Ed Pilkington Dave Duerson had so much going for him. A former professional American football player, he still carried himself with the bearing of a star. In Chicago, he was feted as a member of the legendary 1985 Bears that won the Super Bowl, thrashing the New England Patriots 46-10. In New York, too, he was fondly remembered as a member of the Giants team that took the Super Bowl championship five years later, squeaking to victory over the Buffalo Bills by just one point. He had friends throughout the sport, acquired over an 11-year career with the National Football League (NFL) and many years subsequently helping younger and less fortunate players find their way. He had a loving family with three sons and a daughter and a former wife, Alicia, who kept in regular touch, as well as a girlfriend to whom he had recently become engaged. He lived in a condominium that he owned on Sunny Isles Beach in Florida, a barrier island close to Miami dubbed the Venice of America. He was smart, charming, as kind and gentle off the field as he had been aggressive and ruthless on it. But he knew that he had a problem. There were the outward signs of difficulties – the collapse of his business, the breakup of his marriage, the debts. But there were also the internal changes. The lapses in memory, the mood swings, the piercing headaches on the left side of his head, the difficulty spelling simple words, the blurred eyesight. And hanging over it all was his fear that both his material and physical decline might not be coincidental, that they might have been caused by injuries to his brain suffered playing the game he loved so much – football. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15612 - Posted: 07.28.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Continuity of sleep, not just the total hours of nightly slumber, is crucial to forming and retaining memories, a new study in mice suggests. Mice couldn’t remember objects they’d seen before after a night of interrupted sleep, Asya Rolls of Stanford and her colleagues report online July 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Even though the mice got just as much sleep as normal and slept as intensely as usual, breaking that sleep into one-minute chunks was enough to erase the memory of toys the animal had seen before. The results emphasize that sleep is a process, says Paul Shaw, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study. “Whatever biological function sleep serves takes time,” he says. “So if you wake up, you disrupt that process and have to start from scratch again.” Scientists already had inklings that continuous bouts of sleep were important for learning and memory, Shaw says. But previous experiments had disrupted sleep in ways that made it hard to tell whether learning and memory problems stemmed from fragmented snoozing or from stress or other confounding conditions. In the new study, the Stanford researchers used a “really cool” genetic trick to interrupt the mice’s sleep without all the problems associated with previous studies, Shaw says. Rolls and her colleagues introduced a light-sensitive protein called channelrhodopsin-2 into certain brain cells. Shining a pulse of blue light on the cells through fiber-optic cables implanted in the brain activated the cells and briefly woke the animals. Outwardly, the mice didn’t even appear to wake up. “They maybe just twitched a muscle,” says Rolls. But the researchers could detect the brief arousals by monitoring the mice’s brain waves. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15611 - Posted: 07.26.2011

By Laura Sanders Unlike humans, chimpanzees’ brains don’t shrink as they get older. That means that, so far, people seem to be the only lucky species whose brains wither with age, researchers report online July 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Chimp aging seems to be on a different trajectory than humans’,” says aging and Alzheimer’s expert Caleb Finch of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. So far, the small number of great ape brains that have been studied show mild changes with age, Finch says, but nothing that approaches the damage seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Understanding differences in aging between humans and other primates may help scientists figure out why human brains are susceptible to age-related dementias. In the new study, anthropologist Chet Sherwood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues focused on chimpanzees, which have some of the most developed brains and longest life spans among primates. The researchers wondered if chimps experience brain decline in old age similar to that seen in humans. The researchers scanned the brains of 99 chimpanzees with ages representing the entire adult life span, from 10 to 51 years. For comparison, the team imaged the brains of 87 humans from 22 to 88 years old. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Evolution; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15610 - Posted: 07.26.2011

by Ferris Jabr Should drug addicts be vaccinated to help them recover? Some authorities, such as bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, have suggested coercing addicts into taking drugs like naltrexone, which curb the highs they crave. The recent death of singer Amy Winehouse, who had well-documented problems with drugs and alcohol, and the publication last week of research on a heroin vaccine and an anti-cocaine drug, have again raised the question. Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues have created a vaccine cocktail that consists of a heroin-like hapten – a molecule that provokes the immune system – bound to a carrier protein and mixed with alum, an adjuvant that further stimulates the immune system. The vaccine trains the immune system to swarm heroin molecules with antibodies, as though the drug were an invasive organism, thereby sequestering the drug in the bloodstream before it can reach the brain. Craving curbed Janda's team fitted rats with catheters that delivered a dose of heroin straight into the bloodstream whenever the rodents pushed a lever. All the unvaccinated rats pushed the heroin lever frequently and eagerly, whereas only three of the seven vaccinated rats dosed themselves like addicts (Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/jm200461m). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15609 - Posted: 07.26.2011

by David DeGusta and Jason E. Lewis Stephen Jay Gould claimed unconscious bias could affect even seemingly objective scientific measurements. Not so TRUTH is hard to come by, as personal lives and politics readily illustrate. Since science lays claim to providing some form of truth, it is bound to draw criticism on that count. Surprisingly, one of the sharpest attacks came from within, and from one of the giants, Harvard University's Stephen Jay Gould. Gould was a man of many parts - invertebrate palaeontologist, evolutionary theorist, historian of science, crusader against creationism and a prolific populariser of science with a slew of bestselling books. He was an iconic scientist of the late 20th century, a stature confirmed by that arbiter of cultural relevance, The Simpsons, in which he was a featured guest star in one episode. Even so, Gould harboured grave doubts about the ability of science to remain free from social pressures and bias. He made a series of statements in a 1978 Science paper that are startling given his role as a spokesperson for science: "...unconscious or dimly perceived finagling, doctoring, and massaging are rampant, endemic, and unavoidable in a profession [science] that awards status and power for clean and unambiguous discovery"; "unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm"; "scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth". This was blasphemy from the pulpit. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 15608 - Posted: 07.26.2011

THERE was at least one downside to Farinelli's castration. The operation may have preserved the 18th-century singer's treble voice into adulthood, making him a musical legend, but it also condemned him to a skull deformity that may have affected his mind. Farinelli was exhumed in 2006 so that his skeleton could be studied. Lead investigator Maria Giovanna Belcastro of the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Italy, was able to identify two unusual features. Like those of other castrati, Farinelli's limb bones were unusually long. And the front of his skull had grown inwards in a lumpy mass, in places twice as thick as unaffected bone (Journal of Anatomy, DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2011.01413.x). This is called hyperostosis frontalis interna (HFI). It is thought to be caused by hormonal disorders, particularly too much oestrogen, which explains why it is normally found in post-menopausal women and is rare in men. HFI was thought to be harmless, says Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University in Israel, but is now linked to behavioural disorders, headaches and neurological diseases like Alzheimer's. Though any such symptoms probably would not have affected Farinelli until late in life, Hershkovitz says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15607 - Posted: 07.26.2011

By PAM BELLUCK Is there a way to prevent Alzheimer’s disease? Last week, a study presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Paris suggested there might be, something that would give hope to millions who worry that one day they may be struggling with dementia. The new study, by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, estimated how many Alzheimer’s cases might be attributable to certain behaviors or conditions: physical inactivity, smoking, depression, low education, hypertension, obesity and diabetes. The authors used a mathematical model to surmise that these behaviors and conditions, all of which can be modified, are responsible for about half of the roughly 5.3 million Alzheimer’s cases in the United States and 34 million cases worldwide. And they calculated that if people addressed these risks — by exercising, quitting smoking, increasing their education or losing weight, for example — a significant number of Alzheimer’s cases could be prevented. Reducing the prevalence of these risk factors by 10 percent, the researchers estimated, could prevent 1.1 million cases worldwide; reducing these risk factors by 25 percent could prevent more than three million cases. The operative word was “could.” As the researchers pointed out, there is not yet scientific proof that any of these risk factors in fact cause Alzheimer’s. Only if they are shown to do so could the new analysis be considered a practical recipe for preventing the disease. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15606 - Posted: 07.26.2011

By CAITLIN O’CONNELL-RODWELL Two male black rhinos are huffing and grumbling out their differences just below the tower in a darkness one can know only in wild places. The coming of the new moon makes it hard to ignore the brilliance of the Milky Way in an obsidian sky. Intermittently, the rhinos bellow when one or the other crosses some seemingly arbitrary line drawn in the sand by angry feet. Almost three weeks into the season, it’s impossible not to notice a similar line in the sand drawn by many male denizens of Mushara, and for the elephant, that line plays out in a myriad of forms, from all-out avoidance to full-on combat — not so much over territories, but over who’s in charge. And since the dynamics of male elephant dominance hierarchies are a particular focus of my studies, when and how Greg the elephant draws a line in the sand is under great scrutiny. To address this question, interactions between male elephants are painstakingly documented by my research team via video and live-scoring of behaviors using a Noldus Observer datalogger while elephants visit the water hole. And one or more members of the team are on watch, starting around 10 a.m., to scan the horizon and give the team enough warning that elephants are heading in, in order to ready the equipment for a recording session. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15605 - Posted: 07.26.2011

By Katherine Harmon Singer Amy Winehouse's fame and infamy have now been forever linked to one word: rehab. She is only one of many recent high-profile cases in which attempts at rehabilitation from substance abuse failed. Amidst strange public outbursts earlier this year, actor Charlie Sheen asserted that it was not rehab, but rather he, himself, that had been his secret weapon against abusing cocaine and booze. And celebrities are not the only ones with untreated substance abuse problems. More than 20 million Americans ages 12 and older needed—but were not receiving—treatment as of 2007, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The cause of the 27-year-old singer's July 23 death is still unknown. Initial autopsy results were inconclusive, and toxicology tests will likely take at least two weeks. But the Grammy Award–winner had a recent history replete with physical health problems, psychological difficulties, and drug and alcohol abuse. In 2007 Winehouse was admitted to the hospital after overdosing on a combination of alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin and ketamine. She had at least a few stints at in-patient rehabilitation clinics but did not entirely stay clean afterward. In her 2007 hit "Rehab" Winehouse repeatedly shrugged off the suggestion with the refrain ("They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, 'no, no, no,'") in her dark, bluesy voice. Was she right to be skeptical of this classic treatment? Many of these programs, including 12-step plans such as Alcoholics Anonymous, often embrace at least some aspects of an abstinence-only approach and reliance on a "higher power." At least one overview of decades of research on AA's effectiveness suggests it works for many problem drinkers in conjunction with professional help. Nevertheless, the majority of people who enter more formal treatment centers suffer relapses. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15604 - Posted: 07.26.2011

Analysis by Kieran Mulvaney Whale-watching tourists off western Australia saw more than they expected - and perhaps more than many of them wanted - last week. As two boats of observers took in the action, a humpback whale mother desperately and vainly tried to protect a calf from four predatory orcas. The video below, shot from a light aircraft that circled overhead as the action unfolded, isn't always easy to make out, but it shows the orcas circling as the humpback attempts to protect the calf by lifting it on to her back. (If you pause the video at about 12 seconds, you can see the whale more or less center of the screen, and the lighter-colored calf just above it.) According to witnesses, the humpback was spotted with two calves, but the orcas swiftly came on the attack taking one. The mother only succeeded in protecting her second calf for about three-quarters of an hour before it, too, succumbed to the ambush: "I've been diving for three years and I've never seen anything like it," said Tamar Melen, who watched the 45-minute spectacle unfold metres from the boat. Sadly, the killer whales made off with both calves. Ms Melen, 31, said they grabbed the first in seconds, but the attack on the second lasted half an hour. "It was quite impressive," Ms Melen said. "The first hit was so quick, but then they took their time with the second. It was agonising to watch the mother humpback trying to protect her calf. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Evolution; Aggression
Link ID: 15603 - Posted: 07.26.2011

By CARL ZIMMER To study evolution, Jason Munshi-South has tracked elephants in central Africa and proboscis monkeys in the wilds of Borneo. But for his most recent expedition, he took the A train. Dr. Munshi-South and two graduate students, Paolo Cocco and Stephen Harris, climbed out of the 168th Street station lugging backpacks and a plastic crate full of scales, Ziploc bags, clipboards, rulers and tarps. They walked east to the entrance of Highbridge Park, where they met Ellen Pehek, a senior ecologist in the New York City Parks and Recreation Department. The four researchers entered the park, made their way past a basketball game and turned off the paved path into a ravine. They worked their way down the steep slope, past schist boulders, bent pieces of rebar, oaks and maples, hunks of concrete and freakish poison ivy plants with leaves the size of a man’s hands. The ravine flattened out at the edge of Harlem River Drive. The scientists walked north along a guardrail contorted by years of car crashes before plunging back into the forest to reach their field site. “We get police called on us a lot,” said Dr. Munshi-South, an assistant professor at Baruch College. “Sometimes with guns drawn.” Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them. For these scientists, the New York metropolitan region is one great laboratory. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15602 - Posted: 07.26.2011

By TARA PARKER-POPE The news that the presidential candidate Michele Bachmann suffers from severe migraines has touched off a national discussion about a surprisingly common disorder that is little understood and often undertreated. Migraine patients are coming forward with their stories. And while each one is different, they have two common threads: suffering and trying to cope. For some, a migraine represents throbbing head pain and nausea so severe they retreat to a darkened room for a day or more. For others, it’s about a scary moment, driving on the highway when a migraine-induced aura or vision change forces them to pull over. “Imagine someone having driven a nail straight through your head,” said Craig Partridge, 50, chief scientist for a high-tech research company in East Lansing, Mich., who began having migraines in his late teens. “And then they periodically tap on it to remind you it’s there. It’s that painful.” More than 10 percent of adults and children suffer from migraine — which is three times as common in women and girls as in men and boys — and the Migraine Research Foundation reports that nearly a quarter of households are affected. The World Health Organization ranks migraine among the top 20 most debilitating health conditions; more than 90 percent of sufferers are unable to work or function normally during an attack, which can last for hours or even days. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15601 - Posted: 07.26.2011

A swine flu jab has been linked to rare cases of a sleeping disorder and should be the last line of protection for young people, European regulators say. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said Pandemrix should only be given to children and teenagers at risk of H1N1 flu if other jabs are unavailable. More than six million doses of the vaccine have been given in the UK. Ten suspected cases of narcolepsy linked to the vaccine have been reported to the UK's drug regulator. Pandemrix, made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), was the most widely used in the UK during the 2009/10 flu pandemic. However, the vaccine is no longer in use and the remaining stocks will be destroyed this autumn. The EMA's investigation followed reports, mainly from Finland and Sweden but also from Iceland and the UK, of children and adolescents suffering the sleep disorder narcolepsy, which causes people to fall asleep suddenly and unexpectedly. It said studies had shown a six to 13-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children and adolescents vaccinated with Pandemrix compared with unvaccinated children. In a statement, the EMA said it had "noted that the vaccine is likely to have interacted with genetic or environmental factors which might raise the risk of narcolepsy, and that other factors may have contributed to the results." BBC © 2011

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Sleep
Link ID: 15600 - Posted: 07.26.2011

By JoNel Aleccia Health writer A cluster of cases of a rare illness that can lead to nerve damage and paralysis has been identified along a small stretch of the United States-Mexico border. An outbreak of food poisoning is the likely culprit, health officials in the two countries said. At least two dozen people in Yuma County, Ariz., and San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico, have been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome in the past month, with some left drastically impaired by the illness that triggers the body's auto-immune reaction. “It’s really attacking the nerves,” said Shoana Anderson, office chief of infectious disease at the Arizona Department of Health Services. “All of the patients I’ve seen are not able to walk.” Most of the victims, including 17 from Mexico and seven from the U.S., are adults who range in age from 40 to 70, although younger people also have been affected, Anderson said. Some patients have muscle weakness in their upper bodies as well as in their legs, she added. It's not clear how quickly they may recover. Guillian-Barré Syndrome, or GBS, typically affects only about 1 in 100,000 people, according to government health statistics, so a cluster of 24 cases is cause for alarm, officials said. Although the condition often resolves on its own, recovery can be long and painful. And in rare cases, the illness can cause permanent disability and even death. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 15599 - Posted: 07.26.2011

by Kathleen McAuliffe Elijah Stommel, a neurologist at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock medical center in New Hampshire, often has to deliver bad news to his patients, but there is one diagnosis he particularly dreads. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, kills motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, progressively paralyzing the body until even swallowing and breathing become impossible. The cause of ALS is unknown. Though of little solace to the afflicted, Stommel used to offer one comforting fact: ALS was rare, randomly striking just two of 100,000 people a year. Then, a couple of years ago, in an effort to gain more insight into the disease, Stommel enlisted students to punch the street addresses of about 200 of his ALS patients into Google Earth. The distribution of cases that emerged on the computer-generated map of New England shocked him. In numbers far higher than national statistics predicted, his current and deceased patients’ homes were clustered around lakes and other bodies of water. The flurry of dots marking their locations was thickest of all around bucolic Mascoma Lake, a rural area just 10 miles from Dartmouth Medical School. About a dozen cases turned up there, the majority diagnosed within the past decade. The pattern did not appear random at all. “I started thinking maybe there was something in the water,” Stommel says. That “something,” he now suspects, could be the environmental toxin beta-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA. This compound 
is produced by cyanobacteria, the blue-green algae that live in soil, lakes, and oceans. Cyanobacteria are consumed by fish and other aquatic creatures. Recent studies have found BMAA in seafood, suggesting that certain diets and locations may put people at particular risk. More worrisome, blooms of cyanobacteria are becoming increasingly common, fueling fears that their toxic by-product may be quietly fomenting an upsurge in ALS—and possibly other neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s as well. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 15598 - Posted: 07.25.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer Stare at the spinning patterns in this animation and it will seem like you're looking into a deep tunnel. The new depth illusion, created by Hiroyuki Ito from Kyushu University, occurs with certain circular patterns that rotate around a line of sight. To experience the most pronounced effect, this video should be viewed up close, with one eye closed. "Sometimes, the perceived depth is reversed spontaneously, so that a tunnel changes into a mountain," says Ito. The illusion is similar to what we experience when we look at a scene from a moving vehicle. Distant objects move across our field of view much more slowly than those that are close by. Ito recreated this effect by making the texture near the edges rotate much faster than the dots close to the center. Our brain infers that the edges of the pattern are closer than the middle and so we perceive a 3D tunnel. In the second animation in this video, you can see that the effect doesn't occur with the pattern on the left. In this case, a flat disk is perceived since the speed of the moving dots increases steadily from the center to the edges. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15597 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By Laura Sanders Almost a minute after a rat’s head is severed from its body, an eerie shudder of activity ripples through the animal’s brain. Some researchers think this post-decapitation wave marks the border between life and death. But the phenomenon can be explained by electrical changes that, in some cases, are reversible, researchers report online July 13 in PLoS ONE. Whether a similar kind of brain wave happens in humans, and if so, whether it is inextricably tied to death could have important implications. An unambiguous marker could help doctors better decide when to diagnose brain death, knowledge that could give clarity to loved ones and boost earlier organ donation. In a PLoS ONE paper published in January, neuroscientist Anton Coenen and colleagues at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands described this wave of electrical activity in the rat brain occurring 50 seconds after decapitation. The Nijmegen team, which was exploring whether decapitation is a humane way to sacrifice lab animals, wrote that this brain activity seemed to be the ultimate border between life and death. They dubbed the phenomenon the “wave of death.” But neurologist Michel van Putten of the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, wasn’t convinced. “We have no doubt the observation is real,” he says. “But the interpretation is completely speculative.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 15596 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By Melinda Wenner Moyer It used to be tough to get porn. Renting an X-rated movie required sneaking into a roped-off room in the back of a video store, and eyeing a centerfold meant facing down a store clerk to buy a pornographic magazine. Now pornography is just one Google search away, and much of it is free. Age restrictions have become meaningless, too, with the advent of social media—one teenager in five has sent or posted naked pictures of themselves online, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. With access to pornography easier than ever before, politicians and scientists alike have renewed their interest in deciphering its psychological effects. Certainly pornography addiction or overconsumption seems to cause relationship problems [see “Sex in Bits and Bytes,” by Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld; Scientific American Mind, July/August 2010]. But what about the more casual exposure typical of most porn users? Contrary to what many people believe, recent research shows that moderate pornography consumption does not make users more aggressive, promote sexism or harm relationships. If anything, some researchers suggest, exposure to pornography might make some people less likely to commit sexual crimes. The most common concern about pornography is that it indirectly hurts women by encouraging sexism, raising sexual expectations and thereby harming relationships. Some people worry that it might even incite violence against women. The data, however, do not support these claims. “There’s absolutely no evidence that pornography does anything negative,” says Milton Diamond , director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “It’s a moral issue, not a factual issue.” © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15595 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By Mandy Van Deven We all have things that disgust us irrationally, whether it be cockroaches or chitterlings or cotton balls. For me, it's fruit soda. It started when I was 3; my mom offered me a can of Sunkist after inner ear surgery. Still woozy from the anesthesia, I gulped it down, and by the time we made it to the cashier, all of it managed to come back up. Although it is nearly 30 years later, just the smell of this "fun, sun and the beach" drink is enough to turn my stomach. But what, exactly, happens when we feel disgust? As Daniel Kelly, an assistant professor of philosophy at Purdue University, explains in his new book, "Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust," it's not just a physical sensation, it's a powerful emotional warning sign. Although disgust initially helped keep us away from rotting food and contagious disease, the defense mechanism changed over time to effect the distance we keep from one another. When allowed to play a role in the creation of social policy, Kelly argues, disgust might actually cause more harm than good. Salon spoke with Kelly about hiding the science behind disgust, why we're captivated by things we find revolting, and how it can be a very dangerous thing. What exactly is disgust? Simply speaking, disgust is the response we have to things we find repulsive. Some of the things that trigger disgust are innate, like the smell of sewage on a hot summer day. No one has to teach you to feel disgusted by garbage, you just are. Other things that are automatically disgusting are rotting food and visible cues of infection or illness. We have this base layer of core disgusting things, and a lot of them don't seem like they're learned. ©2011 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15594 - Posted: 07.25.2011

Alison Abbott The increasingly sophisticated blending of different species to create chimaeras is pushing biology into a new ethical dimension. Last year, scientists used new stem-cell technologies to create a mouse with a functioning pancreas composed entirely of rat cells. So might it soon be possible to create a monkey with a brain composed entirely of human neurons? And would it think like a human? Such an animal might be useful to researchers studying human cognition or human-specific pathogens. But it would be ethically unacceptable and should be banned, argues a government-commissioned report from the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, a body that promotes medical research. The document, Animals Containing Human Material , says that genetic and stem-cell technologies are now so advanced that the creation of such animals is already on the horizon. But no country has yet devised a broad regulatory framework for the research. The report, released on 22 July, calls for the United Kingdom to take the lead in putting in place specific safeguards. "We are not proposing a new tier of regulation that will hold up important research," says Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist at the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research in London, and a member of the working group that drew up the report. At the same time, he says, "we don't want scientists to cause problems for the future by overstepping the mark of what is publicly acceptable". Unlike the hypothetical monkey with a human brain, many animals containing human material (ACHMs) are likely to advance basic biology and medicine without transgressing ethical boundaries, the report concludes. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Rights; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15593 - Posted: 07.25.2011