Tiffany O'Callaghan Invasive biopsy is currently the only sure way to diagnose the degenerative neurological condition Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD). But a highly sensitive assay could change that, providing a fast, accurate alternative for early diagnosis of this rare but deadly condition. In its most common form, known as sporadic CJD, the disease affects roughly one in a million people. Beginning in the 1990s, several cases of a variation of CJD known as vCJD were reported among people who had consumed beef from cows infected with another disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The findings, published online in Nature Medicine1, also suggest that the assay — developed by microbiologist Ryuichiro Atarashi of Nagasaki University, Japan, and his team — could pave the way for the screening of broad sectors of the population. CJD is a prion disease, in which an isomer of a common protein known as the prion protein (PrP) takes on an abnormal shape and becomes an infectious variant called PrPSc. This variant is thought to trigger the subsequent malformation of other PrP proteins. Unlike their normal counterparts, PrPSc prions cannot be broken down, and instead accumulate — often clustering in brain tissue. The pockets of abnormal tissue that result cause brain tissue to develop a sponge-like appearance, and because prion conditions can be spread by affected humans or animals, the diseases are often referred to as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). Humans can be affected by several such conditions, while in addition to BSE in cows, there are several other such disorders among animals, including a condition called scrapie in sheep and hamsters. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 14935 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By KATHRYN J. ZERBE, M.D. Reading is an inestimable resource in just about any undertaking, especially so when one discovers a work that performs a real service and is written with passion, accuracy and pragmatism. Such is the case with two unflinching personal narratives on eating disorders, Portia de Rossi’s “Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain” and the 25th anniversary edition of “Bulimia: A Guide to Recovery,” by Lindsey Hall and Leigh Cohn. Both works address a question that often comes up from patients with eating disorders, as well as family members, in my own office practice: “Are there any especially helpful books or resources that can assist in recovery?” Today, when the Internet is full of sites that offer more facts about how to stay obsessed with food or weight than what might be done to recover, it’s a question that’s not always easy to answer. Ms. de Rossi’s “Unbearable Lightness” (Simon & Schuster, 2010) is a mesmerizing account of the devastating psychological and physical effects of self-starvation, excessive exercise and purging. Many readers who know about the range of life-threatening medical consequences of anorexia will still be shaken by seeing the photographs — and reading the wrenching captions — of the actress when, weighing a mere 78 pounds, she collapsed and nearly died. The agony of being scrutinized daily, if not hourly, by others in one’s profession may not be the issue that resonates most deeply for those outside of the worlds of acting or dance. But every patient I have treated in practice will recognize something in the descriptions of harsh self-criticism, denial and pretense that Ms. de Rossi poignantly but realistically makes explicit in her memoir. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 14934 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho — Teenagers who thought about or attempted suicide were more likely to have suffered sleep disorders in earlier years, researchers say. Idaho State University psychology professor Maria Wong, who worked on the study, said the finding should aid parents, educators and others in identifying teens at risk of harming themselves. She said adolescents are more willing to talk about sleep problems than suicidal thoughts or attempts, giving adults an opening to discuss and monitor problems that may be more serious than simply a teen's trouble falling asleep. "It's easier to broach the topic of sleep with patients, since it's easier to talk about a physical problem," said Wong, who worked with colleagues from the University of Michigan on the study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. "It's easier for them to answer questions like, 'Did you sleep well last night?' and get into why they are not sleeping well and how they are feeling lately," Wong said. The study tracked 280 boys and 112 girls from Michigan, beginning when they were ages 12 to 14 and ending when they were between 15 and 17. Participants responded to such questions as whether they had nightmares, felt tired or otherwise had trouble sleeping. They also were asked about whether they had cut or otherwise hurt themselves. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 14933 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By Jesse Bering Author’s note: The following excerpt is the Introduction to my new book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life. God came from an egg. At least, that’s how He came to me. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very fancy egg. More specifically, it was an ersatz Fabergé egg decorated with colorful scenes from the Orient. Now about two dozen years before the episode I’m about to describe, somewhere in continental Europe, this particular egg was shunted through the vent of an irritable hen, pierced with a needle and drained of its yolk, and held in the palm of a nimble artist who, for hours upon hours, painstakingly hand-painted it with elaborate images of a stereotypical Asian society. The artist, who specialized in such kitsch materials, then sold the egg along with similar wares to a local vendor, who placed it carefully in the front window of a side-street souvenir shop. Here it eventually caught the eye of a young German girl, who coveted it, purchased it, and after some time admiring it in her apartment against the backdrop of the Black Forest, wrapped it in layers of tissue paper, placed it in her purse, said a prayer for its safe transport, and took it on a transatlantic journey to a middle-class American neighborhood where she was to live with her new military husband. There, in the family room of her modest new home, on a bookshelf crammed with romance novels and knickknacks from her earlier life, she found a cozy little nook for the egg and propped it up on a miniature display stand. A year or so later she bore a son, Peter, who later befriended the boy across the street, who suffered me as a tagalong little brother, the boy who, one aimless summer afternoon, would enter the German woman’s family room, see the egg, become transfixed by this curiosity, and crush it accidentally in his seven-year-old hand. © 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14932 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By SINDYA N. BHANOO For some genes, either the father’s version or the mother’s version is active, but not both. Which version of the gene works is determined before conception, as the sperm and egg are developing, in a process called imprinting. By mimicking that process in the lab, and turning off a gene in mice, scientists have produced a change in social dominance behavior. In laboratory tests, mice with the paternal version of the gene known as Grb10 inactivated were more aggressive in their behavior, according to new research in the journal Nature. The researchers had two methods of measuring social dominance. They found that mice with the inactive gene engaged in more social grooming, and nibbled off more fur and whiskers of other mice. Also, when two mice were placed in a tube and approached each other, mice with the inactive gene were less likely to back down and turn away. “Both males and females with the paternal gene off are adopting this socially dominant behavior,” said Andrew Ward, a geneticist with the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Bath in Britain. In natural reproduction, the paternal version of the gene is generally active, Dr. Ward said, but some mice may have a greater number of active versions than others. “We’ve shown the extreme,” he said. “But you might have a more subtle variation in how much this behavior is expressed.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14931 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic. He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life. I’ll admit I’m a skeptic. But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging. M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes. But how exactly did these study volunteers, all seeking stress reduction in their lives but new to the practice, meditate? So many people talk about meditating these days. Within four miles of our Bay Area home, there are at least six centers that offer some type of meditation class, and I often hear phrases like, “So how was your sit today?” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14930 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Children who sleep less than their peers may be at greater risk for abnormal blood glucose levels and other metabolic problems. Researchers studied the sleep patterns of 308 children ages 4 to 10, half of them overweight or obese. They used wrist monitors to measure their sleep time over seven days, and did blood tests for cardiovascular risk indicators like glucose, lipids, insulin and C-reactive protein. The study, published in the February issue of Pediatrics, found that obesity and abnormal blood tests were four times as common in children who slept the least, and three times as common in those who used the weekend to catch up on sleep lost during school days. “We can’t rule out that obese children first became obese and then started sleeping less,” said Dr. David Gozal, the senior author. “But it’s unlikely.” Among all children, obese or not, shorter sleep and greater variability in sleep patterns were more likely to be associated with abnormal blood tests. The researchers conclude that irregular sleep by itself may be a risk factor for metabolic problems. “We sacrifice sleep to whatever else we do,” said Dr. Gozal, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago. “But as parents we should be very attentive to preserving the treasure that is sleep — it means health for children’s brains and their bodies, their happiness and their well-being.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 14929 - Posted: 01.29.2011

Mini-strokes are thought to be fairly fleeting, often lasting a few minutes, but experiments conducted at a neuroscience lab in British Columbia paint a picture of a more lasting effect. Symptoms of mini-strokes are gone within 24 hours and no apparent lingering effects although they do heighten a person's risk of full-blown stroke in the future. They're transient, as one might infer from their formal name, transient ischemic attack. They've come and gone. Now researchers have used transcranial magnetic stimulation to examine patterns of brain activity in 13 patients who had experienced TIAs 14 to 30 days earlier, and compared them to the brain activity of 13 healthy people. Lara Boyd, a neuroscientist with the Brain Research Centre at Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and the University of British Columbia, said magnetic resonance imaging might or might not reveal a little damaged area or lesion in the brain after a TIA. "But we wondered if we could maybe detect something with neurophysiology, with electro-physiology, that has previously gone unnoticed," she said in an interview. The non-invasive method involves putting a pulse of electrical current into the brain; for example, it allows scientists to measure how much current is needed to cause a motor response, such as a muscle twitch. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 14928 - Posted: 01.29.2011

by Sara Reardon Next time you have a cold, be glad you're not a messenger pigeon carrying important orders over a battlefield. Breathing through both nostrils, especially the right one, is essential to these birds' famed ability to fly away home, scientists report today in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The researchers saddled a group of homing pigeons with GPS tracking devices, placed a rubber plug in either their right or left nostrils, and released them 25 miles outside of their home in Pisa, Italy. Pigeons with their left nostrils blocked had a little more trouble navigating than clear-nosed pigeons, but eventually made it home. Birds with their right nostrils blocked made it back, too, but they stopped more often and took an even more circular route than the others. The researchers believe that the birds needed time to gather more smells and construct a map based on odors in the wind. And the finding that the right nostril is the better sniffer suggests that the right and left hemispheres of bird brains have different functions. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 14927 - Posted: 01.29.2011

IF TROUT in the St Lawrence seaway around Montreal, Canada, look less stressed than usual, it could be that they're chilling out on Prozac. For three months, Sébastien Sauvé at the University of Montreal exposed groups of 50 native brook trout to sewage from the city's sewage works, mixed with clean water from the St Lawrence (Chemosphere, DOI: 10.1016/j.chemosphere. 2010.12.026). After screening their liver, brain and muscle, they found several well-known antidepressants, including fluoxetine, better known as Prozac, and paroxetine, aka Paxil or Seroxat. Although the amounts were small - typically less than a nanogram of drug per gram of fish tissue - Sauvé warns that over time, the drugs could impact their behaviour and ecology. He and his team showed that the brain cells of fish exposed to the effluent in a Petri dish were less active than normal cells. Sauvé has not yet monitored the fish for changes in courtship or other behaviours, but says the study raises enough questions to dig further. He adds that levels of the drugs in the fish muscle were so tiny they would pose no risk to consumers. The bigger worry is whether fish health and ecology is being affected by effluent from a city where some 500 million antidepressant pills are purchased each year - a level Sauvé says is likely to be comparable with other big cities. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14926 - Posted: 01.29.2011

Catherine de Lange, reporter Take a look at the short video above. See the outer ring of bubbles move up and down as it changes colour? Well, that might be what you think is happening, but take a closer look and you'll see that nothing is actually moving at all. So what's happening? This visual illusion, created by Dario Deefrag, pulls off the opposite trick to this one, which uses motion to trick our brain into seeing colours differently. But we don't know exactly why this one works. If you think you know, we'd love to hear your ideas - just post a comment below. We'll consult an illusion specialist to choose the best answer, which will receive a copy of our latest book, Why Can't Elephants Jump?. Next week, we'll (hopefully!) explain all - and bring you another cool optical illusion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14925 - Posted: 01.29.2011

An NIH researcher has captured video images of a previously unknown form of communication between brain cells that might hold clues to the way learning shapes the brain. The videos, offered as a resource for educators teaching high school, undergraduate and graduate students, are available on the Web from Science Signaling. These newly recorded signals are emitted along the length of nerve fibers. Earlier research has documented the transmission of signals across the synapse — a gap between individual nerve cells, known as neurons. The new videos show that when neurons communicate, electrical signals emitted along the length of neurons stimulates nearby brain cells known as glia, or glial cells. As a result, the glial cells begin making a substance called myelin, which coats the nerve fibers and allows electrical charges to travel with greater speed through the brain's networks. Other studies have shown that the process of myelination underlies learning and is crucial for the development of new skills. The teaching resource on the Science Signaling website features short video clips that document these previously unknown non-synaptic signals. "For the last 100 years researchers have studied how information traverses the brain, crossing synapses and traveling from one nerve cell to the next," said Dr. Fields. "We can now see another type of communication, in which cells along a neuron’s length can sense the chemical signals the neuron releases."

Keyword: Glia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14924 - Posted: 01.29.2011

Eating foods high in trans-fats and saturated fats increases the risk of depression, according to a Spanish study published in the United States Wednesday, confirming previous studies that linked "junk food" with the disease. Researchers also showed that some products, such as olive oil, which is high in healthy omega-9 fatty acids, can fight against the risk of mental illness. Authors of the wide-reaching study, from the universities of Navarra and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, followed and analyzed the diet and lifestyle of over 12,000 volunteers over six years. When the study began, none of the participants had been diagnosed with depression; by the end, 657 of them were new sufferers. "Participants with an elevated consumption of trans-fats (fats present in artificial form in industrially-produced pastries and fast food...) presented up to a 48 percent increase in the risk of depression when they were compared to participants who did not consume these fats," the head study author said. Almudena Sanchez-Villegas, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, also noted that in the event "more trans-fats were consumed, the greater the harmful effect they produced in the volunteers." © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 14923 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By Bruce Bower Sports fans have cried foul for 25 years as scientists have dumped statistical ice water on basketball players' "hot hands." It seems obvious to even casual spectators that competitors occasionally score a bunch of baskets in a row and need to keep shooting while they're in the zone. Sorry, b-ball buffs. Researchers have yet to document any chance-defying scoring runs among even the best players. Kobe Bryant may well sink shot after shot, game in and game out, but even this all-star's season-long pattern of hits and misses fits within the mathematical definition of a random sequence, scientists say. Kobe's chances of hitting a shot are no greater following a swish than a miss. Still, it's perfectly natural to assume that if a sharpshooter sinks one basket — or if a jockey rides a winning horse in the first race of the day, or if a stock goes up in value on Monday, to name a few — it boosts the probability of the same thing happening with the next shot, race or trading session, says psychologist Benjamin Scheibehenne of the University of Basel in Switzerland. In his view, effective thinkers are primed to expect streaks of the same outcome in basketball scoring and other sequences of events — the laws of probability be damned. A hair-trigger sensitivity for perceiving clumps of events makes sense because most animal species — including people — search for food and other vital resources that are typically found in patches, he asserts. Human ancestors did so. And in the modern world, information foragers on the Internet and snack seekers in the supermarket also find what they want in clusters. So a tendency to look for clumpy patterns in sequences of events pays off when it counts, even if it distorts judgments about basketball scoring and the stock market. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14922 - Posted: 01.29.2011

by Greg Miller Sizing up relationships between other people is key to success in human society. Whether your aim is navigating office politics or climbing the social ladder, you'd better know who's the chief and who's a pawn. A new study suggests that babies acquire this skill even before they learn to speak. In the 28 January issue of Science, researchers report that 10-month-old infants perceive social dominance and can predict who's likely to prevail when a conflict arises. In the past decade, developmental psychologists have shown that babies are remarkably perceptive about the social world around them. Before the end of their first year, for example, infants understand that people sometimes have competing goals, and they take notice of whether one individual helps or hinders another. In the new study, Lotte Thomsen, then a graduate student with Harvard University psychologist Susan Carey, and colleagues investigated whether infants also have expectations about who's most likely to get their way when two individuals have conflicting goals. They brought into the lab 144 infants between 8 months and 16 months old, accompanied by their mothers. Seated on mom's lap, each baby watched videos starring two crude cartoon figures—each essentially a block with an eye and a mouth (see video). (Psychologists often use simplified figures like these instead of more realistic ones to avoid confounding cues from facial expressions, gestures, or body posture.) © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14921 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By ANTHONY GOTTLIEB The men of old, reported Socrates, saw madness as a gift that provides knowledge or inspiration. “It was when they were mad that the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona achieved so much; . . . when sane they did little or nothing.” Today, insanity can still bring the gift of knowledge, but in a different manner. Much of what we know about the brain comes from seeing what happens when it is damaged, or affected in unusual ways. If the Delphic seer were to turn up tomorrow, neuroscientists would whisk her straight off into a brain scanner. V. S. Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, San Diego, has done as much as anyone to reveal the workings of the mind through the malfunctions of the brain. We meet some mighty strange malfunctions in his new book, “The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human.” There is a man who, after a head injury, cannot recognize or respond to people when he sees them, but can happily chat on the phone. We meet a woman who laughs when she should be yelping in pain. There are patients with Capgras syndrome, who come to believe that people who are close to them (or, in one case, the patient’s poodle) are imposters. We meet unfortunates with an intense desire to have their own healthy limbs amputated, others who are paralyzed on one side but insist against all evidence that they are not, and, in Cotard’s syndrome, people who sincerely believe they are dead. Ramachandran weaves such tales together to build a picture of the specialized areas of the brain and the pathways between them, drawing his map by relating particular types of damage to their corresponding mental deficits. A recurring theme is the way in which many delusions appear to result from the brain trying to make sense of signals that have gone haywire. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Laterality
Link ID: 14920 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN When inexperienced chess players sit down to play against experts, they probably wonder what it is that makes the experts so good that it seems they are almost playing a different game. New research suggests that one difference is that the experts use more of their brains. In a study in the current issue of the journal PLoS One, a team of scientists in Germany showed experts and novices simple geometric objects and simple chess positions and asked the subjects to identify them. Reaction times were measured and brain activity was monitored using functional M.R.I. scans. On the identification of the geometric objects, the subjects performed the same, showing that the chess experts had no special visualization skills. When the subjects were shown the chess positions, the experts identified them faster. Focusing on an element of an earlier study on pattern and object recognition by chess experts, the researchers had expected to see parts of the left hemispheres of the experts’ brains — which are involved in object recognition — react more quickly than those of the novices when they performed the chess tasks. But the reaction times were the same. What set the experts apart was that parts of their right brain hemispheres — which are more involved in pattern recognition — also lit up with activity. The experts were processing the information in two places at once. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Laterality
Link ID: 14919 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times Among the offerings at this year's Sundance Film Festival is a documentary about a trailblazing chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky who played a key role in the scientific debate over what it means to be human. The James Marsh film, "Project Nim," explores the life of the primate — cheekily named after linguist Noam Chomsky — that was raised like a human child and taught American Sign Language in the 1970s in an effort to prove that language was not exclusive to humans. Four decades later, the questions raised by the experiment are still far from settled. As an infant, Chimpsky was taken to live with the LaFarge family in New York City. There, among seven human "siblings," he was raised just as a human child, taught to sign, dressed in sweaters, even breastfed from his human foster mother. Get important science news and discoveries delivered to your inbox with our Science & Environment newsletter. Sign up » "It was really 'Brady Bunch Plus Chimp,' with a mess of children coming and going," said Elizabeth Hess, whose book "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human" served as the foundation for the film. The arrangement was intended to settle a longstanding feud between Chomsky and psychologist B.F. Skinner about whether language was the key factor that separated humans from other animals, Hess said: "Skinner argued that even chimps could acquire language and Chomsky said language was exclusive to humans." Los Angeles Times, Copyright 2011

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 14918 - Posted: 01.25.2011

By Emily Sohn Frédéric Chopin's music was moving and expressive. But the Polish composer and pianist was a frail and sickly man who died young; his life ended just 39 years after it began. Over the years, experts have proposed a variety of diagnoses for Chopin's health woes, ranging from bipolar disorder to pulmonary tuberculosis. A new analysis adds another theory. Regular hallucinations, bouts of melancholy and other symptoms point to epilepsy, the researchers say. Their findings may offer new insight into a gifted man and his brief life. "The hallucinations of Chopin were considered the manifestation of a sensitive soul, a romantic cliché," said Manuel Várquez Caruncho, a radiologist at the Xeral-Calde Hospital Complex in Lugo, Spain. "We think that to split the romanticized view from reality could help to better understand the man." The results of Chopin's autopsy have long been lost, but plenty of scientists and historians have written about the composer's health. Born in 1810, Chopin suffered throughout his life from breathing troubles and fevers. He was emaciated, coughed often and had frequent lung infections. He had diarrhea as a teen and severe headaches in adulthood. Melancholy plagued him. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 14917 - Posted: 01.25.2011

by Deborah Kotz Want to help your kid avoid a weight problem? Limiting fast-food meals and screen time is a start, but parents may also want to set an earlier bedtime. That's the conclusion of a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. The University of Chicago researchers monitored the sleep patterns of 308 children ages 4 to 10 for a week and compared their sleep patterns with their body mass index. Kids who had a healthy BMI got about the same amount of sleep every night -- about 8 hours -- but then slept in on the weekends to make up for lost sleep. Obese kids, on the other hand, tended to get fewer and fewer hours of sleep as the week progressed and tended not to make up for lost sleep on the weekends. The combination of large sleep variations and not enough catch-up sleep on the weekend was linked to worse health effects such as high levels of insulin, "bad" LDL cholesterol, and the inflammation marker C-reactive protein -- all of which raise the risk of future diabetes and heart disease. Like adults, kids who don't sleep enough may eat extra fat and calories to give themselves an energy boost to overcome chronic drowsiness. "Sleep patterns at the lower end of sleep duration, particularly in the presence of irregularity, were strongly associated with increased health risk," the researchers wrote. Of course, this doesn't prove that too little sleep actually causes obesity and other ill health effects. It could simply be that kids with erratic sleep patterns have other health habits that predispose them to obesity like poorer nutrition habits or less physical activity. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Obesity; Sleep
Link ID: 14916 - Posted: 01.25.2011