by Sarah C.P. Williams Lab mice usually take only an occasional jaunt on their exercise wheels. But mice missing a gene called IL-15Rα run for hours each night, a new study reveals. And the gene doesn't just make a difference to mice—it might also be linked to the ability of long-distance athletes to outperform the rest of us. Previous studies had suggested that IL-15Rα is important for muscle strength. In experiments on cells grown in a Petri dish, the gene seemed to control the accumulation of proteins necessary for muscle contraction. But IL-15Rα had never been studied in a living animal. In the new research, physiologist Tejvir Khurana of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues genetically engineered mice to lack the IL-15Rα gene. The changes were dramatic. Each night, according to sensors on the wheels in the mice's cages, the modified mice ran six times farther than normal mice. But these behavioral quirks weren't quite enough to convince Khurana of the effect on muscles. Lack of the IL-15Rα gene could just be making the mice jittery or giving them extra energy. So the researchers dissected muscles from the longer-running mice. The muscles sported increased numbers of energy-generating mitochondria and more muscle fibers, indicating that they tired less easily. And when the researchers stimulated them with electricity, the muscles continued to contract for longer than normal, taking longer to use up their energy stores, the team reports today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Muscles
Link ID: 15572 - Posted: 07.19.2011

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA Irvina Booker makes a most unlikely criminal. She lives in constant pain, disabled by multiple sclerosis and arthritis, a grandmother whose limited mobility depends on her walker, her daughter and marijuana. “I never smoked it before I got sick, and I don’t smoke it for fun,” said Ms. Booker, 59, who lives in Englewood, N.J. She would not divulge how she obtains her marijuana, but said, “I don’t want to be sneaking around, afraid someone is going to get arrested getting it for me.” Like many people who contend that marijuana eases pain and appetite loss from serious diseases, Ms. Booker cheered in January 2010, when New Jersey legalized its use in cases like hers. But a year and a half later, there is still no state-sanctioned marijuana available for patients, and none being grown, and there is no sign of when there might be. In the last few months, officials in New Jersey, as well as several other states, have said that mixed signals from the Obama administration have left them unsure whether their medical marijuana programs could draw federal prosecution of the people involved, including state employees. A Justice Department memorandum issued late last month left unanswered questions, and Gov. Chris Christie has not said how he will proceed. But medical marijuana advocates say that in New Jersey, at least, the state law is stringent enough not to run afoul of federal policy, and that the governor’s true goal has been to block the program. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15571 - Posted: 07.18.2011

By Julie Steenhuysen PARIS — For many years, an autopsy done by a pathologist was considered the best way to confirm the presence of Alzheimer's disease. But new guidelines proposed on Sunday by the U.S. National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association seek to distinguish between memory changes or dementia diagnosed by doctors when people are alive, and the changes pathologists can see in an autopsy. The proposed guidelines will offer additional information about the disease that will help as scientists develop tests that measure biological changes in the brain, blood or spinal fluid to diagnose Alzheimer's at an earlier stage. Several companies, including Eli Lilly and Co, Bayer and General Electric Co, are working on compounds to identify Alzheimer's-related brain changes on positron emission tomography scans. Many other companies and researchers are working on other types of biomarkers as well. "Someday biomarkers are probably going to replace pathology," Dr. Creighton Phelps of the National Institute on Aging's division of neuroscience, said in an interview at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Paris. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15570 - Posted: 07.18.2011

By Jane Hughes Health correspondent, BBC News Many dementia patients being prescribed "chemical cosh" antipsychotic drugs could be better treated with simple painkillers, research says. The British and Norwegian study, published on the BMJ website, found painkillers significantly cut agitation in dementia patients. Agitation, a common dementia symptom, is often treated with antipsychotic drugs, which have risky side effects. The Alzheimer's Society wants doctors to consider other types of treatment. Experts say that each year about 150,000 patients in the UK are unnecessarily prescribed antipsychotics, which have a powerful sedative effect, and can worsen dementia symptoms, and increase the risk of stroke or even death. They are often given to patients whose dementia makes them aggressive or agitated. But researchers from Kings College, London, and Norway speculated that the behaviour may sometimes be caused by pain, which patients were unable to express in other ways. They studied 352 patients with moderate or severe dementia in nursing homes in Norway. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Alzheimers; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15569 - Posted: 07.18.2011

By Katherine Harmon As we age, all sorts of things may start to break down. Joints ache, or vision fails, and or maybe cognitive abilities falter. The leading known risk for getting Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia is simply getting older, followed, some studies suggest, by major illnesses, such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke. But new research suggests that many of the littler aches, pains or minor disabilities that often pile on with age are linked to increased risk for Alzheimer's and dementia. The new study compared data from 7,239 Canadian adults 65 or older who were dementia-free. After five and 10 years, those in the study were asked about cognitive clarity and asked to report on 19 different health and wellbeing factors (including hearing, foot problems and how well their dentures fit). After the full decade, of the 4,324 people who were still alive, 416 had Alzheimer's disease, 191 had another sort of dementia and 677 had other cognitive problems (1,023 were of uncertain cognitive ability). The findings were described online July 13 in Neurology. Each individual health complaint increased the risk of having dementia by an average of about 3 percent. But as issues accumulated, one's risk for cognitive decline grew, too. A healthy older adult had about an 18 percent chance of having dementia after 10 years, whereas those who reported poor health on a dozen of the health and wellbeing measures had, on average, closer to a 40 percent chance. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15568 - Posted: 07.18.2011

David Gems The 20th century brought both profound suffering and profound relief to people around the world. On the one hand, it produced political lunacy, war and mass murder on an unprecedented scale. But there were also extraordinary gains—not least in public health, medicine and food production. In the developed world, we no longer live in constant fear of infectious disease. Furthermore, a Malthusian catastrophe of global population growth exceeding food production—a terrifying prospect predicted first in the 18th century—did not materialize. This is largely due to a steep decline in birth rates, for which we can thank the education, emancipation and rationality of women. Most people in the developed world can now expect to live long lives. Yet, as too often happens, the solution of one problem spawns others. Because we are having fewer children and living longer, the developed world is now filling up with old people. In Japan, for example, where the population is aging particularly quickly, the ratio of people less than 20 years old to those over 65 is plummeting, from 9.3 in 1950 to a predicted 0.59 in 2025. In Europe and the United States, we see ever more bald and grey heads on streets and in parks and shopping malls. Although this is something to celebrate, old age unfortunately has myriad ways of making us ill. It brings cardiovascular disease that leads to heart attacks and strokes; neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s that erode the self; and macular degeneration, which blinds. And, of course, there is cancer. Aging has been described as the greatest of all carcinogens. Like the pandemic of obesity, the increasing number of people living long enough to experience these illnesses is, in some ways, a side effect of progress. Now we face this challenging question: Should we attack the underlying cause of this suffering? Should we try to “cure” aging? © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15567 - Posted: 07.18.2011

Ian Tucker Tanya L Chartrand is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business in North Carolina. With David T Neal from the University of Southern California she recently published a paper entitled "Embodied Emotion Perception: Amplifying and Dampening Facial Feedback Modulates Emotional Perception Accuracy", which found that using Botox – a neurotoxin injected into muscles to reduce frown lines – reduces a person's ability to empathise with others. It wouldn't surprise people to hear that it's difficult to tell what the Botoxed are feeling, but your study found that the Botoxed have little idea what we are feeling? Yes, we always assume that you can't tell what the Botoxed people are feeling because their faces are somewhat paralyzed and can appear frozen, but what is less intuitive is that being injected with Botox impairs their ability to understand what other people around you are feeling. To demonstrate this you asked women to look at photographs of people's eyes and match them to human emotions… Yes, it's called the "Reading the mind in the eyes test", and it's sometimes given to people on the autism spectrum. The people who had a Botox treatment in the previous two weeks were not as accurate as our control group, who had been treated with Restylane – a skin filler – whose results were similar to untreated adults. Why did you choose a control group who had used filler, rather than a random group? We wanted to match the two groups on everything we could except that one had the paralysing agent and the other hadn't. The Restylane group are demographically similar to the Botox group – in terms of age and gender, socio-economic status, and had the same concerns with looking good. So if we got a random group of people who would never have one of these cosmetic procedures then they could differ in a lot of other ways. This way we made sure that we were just isolating the fact that Botox is the cause. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15566 - Posted: 07.18.2011

By Laura Sanders Peer out the window of a plane landing at LaGuardia Airport, and the tiny people scurrying around the streets of New York City all look the same. But take a stroll down Fifth Avenue and a new view emerges: Up close, New Yorkers are very different. A street view of the brain also reveals a new perspective: No two cells are the same. Zoom in, and the brain’s wrinkly, pinkish-gray exterior becomes a motley collection of billions of cells, each with personalized quirks and idiosyncrasies. Powerful new techniques are giving researchers a glimpse of this staggering diversity — especially among nerve cells, the brain’s information brokers. Even nerve cells presumed to do the same job come in a range of shapes and sizes and display a host of behaviors, sending their electrical messages in unpredictable ways, new studies reveal. The closer scientists scrutinize nerve cells, called neurons, the more differences turn up. This cellular menagerie has left researchers puzzling over how best to categorize what neuroscientist Rafael Yuste of Columbia University calls these “living creatures.” So far, systematic methods are lacking. “Even after 100 years of research, we have no clue how many classes of neurons there are,” says Yuste, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher. He and other scientists are developing new algorithms to automate neuron classification, in the hope of someday compiling a standard “parts list” of the brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15565 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By Laura Sanders When a woman born without limbs watches someone else sew, copycat regions in her brain activate even though she can’t hold a needle herself. Additional brain regions also lend support, demonstrating how flexible the brain is when it comes to observing and understanding the actions of others. Scientists have known for over a decade about the mirror system, a network of brain regions usually activated by watching and performing an action. But just how the brain smoothly and quickly intuits what other people are doing, particularly when the action isn’t something the observer can do, has been unclear, says study coauthor Lisa Aziz-Zadeh of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In the study, a middle-aged, healthy woman born with no arms and legs underwent brain scans as she watched videos of people performing actions such as holding and eating an apple slice, sewing with a needle and tapping a finger. Actions that the woman was capable of performing herself activated the mirror system, including parts of the brain that control movement. Mirror areas kicked in even for tasks the woman accomplishes in a different way, such as picking up food using her mouth instead of hands. (The participant had prosthetics briefly as a teenager but hadn’t used them in the past 40 years.) When the woman witnessed actions that were impossible for her, such as using scissors, her brain’s mirror system still kicked in, but additional brain regions were recruited to help. These extra regions aren’t normally needed when people watch a task they’re able to perform, the researchers write in an upcoming Cerebral Cortex. These regions are thought to be involved in a process called “mentalizing,” in which a person tries to understand what someone else is thinking. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 15564 - Posted: 07.16.2011

by Nic Fleming At high altitude, even the fittest mountaineer's ability to move freely can vanish in the thin air. But it's not the fault of your muscles. In fact, this drop-off in athletic performance in low-oxygen conditions may be mostly in the mind: the brain kicks in to prevent potentially damaging overexertion. The cause of muscle fatigue has been the subject of much debate. Some researchers emphasise the importance of physical changes such as lactic acid build-up, while others back a "central governor" theory whereby fatigue is a sensation generated by the brain. Emma Ross of the University of Brighton, UK, and colleagues asked 11 men to carry out knee extensor muscle exercises while breathing normal air – which has 21 per cent oxygen – as well as mixes with 16 per cent, 13 per cent and 10 per cent oxygen to represent mild, moderate and severe hypoxia. As the oxygen levels fell, so did the forces the participants could generate voluntarily. To assess the role of the brain in muscle fatigue, the team repeated the experiment using non-invasive brain stimulation to artificially generate motor cortex signals, overriding voluntary control and triggering knee muscle contraction. Measuring the difference between the forces participants could generate voluntarily and those created by the brain stimulation helped Ross and colleagues establish that the brain contributes 18 per cent to muscle fatigue with normal oxygen, 25 per cent for mild to moderate hypoxia and 54 per cent for severe hypoxia (Journal of Applied Physiology, DOI: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00458.2010). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 15563 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By Larry Greenemeier Internet,memory,trivia TOTAL RECALL?: The advent of the Internet and near-ubiquitous information at our fingertips makes it less critical for us to commit items to memory. Using the Internet as a mental crutch is not necessarily a bad thing, according to researchers. Image: IMAGE COURTESY OF ALEX HINDS, VIA ISTOCKPHOTO.COM Has the Internet dumbed down society or simply become an external storage unit that enhances the human brain's memory capacity? With Google, Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia at our beck and call via smart phones, tablets and laptops, the once essential function of committing facts to memory has become little more than a flashback to flash cards. This shift is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it irreversible, according to a team of researchers whose study on search engines and learning appears in the July 15 issue of Science. Led by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, the researchers conducted a series of experiments whose results suggest that when people are faced with difficult questions, they are likely to think that the Internet will help them find the answers. In fact, those who expect to able to search for answers to difficult questions online are less likely to commit the information to memory. People tend to memorize answers if they believe that it is the only way they will have access to that information in the future. Regardless of whether they remember the facts, however, people tend to recall the Web sites that hold the answers they seek. In this way, the Internet has become a primary form of external or "transactive" memory (a term coined by Sparrow's one-time academic advisor, social psychologist Daniel Wegner), where information is stored collectively outside the brain. This is not so different from the pre-Internet past, when people relied on books, libraries and one another—such as using a "lifeline" on the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?—for information. Now, however, besides oral and printed sources of information, a lion's share of our collective and institutional knowledge bases reside online and in data storage. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15562 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By JAMES GORMAN From the wild to Wall Street, as everyone knows, the alpha male runs the show, enjoying power over other males and, as a field biologist might put it, the best access to mating opportunities. The beta is No. 2 in the wolf pack or the baboon troop, not such a bad position. But conversationally, the term has become an almost derisive label for the nice guy, the good boy all grown up, the husband women look for after the fling with Russell Crowe. It may now be time to take a step back from alpha worship. Field biologists, the people who gave the culture the alpha/beta trope in the first place, have found there can be a big downside to being No. 1. Laurence R. Gesquiere, a research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and colleagues report in the journal Science that in five troops of wild baboons in Kenya studied over nine years, alpha males showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males. The stress, they suggested, was probably because of the demands of fighting off challengers and guarding access to fertile females. Beta males, who fought less and had considerably less mate guarding to do, had much lower stress levels. They had fewer mating opportunities than the alphas, but they did get some mating in, more than any lower-ranking males. After all, when the alpha gets in another baboon bar fight, who’s going to take the girl home? © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Stress
Link ID: 15561 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News A half-male, half-female butterfly has hatched at London's Natural History Museum. A line down the insect's middle marks the division between its male side and its more colourful female side. Failure of the butterfly's sex chromosomes to separate during fertilisation is behind this rare sexual chimera. Once it has lived out its month-long life, the butterfly will join the museum's collection. Only 0.01% of hatching butterflies are gynandromorphs; the technical term for these strange asymmetrical creatures. "So you can understand why I was bouncing off of the walls when I learned that... [it] had emerged in the puparium," said butterfly enthusiast Luke Brown from London's Natural History Museum. Mr Brown built his first butterfly house when he was seven, and has hatched out over 300 thousand butterflies; this is only his third gynandromorph. Half and half It is not only the wings that are affected, he explained. The butterfly's body is split in two, its sexual organs are half and half, and even its antennae are different lengths. "It is a complete split; part-male, part-female... welded together inside," he told the BBC. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15560 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By Nadia Webb In studies that observe the brain in action, the right hemisphere seems to be the sexy hemisphere. It lights up during orgasm—so much so that, in one study, much of the cortex went dark, leaving the right prefrontal cortex as a bright island. New research suggests the right hemisphere is also hyperactive amongst the “hypersexual,” a symptom of brain injury loosely defined as groping, propositioning or masturbating in public without shame. What is surprising about this is that pleasure is classically thought of as the province of the left hemisphere, not the right. The left is most active when recalling happy memories, meditating on love for another, and during the expansiveness of grandiosity or mania. The left hemisphere is even preferentially more active among people free of depression and less active among the unhappy. If the brain were a simpler and more cooperative organ, the left hemisphere would be lit up like the Fourth of July during an orgasm. Instead, it is surprisingly silent. Why might this be so? Until eight years ago, neuroscience had little scientific basis from which to comment on bliss, sexual or otherwise. Despite our public fascination with things sexual, as researcher, Gemma O’Brien put it, “orgasm is not impersonal and third person enough for the sciences.” Neuroscience was hobbled by the avoidance of such squashy topics, even if it meant setting aside important parts of human experience. However, a clearer portrait of pleasure is now emerging. Bliss, both sacred and profane, shares the diminution of self-awareness, alterations in bodily perception and decreased sense of pain. And while the left frontal lobe may be linked to pleasure, the other three characteristics are bilateral. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15559 - Posted: 07.14.2011

Meredith Wadman The contentious issue of drug-industry influence over medical-research writing erupted on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia this week. A professor of psychiatry has alleged that several colleagues — including the chair of his department — allowed their names to be added to a manuscript while ceding control to the global pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The professor, Jay Amsterdam, also claims that the manuscript, written with an unacknowledged contractor paid by GSK, unduly promotes the company's antidepressant drug Paxil (paroxetine), the subject of the study. "The published manuscript was biased in its conclusions, made unsubstantiated efficacy claims and downplayed the adverse-event profile of Paxil," Amsterdam's lawyer wrote in an 8 July letter to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the body responsible for investigating research misconduct in US Public Health Service agencies and its grant recipients. The letter accuses the study's academic authors of engaging in scientific misconduct by allowing their names to be attached to the manuscript (C. Nemeroff et al. Am. J. Psychiatr. 158, 906–912; 2001), which has been cited more than 250 times. Documents accompanying Amsterdam's complaint are offered as evidence that "most if not all" of the authors were handpicked by GSK, working in conjunction with the medical-communications company Scientific Therapeutics Information (STI) in Springfield, New Jersey, to lend credibility to a result that Amsterdam says places Paxil in an overly favourable light. In one such document, Karl Rickels, a psychiatrist not involved with the study who looked at the issue for the department in 2001 said that "apparently … [academic] participants never had a chance to review or even just see the manuscript before it went to press". © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 15558 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By Susan Milius Lizards everywhere may be scampering a little taller now that an Anolis species from tropical tree canopies has passed tests for behavioral flexibility. “These guys are smarter than people say,” reports behavioral ecologist Manuel Leal of Duke University in Durham, N.C. Cognitive scientists have studied birds’ and mammals’ powers to solve unexpected problems and learn new rules, but research on lizard cognition has been limited. Yet several Anolis evermanni lizards collected from Puerto Rico and brought into the lab coped with devices not seen in nature that were modeled on tests of avian brain power, Leal and Brian Powell, also of Duke, report in an upcoming issue of Biology Letters. In a series of tests, four out of six lizards figured out how to remove plastic lids firmly stuck on a food box and how to ignore lids with other colors introduced as possible distractors. Two lizards eventually were able to undo their previous training and choose the “wrong” color because researchers had reversed the rules. Lizards indeed deserve more respect, says Walter Wilczynski of Georgia State University in Atlanta, who studies the neural basis of animal behavior. “I agree with the authors that reptiles, and amphibians for that matter, are generally dismissed as being incapable of the simplest cognitive task,” he says, “despite the fact that whenever researchers do a careful study like this one, it turns out that, in fact, they do learn, often in a sophisticated way.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 15557 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Skin cells from a 30-year-old woman have been turned directly into mature nerve cells similar to those found in the brain using a procedure that promises to revolutionise the emerging field of regenerative medicine. Scientists said they were astonished to discover that they could convert a person's skin tissue into functioning nerve cells – bypassing an intermediate stem-cell stage – by the relatively simple procedure of adding a few short strands of RNA, a genetic molecule similar to DNA. The breakthrough could soon lead to the generation of different types of human brain cells in a test tube which could be used to study a range of neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. "A major problem in neurobiology has been the lack of a good human model. Neurons aren't like blood. They're not something people want to give up," said Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology at Stanford University Medical Centre in California. The findings may also one day allow doctors to grow nerve cells directly from a patient's skin cells to regenerate damaged parts of their brain or spinal cord. It would for instance bypass the need to produce stem cells by creating human embryos or embryonic-like tissue. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stem Cells
Link ID: 15556 - Posted: 07.14.2011

Macular degeneration, a progressive, degenerative eye disease, is a leading cause of vision loss in people over 60. Stargardt’s disease, also called juvenile macular degeneration, is a similar illness that typically begins in late childhood. Here six men and women speak about how their vision problems have affected their lives. (Join the discussion here.) © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15555 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. The Challenge: Can you solve a medical mystery involving a 38-year-old gardener with a leg rash, numbness and chills? The Presenting Problem: A 38-year-old man comes to the emergency room with a rash and numbness and tingling in his right leg. The Patient’s Story: The patient was working in his tiny city garden in Washington one afternoon when he felt a strange burning in his right foot. He took off the plastic garden sandal he was wearing but didn’t see anything under the layer of dark soil that he dusted off his foot. Half an hour later, when he looked at his leg, he noticed a burst of fluorescent purple climbing from his foot, over his ankle and nearly to the knee. On closer inspection, the lines of day-glo violet seemed to trace the veins in his leg. He still had a couple more hours of work to do that day, so rather than stopping, he pulled out his phone and snapped a couple of pictures of his leg. He was a healthy guy and wasn’t particularly worried. But by the end of the day he would be. As the man continued his work, he became aware that the burning sensation he’d felt in his foot was climbing up his leg, well past the knee. Still, he wanted to get the plants cleared and continued working for another couple of hours. Finally, he put away the shovel and other tools, cleared away the plants he’d pulled up and went in to take a shower. Under the hot stream he could see that the fluorescent purple rash had faded but was still visible. His leg now had that combination of numbness and tingling you get when a body part “falls asleep.” He dressed and joined his wife and 8-year-old daughter for a dinner of takeout pizza. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 15554 - Posted: 07.14.2011

by Michael Marshall Life is all about making decisions, and often the answers boil down to your personality. Do I have the nerve to quit my job? If I work in London can I deal with crowds of smelly people on buses? Am I willing to accept a hangover tomorrow morning? (Answers at the bottom of the page.) Personality and the ability to make difficult choices seem like human characteristics, but other animals had them long before we came along. Even the beadlet anemone can boast these traits, and it doesn't even have a brain. Yet individual anemones have distinct personalities, and they can make decisions in a remarkably nuanced way. "Personality" is one of those words like "intelligence" or "consciousness" that means different things to different people. But shorn of cultural baggage, it simply means that individuals consistently behave in particular ways. In that sense, animals as diverse as monkeys, fish, squid and insects have personalities. Mark Briffa of the University of Plymouth, UK, wondered if personalities might be found even in some of the simplest multicellular animals. Sea anemones are cnidarians, like jellyfish and corals, and unlike most species that evolved later they don't have discrete brains. Instead they have diffuse nets of nerves running through their bodies. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15553 - Posted: 07.14.2011