by Wendy Zukerman A hooked herb, root extract and a dash of bark – it may sound like a witches' brew, but these compounds could provide treatments for diseases that have so far foiled western doctors, such as Parkinson's and irritable bowel syndrome. For over 2000 years Chinese doctors have treated "the shakes" – now known as Parkinson's disease – with gou teng, a herb with hook-like branches. Early this year, 115 people with Parkinson's were given a combination of traditional Chinese medical herbs, including gou teng, or a placebo for 13 weeks. At the end of the study, volunteers who had taken the herbs slept better and had more fluent speech than those taking the placebo. Parkinson's symptoms, such as muscle tremors, slowness of movement and rigidity, are caused by the progressive destruction of brain cells that produce dopamine. Previous work has suggested that an abundance of a protein called alpha-synuclein may be to blame. Current treatments aim to boost levels of dopamine, which only partly alleviates symptoms and does not affect the protein clusters. It is thought that clumps of alpha-synuclein accumulate because brain cells cannot remove them through autophagy – a type of programmed cell death. Mice without the genes needed for autophagy quickly develop Parkinson's-like symptoms. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 15458 - Posted: 06.18.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer Stare at a psychedelic image for long enough and you'll be able to colour in a greyscale photo with your eyes. You can try it out in the video above. Fix your eyes on the dot in the middle of the picture and watch what happens when the image changes. The animation was originally submitted to psychologist Richard Wiseman's blog and is one of the best examples of the afterimage effect we've come across. It's a well-known optical illusion that occurs when the eyes' photoreceptors are overstimulated from staring at an image. These receptors lose sensitivity but when you look at a neutral image, the surrounding cells that were not being excited send out a strong signal and you perceive complementary colours. Now you can create these illusions with your own images using Photoshop. One tutorial available online was created by graphic designer John Sadowski. Let us know if you manage to create any stunning examples of the illusion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15457 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Dave Mosher Kids spend an increasing fraction of their formative years online, and it is a habit they dutifully carry into adulthood. Under the right circumstances, however, a love affair with the Internet may spiral out of control and even become an addiction. Whereas descriptions of online addiction are controversial at best among researchers, a new study cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain. The work, published June 3 in PLoS ONE, suggests self-assessed Internet addiction, primarily through online multiplayer games, rewires structures deep in the brain. What's more, surface-level brain matter appears to shrink in step with the duration of online addiction. "I'd be surprised if playing online games for 10 to 12 hours a day didn't change the brain," says neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who wasn't involved in the study. "The reason why Internet addiction isn't a widely recognized disorder is a lack of scientific evidence. Studies like this are exactly what is needed to recognize and settle on its diagnostic criteria," she says. Loosely defined, addiction is a disease of the brain that compels someone to obsess over, obtain and abuse something, despite unpleasant health or social effects. And "internet addiction" definitions run the gamut, but most researchers similarly describe it as excessive (even obsessive) Internet use that interferes with the rhythm of daily life. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15456 - Posted: 06.18.2011

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered that the innate ability to estimate quantities is impaired in children who have a math learning disability. The link between difficulty estimating quantities and math difficulties was seen only in children who had a math learning disability, and not in those who did poorly in math but were not considered to be learning disabled. "The findings suggest that students may struggle with math for very different reasons," said Kathy Mann Koepke, Ph.D., director of the Mathematics and Science Cognition and Learning program at the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which funded the study. "Research to identify these reasons may lead to new ways of identifying those at risk, and developing the means to help them." Math learning disability is also referred to as dyscalculia. The study was published in Child Development and was conducted by Michèle Mazzocco, Ph.D., at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and her colleagues, Lisa Feigenson, Ph.D., and Justin Halberda, Ph.D., also at Johns Hopkins. In earlier research, Drs. Feigenson and Halberda have shown that the innate ability to estimate and compare quantities is present in infancy and improves with age.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15455 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News Researchers in Oxford have begun creating a bank of artificially grown brain cells from Parkinson's patients, BBC news has learned. They are using a new stem cell technique that allows them to turn a small piece of skin from the patient into a small piece of brain. This is the first time this has been done in a large-scale study aimed at finding cures for the disease. Researchers say they can analyse nerve cells as they start to deteriorate. The first batch of nerve cells have been grown from a 56-year-old Oxfordshire man, Derek Underwood. He had to take early retirement because of the progression of the disease. Mr Underwood will be the first of 50 patients whose skin cells will be grown into brain cells as part of a five year study. According Dr Richard Wade Martins of Oxford University, who is leading the study, the aim is to build up a "brain bank" which will enable researchers to study how the disease develops in unprecedented detail. "The brain is an inaccessible organ and you can't get bits of people's brain to study very easily," he said. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 15454 - Posted: 06.18.2011

by Carl Zimmer; For tens of millions of Americans, pain is not just an occasional 
nuisance—a stubbed toe, a paper cut—but a constant and torturous companion. Chronic pain can be focused on an arthritic knee or a bad back, diffused throughout the body, or even located virtually in an amputated limb. It can linger for years. And it can transform the world so that merely the light brush of a finger is an agonizing experience. The daily devastation can be so intense that people with chronic pain are up to six times as likely as those who are pain-free to report suicidal thoughts. Despite the toll, chronic pain has been relatively neglected by 
doctors. Perhaps that’s because it seems less real to them than other, more tangible medical disorders. With no equivalent of a stethoscope 
or thermometer to measure pain objectively, they have had to rely 
entirely on their patients’ testimony. As neuroscientists learn more about the biological basis of pain, the situation is finally beginning to change. Most remarkably, unfolding research shows that chronic pain can cause concrete, physiological changes in the brain. After several months of chronic pain, a person’s brain begins to shrink. The longer people suffer, the more gray matter they lose. With that bad news, though, comes a message of hope. In documenting the damage that chronic pain causes, neuroscientists are also beginning to decipher how it comes to exist in the first place. Those insights suggest better treatments and cures. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15453 - Posted: 06.18.2011

A man in the US, who was blinded in one eye 55 years ago, has had his sight restored, according to the Journal of Medical Case Reports. The patient was eight when his retina was detached after he was hit in the right eye with a stone. When the retina is detached for a long time it can be permanently damaged, so re-attaching it might not restore vision. Doctors said restoring sight after this length of time was a medical first. The man was 63 when he went to the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, saying he had pain and redness in his eye. There was swelling, bleeding and a high fluid pressure in his right eye. After washing the eye out and treatment with a drug which stopped new blood vessels forming - the eye went from completely blind to being able to detect the source of a bright light. Doctors thought this was encouraging enough to try re-attaching the retina. After surgery he was able to see again. Surgeons believe it was successful because of the low "height" of the retinal detachment. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15452 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Ben Harder, Those who believe in free will might be troubled to learn a few secrets about viruses, bacteria and parasites. While it may sound like science fiction, science hints at the potential for microbes to influence our minds, or at least our behavior. Granted, with very limited exceptions, there’s no conclusive proof that foreign agents can control us from within. But when you consider the evidence with an open mind, it’s interesting to consider the possibilities. The latest relevant finding seems innocuous enough. Last month, three insect and plant disease researchers in the University of California system reported a discovery about the tomato spotted wilt virus. As its name suggests, this virus infects and damages tomato plants. It’s harmless to people. To jump from plant to plant, the virus relies on insects known as thrips. A thrip feeds by sticking its oral probe into a plant’s cells and sucking out the contents. If a cell happens to contain the virus, the thrip sucks it up, too. Scientists already knew that virus-infected tomato plants are more appealing to thrips than uninfected plants. The California researchers discovered something else: Once a thrip consumes the virus, its behavior changes. It spends more time feeding, and it licks more plant cells in the process, coating the next tomato plant with the virus. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Stress
Link ID: 15451 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Bruce Bower Bare-knuckled brawlers sometimes have to fight to be seen. College students chasing a person across campus frequently don’t notice two guys beating up a lone victim in plain sight, a new set of experiments finds. That result has real-world implications, say psychologist Christopher Chabris of Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and his colleagues. Consider a Boston police officer who was sentenced to prison in 1998 because jurors didn’t believe his claim that, while running after a murder suspect, he passed but didn’t see fellow officers pummeling a misidentified suspect. Science can’t determine what the Beantown cop actually saw, but his story was plausible, Chabris’ team reports in a paper published June 9 in the online journal i-Perception. “Even under less demanding conditions than the police officer must have experienced, it’s possible to miss something as obvious as a fight,” says psychologist and study coauthor Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois in Champaign. Previous attention research has found, for example, that volunteers counting passes made by basketball players on a video don’t see a gorilla-suited person walk through the scene (SN: 5/21/11, p. 16). Related research conducted by psychologist Jason Watson of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City indicates that talking on a cell phone distracts most car drivers from noticing road hazards (SN Online: 3/31/10). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15450 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By JOHN S. SPARKS and CHRISTOPHER B. BRAUN Having departed the surreal landscape of the Ankarana tsingy with our precious collections, we head north to Antsiranana, a large town at the northern tip of Madagascar. Our focus now has shifted to obtaining data related to the evolution of hearing in the endemic Malagasy cichlids. As mentioned in a previous post, these fish have a highly modified gas bladder with elaborate anterior projections that actually enter the skull and come in contact with the inner ear. Any type of sound field will resonate within that air-filled cavity to vibrate, stimulating the ear. We have already shown that such fish have much more sensitive hearing than their relatives. We are trying to determine if there is an environmental correlation that might explain why some species have such sensitive hearing but others do not. Rivers can be very quiet places if they flow over a smooth flat bottom, but if the river bank contains richer three-dimensional structures like root masses or rock formations, the ambient noise can be so loud as to make hearing essentially useless. Most rivers contain both types of habitat, of course, so we’re here to see specifically where the fish are found and what the noise regime is like. Our first target is a species of Ptychochromis that has only been collected once before, and has never been examined alive. We head out over roads that skirt the northwestern flank of Montagne de Ambre (Amber Mountain), although these roads are more akin to boulder strewn canyons that put our 4WD vehicles to the test. After driving for a number of hours through trails barely wide enough for two people walking abreast, we run into mud so deep we are forced to turn back — there is not enough time for us to walk to our destination, so the most northerly cichlid ever collected in Madagascar will have to wait for another time. We are disappointed, but the smell of mud and Zebu excrement mélange is something we don’t mind leaving behind. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 15449 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Susan Gaidos Video games can be mesmerizing, even for a rhesus monkey. Which may explain, in part, why 6-year-old Jasper has been sitting transfixed at a computer screen in a Washington University lab for nearly an hour, his gaze trained on a small red ball. A more interesting reason for Jasper’s quiet demeanor is that he is hurling the ball at a moving target using just his thoughts. Jasper is not the only monkey to control objects with his mind. At the University of Pittsburgh, a pair of macaques manipulated a thought-controlled synthetic arm to grab and eat marsh­mallows. The monkeys then worked the arm to turn a doorknob — no muscle power required. In another case, a monkey in North Carolina transmitted its thoughts halfway around the world to set a Japanese robot in motion. Now it’s time to let humans give it a serious try. In a series of clinical trials, scientists are preparing to take thought-controlled technologies, known as brain-computer interfaces, to those who might benefit most. The trials are a major step in realizing what many scientists say is an ambitious, but fully obtainable, goal — to restore mobility and independence to people who have lost the use of their muscles through brain or spinal cord injury. Over the next few years, paralyzed patients will attempt to learn how to maneuver virtual hands and robotic arms to reach, push, grasp or eat. As the trials progress, researchers hope to train users to perform increasingly complex movements. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 15448 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By BENEDICT CAREY Scientists have designed a brain implant that restored lost memory function and strengthened recall of new information in laboratory rats — a crucial first step in the development of so-called neuroprosthetic devices to repair deficits from dementia, stroke and other brain injuries in humans. Though still a long way from being tested in humans, the implant demonstrates for the first time that a cognitive function can be improved with a device that mimics the firing patterns of neurons. In recent years neuroscientists have developed implants that allow paralyzed people to move prosthetic limbs or a computer cursor, using their thoughts to activate the machines. In the new work, being published Friday, researchers at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California used some of the same techniques to read neural activity. But they translated those signals internally, to improve brain function rather than to activate outside appendages. “It’s technically very impressive to pull something like this off, given our current level of technology,” said Daryl Kipke, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the experiment. “We are just scratching the surface when it comes to interacting with the brain, but this experiment shows what’s possible and the great potential of interacting with the brain in this way.” In a series of experiments, scientists at Wake Forest led by Sam A. Deadwyler trained rats to remember which of two identical levers to press to receive water; the animals first saw one of the two levers appear and then (after being distracted) had to remember to press the other lever to be rewarded. Repeated training on this task teaches rats the general rule, but in each trial the animal has to remember which lever appeared first, to inform the later choice. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15447 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By PAMELA PAUL It’s no shock that we can’t tell what the Botoxed are feeling. But it turns out that people with frozen faces have little idea what we’re feeling, either. No, Botox injections don’t zap brain cells. (At least not so far as we know.) According to a new study by David T. Neal, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, and Tanya L. Chartrand, a professor of marketing and psychology at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, people who have had Botox injections are physically unable to mimic emotions of others. This failure to mirror the faces of those they are watching or talking to robs them of the ability to understand what people are feeling, the study says. The idea for the paper stemmed from a study conducted in the 1980s, which found that long-married men and women began to resemble each other over time, especially if they were happily wed. “So we thought, what’s going to happen now that there’s Botox?” Dr. Neal said. The toxin might interfere with “embodied cognition,” the way in which facial feedback helps people perceive emotion. According to the theory in the study, a listener unconsciously imitates another person’s expression. This mimicry then generates a signal from the person’s face to his or her brain. Finally, the signal enables the listener to understand the other person’s meaning or intention. While the first two steps of this process had been established by research, it was unclear whether facial feedback helped people make better judgments about other peoples’ emotions. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15446 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By ROBBIE BROWN ELKMONT, Tenn. — Lynn Faust remembers the old days of firefly season here. You would hike into the woods at night, with nobody else around, waiting for one of nature’s strangest and most beautiful rituals. Then the fireflies would emerge, thousands and thousands of them, and under the moonlight they would all flash in unison. On. Off. On. Off. “It’s as though they wear little watches,” said Ms. Faust, 56, a biologist and naturalist who has studied fireflies for decades. “It’s awe-inspiring, it’s beautiful, it’s rhythmic and it’s bright. You’re surrounded by the fireflies.” These days, you are also surrounded by the tourists. The secret is out about this marvelously rare and very brief annual spectacle. About a thousand tourists a night come to Elkmont, a small trailhead in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, during the two weeks each June when the country’s largest population of synchronous fireflies puts on what locals call “the light show.” Reactions tend toward the spiritual, and people wander out of the woods with the quiet, dazed look of those who have seen aurora borealis or a solar eclipse, or spent an hour getting massaged at Sedona. “It’s mind-blowing, like a silent symphony,” said Daniel Carlson, 47, an engineer from Raleigh, N.C., lying flat on a blanket in the forest. “How? Why? Why here? We have no clue.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15445 - Posted: 06.16.2011

By SHARON LaFRANIERE MENGXI VILLAGE, China — On a chilly evening early last month, a mob of more than 200 people gathered in this tiny eastern China village at the entrance to the Zhejiang Haijiu Battery Factory, a maker of lead-acid batteries for motorcycles and electric bikes. They shouldered through an outer brick wall, swept into the factory office and, in an outpouring of pure fury, smashed the cabinets, desks and computers inside. News had spread that workers and villagers had been poisoned by lead emissions from the factory, which had operated for six years despite flagrant environmental violations. But the truth was even worse: 233 adults and 99 children were ultimately found to have concentrations of lead in their blood, up to seven times the level deemed safe by the Chinese government. One of them was 3-year-old Han Tiantian, who lived just across the road from the plant. Her father, Han Zongyuan, a factory worker, said he learned in March that she had absorbed enough lead to irreversibly diminish her intellectual capacity and harm her nervous system. “At the moment I heard the doctor say that, my heart was shattered,” Mr. Han said in an interview last week. “We wanted this child to have everything. That’s why we worked this hard. That’s why we poisoned ourselves at this factory. Now it turns out the child is poisoned too. I have no words to describe how I feel.” Such scenes of heartbreak and anger have been repeated across China in recent months with the discovery of case after case of mass lead poisoning — together with instances in which local governments tried to cover them up. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15444 - Posted: 06.16.2011

By ABBY GOODNOUGH and KATIE ZEZIMA BROCKTON, Mass. — Michael Capece had been snorting OxyContin for five years when a new version of the drug, intended to deter such abuse, hit the market last summer. The reformulated pills are harder to crush, turning instead into a gummy substance that cannot be easily snorted, injected or chewed. Instructed by his dealer, Mr. Capece, 21, tried microwaving one of the new pills, then sniffing up the burnt remains. Other addicts have tried to defeat the new formula by freezing, baking or soaking the pills in solvents ranging from soda to acetone. Many are ending up frustrated. “It’s too much work,” said Mr. Capece who entered a rehab program here last month. “It wasn’t anything I enjoyed.” A powerful narcotic meant for cancer patients and others with searing pain, OxyContin is designed to slowly release its active ingredient, oxycodone, over 12 hours. But after it was introduced in 1996, drug abusers quickly discovered that chewing an OxyContin tablet — or crushing one and snorting the powder, or injecting it with a needle — produced an instant high as powerful as heroin. It has been blamed for waves of addiction that have ravaged certain regions of the country, and has been a factor in many overdose deaths. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15443 - Posted: 06.16.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer How does an octopus locate a hidden meal? In this video, filmed by Michael Kuba and his team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, food is placed in one compartment of a maze denoted with a visual cue. The octopus picks the right route and successfully retrieves the treat. It's the first time that an octopus has been shown to guide one of its arms to a location, based on sensory input, using a complex movement. In the wild, octopuses use their arms to search for food in small crevices. Previously, it's been thought that they feel their way to a food source by simply using sensors on their tentacles. Now this research is showing that they are capable of more complex processing, in this case by combining information from their tentacles with visual input to achieve a goal. Six out of the seven octopuses tested successfully learned the task and used the strategy more often once it was mastered. It's only one example of clever tricks used by cephalopods. Check out our full-length feature to find out more about these animals' astounding mental skills. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15442 - Posted: 06.16.2011

by Mark Cohen My medical assistant put the chart on my desk. “your next patient is in room five, Dr. Cohen. Her name is Taylor and 
she’s a cutie!” “Thanks, Mary,” I said, pulling up Taylor’s medical record on my desktop computer. I glanced at the consultation request: Six-year-old girl with speech problem. As a developmental pediatrician, I am often called on to evaluate children’s speech and language. Those are among the most complex tasks the young brain has to master, so it’s no wonder many childhood disorders express themselves in those areas. Kids with developmental delay or autism commonly show up in the pediatrician’s office with a parent who simply says, “My child isn’t talking.” When I opened the door to the examining room, I saw a petite girl with long, blond hair sitting very still on the exam table. She wore a purple jumper over a short-sleeved white blouse, and her hair was tied at the back with a ribbon that matched her dress. She was deeply engrossed in reading a Dr. Seuss book. She looked up at me and smiled. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Dr. Cohen. What’s your name?” The girl continued to smile, but she didn’t say anything and quickly went back to her reading. Hmmm. Could just be a shy one, I thought. I turned to her mother. “I understand your daughter is having some problems with her speech. Can you tell me what your concerns are?” © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15441 - Posted: 06.16.2011

Meredith Wadman The unusual meeting was held in a conference room, but it might have been called a war room. Gathered inside a little-known research centre in southern Louisiana, the people who oversee chimpanzee research in the United States were preparing to battle for the survival of their enterprise. Although no other country besides Gabon carries out invasive experiments with chimpanzees, the United States continues such work at three major research facilities. Louisiana's New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) is the largest, with a population of 360 chimps, used by investigators from pharmaceutical companies and federal agencies to test new drugs and study diseases such as hepatitis. During the meeting, Thomas Rowell, director of the NIRC, stood up, surveyed the audience, and launched into a presentation about possible strategies to build public support for their work. Another slide went on to note that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends about US$12 million a year caring for the chimpanzees it supports (currently totalling 734), versus the billions in health-care costs for the human diseases that can be studied through experiments on chimpanzees. One of them, hepatitis C, currently affects at least 170 million people globally. If researchers don't have access to the chimp model, said Rowell, people afflicted with hepatitis C will suffer. "Their lifespans are going to be shortened. They will not have a proper quality of life." He called them a "silent voice". © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 15440 - Posted: 06.16.2011

By Mark Schaller We are prejudiced against all kinds of other people, based on superficial physical features: We react negatively to facial disfigurement; we avoid sitting next to people who are obese, or old, or in a wheelchair; we favor familiar folks over folks that are foreign. If I asked you why these prejudices exist and what one can do to eliminate them, your answer probably wouldn't involve the words "infectious disease." Perhaps it should. What does infectious disease have to do with these prejudices? The answer lies in something that I've come to call the "behavioral immune system." The behavioral immune system is our brain's way of engaging in a kind of preventative medicine. It's a suite of psychological mechanisms designed to detect the presence of disease-causing parasites in our immediate environment, and to respond to those things in ways that help us to avoid contact with them. This has many important implications – for prejudice, for sexual attraction, for social interaction, and even for the origins of cultural differences. (And, yes, for health too.) It makes immediate sense that people would develop aversions against people who actually have infectious diseases. But why does it also lead to these aversions to perfectly healthy people? Because it's impossible to directly detect the presence of bacteria and viruses and other microscopic parasites; and so we're forced to use crude superficial cues. Consequently, we make mistakes. Some of those mistakes lead to the irrational avoidance of things (including people) that pose no infection risk at all. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 15439 - Posted: 06.16.2011