By Tina Hesman Saey Fungi may be to thank for mammals’ warm blood, a new theory suggests. But exactly how hot-blooded an animal is may depend on balancing fungal protection with food consumption. The optimum body temperature for organisms to ward off fungal infections without burning too much energy is 36.7˚ Celsius — close to the core body temperatures of mammals, including humans, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City reported online November 9 in mBio. The finding is the latest piece of evidence for a theory that fungi may have been a driving force in the evolution of mammalian body temperatures. The new mathematical analysis also helps explain why mammals aren’t even hotter. “Mammals don’t make any sense,” says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Einstein who devised the theory. “We have to eat all the time. Our reproduction rate is low.” In fact, until catastrophic events caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, “mammals were an experiment that wasn’t going anywhere,” he says. Casadevall wondered why reptiles didn’t retake control of the Earth once environmental conditions had stabilized again. A couple of pieces of evidence led him to develop the new theory. First, a massive fungal bloom swept the Earth about the time of the dinosaur extinction. “The world became a huge a compost pile,” he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14744 - Posted: 12.06.2010

by Amy Barth As a chemical engineering grad student at Caltech, Sarah Heilshorn could not make up her mind: “One day I wanted to work on green chemistry; then I’d meet someone working on solar cells and think that was the specialty for me.” Clarity came after she heard a talk by David Tirrell, a Caltech engineer who designed synthetic biomolecules. Soon he became Heilshorn’s mentor. “I was fascinated by the idea that engineers could program organisms to create new materials for medicine,” she explains. Now head of her own lab at Stanford, Heilshorn engineers proteins to aid neural stem cells in healing injured brains and spines. If I cut my hand, it heals on its own. Why is it so much harder to heal spinal cord injuries? Peripheral nerves like the ones in your hand regenerate well. Nerves in the spinal cord and brain do not. This might have to do with the blood-brain barrier, which protects the central nervous system but also makes drug delivery difficult. In addition, spine injuries are often caused by a crushing or twisting motion, so there may be bone fragments floating around and compromised blood flow to the region. You engineer proteins to help stem cells regenerate neurons. How does that work? Proteins are made of smaller molecules called amino acids, which combine to form modules. Some modules make a protein act like a spring; others help it bind to cells. I mix modules in new ways to create novel proteins with new functions, and then I mass-produce them [in the machine at right]. Copyright © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 14743 - Posted: 12.06.2010

By Elizabeth Cooney Jennipher Ray knew her son was on the quiet side. Even as a baby, he was nervous, and as he grew older his body would stiffen when he crossed the threshold into his day-care center near his mother’s part-time job in downtown Boston. His pediatrician said he was “just shy’’ and would outgrow it. Despite Ray’s misgivings, nothing prepared her for the first parent-teacher conference when her son was 3 1/2. “They said he doesn’t know his ABCs and he can’t count to 10. We were shocked,’’ Ray said in a recent interview. When she told his teachers he talked nonstop at home, they said, “He has never spoken to us.’’ Her heart dropped. Then they said, “We think he’s just shy.’’ That moment started Ray and her son on a search that eventually led to a diagnosis of selective mutism, a relatively rare anxiety disorder that affects an estimated 0.5 to 0.75 percent of the population. Children like Ray’s now 9-year-old son — whose name she declined to disclose because of the stigma that clings to such problems — can be chatterboxes at home, but they do not speak in other settings such as school, their neighborhoods, or the grocery store. They may develop other ways to communicate, through nods, gestures, or whispers to trusted teachers or peers, but their inability to fully participate in communications can lead to academic and emotional problems in childhood and in some cases set the stage for depression and social isolation later in life. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14742 - Posted: 12.06.2010

By Rachael Rettner In recent years, we've been bombarded with studies about the hormone oxytocin — researchers have demonstrated it increases trust and helps aid in social bonding. It has even garnered a reputation as the "love hormone." But what good is it for? Despite all these findings, the hormone's medical use remains limited to obstetrics — it is used to induce labor and aid in breastfeeding. But researchers are now trying to apply these findings, and are investigating oxytocin as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses. They say its unique ability to adjust our wiring could remedy symptoms of schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD) and anxiety, and improve social abilities among those with autism. A number of oxytocin studies have even reached the stage of clinical trials — which test the effectiveness and safety of a substance before it can become an approved drug — with promising findings. "The idea of augmenting … the way we connect to and with each other, would just be so helpful for so many people," said Dr. Kai MacDonald, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied oxytocin as a treatment for schizophrenia. However, the results so far, while hopeful, have not been "earthshaking," MacDonald said. There are hurdles to such research. Because oxytocin is a large molecule, it doesn't cross from the bloodstream into the brain very easily. It is also rapidly degraded in both the stomach and the blood. MyHealthNewsDaily Copyright © 2010.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14741 - Posted: 12.06.2010

By LESLEY ALDERMAN Notoriously difficult to treat, eating disorders may persist for years, wreaking havoc not just on the patient’s health and personal relationships but often on family finances, as well. Hospitalizations for problems caused by eating disorders grew 18 percent from 1999 to 2006, with the steepest rise among children under age 12 (up 119 percent), followed by adults ages 45 to 64 (up 48 percent) and men of all ages (up 37 percent), according to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Care for these patients can be expensive. Many must be seen on a weekly basis by a team of specialists, including a psychiatrist, a physician and a nutritionist. A residential program costs $30,000 a month on average. And many patients require three or more months of treatment, often at a facility far from home. Even after leaving a specialized program, patients may need years of follow-up care. Yet most insurers will not cover long-term treatment, and some routinely deny adequate coverage of eating disorders on the grounds that there is not enough evidence on how best to treat them, said Lynn S. Grefe, chief executive of the National Eating Disorders Association. “Eating disorders pose a unique treatment challenge in comparison to other psychiatric illnesses,” said Dr. Evelyn Attia, director of the eating disorders research program at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. “They are not always easy to diagnose, and insurers are often not well informed about which treatments work." Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 14740 - Posted: 12.04.2010

By Emily Anthes In the wake of several tragedies that have made bullying a high-profile issue, it’s becoming clear that harassment by one’s peers is something more than just a rite of passage. Bullied kids are more likely to be depressed, anxious, and suicidal. They struggle in school — when they decide to show up at all. They are more likely to carry weapons, get in fights, and use drugs. But when it comes to the actual harm bullying does, the picture grows murkier. The psychological torment that victims feel is real. But perhaps because many of us have experienced this sort of schoolyard cruelty and lived to tell the tale, peer harassment is still commonly written off as a “soft” form of abuse — one that leaves no obvious injuries and that most victims simply get over. It’s easy to imagine that, painful as bullying can be, all it hurts is our feelings. A new wave of research into bullying’s effects, however, is now suggesting something more than that — that in fact, bullying can leave an indelible imprint on a teen’s brain at a time when it is still growing and developing. Being ostracized by one’s peers, it seems, can throw adolescent hormones even further out of whack, lead to reduced connectivity in the brain, and even sabotage the growth of new neurons. These neurological scars, it turns out, closely resemble those borne by children who are physically and sexually abused in early childhood. Neuroscientists now know that the human brain continues to grow and change long after the first few years of life. By revealing the internal physiological damage that bullying can do, researchers are recasting it not as merely an unfortunate rite of passage but as a serious form of childhood trauma. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Aggression; Stress
Link ID: 14739 - Posted: 12.04.2010

by Jane J. Lee Just as human cliques have their own language quirks, groups of killer whales have their own dialects. But that doesn't stop them from imitating one another. A new study of wild orcas shows that they mimic calls from other groups even when members of that group aren't around. The whales could have multiple uses for the imitation, such as labeling outsiders or keeping tabs on their location. Vocal mimicry in nonhuman mammals is rare. Songbirds are famous for imitating their neighbors, an ability they use to defend their territories. Anecdotal reports suggest that orcas mimic, too, which makes sense considering scientists have shown that their close cousins, bottlenose dolphins, mimic one another in captivity. But studying these animals in the wild is challenging because current technology can't pinpoint which animal is doing the calling, especially during mingling sessions when they are close together. While analyzing how wild orcas near Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, used sound when socializing, behavioral biologist Brigitte Weiß of the University of Vienna discovered a set of calls that were not a part of their normal repertoires. The calls seemed to resemble the calls of foreign groups that the original group would have mingled with to mate or cement alliances. Weiß and colleagues then categorized the calls and produced sonograms, which show the structure of the sound waves, to compare against sonograms of the originals. The study, published online 15 July in Marine Mammal Science, concludes that resident orcas mimicked the calls of foreign groups about once every 500 calls. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 14738 - Posted: 12.04.2010

A fast test to diagnose fatal brain conditions such as mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans could be on the horizon, according to a new study from National Institutes of Health scientists. Researchers at NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have developed a highly sensitive and rapid new method to detect and measure infectious agents called prions that cause these diseases. Prion diseases are primarily brain-damaging conditions also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. They are difficult to diagnose, untreatable and ultimately fatal. A key physical characteristic of these diseases is dead tissue that leaves sponge-like holes in the brain. Prion diseases include mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle; scrapie in sheep; Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans; and chronic wasting disease in deer, elk and moose. For more information about NIAID research on prion diseases, visit the NIAID Prion Diseases portal (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/prion/Pages/default.aspx). Currently available diagnostic tests lack the sensitivity, speed or quantitative capabilities required for many important applications in medicine, agriculture, wildlife biology and research. Because prion infections can be present for decades before disease symptoms appear, a better test might create the possibility for early treatment to stop the spread of disease and prevent death. Now, a blending of previous test concepts by the NIAID group has led to the development of a new prion detection method, called real time quaking induced conversion assay, or RT-QuIC. This approach is described in a paper now online in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens. Byron Caughey, Ph.D., led the study at NIAID's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 14737 - Posted: 12.04.2010

by Wendy Zukerman People with Huntington's disease show symptoms more than a decade before they are likely to get a clinical diagnosis. These early effects of the disease don't affect day-to-day functioning, but they will help drug developers evaluate treatments that target the early stages of the disease. Huntington's is a fatal and incurable brain condition whereby a faulty gene makes brain cells commit suicide en masse. It causes problems in communication, mental processes and movement. Within the faulty gene, a specific sequence called CAG is repeated too many times. Although "environmental" factors such as exercise may slow Huntington's progression, the number of CAG repeats accurately predicts the age of illness onset. For example, someone with around 40 repetitions is likely to get their first symptoms in late middle age. Previous studies have found that several years before the disease manifests itself, the brains of people with the mutation undergo subtle changes, with a thinning of the regions involved in motor function. To find out whether how these changes affected people with the Huntington's gene before clinical symptoms begin, Julie Stout of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues selected 119 people who had the gene but no symptoms. The volunteers were predicted to get clinical symptoms around 10 years later, on average, based on their age and number of CAG repeats. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 14736 - Posted: 12.04.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Standing over Darwin’s grave in Westminster Abbey, Andrew Feinberg had a realization. Feinberg, a genetics researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, looked to the left and saw Newton’s grave. Just above Newton is a plaque honoring physicist Paul Dirac, a pioneer of quantum theory. Inherent in quantum theory is the idea of uncertainty in the interaction of subatomic particles. “So I look back at Darwin’s grave and it hits me; there’s nothing like that in biology,” Feinberg says. Nothing that deals with uncertainty. Yet there is uncertainty in biology. Genes that run in families explain only some of the wide variety of physical appearances among people and their susceptibility to diseases. Much uncertainty in what causes these differences remains. But biologists don’t just accept this seeming randomness as a fundamental part of reality. Instead, they are seeking an explanation for unknown sources of variation in heritable traits, the way physicists are searching for a mysterious substance dubbed dark matter that could explain puzzling aspects of the cosmos. And biologists have proposed some solutions. Feinberg’s, scribbled down at a pub in the shadow of the Tower of London, is that chemical modifications to DNA could be the genetic dark matter. Feinberg is in the minority, though; others have their own favorite theories about what the missing ingredient might be. Some think that researchers just need to hunt harder and longer for common changes in the sequence of genetic letters that make up DNA. But a growing number of researchers are turning to rare genetic changes or absent or duplicated chunks of DNA as important contributors. Others say that interactions among genes deserve more attention. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14735 - Posted: 12.04.2010

By Laura Spinney Stress: there's not a system in your body it doesn't poison in the end. Over time, it raises your blood pressure, increases your chances of infertility and makes you age faster, and that's not all. Remove the source of the stress and all those horrors vanish, right? Wrong. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that not only can stress bring about permanent changes in your body, but you can even pass on some of those changes to your offspring. What's more, some researchers are now arguing that, far from being an exclusively human problem, psychological stress is rampant in nature. Its influence is so powerful, they claim, that like the conductor of an orchestra, it imposes a rhythm on whole ecosystems, determining which species are booming, and which are bust. In fact, says Rachel Yehuda, a neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, it's time to rewrite the textbooks about stress, doing away with the outdated idea that its effects are transient. "Some effects of the environment and of experience are long lasting," she says. "And for that we need a new biology." Yehuda had her first inkling of the indelible mark that stress can leave on families back in 1993, when she opened a clinic to treat the psychological problems of Holocaust survivors, and was deluged with calls from their adult children. Investigating further, she found that those children were particularly prone to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both parents and children tended to have low levels of the hormone cortisol in their urine. Stranger still, the more severe the Holocaust survivor's PTSD symptoms, the less cortisol there was in their child's urine. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14734 - Posted: 12.02.2010

Vincent A. Billock Until recently, biologists treated theory as a reward, claimed after a lifetime of labour in experiment and observation. Yet, within just a few generations, theorists in neuroscience have begun to resemble their cousins in physics, choosing to specialize in theory early in their careers. The focus of theoretical neuroscience has shifted in that time towards complexity: from models of nerve conduction to an emphasis on the dynamics of nonlinear neural interactions. Bard Ermentrout, a biophysicist, had much to do with that transformation, which is highlighted in his and mathematician David Terman's textbook, Mathematical Foundations of Neuroscience. Terman and Ermentrout share an interest in the failure modes of neural systems. Nonlinear dynamic aspects are often only revealed when neural systems are pushed to the edges of their performance abilities. Migraines, strobe lights and drug intoxication can all cause geometric hallucinations: Ermentrout studies these as well as the illusions produced by viewing moving images during electric retinal stimulation. Terman's model of image segmentation fragments noisy images (such as television static) in a manner that is reminiscent of these visual effects. However, aside from geometric hallucinations, the wilder sides of Ermentrout and Terman's research interests are not emphasized in the book, which is directed at a broad interdisciplinary audience. The traditional material on membrane biophysics, cable theory and neural-spike generation models is presented first. The latter part of the book — covering the nonlinear dynamics of neural interactions — takes a balanced approach, describing models in which the correct timing of individual neural spikes is crucial, and population models based on the firing rates of an ensemble of neurons. Rapidly evolving topics such as neural synchronization and spatially extended models are included. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Vision; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14733 - Posted: 12.02.2010

By Stephanie Pappas When a fruit fly sniffs out a chemical scent, the signal travels to its little brain where a newly discovered circuit quickly transforms that information into a physical response. The feat takes just four neurons, researchers say. In addition, the circuit differs between male and female fly brains, suggesting that gender-related behaviors arise not from what the flies sense, but from how they process those signals. Because fruit flies are model organisms for biological research, the findings could help scientists understand brain connections in other organisms. When fruit flies are in the mood for courtship, they communicate using chemical signals called pheromones. One of these signals, 11-cis-vaccenyl acetate (or, more simply, cVA), elicits very different responses in male and female flies. Males become aggressive and less interested in mating in response to cVA. Females become receptive to males' advances. "Somehow the processing of this pheromone signal within the brain must be different, so that it can allow this same signal to have different outcomes in both males and females," study researcher Vanessa Ruta, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University in New York, told LiveScience. Ruta and her colleagues reported their work Dec. 1 in the journal Nature. © 2010 LiveScience.com

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 14732 - Posted: 12.02.2010

By ANDREW POLLACK Weight-loss surgery, once a last resort for extremely overweight people, may soon become an option for those who are less heavy. An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration will consider on Friday a request by Allergan, the pharmaceutical company, to significantly lower how obese someone must be to qualify for surgery using the company’s Lap-Band device, which restricts intake to the stomach. On Wednesday, the F.D.A. acknowledged that a new study by the company showed that people in the proposed range of obesity who had the band experienced “statistically significant decreases in all measures of weight loss.” If the agency approves the change, the number of Americans eligible for the Lap-Band operation could easily double, ensuring more sales for Allergan and probably more insurance coverage for such operations. But the proposed change, sought at a time when the obesity epidemic in the United States seems intractable, still leaves some people uneasy, in part because of side effects and failure rates. In addition, long-term weight reduction is hard to maintain. “You’re talking about millions and millions of people who would meet these criteria,” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School. “Let’s make sure by the most rigorous research that this is safe and effective.” A new generation of diet pills has failed to gain federal approval, limiting options for overweight Americans, and Allergan and other companies are betting that surgery will become more of a frontline option rather than a last resort. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14731 - Posted: 12.02.2010

By ALAN SCHWARZ In a finding that could eventually lead to ways to identify and perhaps treat athletes who have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, Boston-based researchers announced on Wednesday that a new imaging technique found chemical changes in the brains of living athletes with a history of head trauma. C.T.E., whose diagnosis in more than a dozen deceased N.F.L. players and one collegian has helped lift the dangers of sports concussions to national prominence, can be confirmed only through a specialized examination of brain tissue after death. As such, the question of whether a particular living athlete who is showing symptoms of the disease — anger control, memory loss and more — has C.T.E. has remained only gnawing speculation. At the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting in Chicago, Dr. Alexander Lin of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston described how magnetic resonance spectroscopy scans identified biomarkers in five athletes showing signs of C.T.E. The subjects were three retired N.F.L. players, one boxer and one wrestler; their scans were compared with those of nonathletes of the same age and relative lifestyle. “We measured the brain chemistry of men with a broad history of brain trauma and found these changes that indicate something biochemically abnormal,” Lin said. “We don’t know whether they have C.T.E. We don’t know at this point if these living changes are related.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14730 - Posted: 12.02.2010

by Michael Marshall Low levels of mercury in the diet of male white ibises cause the birds to mate with each other rather than with females. As a result many of the females can't breed, and fewer chicks are produced. It's the first time a pollutant has been found to change an animal's sexual preference. Many chemicals can "feminise" males or reduce fertility, but males affected in these ways still prefer females. Mercury is extremely toxic, particularly in the form of methylmercury, which reduces breeding in wild birds by disrupting their parenting behaviours. To find out if it also affected mating, Peter Frederick of the University of Florida in Gainesville and Nilmini Jayasena of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, captured 160 young white ibises from south Florida. They gave them food laced with methylmercury and monitored them closely. The birds were split into four groups. One group ate food with 0.3 parts per million methylmercury, which most US states would regard as too high for human consumption. A second group got 0.1 ppm, and the third 0.05 ppm, a low dose that wild birds would be exposed to frequently. The fourth group received none. All three dosed groups had significantly more homosexual males than the control group. Male-male pairs courted, built nests together and paired off for several weeks. Higher doses increased the effect, with 55 per cent of males in the 0.3 ppm group affected. Male-male matings were responsible for 81 per cent of unproductive nests in the dosed groups. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 14729 - Posted: 12.02.2010

by Ed Yong IT WAS a bunch of robins that started it. The birds were locked in cages in Frankfurt, Germany, where they were being studied by biologist Hans Fromme. When the time came when they would normally migrate to sunny Spain, Fromme noticed they were becoming restless. What's more, they always tried to flee their cages in the same direction. This was in the late 1950s, and the thinking at the time was that migrating birds navigated using the sun, moon and stars. The cages were in a shuttered room, though, so the robins must have worked out which direction was which some other way. Magnetism was one possibility. The idea that migrating birds navigate across continents and oceans with the help of an internal compass had been suggested a century earlier by a Russian zoologist, but attempts to prove it had failed. That changed in 1966, when zoologist Wolfgang Wiltschko showed that the direction in which the robins attempted to escape could be changed by powerful magnets. His work suggested that most birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field, although many of his peers refused to believe it. "You don't want a stupid little bird doing something you don't do", says Roswitha Wiltschko of the University of Frankfurt, who together with her husband Wolfgang has been studying this ability for four decades. Their studies and others have proved the sceptics utterly wrong; we now know that a wide array of animals, from beetles to bats, rely on the Earth's magnetic field to help them navigate. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 14728 - Posted: 12.02.2010

by Carrie Arnold Chilling out might be the key to losing the weight you gained over Thanksgiving. New research shows that dieting makes the brain more sensitive to stress and the rewards of high-fat, high-calorie treats. These brain changes last long after the diet is over and prod otherwise healthy individuals to binge eat under pressure. Most research on weight loss has focused on tweaking appetite regulation—helping people eat less, get full faster, and have fewer cravings. But once we lose weight, we have trouble keeping it off. Even weight-loss surgery doesn't always help people maintain their more svelte physiques. Maybe, thought Tracy Bale, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, the problem is stress. Stress causes the body to release the hormone cortisol, which fuels the blood with energy in the form of sugar, enabling us to flee from potential dangers. Over time, high stress levels lead to chronically elevated cortisol levels that can cause increased appetite and weight gain. Bale and her co-authors hypothesized that dieting leaves people more susceptible to the chronic stresses of everyday life, making even the strongest dieter yearn for a pint of ice cream or a hot, cheesy pizza. Although one hot fudge sundae won't cause significant weight gain, persistent stress could lead to a pattern of binge or comfort eating that undoes previous weight loss. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity; Stress
Link ID: 14727 - Posted: 12.02.2010

David Stock It's a cold London evening, and I've arranged to meet a friend. We're ostensibly heading to the cinema, but exactly where, or to see what, neither of us yet know. After wandering the back streets of Ladbroke Grove, guided on our way by polite yet impersonal men in white coats, we arrive at a grandiose and eerie mansion. We're robed in standard-issue medical gowns and ushered inside to collect our "prescriptions" of alcoholic or non-alcoholic medicine, then left to shuffle aimlessly down non-descript whitewashed corridors, afraid to make eye contact with any of the two hundred or so other "residents". By this point you'd be forgiven for thinking that New Scientist has finally noted my erratic behaviour and put word to my psychiatrist, and for a moment I might have agreed. Locked inside the walls of what purports to be The Oregon State Hospital, I am experiencing what it might be like to be detained for psychiatric assessment. This is Secret Cinema, an environment in which to experience film rather than just watch it. The film is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, of course. My initial anxiety subsides and I begin to enjoy the madness of my surroundings. "Spiders...do you see the spiders?" one inmate asks. "No," I reply. "They're like communists, everywhere," he says, pointing. When I ask what he means he responds: "I'm tired." At every turn I am met with fresh strangeness, from maniacal goose heads, to a choir of angelic voices, urns of the cremated or an impromptu yoga therapy session. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14726 - Posted: 12.02.2010

By Laura Sanders A rose sniffed through a snotty nose may not smell so sweet. Enzymes in mice’s nasal mucus transform certain scents before the nose can detect them, a new study finds. The results, published December 1 in the Journal of Neuroscience, show that lowly mucus may feature prominently in the sense of smell. “It is completely unexpected that snot would play a potential role in changing how we perceive odors,” says neuroscientist Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University in New York City. “Most people and most scientists pay no attention at all to mucus.” But there’s more to mucus than what meets the nose: The thick goo that serves to lubricate the nose is teeming with proteins and protein-chopping enzymes. Some of these molecules are thought to catch smells and shuttle them to odor receptors in the nose. Other components may protect the body from toxic chemicals by chopping them up into less harmful pieces. But no one knew whether this chopping action had any effect on smell perception. In the new study, Ayumi Nagashima and Kazushige Touhara of the University of Tokyo added particular odorants to tiny amounts of mucus sucked out of a mouse’s nose and tested the resulting chemical composition of the mix. After five minutes of sitting in mucus, about 80 percent of almond-smelling benzaldehyde was converted into benzyl alcohol (a scent found in some teas and plants) and the odorless benzoic acid. Inactive enzymes in boiled mucus couldn’t do this odor conversion, the team found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 14725 - Posted: 12.02.2010