by Michael Marshall If there's one word that sums up a newborn human baby, it's "helpless". Newly hatched greater honeyguide chicks are far more capable: chillingly so. They emerge into pitch darkness, inside a tunnel dug by another bird where their mother has left them. They will soon be joined by the host bird's own chicks when they hatch. If this was a slasher movie, now would be the time to cover your eyes. The young honeyguide kills the other chicks within an hour. All this from a bird that as an adult helpfully guides humans to bees' nests, which the humans then raid for honey. Honeyguides lay their eggs in other birds' nests, just like cuckoos. Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge studies them in southern Zambia, where they tend to parasitise little bee-eaters. These birds dig tunnels in the sandy ground, often in the roofs of aardvark holes, where they lay their eggs. Spottiswoode was able to insert video cameras into these nests. Female honeyguides slip into the tunnels and lay their own eggs there. If there are any little bee-eater eggs in place, the honeyguide mother punctures them with her beak. That's not always enough, however, because eggs sometimes survive and the little bee-eater may lay more. Spottiswoode found that only 67 per cent of host eggs were punctured in parasitised nests. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 15773 - Posted: 09.08.2011

By THERESA BROWN, R.N. During nursing school, I remember my first clinical instructor initiating us into one of the paradoxical truths of health care: “You don’t come to the hospital to sleep.” Recently, a patient was set to be discharged the next day. But he needed a transfusion of platelets before we could remove the intravenous line that had been used to deliver chemotherapy. Thinking through the timing, the physician assistant realized that to get everything done, and to get the patient discharged on time, his treatment would have to start early in the morning. She scheduled the transfusion for 4 a.m, which meant the patient had to be woken at 3:30 a.m. to take the medications required before a transfusion. For practical reasons, it made sense. But the patient didn’t see it that way. “Can’t it be later so that I can sleep?” he asked. I started explaining why the transfusion had to be at 4 in the morning, but the patient wasn’t buying it. A kind and gentle man, he had had enough of being woken in the middle of the night. After several weeks in the hospital, he was tired. He wanted to sleep. And there was no way for him to doze through this particular procedure. For starters, we would turn on the lights in his darkened room, and two nurses would begin reading the medical record number on his wristband. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15772 - Posted: 09.08.2011

By Ivan Amato, The next time you experience a horseradish rush — you know, those tear-jerking omigod seconds when your entire head is tsunamied by pungency from the too-big dollop of herb you just wolfed down — consider that some biologists describe your moments of agony as nothing less than a brief exposure to a natural form of tear gas. The horseradish’s primary chemical irritant, allyl isothiocyanate, stimulates the same class of chemical receptors on the same sensory cells in your mouth, throat, nose, sinuses, face and eyes as do tear gas agents and pepper spray’s capsaicin, the chemical in chili peppers that lights your mouth on fire. In recent years, scientists have been uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying these sensations. They say their discoveries could lead to new pain-managing medicines and provide insights into whether adding menthol to cigarettes makes it easier to get hooked on on them. But before we go there, it is worth looking at how and why we take notice of such chemicals at all. It comes down to this: Evolution has given animals, including us humans, some serious protective measures against harmful chemicals in the environment. Meanwhile, plants, which have been forced to be sneaky because of their inability to run away, have developed chemical defenses to prevent them from being eaten, at least by animals that don’t help spread the plants’ seeds. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 15771 - Posted: 09.08.2011

by Alison George He has already revealed that early humans interbred with Neanderthals and discovered a whole new type of hominin from its DNA alone. Now Svante Pääbo is setting his sights on even more exotic discoveries. He tells Alison George why he thinks the bombshells will keep coming Last year you revealed a previously unknown type of hominin, called the Denisovans, from DNA in a pinkie bone found in a cave in Denisova, Siberia. Tell me about this. We knew people had lived in this cave, but thought they were either Neanderthals or modern humans. When we sequenced the DNA, I was in the US so a postdoc called me to tell me the results. He said: "Are you sitting down?" because it was immediately clear this was some other form of human; not a Neanderthal, not a modern human. We were totally shocked. This is the first time that a new form of human has been defined totally from molecular data, not from the morphology of fossils. I think this will happen much more in the future - that just from a tiny speck of bone we can determine the whole genome and reconstruct much of the history. You recently visited this cave. What was it like? The cave is in the Altai mountains in central Asia and it was the first time I had seen it. It is really beautiful. It's big, almost cathedral-like with light coming in through a natural chimney. And you know that in this cave there have been both the Denisovans and modern humans and perhaps Neanderthals too. I went there for a meeting where anatomists, palaeontologists and archaeologists came together for the first time to try to sort out what we can say about this group of humans. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15770 - Posted: 09.06.2011

by Mark Buchanan The fuzziness and weird logic of the way particles behave applies surprisingly well to how humans think THE quantum world defies the rules of ordinary logic. Particles routinely occupy two or more places at the same time and don't even have well-defined properties until they are measured. It's all strange, yet true - quantum theory is the most accurate scientific theory ever tested and its mathematics is perfectly suited to the weirdness of the atomic world. Yet that mathematics actually stands on its own, quite independent of the theory. Indeed, much of it was invented well before quantum theory even existed, notably by German mathematician David Hilbert. Now, it's beginning to look as if it might apply to a lot more than just quantum physics, and quite possibly even to the way people think. Human thinking, as many of us know, often fails to respect the principles of classical logic. We make systematic errors when reasoning with probabilities, for example. Physicist Diederik Aerts of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, has shown that these errors actually make sense within a wider logic based on quantum mathematics. The same logic also seems to fit naturally with how people link concepts together, often on the basis of loose associations and blurred boundaries. That means search algorithms based on quantum logic could uncover meanings in masses of text more efficiently than classical algorithms. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 15769 - Posted: 09.06.2011

McMaster University researchers have discovered that a key gene may explain why some people are energetic and others find it hard to get moving. The team was working with mice, some of which had two genes removed. The genes control the AMP-activated protein kinase (or AMPK), an enzyme that is released during exercise. While mice like to run, the mice without the genes were not as active as mice with the genes. "While the normal mice could run for miles, those without the genes in their muscle could only run the same distance as down the hall and back," Gregory Steinberg, associate professor of medicine in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine and Canada Research Chair in Metabolism and Obesity, said in a release Monday. "The mice looked identical to their brothers or sisters, but within seconds we knew which ones had the genes and which one didn't." The researchers found the mice without the AMPK genes had lower levels of mitochondria — sometimes described as cellular power plants — and their muscles were less able to take up glucose while they exercised. By removing the genes, the researchers found that AMPK is the key regulator of the mitochondria, said Steinberg. The research is in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15768 - Posted: 09.06.2011

By GUY GUGLIOTTA LOS ANGELES — There is, perhaps, no more uplifting musical experience than hearing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” performed in a perfect space. Many critics regard Symphony Hall in Boston — 70 feet wide, 120 feet long and 65 feet high — as just that space. Tyson Yaberg of Audyssey Laboratories listened to an experimental system at the University of Southern California. Audyssey’s goal is to make dens and living rooms sound like concert halls and movie theaters. Some 3,000 miles away, however, a visitor led into the pitch-blackness of Chris Kyriakakis’s audio lab at the University of Southern California to hear a recording of the performance would have no way to know how big the room was. At first it sounded like elegant music played in the parlor on good equipment. Nothing special. But as engineers added combinations of speakers, the room seemed to expand and the music swelled in richness and depth, until finally it was as if the visitor were sitting with the audience in Boston. Then the music stopped and the lights came on. It turned out that the Immersive Audio Lab at U.S.C.’s Viterbi School of Engineering is dark, a bit dingy, and only 30 feet wide, 45 feet long and 14 feet high. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 15767 - Posted: 09.06.2011

By JOYCE COHEN For people with a condition that some scientists call misophonia, mealtime can be torture. The sounds of other people eating — chewing, chomping, slurping, gurgling — can send them into an instantaneous, blood-boiling rage. Or as Adah Siganoff put it, “rage, panic, fear, terror and anger, all mixed together.” “The reaction is irrational,” said Ms. Siganoff, 52, of Alpine, Calif. “It is typical fight or flight” — so pronounced that she no longer eats with her husband. Many people can be driven to distraction by certain small sounds that do not seem to bother others — gum chewing, footsteps, humming. But sufferers of misophonia, a newly recognized condition that remains little studied and poorly understood, take the problem to a higher level. They also follow a strikingly consistent pattern, experts say. The condition almost always begins in late childhood or early adolescence and worsens over time, often expanding to include more trigger sounds, usually those of eating and breathing. Aage R. Moller, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas who specializes in the auditory nervous system, included misophonia in the “Textbook of Tinnitus,” a 2010 medical guide of which he was an editor. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Emotions
Link ID: 15766 - Posted: 09.06.2011

By Roxanne Khamsi Night owls might think staying up late is a real hoot, but a new study hints that delayed sleep might have a sinister side. People who hit the sack late might have a greater risk of experiencing nightmares, according to scientists, although they add that follow-up research is needed to confirm the link. "It's a very interesting preliminary study, and we desperately need more research in this area," says Jessica Payne, director of the Sleep, Stress and Memory Lab at the University of Notre Dame, commenting on the new findings. Previous reports have estimated 80 percent of adults experience at least one nightmare a year, with 5 percent suffering from disturbing dreams more than once a month. The new paper, from a group of scientists writing in the journal Sleep and Biological Rhythms, surveyed 264 university students about their sleep habits and frequency of nightmares, defined as "dysphoric dreams associated with feelings of threat, anxiety, fear or terror." The scientists, led by Yavuz Selvi at the Yuzuncu Yil University in Van, Turkey, used a measure known as the Van Dream Anxiety Scale to assess the rate of bad dreams. Specifically, study participants were asked to rate their frequency of experiencing nightmares on a scale from zero to 4, corresponding to never and always, respectively. On average, individuals who described themselves as evening types had a score of 2.10, whereas their morning-type equivalents averaged 1.23 on the scale, a significant difference according to the authors of the study. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15765 - Posted: 09.06.2011

While the tongue map may have been thoroughly debunked, what about our brains? Does each kind of flavor get processed in its own little corner of our grey matter? According to new research, they just might. The image above is of the taste cortex (insula) of a mouse, with each of the color clumps representing one of four of the five primary tastes. Red is bitter, green is sweet, yellow is umami, and orange is salt. While the researchers also tested sour foods, they didn't spot a sour cluster, either because it was elsewhere in the brain or because sour food can also mess with pain pathways in the brain, as well as taste. What's interesting is how densely packed these taste hot spots are. Apparently, very few flavors cross over from one region to the other. In case you're curious what foods the researchers used as perfect examples of each taste type, they were: quinine and cycloheximide for bitter, sucrose and acesulfame potassium for sweet, MSG for umami, NaCl for salty and citric acid for sour. So, how long before we start hacking our brains to taste completely new flavors?

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15764 - Posted: 09.06.2011

By SETH MYDANS YEKATERINBURG, Russia — The treatment center does not handcuff addicts to their beds anymore. But caged together on double-decker bunks with no way out, they have no choice but to endure the agonies of withdrawal, the first step in a harsh, coercive approach to drug treatment that has gained wide support in Russia. “We know we are skirting the edge of the law,” said Sergei Shipachev, a staff member at the center, which is run by a private group called City Without Drugs. “We lock people up, but mostly we have a written request from their family. The police couldn’t do this, because it’s against the law.” A thick silence fills the little room crammed with tall metal beds, obscuring the fact that there are 37 men lying shoulder to shoulder, each lost in a personal world of misery. Outside the chamber, known as the quarantine room, 60 men who have emerged — after as long as a month with only bread and water or gruel — work at menial jobs, lift weights or cook in a regimen of continued isolation from the world that staff members said usually takes a year. “To put someone in handcuffs, it calms them psychologically,” Mr. Shipachev said as he paged through photographs of men shackled to their beds or to each other. “Now, it’s the old-timers who calm the new ones. A guy shouts, ‘I’m going to die now!’ and everyone just laughs at him, because they’ve been there themselves. It would be much worse for him if he was alone. The best thing is to just go to sleep.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15763 - Posted: 09.03.2011

By Janet Raloff Obesity can trigger inflammation in the fat cells found just below the skin, creating an environment that has been linked with the development of both diabetes and heart disease, two new studies indicate. The findings suggest that people need to worry about all types of body fat, not just the deeply embedded fat that earlier work had focused on. But the new work also hints that some face a higher risk than others. In the body, most fat clusters under the skin in what’s known as subcutaneous adipose tissue. Much of the rest, called visceral fat, accumulates within muscle and between organs deeper inside the body. For more than a decade, studies have shown that obesity triggers visceral fat to begin spewing hormonelike chemicals called cytokines. These proinflammatory chemicals have been linked with metabolic syndrome, a constellation of abnormalities that can include impaired insulin sensitivity (known as insulin resistance), fat buildup around the waist, high blood pressure and low concentrations of HDL, the good cholesterol. “There’s been this sort of ill-proven idea that subcutaneous adipose tissue is not harmful and that visceral adipose tissue is the vicious demon that makes us sick,” says Gökhan S. Hotamisligil of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, who was not involved in the studies. The new data, he says, reinforce the fact that subcutaneous fat is far from benign. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15762 - Posted: 09.03.2011

By Larry Greenemeier It sounds like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe tale of horror. A man becomes agitated by strange sounds only to find that they are emanating from inside his own body—his heart, his pulse, the very movement of his eyes in their sockets. Yet superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS) is a very real affliction caused by a small hole in the bone covering part of the inner ear. Such a breach results in distortion of hearing and, often, impaired balance. The human ear consists of three parts. The outer ear includes the ear lobe and external auditory canal, which funnels sound waves toward the eardrum (or tympanic membrane) allowing it to vibrate. The middle ear converts sound waves that vibrate the eardrum into mechanical vibrations for the cochlea, the hearing part of the inner ear. This area, however, also includes of a system of three fluid-filled semicircular canals in each ear—superior, posterior and horizontal—responsible for giving the brain information about angular motion of the head. SCDS can occur when some part of the bone protecting the superior semicircular canal is missing. Whereas it is difficult to know exactly how prevalent SCDS is, several reported cases define how it impacts the lives of those suffering from the disorder. Stephen Mabbutt, a 57-year-old Englishman who suffered from SCDS for six years, described "hearing his eyes scratching like sandpaper every time they moved in their sockets." He returned to work earlier this month after successful surgery to plug a pin-size hole in the bone covering the semicircular superior canal in one of his ears. Toby Spencer, a 41-year-old IT professional from Skowhegan, Maine, described similar symptoms as Mabbutt as well as the feeling that loud noises made him feel as though he was losing his balance. Spencer had surgery in April to correct the problem. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 15761 - Posted: 09.03.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer Watch a line sweep across a screen and its direction of motion is easily perceived. But when the same line is viewed through an opening, it appears to change course (see animation above). The perceived motion seems to be determined by the shape of the aperture and the line's orientation, rather than its true behaviour, so why do we experience this effect? According to Dale Purves and his team from Duke University, North Carolina, we're tricked because our brain assumes that the line in the video is a 2D projection originating from a linear object moving in 3D space. Since it's impossible to determine the real world source of the projected line, we rely on a mental model formed by accumulated experience and presume that the object is moving in that direction. Purves and his team tested the theory by using a variety of 3D sources and examining the linear motion produced through different shaped openings. They confirmed that, in each case, the motion we perceive represents the most common scenario. Previous research has suggested that the phenomenon is based on how the moving object interacts with the boundary of the opening. But this doesn't hold up for every type of aperture shape. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15760 - Posted: 09.03.2011

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter An Italian woman is the latest person to have a murder sentence reduced on the grounds that abnormalities in her brain, and genes, could explain her behaviour. Neuroimaging is being used more and more in courtrooms across the globe, but is it really possible to judge how responsible a person is for their actions by looking at a picture of their brain? Two years ago, Stefania Albertani was convicted of murdering her own sister. Albertani is widely reported as having killed her sibling by force-feeding her psychotropic drugs, before setting fire to her corpse. Months later, she went after her parents. After being found guilty of the killing, Albertani was initially sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. Appeals by neuroscientists and geneticists, however, have controversially succeeded in reducing the sentence to 20 years - a first for the Italian courts. The scientists involved pointed out that a scan of Albertani's brain looked different to those of ten healthy women. According to the journal Nature, the team claimed that her behaviour could be explained by alterations in the grey matter of two key brain regions: the anterior cingulate gyrus - involved in inhibiting behaviour - and the insula, which has been linked to aggression. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Aggression
Link ID: 15759 - Posted: 09.03.2011

by Moheb Costandi The brain waves associated with sleep and dreaming could be helpful for distinguishing between people in a persistent vegetative state and those who are minimally conscious – a distinction that could seal the fate of the individual. The minimally conscious state, persistent vegetative state and coma are all disorders of consciousness caused by severe brain damage. Minimally conscious individuals tend to have better outcomes than vegetative individuals, but distinguishing between them is difficult and misdiagnosis is common. Getting it wrong can sometimes mean that a person who might otherwise recover has their life-support machine switched off. Earlier this year, Mélanie Boly at the University of Liège in Belgium and colleagues reported that minimally conscious patients respond to sounds, whereas vegetative patients do not. The team has now found more evidence that some brain function is preserved in the minimally conscious state. The team used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the electrical activity of the brain in six minimally conscious and five vegetative people while they slept. These individuals had been diagnosed using traditional tests for reflex movements and responses to sounds and other stimuli. Five of the six minimally conscious people exhibited brain-wave patterns that are typical of normal sleep, alternating between rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM, or "slow-wave", sleep during the night. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 15758 - Posted: 09.03.2011

by Michael Marshall WHEN wondering about the origins of our brain, don't look to Homo sapiens, chimpanzees, fish or even wormsMovie Camera. Many key components first appeared in single-celled organisms, long before animals, brains and even nerve cells existed. Dirk Fasshauer of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and colleagues were studying a pair of essential neural proteins called Munc18/syntaxin1 when they decided to look for them in very simple, single-celled organisms. Choanoflagellates are aquatic organisms found in oceans and rivers around the globe. Being a single cell, they do not have nerves, yet the team found both proteins in the choanoflagellate Monosiga brevicollis, and the interaction between the two was the same as in neurons (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1106189108). These proteins are found in every nerve cell and control the release of the chemicals which neurons use to talk to each other, called neurotransmitters. The finding is intriguing on its own, but much more significant when combined with a growing body of evidence that essential brain components evolved in choanoflagellates before multicellular life appeared. In 2008, Xinjiang Cai of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, discovered that M. brevicollis has the same calcium channels in its cells as those used by neurons (Molecular Biology and Evolution, DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msn077). Then, in 2010, it emerged that M. brevicollis also has several proteins that neurons use to process signals from their neighbours (BMC Evolutionary Biology, DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-10-34). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15757 - Posted: 09.03.2011

Tiny clots in the brain may be the cause of some signs of old age such as stooped posture and restricted movement, say US scientists. Researchers examining the brains of 418 deceased patients found damaged blood vessels in 29% of them which would not have been picked up by normal scans. They said higher levels of damage were linked to more limited movement. The researchers, writing in the journal Stroke, said declining mobility should not be accepted as normal ageing. Mild symptoms of Parkinson's disease - such as slow movement, rigidity, tremors and posture - increase with age and are thought to affect up to half of people by the age of 85. A team of scientists at the Rush University Medical Center, in Chicago, carried out autopsies on the brains of nuns and priests who were taking part in the Religious Order Study. The brains were examined under a microscope for signs of damage which would be invisible to normal brain scans. They found 29% of patients with no previously detected sign of stroke had clotted or narrowed blood vessels. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Stroke; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15756 - Posted: 09.03.2011

by Alva Noë Our attitudes to addiction conceal a whole philosophy. And this goes for our neuroscientific theories as well. It is commonplace for scientists theorizing about the brain to take for granted that, well, we are our brains. We seem to experience other people, surrounding environs, events, actions, things of value and importance. Yes, but, from a scientific point of view, this is all an illusion. Our brains have evolved to produce this robust confabulation! After all, what is the world to us, really? At best: patterns of sensory rubbing. And what are our thoughts, feelings, our aspirations, our actions, our loves and our pleasures? What are our friends? What are wars? These are nothing but neuro-chemical fluctuations in the selves we really are. According to the new experts, everything is a phenomenon — one might say disease — of the brain. Why does a baby love his mother? It's the opioids in the mother's milk, of course! And what is that love anyway but a neurotransmitter-induced alteration of activity in our neural circuits! And so it should come as no surprise that the experts also think that addiction is a disease of the brain. What else could it be? In fact, from the standpoint of the new philosopher-neuroscientists, there is almost something ideologically pristine or kosher about the addict's world view. Most of us non-addicts, we slog and toil, trying to make careers, support families, earn money, afford leisure — we work hard to make worlds for ourselves that can in turn provide us with satisfaction and meaning. We make choices. Copyright 2011 NPR

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15755 - Posted: 09.03.2011

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News The world's first clinical trial of brain stem cells to treat strokes is set to move to its next phase. An independent assessment of the first three patients to have had stem cells injected into their brain at Glasgow's Southern General Hospital has concluded it has had no adverse effect. The assessment paves the way for the therapy to be tested on more patients to find a new treatment for stroke. The hope is that the stem cells will help to repair damaged brain tissue. The trial is being led by Prof Keith Muir of Glasgow University. He told BBC News that he was pleased with the results so far. "We need to be assured of safety before we can progress to trying to test the effects of this therapy. Because this is the first time this type of cell therapy has been used in humans, it's vitally important that we determine that it's safe to proceed - so at the present time we have the clearance to proceed to the next higher dose of cells." An elderly man was the first person in the world to receive this treatment last year. Since then it has been tried out on two more patients. The patients have received very low doses of stem cells in trials designed to test the safety of the procedure. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Stroke; Stem Cells
Link ID: 15754 - Posted: 09.01.2011