Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a risk factor for premature birth, research suggests. A study of more than 800 women in the US also found a link with having a smaller baby. Babies of women with the anxiety disorder, triggered by a harrowing event, weighed about half a pound less than usual. Researchers at the University of Michigan, US, say PTSD needs to be taken into account in maternity care. Nearly half of the women in the study were African American. Lead researcher Julia Seng, Professor of Nursing at the University of Michigan, said: "An African American infant in Michigan is 70% more likely to be born prematurely than an infant of any other race. "Therefore PTSD, which is treatable and affects African Americans more widely, may be an additional explanation for adverse perinatal outcomes. "It is essential that outcomes are improved in this high-risk group of women. Maternity care needs to take traumatic stress into account with awareness being raised amongst health workers." BBC © 2011

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15621 - Posted: 07.28.2011

by Rebecca Coffey 1 Think about money, work, economic outlook, family, and relationships. Feeling anxious? In a 2010 American Psychological Association survey [pdf], those five factors were the most often cited sources of stress for Americans. 2 Stress is strongly tied to cardiac disease, hypertension, inflammatory diseases, and compromised immune systems, and possibly to cancer. 3 And stress can literally break your heart. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” occurs when the bottom of the heart balloons into the shape of a pot (a tako-tsubo) used in Japan to trap octopus. It’s caused when grief or another extreme stressor makes stress hormones flood the heart. advertisement | article continues below 4 The hormone cortisol is responsible for a lot of these ill effects. Elevated cortisol gives us a short-term boost but also suppresses the immune system, elevates blood sugar, and impedes bone formation. 5 Even the next generation pays a price: Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, find an association between high cortisol in mothers during late pregnancy and lower IQs in their children at age 7. 6 Stress during pregnancy has also been linked to offspring with autism. 7 But enough stressing! One way to relax: a career of mild obsolescence. Surveying 200 professions, the site CareerCast.com rated bookbinder the least stressful job of 2011. (Most stressful: firefighter and airline pilot.) © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 15620 - Posted: 07.28.2011

By Judith Burns Science reporter, BBC News Humans living at high latitude have bigger eyes and bigger brains to cope with poor light during long winters and cloudy days, UK scientists have said. The Oxford University team said bigger brains did not make people smarter. Larger vision processing areas fill the extra capacity, they write in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal. The scientists measured the eye sockets and brain volumes of 55 skulls from 12 populations across the world, and plotted the results against latitude. Lead author Eiluned Pearce told BBC News: "We found a positive relationship between absolute latitude and both eye socket size and cranial capacity." The team, from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, used skulls dating from the 1800s kept at museums in Oxford and Cambridge. The skulls were from indigenous populations ranging from Scandinavia to Australia, Micronesia and North America. Largest brain cavities The largest brain cavities came from Scandinavia, while the smallest were from Micronesia. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15619 - Posted: 07.28.2011

By Nadia Drake Fleeing fish beware: The Guiana dolphin has a super Spidey sense. But instead of danger, the dolphin detects faint electrical fields generated by such things as contracting muscles, a beating heart and pumping gills — telltale signs of potential prey. The dolphin is the first true mammal with these super sensory powers, scientists report. It detects electrical fields using organs on its snout that were once considered simple remnants of long-lost whiskers. Electroreception — the ability to sense these bioelectric fields — has already been described in sharks, amphibians, fish and some egg-laying mammals. “We were really surprised to find this in the dolphin. Nobody had expected it,” says sensory biologist Wolf Hanke of the University of Rostock in Germany. Hanke and his team first suspected the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia guianensis) had electropowers based on the size of organs called vibrissal crypts on its snout. Earlier work suggested the crypts, shaped like pits, have a rich blood supply. “We thought they must have some function — they were pretty big — and otherwise would have disappeared during evolution,” Hanke says of the crypts. When the team considered the dolphins’ lifestyle, the idea became even more plausible. Scientists think the dolphins, which live off the eastern edge of Central and South America, are benthic feeders, gulping fish from the seafloor. The resulting plumes of sediment can limit visibility and echolocation, meaning a different way of detecting prey would be especially helpful. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 15618 - Posted: 07.28.2011

By Sander van der Linden For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung​ put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of dreaming. Freud’s theory centred around the notion of repressed longing -- the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved, repressed wishes. Carl Jung (who studied under Freud) also believed that dreams had psychological importance, but proposed different theories about their meaning. Since then, technological advancements have allowed for the development of other theories. One prominent neurobiological theory of dreaming is the “activation-synthesis hypothesis,” which states that dreams don’t actually mean anything: they are merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. Humans, the theory goes, construct dream stories after they wake up, in a natural attempt to make sense of it all. Yet, given the vast documentation of realistic aspects to human dreaming as well as indirect experimental evidence that other mammals such as cats also dream, evolutionary psychologists have theorized that dreaming really does serve a purpose. In particular, the “threat simulation theory” suggests that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defence mechanism that provided an evolutionary advantage because of its capacity to repeatedly simulate potential threatening events – enhancing the neuro-cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and avoidance. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15617 - Posted: 07.28.2011

By David Biello A drink of alcohol, any kind; "rails" of white powder; a pill prescribed by a pediatrician to assist with attention deficit disorder. Whatever the poison, addiction can take a powerful toll. Nor is it limited to drugs—food, sex and even death-defying stunts can exert the same pull. But it seems to be a particular breed of person who succumbs to addiction, most recently exemplified by the late singer Amy Winehouse​. She joins the "27 Club" of rock stars who died, via addictive behavior, too young—Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. Nor is it limited to the rock-and-roll lifestyle—Thomas de Quincey invented the modern addiction memoir with his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821. In fact, the list of addicts often overlaps with the giants of culture. So is there a link between creativity and addiction? To find out, Scientific American spoke with neuroscientist David Linden of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning and Gambling Feel So Good. Is there a link between creativity and addiction? No. I think the link is not between creativity and addiction per se. There is a link between addiction and things which are a prerequisite for creativity…. We know that 40 percent of a predisposition to addiction is genetically determined, via studies on heritability in families and twins. There's no single addiction gene. We don't even know all the genes involved in conferring addiction risk. But the ones we do know have to do with the signaling of the neurotransmitter dopamine for pleasure and reward. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15616 - Posted: 07.28.2011

By Christof Koch Recently developed powerful, yet also delicate and refined, genetic tools can inva­sively probe nervous systems of animals, far surpassing the safer but much cruder techniques that psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists use to observe the human brain. Now in a remarkable series of experiments, researchers have located a trigger for aggression in mice—providing us with fresh insights into the workings of our human consciousness. You might object that mice and men are not the same and that studying the murine mind is different from studying the human mind. This fact is obviously true. Yet both Mus musculus and Homo sapiens are nature’s children, sharing much perceptual, cognitive and affective processing. The same process of relentless evolutionary selection has shaped both species—our last common ancestor was a mere 75 million years ago. The structure of their brains, and of their genomes, reflects this similarity. Indeed, only a neuroanatomist can tell a rice grain–size piece of mouse cortex from the same chunk of human cortex. If you think of a mouse as a mere automaton, Google “world’s smartest mouse.” The top hit will be a YouTube video of Brain Storm, a cute brown mouse running a complicated obstacle course—crossing an abyss on a rope; jumping through hoops; going up and down a seesaw, over a pencil, up a steep incline and down a ladder; and navigating around obstacles. It hesitates on occasion, sniffs the air but, once started, speedily completes the circuit. The amazing finesse and utility of contemporary molecular biology techniques are illustrated in recent experiments dealing with sex and power—the twin themes around which much of popular culture, psychoanalysis and art is centered. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 15615 - Posted: 07.28.2011

by Sara Reardon The "singing" in this video may not be your idea of a pop masterpiece—indeed it may make you want to throw your speakers through the window—but to female mice the sounds are as sweet as the deep crooning of Frank Sinatra. In a new study, researchers captured approximately 100 singing mice, also known as Alston's Brown Mice (Scotinomys teguina) from Costa Rica, and implanted some of the males with extra male hormones while castrating the others. The hormonally enhanced males sang more rapidly and with a wider range of frequencies than the castrati—and females noticed the difference. When the researchers played the recordings for a female mouse through speakers on either end of her cage, she walked over to the speaker piping out the tunes of the pumped-up male and sat down in front of it, like a groupie at a concert. The female probably assumes that this male would make a better mate and father, the researchers report in the August issue of Animal Behavior, though you never know with pop stars. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 15614 - Posted: 07.28.2011

by Virginia Morell Asian elephants have long been considered somewhat antisocial. Instead of living in large, tightly knit herds, as do female elephants on the African savanna, those in Asia were thought to have only small groups of friends and few outside connections. But a new study shows that many female Asian elephants are more like social butterflies, with numerous pals. And they're able to maintain strong friendships even with those they have not seen in a year or more. The study adds Asian elephants to a short list of other species, including dolphins, that are able to maintain complex social relationships despite not having daily contact, an ability regarded as being cognitively demanding. "People thought they knew what Asian elephants were doing [socially] based on what they saw them doing in captivity," says Shermin de Silva, a behavioral ecologist with the Elephant, Forest and Environment Conservation Trust in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the lead author of the new study. Asian elephants are also extremely difficult to study in the wild, she adds. They inhabit dense forests, so researchers are usually able to observe the animals only by climbing tall trees or watching them when they gather at water holes. But 30 years ago, one population of Asian elephants on Sri Lanka became observable because it lost its forest home. People logged the trees, converted the land into teak plantations, and subsequently dammed the region's main river, creating the large Uda Walawe reservoir. In 1972, 308 square kilometers around the reservoir were made into the Udawalawe National Park. Some 800 to 1200 former forest elephants now live here on grass- and scrublands that resemble an East African savanna, de Silva says. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15613 - Posted: 07.28.2011

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