By ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ and AMMON SHEA HUMANS have long been fascinated with animal intelligence. Scientific studies have asked if animals use language or tools; have culture; can imitate, cooperate, empathize or deceive. Inevitably, the results of these studies invite comparison with our own cognitive faculties. In such comparisons, humans nearly always come out on top. An impartial observer might suggest that the deck is stacked. After all, we are the ones running these tests. But if we look at some of the subtler aspects of animal behavior, the beasts begin to offer surprisingly stiff competition. A few recent research papers describe animal competence at social and cognitive tasks that humans often struggle with — mastering conversational etiquette, understanding botanical classification, competing on game shows and figuring out how to get a drink when you’re thirsty and the only glass of water is glued to the table and your hands are tied behind your back. “Aping Expressions? Chimpanzees Produce Distinct Laugh Types When Responding to Laughter of Others,” in the journal Emotion (2011). You’re at a dinner party. Your hostess regales you with a long, meandering tale of her recent back surgery. It ends with attempted humor: she laughs and glances at you. You laugh in response, trying to convey an appreciation for her humor that you don’t actually feel. Congratulations: you are now at the level of social politeness of chimpanzees. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 15701 - Posted: 08.23.2011

By Laura Sanders A new kind of visual illusion confirms that people are not masters of perception. Observers are oblivious to peripheral visions of a woman’s face dissolving into a fountain, a stroller becoming a blob, and windows melding into trees, researchers report online August 14 in Nature Neuroscience. By studying these visual oversights, scientists hope to understand how the brain culls the flood of visual data that constantly streams into the eyes. Jeremy Freeman of New York University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Eero Simoncelli, also of NYU, started the project by developing a mathematical description of how information moves through the visual system in the brain. Their model predicted that the visual system tosses unnecessary information that comes from the periphery. “Your visual system is giving you the information that you need, and it’s throwing away information that you really don’t need,” Simoncelli says. To see whether this information loss actually happens, the team showed eight people quick flashes — a fifth of a second — of various scenes, scrambled in a way the math model predicted would be undetectable to humans. While fixating on a point in the middle, people couldn’t tell the difference between two very different van Gogh-esque scrambles of a normal scene of a crowd at Washington Square Park in New York City, for example. These scrambles went undetected even when people were allowed to stare at the images for nearly half a second, the team reports. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 15700 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE Sustaining the flickering hope that human aging might somehow be decelerated, researchers have found they can substantially extend the average life span of obese mice with a specially designed drug. The drug, SRT-1720, protects the mice from the usual diseases of obesity by reducing the amount of fat in the liver and increasing sensitivity to insulin. These and other positive health effects enable the obese mice to live 44 percent longer, on average, than obese mice that did not receive the drug, according to a team of researchers led by Rafael de Cabo, a gerontologist at the National Institute on Aging. Drugs closely related to SRT-1720 are now undergoing clinical trials in humans. The findings “demonstrate for the first time the feasibility of designing novel molecules that are safe and effective in promoting longevity and preventing multiple age-related diseases in mammals,” Dr. de Cabo and colleagues write in Thursday’s issue of the new journal Scientific Reports. Their conclusion supports claims that had been thrown in doubt by an earlier study that was critical of SRT-1720. A drug that makes it cost-free to be obese may seem more a moral hazard than an incentive to good health. But the rationale behind the research is somewhat different: the researchers are trying to capture the benefits that allow mice on very low-calorie diets to live longer. It just so happens that such benefits are much easier to demonstrate in mice under physiological stress like obesity than in normal mice. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15699 - Posted: 08.20.2011

by Michael Marshall IT SMELLS, it buzzes, it even dances like a honeybee. In a field in Germany, RoboBee is making its first attempts at speaking to the insects in their own language. Bees are famous for communicating using the waggle dance - walking forward while rapidly vibrating their rear. In the 1940s, biologist Karl von Frisch realised that the length and angle of the dance correlated with the distance and direction of the food source the bee had just visited. Since then, most apiologists have held that dancers tell their fellows where to find foodMovie Camera (New Scientist, 19 September 2009, p 40)Movie Camera. Now Tim Landgraf of the Free University of Berlin in Germany and colleagues have programmed their foam RoboBee, to mimic the dance. RoboBee is stuck to the end of a rod attached to a computer, which determines its "dance" moves. The rod is also connected to a belt which makes it vibrate. Like a real bee, it can spin, buzz its wings, carry scents and droplets of sugar water, and give off heat. To program RoboBee, Landgraf took high-speed video of 108 real waggle dances, and put the footage through software that analysed the dances in detail (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0021354). The outcome is "the most detailed description so far of the waggle dance", says Christoph Grüter of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, who was not involved in the study. What do real bees think of RoboBee's skills? In a field outside Berlin, Landgraf trained groups of honeybees to use a feeder, which he then closed. The bees stopped foraging and stayed in their hives. There they met RoboBee, which had been programmed with Landgraf's best guess at a waggle dance pointing to another feeder, which the bees had never visited. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 15698 - Posted: 08.20.2011

by Michael Marshall Anyone who has used an in-car satnav will be familiar with Jane, the calm voice that tells you to turn around because you've gone the wrong way. Many users will also be familiar with the response: yelling "Shut up, Jane!" while performing illegal turns. Bumblebees, it turns out, could give Jane a run for her money. Despite having a brain the size of a poppy seed, these insects can solve a fiendish navigational problem that modern supercomputers struggle to crack. Not so bumbling Bumblebees have been changing their name for centuries. From Shakespeare through to Darwin they were known as "humblebees", because of the humming sound they make. Then in the 20th century, for no good reason, they became "bumblebees". Like honeybees and ants they are social insects, with a queen who controls hordes of sterile workers. Among other ingenious behaviours, they keep their nests at a constant temperatureMovie Camera, avoid foraging close to homeMovie Camera for fear of leading predators to it, and become paranoid when camouflaged predators are aboutMovie Camera. Buff-tailed bumblebee workers fly from flower to flower in search of nectar and pollen. But each flight costs energy and time, so they need to minimise the distance they fly. To do that, they have to solve one of the hardest problems in mathematics: the travelling salesman problem. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15697 - Posted: 08.20.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou Until now, neuroscientists have focused on identifying parts of the brain that are active during learning. "But no one has looked at the preparedness state," says John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The idea is to identify before the event whether the brain is prepared to be a learner." Gabrieli and his colleagues used functional MRI scanning to monitor the naturally fluctuating brain activity of 20 volunteers and investigate whether the brain enters such a learning state. While in the scanner, each person was presented with 250 images, one at a time, and asked to memorise them. The volunteers were shown the images again 2 hours later - mixed in with 250 new ones - and asked to remember which they had seen before. Looking through the results, the team was surprised to find that in the moments before individuals were shown images that they later remembered, they had low levels of activity in the parahippocampal place area - a region of the brain that is known to be highly active during learning. "Maybe the fact that this region was less active meant that the deck was cleared - that it was more open for a stimulus to provoke a response," suggests Gabrieli. To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants' memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. "There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task," Gabrieli says (NeuroImage, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.07.063). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15696 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran You probably look in a mirror every day without thinking about it. But mirrors can reveal a great deal about the brain, with implications for psychology, clinical neurology and even philosophy. They can help us explore the way the brain puts together information from different sensory channels such as vision and somatic sensations (touch, muscle and joint sense). In doing so, they can reveal a lot about our sense of self. Would a person who has never looked at his reflection—even in a pool—ever develop a sophisticated self-representation? Using two bricks, or some duct tape, prop up an 18-inch-square mirror vertically on a table. Sit so that the edge faces you. Now put your left hand on the table at the left side of the mirror (either palm up or down) and match your right-hand position on the right side. If you now look into the right side of the mirror, you will see the right hand’s reflection optically superimposed in the same place where you feel your left hand to be. (You may need to adjust the position of the left hand to achieve this sensation.) It will now look like you are viewing your own left hand, but of course you are not. Now try the following experiments. While continuing to look in the mirror on the right side and keeping your left hand perfectly still, move your right hand, wiggle its fingers or make a fist. The “left hand” in the mirror will appear to move in perfect synchrony with the right but, paradoxically, feel completely still. The conflict creates a slight jolt; it feels spooky, sometimes mildly uncomfortable. The brain abhors discrepancies. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15695 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By WALLACE RAVVEN The parasite, a common single-celled organism called Toxoplasma gondii, infects all sorts of animals, including rats, in which it causes a strange transformation. For obvious reasons, rats normally avoid cats. In the presence of cat urine they become very timid — unless they’re infected with Toxoplasma. Research over the past 10 years has shown that infected rats drop their normal fearful “freezing” response, and instead go exploring. They even approach the cat smell. Bad news for the rats, but very good news for the parasite, because Toxoplasma reproduces sexually only in cats. Parasite infects rat. Cat eats rat. Parasite reproduces. The parasite can also infect all sorts of other animals, including humans, in which it causes toxoplasmosis — one of many good reasons to avoid contact with cat droppings. But outside of cats, its reproductive cycle cannot be completed. If this puppet-master behavior were not strange enough, scientists have now found out how the parasite may change rat behavior. Toxoplasma infection activates a part of the rat’s brain normally engaged in sexual attraction. The smell of cat urine revs up this set of neurons like the presence of a sexually receptive female rat normally would. The neurons that trigger the rat’s normal “freezing” reaction to cats continue to fire. But their message may get swamped by the overactive sexual attraction signaling, the researchers suspect. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 15694 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By Jennifer Viegas The brain-eating amoeba that killed three people this summer is an organism that thrives in warm fresh water and can be found in lakes, rivers, hot springs and soil, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All three deaths this year occurred in the South: a 16-year-old girl in Florida, a 9-year-old boy in Virginia and a 20-year-old man in Louisiana. A brutal summer and drought make the conditions perfect for the amoeba. The threat of N. fowleri could potentially be elevated for weeks in some areas. According to the CDC, infections occur mainly in July, August and September. The microscopic amoeba, Naegleria fowleri, attacks anyone who has the misfortune of inhaling it. It enters first up the nose and then goes to the brain, usually killing its victims within two weeks. "Once forced up the nose, it can travel to the brain, where it digests brain cells," Jonathan Yoder, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Discovery News. "It's a very tragic disease that thankfully is very rare." Aside from its rarity, the amoeba "is not looking to prey upon human victims," he said. "They usually go after bacteria in water and soil." © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15693 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Millions of people who suffer from post-traumatic stress after a harrowing experience could benefit from mind-altering drugs that can rid the brain of bad memories, a legal scholar has suggested. Yet the prospect of using drugs to dampen the memory of a distressing episode in someone's life is being thwarted by unfounded concerns about their misuse, according to Adam Kolber, professor of law at Brooklyn Law School in New York. In a commentary published in the science journal Nature, Professor Kolber says there is a need for a more open attitude to the development and use of drugs that can alter memories, which many ethicists have opposed on the grounds that destroying memories risks altering peoples' personalities. "The fears about pharmaceutical memory manipulation are overblown. Thoughtful regulation may some day be appropriate, but excessive hand-wringing now over the ethics of tampering with memory could stall research into preventing post-traumatic stress in millions of people," Professor Kolber says. "Delay could also hinder people who are already debilitated by harrowing memories from being offered the best hope yet of reclaiming their lives." Recent studies on laboratory animals have revealed fascinating insights into how memories can be manipulated with chemicals. One drug called ZIP, for instance, has been shown to block the ability of cocaine-addicted rats to remember the places where they had regularly been given cocaine. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 15692 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By Rob Stein Nearly one in 10 U.S. children is being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a new analysis of federal data released Thursday. The percentage of U.S. children between ages 5 to 17 who were diagnosed with ADHD increased from about 7 percent to 9 percent between 1998 and 2009, according to the analysis by the National Center for Health Statistics. As expected, the condition was more common among boys than girls, according to the analysis. The prevalence of ADHD increased from 9.9 percent to 12.3 percent among boys and from 3.6 percent to 5.5 percent among girls. The condition, which is marked by difficulty paying attention, impulsive behavior and hyperactivity, varies by race and ethnicity, according to the report. But the gap between whites and blacks narrowed during that time period, according to the report. The prevalence of the condition increased from 8.2 percent to 10.6 percent among whites compared to an increase from 5.1 percent to 9.5 percent among blacks. Puerto Rican children had about the same rate as blacks, while the rate among Mexican Americans remained lower, according to the analysis. The prevalence also varied by region of the country, with the rates being higher in the South and Midwest than the Northeast and West. © 2011 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 15691 - Posted: 08.20.2011

Gayathri Vaidyanathan Thump! Thump! Thump! As the hollow sound echoes through the Liberian rainforest, Vera Leinert and her fellow researchers freeze. Silently, Leinert directs the guide to investigate. Jefferson 'Bola' Skinnah, a ranger with the Liberian Forestry Development Authority, stalks ahead, using the thumping to mask the sound of his movement. In a sunlit opening in the forest, Skinnah spots a large adult chimpanzee hammering something with a big stone. The chimpanzee puts a broken nut into its mouth then continues pounding. When Skinnah tries to move closer, the chimp disappears into the trees. By the time Leinert and her crew get to the clearing, the animal is long gone. For the past year, Leinert has been trekking through Sapo National Park, Liberia's first and only protected reserve, to study its chimpanzee population. A student volunteer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, Leinert has never seen her elusive subjects in the flesh but she knows some of them well. There's an energetic young male with a big belly who hammers nuts so vigorously he has to grab a sapling for support. There are the stronger adults who can split a nut with three blows. And there are the mothers who parade through the site with their babies. They've all been caught by video cameras placed strategically throughout Sapo. Chimpanzees in the wild are notoriously difficult to study because they flee from humans — with good reason. Bushmeat hunting and human respiratory diseases have decimated chimpanzee populations1, while logging and mining have wiped out their habitat. Population numbers have plunged — although no one knows by exactly how much because in most countries with great apes, the animals have never been properly surveyed. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15690 - Posted: 08.20.2011

Jo Marchant Hyenas can count up to three. Researchers playing recorded calls to the wily carnivores found that wild spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) responded differently depending on whether they heard one, two or three individuals. The result adds numerical assessment to the list of cognitive abilities that hyenas share with primates, and supports the idea that living in complex social groups — as both primates and hyenas do — is key to the evolution of big brains. Sarah Benson-Amram, a zoologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, and her colleagues played recordings of hyena calls, or whoops, to members of two hyena clans in the Masai Mara National Reserve in southwestern Kenya1. The recordings were made in Tanzania, Malawi and Senegal, so the calls were unfamiliar to the Kenyan clans, and would have been interpreted as belonging to potential intruders. The recordings each consisted of three bouts of whooping, from one, two or three different animals. In 39 trials involving resting adults — mostly lone females — Benson-Amram measured how vigilant the animals became while the recordings were playing by comparing the amount of time they spent facing the speaker with the amount of time they spent looking away or resting. Although some females became equally watchful in response to all of the recordings, most of the animals distinguished between one, two or three intruders, their attentiveness increasing with the number of unique calls they heard. The finding is published in Animal Behaviour. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15689 - Posted: 08.20.2011

by Virginia Morell Highly social and clever and cooperative with tools, elephants are often near the top of the brainiest creatures list. Now, scientists have added a new talent to elephants' mental repertoire: The ability to solve a problem using insight—that aha! moment when your internal light bulb switches on and you figure out the solution to a puzzle. Previously, only a limited number of species, including certain primates, crows, and parrots were known to have this ability. Elephants had failed other tests for insightful problem solving because they were asked to use their trunks as we do our hands, says Preston Foerder, the lead author of the new study and a graduate student in comparative psychology at the City University of New York. For example, Foerder first tested whether three Asian elephants (two females and one male) at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., would use sticks placed just outside their enclosure to retrieve food that was out of reach of their trunks. "They didn't have any trouble getting or using the sticks," Foerder says. "They hit them on walls and toys; one even stuck his stick into the opening of his cage door," as if using a crowbar, "but they never used any of these methods to try to get food." That's when Foerder had an aha! moment of his own. Elephants don't use sticks to get food because they must hold the stick with their trunk, which, despite being able to grasp things, is really an appendage for smelling and eating. When an elephant is asked to hold a stick with its trunk to get food, the trunk loses its primary olfactory function, which is also needed to locate food. "It would be like having an eye in the palm of your hand," Foerder says, "and then being asked to hold a tool and find food. You wouldn't be able to do it." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 15688 - Posted: 08.20.2011

If you think addiction is all about booze, drugs, sex, gambling, food and other irresistible vices, think again. And if you believe that a person has a choice whether or not to indulge in an addictive behavior, get over it. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) blew the whistle on these deeply held notions with its official release of a new document defining addiction as a chronic neurological disorder involving many brain functions, most notably a devastating imbalance in the so-called reward circuitry. This fundamental impairment in the experience of pleasure literally compels the addict to chase the chemical highs produced by substances like drugs and alcohol and obsessive behaviors like sex, food and gambling. The definition, a result of a four-year process involving more than 80 leading experts in addiction and neurology, emphasizes that addiction is a primary illness—in other words, it’s not caused by mental health issues such as mood or personality disorders, putting to rest the popular notion that addictive behaviors are a form of "self-medication" to, say, ease the pain of depression or anxiety. Indeed, the new neurologically focused definition debunks, in whole or in part, a host of common conceptions about addiction. Addiction, the statement declares, is a “bio-psycho-socio-spiritual” illness characterized by (a) damaged decision-making (affecting learning, perception, and judgment) and by (b) persistent risk and/or recurrence of relapse; the unambiguous implications are that (a) addicts have no control over their addictive behaviors and (b) total abstinence is, for some addicts, an unrealistic goal of effective treatment.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15687 - Posted: 08.20.2011

By Maria Popova Far from a mere motherboard, the brain has swollen into one of humanity's greatest obsessions. We have been trying to visualize it since antiquity, we have written countless books about it, we've even enlisted it in our pop culture satire. The brain, in fact, has become a pop culture fixture in and of itself. That's exactly what Davi Johnson Thornton explores in Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Popular Media -- a fascinating account of the rhetoric and sociology of cognitive science, exploring our culture's obsession with the brain and how we have elevated the vital organ into cultish status, mythologizing its functions and romanticizing the promise of its scientific study. The brain, it seems, has become a modern muse. (As Jonah Lehrer brilliantly notes in his Wired interview with Thornton, "If Warhol were around today, he'd have a series of silkscreens dedicated to the cortex; the amygdala would hang alongside Marilyn Monroe.") From the media's propensity for pretty pictures like PET and fMRI scans, often misinterpreted or presented out of context to the misappropriation of the language of neuroscience in simplistic self-help narratives to the "anxious parenting" triggered by the facile findings of developmental cognitive science, Thornton offers a refreshing lens on the many contradictions in how we think about the brain as we continue to hope that making the brain calculable and mappable would also make it manipulable in precisely the ways we need it to be. What makes Thornton's take most compelling is the lucidity with which she approaches exactly what we know and don't know about the brain. Every day, we're bombarded with exponentially replicating headlines about new "sciences" like neuromarketing, which, despite the enormous budgets poured into them by the world's shortcut-hungry Fortune 500, remain the phrenology of our time, a tragic manifestation of the disconnect between how much we want to manipulate the brain and how little we actually know about its intricately connected, non-compartmentalizable functions. © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15686 - Posted: 08.20.2011

Roger Highfield, editor, New Scientist magazine This hyperaggressive rat is a legacy of a remarkable experiment started in the former Soviet Union in 1972 by Dmitry Belyaev. Like Charles Darwin before him, he was interested in the process of domestication. But while Darwin thought the process must be "insensibly slow", Belyaev suspected otherwise. He caught wild rats around the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and selectively bred two colonies on a farm a few kilometres away, hoping to mimic the process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated animals. One colony was selected for tameness, the other for aggression. Belyaev died in 1985, but the experiment was continued by his successor, Lyudmila Trut, at the city's Institute of Cytology and Genetics. In 2003, geneticist Svante Pääbo visited Novosibirsk and the experiment. He was stunned by the vast changes in the animals' behaviour and how quickly these had been induced. The rats bred for tameness were incredibly easy to handle, while the aggressive ones were so prone to scream and bite that Pääbo said: "I got the feeling that 10 or 20 of them would probably kill me if they got out of the cages." Since returning to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Pääbo and colleague Frank Albert have been researching which of the rats' genes were selected for by the domestication process. They have now found several key regions of the genome that have a strong effect on tameness and suspect at least half a dozen genes are involved. The next step is to locate individual genes that influence tameness and aggression. "We're currently pursuing several approaches to home in on the genes and all of them are in their early days," says Albert. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15685 - Posted: 08.16.2011

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR For migraine sufferers, summer can be a perilous time of year. Oppressive heat and spikes in temperature have long been thought to precipitate attacks in people prone to chronic headaches. One large study in the journal Neurology even showed that the risk of migraines jumps nearly 8 percent for every nine-degree rise in temperature. But a simple step that may lower the risk, especially in warm weather, is to stay properly hydrated. Dehydration causes blood volume to drop, researchers say, resulting in less blood and oxygen flow to the brain and dilated blood vessels. Some experts suspect that a loss of electrolytes causes nerves in the brain to produce pain signals. Anyone who has ever woken up dehydrated after a night of heavy drinking knows this feeling as a hangover. But migraine sufferers may be more sensitive to the effects of dehydration. In one study, also published in Neurology, scientists recruited migraine sufferers and divided them into two groups. Those in the first group were given a placebo medication to take regularly. The others were told to drink 1.5 liters of water, or about six cups, in addition to their usual daily intake. At the end of two weeks, the researchers found that those in the water group had increased their fluid intake by just four cups a day. But on average they experienced 21 fewer hours of pain during the study period than those in the placebo group, and a decrease in the intensity of their headaches. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15684 - Posted: 08.16.2011

In a move that researchers called a victory for science, a lawsuit that threatened scientists who use mouse models in Alzheimer’s research has been dismissed. In February 2010, the Alzheimer’s Institute of America (AIA) in Kansas City, Kansas, filed a lawsuit against the Jackson Laboratory of Bar Harbor Maine, and other institutes and companies. The suit claimed that Jackson Lab and the other defendants had infringed on patents covering a genetic mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. In June, the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, intervened on the Jackson Lab's behalf; this week, that intervention led to the dismissal of the suit against the lab. Litigation against the other defendants continues. In a statement, NIH director Francis Collins said today, “We applaud today’s news in the legal battle over mouse models critical to Alzheimer’s disease research. This action ensures that researchers worldwide will have the tools they need as they strive to understand, treat, and, ultimately, defeat this devastating disease.” The suit is the latest in almost a decade of legal fights that have had a chilling effect on the Alzheimer’s research field. But the suit against the Jackson Lab was especially troubling because it aimed at the heart of basic research on the disease, alleging that the lab was breaking the law by distributing 22 mouse models that carry the mutation to academic researchers. Researchers said that stopping distribution of the mouse models would have been a serious blow to science.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15683 - Posted: 08.16.2011

Analysis by Marianne English There's more to picking up math concepts than paying attention in class, according to recent research. It turns out kids' math performance may be better for those with a natural knack for sensing number quantities. Previous studies looked at how sensing numbers affected performance, but researchers didn't know whether the natural ability to sense numbers or proficiency seeing numbers as symbols limited math skills. Pinpointing which factor affects learning in children will help teachers and researchers develop better programs for kids who may enter formal education at a disadvantage. For example, flashing a number of dots -- some blue, others red -- and asking someone to determine which group of objects there was more of is a common way to measure people's ability to sense numbers. The dots appear and disappear so quickly that it becomes impossible to count, so the amounts have to be sensed instead. Also called the Approximate Number System (ANS), this innate ability has been studied in adults, children, infants and even non-human animals. So far, researchers suggest that the accuracy of a person's ANS improves throughout childhood. The concept also falls within a larger area teachers and researchers refer to as "number sense," or the ability to count, discern quantities, pick up on number patterns and "to rule out unreasonable results to arithmetic operations," according to the paper. Specifically, people and animals subitize, or perceive and estimate the number of objects by glance. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Attention; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15682 - Posted: 08.16.2011