By MARILYN BERGER During the horrendous heat wave in July, when all of us in New York were not quite ourselves, I started feeling funny. I was sleeping too much; my right foot was dragging; my typing was skewed; I lost interest in reading the paper, about which I am usually obsessive. I figured I’d been done in by the weather. But when it improved and I didn’t, I finally gave in and called my longtime doctor, a brilliant diagnostician who had given me my annual checkup just a month earlier. I hate to be the kind of patient who calls about every hangnail, and worse, I couldn’t report anything specific — just the foot and a sort of general lethargy. It didn’t occur to me to connect my symptoms with a minor accident I’d had in May, when I fell off my bike onto the grass, crunching my helmet. (At my checkup, the doctor and I had discussed this and another fall I’d taken, noting the curiosity that when you’re young you “fall,” but when you’re older you “have a fall.”) But when there’s something wrong with your head, I’ve discovered, you have no way of knowing there is something wrong with your head. And that Catch-22 almost proved fatal. I described my symptoms to my doctor on the phone, and she replied crisply: “Doesn’t sound like you. Go see a neurologist.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 14542 - Posted: 10.12.2010

By Laura Sanders Some deaf people have extraordinarily keen vision, and a new study of cats may explain why. The results, published online October 12 in Nature Neuroscience, show how parts of the brain normally dedicated to a sense that has been lost can pitch in to augment another type of input. For years, researchers have known that deaf people often have superior peripheral vision and motion detection, but just how the brain creates these advantages was unclear. “Over the years, we’ve speculated about how these changes might be taking place,” says neuroscientist Helen Neville of the University of Oregon in Eugene, but a clear cause has been elusive. In the new study, researchers led by Stephen Lomber found that in deaf cats, brain regions important for hearing get co-opted to enhance vision. Instead of processing sound, these regions lend a hand to the visual system. For the first time, the study establishes a causal link between particular auditory regions and vision enhancements. “There have been all these theories out there for what region of the brain might be responsible for this, but no one has actually gone in there and demonstrated it,” Lomber says. Since cat brains are organized much like human brains, the results may mirror what happens in the brain of a deaf person. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Hearing; Vision
Link ID: 14541 - Posted: 10.11.2010

by Andy Coghlan Just 2 minutes ago, a sperm whale swam by about 4 kilometres south of Cassis on the French Mediterranean coast. From my desk in London, I heard its clicks. Thanks to a new website, so can you. The LIDO (Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment) site offers a live feed to 10 hydrophones sprinkled around European waters, and one in Canada. Several more are scheduled to come soon in Canada and in Asia. The network's primary aim is to record and archive long-term subsea noise so that researchers can study the effects of human activity on whales and dolphins. It is the brainchild of Michel André, a bioacoustician at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. He and his colleagues have spent the past 10 years placing hydrophones on the seabed, on existing research platforms that monitor earthquakes and tsunamis, for instance, or detect neutrino particles from space. "These observatories were already cabled to shore for geophysics and astrophysics data monitoring, so we took advantage of the existing network to install real-time acoustic data hubs on them," says André, who will demonstrate the system next month at a meeting on underwater acoustics technology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. "The system is powered from the shore, and streams audio data to a server where the signals are analysed and published directly on the internet," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 14540 - Posted: 10.11.2010

By Ferris Jabr For people with katsaridaphobia, or the fear of cockroaches, the common pests are more than nuisances—they are the stuff of nightmares. When some phobics spot one of the skittering beasts they start sobbing uncontrollably, whereas others who have seen them in their homes seriously consider moving. Psychologists can treat such disruptive fears with exposure therapy, in which a therapist gradually presents the feared stimulus to the patient in increasingly intimate scenarios. Recently, some psychologists have successfully combined exposure therapy and virtual reality to treat fears of flying, heights and spiders, asking patients to interact with simulated environments that guarantee their safety. Now, a team of psychologists has completed the first clinical trial testing the treatment of cockroach phobia with augmented reality—a younger cousin of virtual reality that layers digital animations over video or photos of a real-world environment. The new study, published in the September issue of Behavior Therapy, is the most recent and most significant step toward bringing augmented reality therapy out of the lab and into common clinical practice. "I am thrilled with the research," says Stéphane Bouchard, a psychologist at the University of Québec in Outaouais who has studied virtual reality therapy, but was not involved in the new study. "This study shows reliably the feasibility of augmented reality to treat specific phobias." In the study psychologist Cristina Botella of the University of Jaume I in Spain and her colleagues treated six women diagnosed with cockroach phobia. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14539 - Posted: 10.11.2010

By Rob Stein The withdrawal of the diet drug Meridia on Friday marks the latest setback in the long, frustrating quest for a pharmaceutical solution to the nation's obesity epidemic. Despite millions of dollars in research by scientists and drug companies, only a handful of government-approved weight-loss drugs remain on the market. Only one can be used long term, and none is considered very effective. "It's been very frustrating," said Jennifer Lovejoy, incoming president of the Obesity Society, a research and advocacy group. "We desperately need safe new drugs so we can begin to have something effective against this public health epidemic." The search for a weight loss cure, once dismissed as a cosmetic luxury, has intensified as more than two-thirds of Americans have become overweight, including one-third who are obese, boosting their risk for a host of health problems. Experts stress that the best way to be healthy is to eat well and exercise regularly and to avoid gaining weight in the first place - and the failure to produce a pharmaceutical magic bullet makes the importance of that ever clearer. Doctors recommend that people always try to improve their eating habits and increase their physical activity to lose weight. But diets and exercise regimens often fail, and many people are unable to shed significant numbers of pounds or keep them off, so they resort to drugs or even surgery. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14538 - Posted: 10.09.2010

By Nancy Shute Parents who research treatments for autism are confronted with a bewildering array of options, almost all of which have never been tested for safety and effectiveness. Organizations like The Cochrane Collaboration, which reviews the quality of evidence for medical treatments, are putting more effort into evaluating popular alternative treatments. So far, the most comprehensive review of alternative autism treatments comes from two pediatricians: Susan Hyman of the University of Rochester School of Medicine Golisano Children's Hospital at Strong and Susan Levy, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Their 2008 analysis gave each treatment a letter grade for the quality of the research conducted up to that point; the mark, however, is not a ranking of the treatment's safety or effectiveness. The two pediatricians based the grades on the amount of testing done on the treatments, which in most cases was skimpy at best. Research that got an "A" grade included randomized control trials, the gold standard for medical research, and meta-analyses, which compare research from different labs. A "B" went to treatments that had been studied in "well-designed controlled and uncontrolled trials," according to Hyman. The "C" grades, the lowest category (there were no "D"s or "F"s), were based on case reports, theories and anecdotes, which are not considered acceptable for mainstream medical research. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14537 - Posted: 10.09.2010

By Bruce Bower Autism seems to play a genetically inspired hide-and-seek game in some families. Undiagnosed siblings in families that include two or more children with autism often grapple with language delays, social difficulties and other mild symptoms of the disorder, a new study suggests. Genes prompt autism symptoms of varying intensity among members of these families, including in some kids who don’t qualify as having an autism spectrum disorder, say psychiatrist John Constantino of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and his colleagues. Researchers have generally limited their search for DNA peculiarities to children diagnosed with autism or related disorders (SN: 7/3/10, p.12), a strategy that overlooks those with mild autism signs, Constantino’s group asserts in a paper published online October 1 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. “Subtle aspects of the autistic syndrome have not been accounted for in most studies of its intergenerational transmission,” Constantino says. By including individuals with mild autism symptoms in DNA studies, researchers could enlarge their sample sizes and amplify the statistical power of studies to find genetic effects, remarks psychiatrist Joseph Piven of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Given Constantino’s data, it is clearly wrong to label all nonautistic individuals as unaffected by an underlying genetic liability for the condition,” Piven says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14536 - Posted: 10.09.2010

By Rebecca Dube It seems like pain would be the great equalizer: Whether you’re black or white, we all hurt the same way. Except, it turns out, how we're treated for it varies greatly. Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to deal with untreated pain and less likely to get adequate care for it, studies show. And minority patients who don't get proper pain treatment early on are likely to suffer depression and post-traumatic stress disorder down the road, says Dr. Carmen Green, a pain specialist and professor of anesthesiology at the University of Michigan. Researchers don’t know whether the pain imbalance is due to caregiver bias, cultural differences, physiological variances, or a combination of factors, but they do know one thing: Pain is not colorblind. “There is an unequal burden of pain,” Green said. A recent study by Green of 200 chronic pain patients in the University of Michigan health system found that black patients were prescribed fewer pain medications than whites and that women were given weaker pain medications than men were given. The research published in the Journal of Pain showed that, on average, a minority pain patient would be prescribed 1.8 pain medications compared to 2.6 drugs for non-minority sufferers. © 2010 msnbc.com.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14535 - Posted: 10.07.2010

Adam Mann Researchers have produced a full wiring diagram of a macaque monkey retina, showing how thousands of nerve cells connect up to each other. The findings, published in this week's Nature1, provide insight into how primates including humans see colours, and could help to assess therapies for certain types of blindness. "For the first time we can really see all the signals feeding into the retina that convert visual images from the outside world into electrical output," says physicist Alan Litke of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, a co-author of the study. Colour is mainly perceived by the retina, where photoreceptors called cone cells — a special type of neuron responsible for seeing colour — relay information to the brain through neurons known as ganglion cells. To make the cell-by-cell circuit map, the team of scientists bathed a small section of retina from macaque monkeys (Macaca fascicularis and Macaca mulatta) in saline solution, and then stimulated the cone cells with a movie on a computer screen. Using two previously described arrays of either 512 or 519 micro-electrodes2 situated beneath the tissue, the researchers recorded the impulses that the thousands of photoreceptors sent to hundreds of retinal ganglion cells. measurement techniques (Field et al, 2010, Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09424) have revealed a complete functional map of how ganglion cells in the retina sample from the mosaics of (L)ong, (M)iddle and (S)hort wavelength sensitive cone photoreceptorsThe map shows how cone cells relay signals to ganglion cells.Field et al. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14534 - Posted: 10.07.2010

By Karen Weintraub Are you feeling sleepy right now? Too sleepy to work effectively or drive safely? How do you know? We may not have anything like a “sleepalyzer’’ machine to measure precisely how deprived a person is, but there are sleepiness warning signs to be aware of. According to Dr. Robert Stickgold, of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, you are probably too sleepy to drive safely if: ■ It is between 2 and 5 a.m., unless you are habitually up at this time. ■ You have been awake much more than 18 consecutive hours. (Somewhere before 24 consecutive hours without sleep, you have definitely become too sleepy to drive.) ■ You have had alcohol — even a little — and you are sleep-deprived. (The effects of sleepiness and alcohol compound.) ■ You are using coffee, caffeine, open windows, or the radio to help keep you alert. ■ You even suspect just a little bit that you might be too sleepy. Judging and measuring sleepiness is tricky business. It’s totally subjective and personal — you may feel sleepy and perform poorly with the same hours of shut-eye that leave someone else completely refreshed. So, how little sleep is too little when you’re behind the wheel of a car? An 18-wheeler? A military jet? There are no standards, though people have been convicted of reckless driving for car accidents they caused after pulling an all-nighter. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14533 - Posted: 10.07.2010

By PAULA SPAN The woman who came to see Dr. Ronald Petersen, an Alzheimer’s specialist at the Mayo Clinic, was only in her 60s but complained that she was having trouble concentrating. “Her attention was waning,” Dr. Petersen recalled. “She couldn’t follow a television program or stay focused during a conversation.” A C.P.A.P. machine at the home of a sleep apnea patient in Pottstown, Pa.Ryan Collerd for The New York Times A C.P.A.P. machine at the home of a sleep apnea patient in Pottstown, Pa. She was probably developing dementia, Dr. Petersen thought as he took her history. But along the way he asked, as he usually does, how she was sleeping. The woman, who lived alone, hadn’t noticed any problems. Her son, however, had stayed with her the previous night to drive her to the appointment. “She was snoring like a freight train,” he reported. Aha. Overnight sleep testing determined that the woman had obstructive sleep apnea — nightlong interruptions in breathing that reduce oxygen flow to the brain and prevent deep sleep. The interruptions can happen 10 or more times an hour and are quite common in older adults, exacerbating — or sometimes mimicking — dementia symptoms. Treated with a C.P.A.P. machine — the acronym stands for continuous positive airway pressure, a therapy that involves wearing a mask over the nose and/or mouth during sleep — the woman rapidly improved. Her scores on neuropsychological tests eventually climbed back into the normal range. A year later, Dr. Petersen said, “I can’t find any abnormalities.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14532 - Posted: 10.07.2010

By NOAH SNYDER-MACKLER In baboons, a new mother will rarely find herself alone. She will be hounded constantly by other, higher-ranking females who want to look, touch and sometimes steal the infant. But female geladas do not usually show much interest in others’ babies. A newborn gelada never leaves its mother’s chest in the first month, and it spends a majority of its time attached to her until it is about six months old. Mama geladas are extremely protective of their infants, and with good reason. Infanticide appears to be prevalent, especially following a change in dominant male (known as a “takeover”). Male infanticide — the killing of infants by males — is the most common form of infanticide in primates. It has been argued that this is beneficial for newly dominant males because the females will come into estrus sooner, meaning they can produce the new dominant male’s offspring sooner, rather than wait until the former dominant male’s offspring are weaned. There are only a few observed cases of male infanticide in geladas, but our project has found plenty of evidence suggesting that it is common in our study population. I have observed the protectiveness of new gelada mothers. Even though I am not a newly dominant male, nor do I pose a threat, if a curious infant gets too close to me while I am doing behavioral observations, the mother will sprint over, grab her infant and threaten me by flashing her bright pink eyelids. This is when I need to back away. It’s the same response a female will give to another gelada if she perceives that her child is unsafe. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 14531 - Posted: 10.07.2010

By Ferris Jabr In the past researchers have observed an association between poor mitochondrial function and Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system that impairs speech and motor functions and affects five million people worldwide. A new meta-analysis suggests that low expression levels of 10 related gene sets responsible for mitochondrial machinery play an important role in this disorder—all previously unlinked to Parkinson's. The study, published online today in Science Translational Medicine, further points to a master switch for these gene sets as a potential target of future therapies. Mitochondria, specialized organelles found in nearly every cell of the body, use cellular respiration to generate one of the most important sources of chemical energy—adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a versatile nucleotide that powers everything from cell division to cell signaling to transportation of large molecules across the cell membrane. Because mitochondria are so vital to a cell's normal functions, damaged and dysfunctional mitochondria have been implicated in a wide array of diseases and disorders, such as diabetes and schizophrenia. Brain tissue is particularly susceptible to mitochondrial deficits because neurons generally have high-energy requirements. Charleen Chu, a neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who has studied the link between mitochondrial function and Parkinson's, but was not involved in the new study, called it " a very interesting paper," adding that the massive study "indicates that mitochondrial dysfunction occurs early and for whatever reason mitochondrial biogenesis is either impaired or not stepping up to the demand of the neurons." © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 14530 - Posted: 10.07.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou Choose wisely when considering a partner, whether to attend church and how you look after your body. These decisions could have a significant effect on your overall life satisfaction. That's according to a study that challenges the theory that life happiness is largely predetermined by your genes. The widely accepted "set-point" theory of happiness says that an individual's long-term happiness tends to be stable because it depends mainly on genetic factors. The idea is based in part on studies that show identical twins to have more similar levels of life satisfaction than non-identical twins, and suggests that although your level of happiness may occasionally be thrown off by major life events, it will always return to a set level within two years. To find out whether people really are destined for a certain level of happiness, Bruce Headey at the University of Melbourne in Australia and his team questioned people in Germany about their jobs, lifestyles and social and religious activities. The survey was initially completed by 3000 people annually, but that rose to 60,000 per year by the end of the 25-year study period. They found that certain changes in lifestyle led to significant long-term changes in reported life satisfaction, rather than causing the temporary deflections in happiness that set-point theory would suggest. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14529 - Posted: 10.07.2010

by David Cohen Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who brought us Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells David Cohen about his "lost years" in California, his subsequent life as an alien and how cancer gave him the opportunity to experiment on himself for his latest book FOR his 76th birthday, Oliver Sacks received an ounce of osmium, the densest natural element in the periodic table. "I like density, and it's the only really blue metal, it's rather beautiful," he says. The year before he got a "nice rod of rhenium" and the year before that it was a piece of tungsten. You may have worked out that the gifts were chosen because the place they occupy in the periodic table corresponded to his age. Sacks's office in downtown Manhattan, New York, is littered with samples of elements. "I like to have some of my metals around me all the time," he says. It is an impressive collection, though perhaps a little unexpected for a man who is famous for his amazing collection of case histories in neurology. Sacks, a physician-turned-author, shot to fame in 1973 with the publication of Awakenings, a book that describes how he treated a group of patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, otherwise known as sleepy sickness. The story was later turned into a film starring Robin Williams. His next famous book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, created a template for his non-fiction books about neurology: collections of case histories that Sacks picked for the intriguing ways in which his patients cope with baffling neurological disorders, together with his own scientific, poetic and philosophical reflections. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14528 - Posted: 10.07.2010

Rebecca Adler, a freelance writer in Sacramento, has lived with Harlequin Syndrome for 29 years. Rebecca Adler writes: My game face has been known to cause genuine panic on the field -- mostly among race officials and umpires worried they've got some kind of medical emergency on their hands. Either they think I've somehow been severely sunburned on just one side of my face or they worry that I'm on my way to having heat stroke. I have a condition called Harlequin Syndrome, which causes me to sweat and flush red on only on the left side of my body. I got it the day after I was born, in the same way that anyone gets it -- by sustaining an injury to the sympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system that reacts to stress and flight-or-fight circumstances), according to Peter Drummond, a professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. (FYI, it was Drummond who first researched the condition and coined the catchy term "Harlequin Syndrome" in 1988 after researching others who have it.) But it isn't just general trauma to the sympathetic nervous system. It occurs at a very specific area of that system: the space right between the shoulder blades where the sympathetic nerves leave the spinal cord. © 2010 msnbc.com

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14527 - Posted: 10.05.2010

There's a male-female gap in perceptions of orgasm in the U.S., with 85 per cent of the men saying their latest sexual partner had an orgasm, compared with 64 per cent of women saying they had one, a new study suggests. The 130-page report in a special issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, published Monday, also: * Examined the sex lives of 14-year-olds. * Broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more safe-sex-conscious than boomers. * Found about seven per cent of women and eight per cent of men surveyed said they are gay, lesbian or bisexual, but the number of people who have had same-gender sex is higher. In all, 5,865 people, ranging in age from 14 to 94, participated in the survey. The U.S. survey, published Monday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more conscious of safe-sex than boomers.The U.S. survey, published Monday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more conscious of safe-sex than boomers. (Frank Franklin II/Associated Press) The lead researchers were from Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion in Bloomington. They said the study fills a void that has grown since the last comparable endeavour — the National Health and Social Life Survey — was published 16 years ago. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14526 - Posted: 10.05.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN It may sound counterintuitive, but a study that randomly assigned dieters to different sleep regimens found that participants allowed only five and a half hours in bed at night lost less flab than those who spent eight and a half hours in bed and got more sleep. The total amount of weight loss did not differ — both groups lost about six and a half pounds over two weeks — but the optimal outcome of a diet is to lose fat, not muscle, researchers said. The sleep-deprived participants felt hungrier than the others, and had higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that drives appetite, the study found. “The bottom line is that if people are trying to diet and lose weight for health reasons, it makes sense to get a sufficient amount of sleep,” said Dr. Plamen D. Penev, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and the senior author of the study, which is being published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. “If they’re not getting enough sleep as they diet, they may have higher levels of hunger and be struggling to adhere to the regimen.” The study was small, including only 10 adults; they lived in a clinical research center for weeks at a time so their exercise, food intake and sleep schedules could be tightly controlled and monitored. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Sleep
Link ID: 14525 - Posted: 10.05.2010

By KATHERINE ELLISON You sit in a chair, facing a computer screen, while a clinician sticks electrodes to your scalp with a viscous goop that takes days to wash out of your hair. Wires from the sensors connect to a computer programmed to respond to your brain’s activity. Try to relax and focus. If your brain behaves as desired, you’ll be encouraged with soothing sounds and visual treats, like images of exploding stars or a flowering field. If not, you’ll get silence, a darkening screen and wilting flora. This is neurofeedback, a kind of biofeedback for the brain, which practitioners say can address a host of neurological ills — among them attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression and anxiety — by allowing patients to alter their own brain waves through practice and repetition. The procedure is controversial, expensive and time-consuming. An average course of treatment, with at least 30 sessions, can cost $3,000 or more, and few health insurers will pay for it. Still, it appears to be growing in popularity. Cynthia Kerson, executive director of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research, an advocacy group for practitioners, estimates that 7,500 mental health professionals in the United States now offer neurofeedback and that more than 100,000 Americans have tried it over the past decade. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 14524 - Posted: 10.05.2010

by Amber Angelle For nearly 30 years, researchers have gathered evidence that a group of bizarre, fatal brain diseases—including mad cow and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—are caused not by a virus or bacterium but by an abnormal form of a protein, called a prion. New studies lend the strongest support yet to this once-controversial idea and are also starting to reveal the beneficial natural functions these proteins perform before they go bad. Molecular biochemist Jiyan Ma at Ohio State University and colleagues were able to transform a normal protein produced by E. coli bacteria into a prion whose properties match those of the infectious version: It forms clumps, resists being cut by enzymes, and converts other normal proteins into the aberrant form. When the prion was injected into the brains of mice, the brains became spongy and riddled with holes, the telltale signs of prion disease. “Next we plan to take a closer look at the system we used to create infectious prions to identify the molecular mechanisms behind the change,” Ma says. In a separate experiment, researchers in the United States and Austria used a prion protein generated by E. coli to infect hamsters with a transmissible brain disease. The disease progressed very gradually, just as it does in humans, suggesting that the hamsters could provide a useful animal model system. Copyright © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 14523 - Posted: 10.05.2010