diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP); measles, mumps and rubella (MMR); hepatitis A; and meningococcal disease. According to the report, evidence "convincingly supports a causal relationship" for only 14 specific adverse effects, including a range of infections associated with the chickenpox vaccine; brain inflammation and fever-induced seizures related to the MMR vaccine; allergic reactions to six of the vaccines and fainting or local inflammation caused by injection of any of them. The report noted that many of the more serious events, such as those linked to the chickenpox and MMR vaccines, only occur in children with weakened immune systems. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15731 - Posted: 08.27.2011

by Wendy Zukerman A SEXUAL development disorder in baby boys may be due to the absence of a hormone-production pathway identified in wallabies. The finding could help diagnose cases of ambiguous genitalia. One in 4500 babies has gene mutations that disrupt normal development of testes or ovaries in the womb. These children can be born with external genitalia that do not look typically female or male. In humans, normal development of the testes relies on two male hormones - testosterone and dihydrotestosterone (DHT). The latter is the more potent, and is produced when testosterone is broken down. Wallabies and some rodents are known to be able to make DHT via two different routes, one of which bypasses testosterone completely. The process works by converting cholesterol, the precursor to testosterone, directly into DHT. To find out whether a similar "back door" pathway exists in humans, Anna Biason-Lauber and her colleagues at the University Children's Hospital Zurich in Switzerland investigated the genetic make-up of a family, three of whom have ambiguous genitalia. As these individuals were all able to produce DHT from testosterone, multiple attempts to diagnose the cause of their symptoms had failed. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15730 - Posted: 08.27.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer If you're familiar with the spinning dancer illusion, you'll know that it can be hard to perceive which way an object is rotating. But now a new animation by psychophysiologist Marcel de Heer shows that a single moving image can appear to move in three different ways. Watch the animation above. How do the stingrays seem to move? According to de Heer, most people will see them swimming up and down, with their tail always away from us. But in the middle of the animation, as the stingrays turn sideways, their true motion is revealed. The one on the left was actually rotating clockwise while the one on the right was turning counterclockwise. Did you see them spinning or swimming? When we look around us, our visual system assesses the angle of objects to infer the perspective of the scene. But because of the stingrays' shape and two-dimensional striped pattern, it's hard to determine the point of view. This leads to ambiguous motion perception with several plausible alternatives. If you watch this animation for long enough, the stingrays' motion may even flip between the different possibilities. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15729 - Posted: 08.27.2011

by Caroline Williams Pythons, boas and pit vipers (the family that includes rattlesnakes) see the world pretty much as we do, but with a twist: they can "see" in infrared too. This allows them to track their prey by their body heat from up to a metre away. They do this using relatively simple organs, called pits, which lie near their nostrils. These differ slightly among different snakes but are always a small dip containing a membrane that is packed with heat-sensitive nerve endings which act as infrared receptors. The pit organs were first described in 1952 but it was only last year that the specific protein channels that react to heat were identified (Nature, vol 464, p 1006). These are found on nerve cells that are part of the sensory system that detects touch and temperature, and registers pain. Yet while this is completely separate from the visual system, both sets of information end up in the same place: a part of the brain called the optic tectum. "There, the two maps of space - visual and infrared - merge into one," says Michael Grace, a neuroscientist investigating pit viper thermal sensing at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Grace speculates that this allows the snake to see in infrared and visible light at the same time, or to switch between one and the other. When hunting in a dark burrow, for example, it can use infrared to hunt its prey and to find its way to the warmer air at the surface of the burrow, and then return to regular vision when it emerges into a hot desert day where there are few differences in temperature. The snakes may be able to use both senses at once in early morning, when there is enough light to see and it is still cool enough for its warm-blooded prey to pop out as being much hotter than their surroundings. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 15728 - Posted: 08.27.2011