By Alyssa Danigelis The thoughts are there, but there is no way to express them. For "locked in" patients, many with Lou Gehrig's disease, the only way to communicate tends to be through blinking in code. But now, words can be read directly from patients' minds by attaching microelectrode grids to the surface of the brain and learning which signals mean which words, a development that will ultimately help such patients talk again. "They're perfectly aware. They just can't get signals out of their brain to control their facial expressions. "They're the patients we'd like to help first," said University of Utah's Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering who, with neurosurgery professor Paul House, M.D., published the study in the October issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering. Some severely-epileptic patients have the seizure-stricken parts of the brain removed. This standard procedure requires cutting the skull open and putting large, button-sized electrodes on the brain to determine just what needs removal. The electrodes are then taken off the brain. The University of Utah team worked with an epileptic patient who let them crowd together much smaller devices, called micro-electrocorticography, onto his brain prior to surgery. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14442 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Great bowerbirds are known for their dramatic mating displays and elaborate constructions. Now researchers have determined males of this crafty species build staged scenes that make themselves look larger or smaller than they actually are. As a result, the scientists believe great bowerbirds are the first known non-human animals that create scenes with altered visual perspectives for viewing by other individuals. In this case, those other individuals are female great bowerbirds seeking mates. Architects, set designers and artists frequently employ the technique when creating certain paintings, gardens, amusement parks and other constructions that feature optical illusions. But we're relatively new at this. "Bowerbirds have been doing it longer than we have," lead author John Endler told Discovery News. "Good human perspective didn't get started until the 15th century." Endler, a professor of sensory ecology and evolution at Deakin University, and colleagues Lorna Endler and Natalie Doerr studied great bowerbird bowers in Queensland, Australia. Each male-made bower consists of an avenue -- two rows of tightly packed sticks with a stick floor -- that opens onto a court. The court functions as a stage where the male displays for females. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Vision
Link ID: 14441 - Posted: 09.11.2010

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter Can cheap vitamin supplements really defend you from Alzheimer's? In a paper published today, David Smith and colleagues at the University of Oxford have claimed that dosing up on B vitamins can protect an ageing brain from shrinking. The team instructed a group of 168 people over the age of 70 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to take a 2 year course of either daily vitamin B supplements or placebo pills. The vitamins included folic acid, B6 and B12. Each person had an fMRI brain scan at the start and end of the study, in order to compare how their brains had atrophied or shrunk over the period. While the brains of the placebo group shrunk by an average of 1.08 per cent per year, those taking vitamin B supplements experienced an average atrophy of "only" 0.76 per cent per year. Smith's team only looked at brain scans, and didn't carry out cognitive tests on the study participants, but the authors reckon that B vitamins might slow the onset of Alzheimer's disease. The results certainly sound dramatic when you consider that vitamin B supplements reduced the rate of atrophy by 30 per cent. But in absolute terms this was only an average difference of 0.32 per cent. On top of this, the sample was small - only 85 people received the treatment. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14440 - Posted: 09.11.2010

Lizzie Buchen After dropping a pair of male and female adult rats into a rectangular Plexiglas container, Frances Champagne can expect one of a few scenarios to ensue. The male will definitely try to mate with the female — but the female is less predictable. She might approach him, appraise his scents and arch her back to allow him to mount her. Should a second male enter the cage after she's mated with the first, she may be similarly hospitable. Some females play it coy, however, evading the male, requiring more courtship and, if mating does occur, avoiding another go. A number of factors can influence what the female does, but to Champagne, a behavioural scientist at Columbia University in New York, one is particularly beguiling: how often the female rat's mother licked and groomed her during her first week of life1. Doting mothers have prudish daughters, whereas the daughters of inattentive rats cavort around like mini Mae Wests. At the heart of these differences lies the sex hormone oestrogen, which drives female sexual behaviour. Champagne says that neglected rats might respond to it more strongly than those raised by attentive mums. The phenomenon is just one example of how experiences early in life can shape behaviour, and it may apply to humans. It is known, for example, that children who grow up in poverty are at greater risk as adults for problems such as drug addiction and depression than those with more comfortable upbringings, regardless of their socioeconomic situation later in life. But what is it about early experiences that has such a lasting effect? For Champagne and many of her colleagues, the answer has been apparent for nearly a decade. Life experiences alter DNA; not necessarily its sequence but rather its form and structure, including the chemicals that decorate it and how tightly it winds and packs around proteins inside the cell. These changes, often referred to as epigenetic modifications, make genes easier or more difficult for the cell's protein-making machinery to read (see 'The marking of a genome'). © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14439 - Posted: 09.09.2010

Can powerful noises affect whales? There's circumstantial evidence to suggest that they might. Now a team of researchers is attempting to find out for sure. The notion that at least some species of whales might be adversely affected by loud noises rests on two pillars. First, the cetacean world is one of sound, rather than vision; toothed whales use echolocation to find their way around and locate prey, and several species of baleen whales in particular emit deep vocalizations that can travel hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles across the ocean. Secondly, there have been more than a few occasions on which whales have beached or been found dead in close proximity to a powerful noise source. In particular, accusatory fingers have frequently been pointed at military use of powerful active sonar, which has been linked to numerous cases of strandings and death, particularly in various beaked whale species. While few if any of the individual cases can be linked unequivocally to a specific use of sonar, the accumulation of incidents is making a powerful case for the prosecution. Some have theorized that the sound panics the whales, forcing them to flee to the surface too quickly, causing them to suffer from rapid decompression. But there is still surprisingly little clarity on the precise mechanisms by which sound could impact a cetacean, or even how an external source would propagate inside a cetacean's head — a hole in the knowledge base that a joint US-Swedish team is attempting to fill. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Migration
Link ID: 14438 - Posted: 09.09.2010

By David Biello Can the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" help those with terminal cancer cope with their fate? That was the question asked by researchers, who published the results of their investigation September 6 in Archives of General Psychiatry. After all, impending death wreaks havoc on the psyche of not only the terminally ill patient but also their family and friends. More broadly, our society spends so much time avoiding death that it can be well nigh impossible to cope with its reality. To try and address this, UCLA psychiatrist Charles Grob and his colleagues enlisted 12 cancer patients—11 of them women—between June 2004 and May 2008. All suffered from fatal cancers, ranging from breast cancer to multiple myeloma, as well as "acute stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, anxiety disorder due to cancer, or adjustment disorder with anxiety." All agreed to take a "moderate dose" (0.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) of psilocybin (and niacin on another occasion) to see if the psychedelic drug might offer some relief from their fear of death and disease. The unusual decision to have each patient serve as both a subjects and then as a control—rather than having two separate groups, one treated with psilocybin and one with niacin—was taken because the researchers believed "that to be the ethical course to take, given the life circumstances subjects were encountering," (i.e. imminent demise). In other words, Grob and his colleagues felt that all the terminally ill patients should be allowed to experience any potential benefit from the psilocybin treatment. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14437 - Posted: 09.09.2010

by Helen Fields Hey, guys, want to impress ladies on the dance floor? Keep your head and torso moving, and don't flail your arms and legs. This useful advice comes courtesy of a new study, which finds that women are more attracted to computer avatars that rock these moves. Humans aren't the only animals that move in special ways to lure females. Male fiddler crabs wave an outsized claw to show off, and male hummingbirds display their flying prowess with a flamboyant mating dive. These moves probably show off their strength and motor skills. Evolutionary psychologist Nick Neave of Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne wondered whether there was something about male human dancing that impressed females as well. Neave and colleagues couldn't just round up a bunch of men and ask them to gyrate in front of women, however. That's because it's hard to separate a man's physical appearance from his dancing skills. "You could be the best dancer in the world, but if you've got an awful haircut or something like that," women may still find you unattractive, says Neave. So he and colleagues cut out the effect of physical appearance by using motion-capture technology, like the techniques moviemakers use to make digital characters. The researchers stuck 38 reflective markers to the joints and other body parts of 30 male students at Northumbria University. Then they asked the guys to dance for 30 seconds as if they were in a nightclub, while a thumping drum beat played over speakers. Twelve video cameras recorded the action. A computer used data on the location of the markers to construct an avatar of each man (see videos). © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14436 - Posted: 09.09.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Being obese has long been linked to infertility in females, but researchers may have been wrong about how the link was forged, a new study suggests. Doctors and scientists have thought that the fertility problems were caused by resistance to the hormone insulin. Chronically high levels of insulin often accompany obesity, eventually making muscles and other tissues impervious to the hormone’s signals. A new study in mice shows that the pituitary gland, which helps regulate the release of fertility-associated hormones, remains sensitive to insulin. But in obese mice, insulin’s constant signaling to release the fertility hormones leads to an overabundance of those hormones, and consequently infertility, researchers report in the Sept. 8 Cell Metabolism. The discovery firmly ties metabolism to fertility in an unexpected way and may have implications for treating women with a condition known as polycystic ovary syndrome, which is characterized by abnormal menstrual cycles and is often associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes. Researchers led by Andrew Wolfe of Johns Hopkins University stumbled upon the discovery when studying mice genetically engineered to lack proteins called insulin receptors that sit on the surface of a cell, latch onto insulin and pass along the hormone’s message to the rest of the cell. The team had engineered the mice so that insulin receptors were missing only from cells in the pituitary, a gland that it is important for regulating many important body functions, including fertility. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Obesity; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14435 - Posted: 09.09.2010

by Timothy McDonald, Babies born with low vitamin D levels are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia later in life, researchers from the Queensland Brain Institute have found. But the researchers say the good news from the study is that it suggests it may be possible to prevent schizophrenia. John McGrath from the Queensland Brain Institute says there have been suggestions for some time that there may be a link between sunlight, vitamin D and brain development. He says it is increasingly clear children with low vitamin D levels are more likely to develop schizophrenia. "For the babies who had very low vitamin D, their risk was about twice as high as those babies who had optimal vitamin D," said McGrath. "But the amazing thing was that the study that was based in Denmark, where low vitamin D is quite common, we found that if vitamin D is linked to schizophrenia our statistics suggest that it could explain about 40 percent of all schizophrenias. That's a much bigger effect than we're used to seeing in schizophrenia research." While the simplest way to get enough vitamin D is to spend more time in the sun, it remains unclear whether there are fewer cases of schizophrenia in a country like Australia which sees a lot more sunlight. "We don't have high-quality data on that, but some statistics suggest we do have slightly lower incidences and prevalence of schizophrenia," said McGrath. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14434 - Posted: 09.09.2010

by Michael Marshall Changing sex is more common than you might think. Many animals start out as one sex, and then change into the other part-way through their lives. There are also plenty of animals that are both male and female at the same time. But a few go one step further. They start out as one sex, and then transform into hermaphrodites. The peppermint shrimp is one of these rare beasts. It gets its name from the red stripes that run along its translucent body, which make it look like a peppermint stick or candy cane. It first matures as a male, and sometimes turns into a hermaphrodite with both male and female sexual organs. This lifestyle, named by an extreme-pronunciation enthusiast, is called protandric simultaneous hermaphroditism. But most peppermint shrimps prefer to stay male. All-male shrimps are more successful at finding mates than hermaphrodites acting as males – probably because they can put more effort into trying to find a mate – and they will delay changing sex if there are hermaphrodites present. In fact, the decision whether or not to change is determined by the size of the social group. To maximise their chances of one day being able to mate, shrimp living on their own always turn into hermaphrodites, even though they end up growing more slowly because of the energy spent on making eggs. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14433 - Posted: 09.09.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou CRASH! A deafening roar and the cinema screen explodes with light. The scene is certainly startling, but is this movie stirring up the right emotional reactions deep down? Rather than ask your opinion, it's now possible to cut out the middleman and go straight to your brain for the verdict. This new approach, known as neurocinematics, is beginning to make itself felt in movie-making and could one day help regulatory bodies implement appropriate age restrictions on films. Neurocinematics is a term coined by Uri Hasson at Princeton University, who was among the first to investigate how the brain responds to movies using an fMRI brain scanner. His team looked at the similarity in the brain responses of a group of viewers to different types of films. When volunteers watched a section of Alfred Hitchcock's Bang! You're Dead, for example, they found that about 65 per cent of the frontal cortex - the part of the brain involved in attention and perception - was responding in the same way in all the viewers. Only 18 per cent of the cortex showed a similar response when the participants watched more free-form footage, of sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm (Projections, DOI: 10.3167/proj.2008.020102). The level of correlation between people indicates how much control the director has over the audience's experience, Hasson claims. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14432 - Posted: 09.09.2010

People with a severe mental illness are no more likely to be violent than anyone else - unless they abuse drugs or alcohol, a study has suggested. The relationship between bipolar disorder and violence largely came down to substance abuse, researchers said.. The study compared the behaviour of people with the disorder with their siblings and the wider population. One of the authors said it was probably more dangerous to walk past a pub at night than a mental health hospital. The study, led by Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry, examined the lives and behaviour of 3,700 people in Sweden who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, commonly known as manic depression. The disorder leads to sudden and unpredictable mood swings which are more severe than the normal ups and downs of life. The team, led by consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Seena Fazel, wanted to examine the public perception that there is a link between the disorder and violent crime. They did this by comparing the experiences of the patients with some 4,000 siblings of people with bipolar disorder - and a further group of 37,000 people selected from the general population. (C)BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14431 - Posted: 09.07.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies). And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school. Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how. Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying. The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on. For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14430 - Posted: 09.07.2010

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR THE FACTS In the world of sleep research, dreams are something of a black box. But one tidbit that scientists have discerned is the peculiar but predictable pattern in which dreams tend to occur. Research suggests that much of what happens in a dream is unique to that dream. But some events from a person’s day can be incorporated into dreams in two stages. First there is the “day residue” stage, in which emotional events may work their way into a person’s dreams that night. But that is followed by the more mysterious “dream lag” effect, in which those events disappear from the dream landscape — often to be reincorporated roughly a week later. This lag has been documented in studies dating to the 1980s. A 2004 study in The Journal of Sleep Research began to shed some light on this cycle. Researchers reviewed the journals of 470 people who recorded their dreams over a week. The dream-lag effect was strongest among people who viewed their dreams as a chance for self-understanding; their dreams often involved the resolution of problems or emotions tied to relationships. The researchers speculated that the delayed dreams were the mind’s way of working through interpersonal difficulties and even “reformulating” negative memories into more positive ones. Other studies have also shown a connection between dreams and this type of emotional memory processing. THE BOTTOM LINE The dream cycle can be much longer than a single night. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14429 - Posted: 09.07.2010

By JANE E. BRODY You may think you know why Americans continue to get fatter and develop obesity-related diseases. But the explanation may start long before people have an opportunity to eat too much of the wrong foods and exercise too little. Increasing evidence indicates that the trouble often starts in the womb, when women gain more weight than is needed to produce a healthy, full-size baby. Excessive weight gain in pregnancy, recent findings show, can result in bigger-than-average babies who are prenatally programmed to become overweight children — who, in turn, are more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease and cancer later in life. The Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, reported last year that more than a third of normal-weight women and more than half of overweight and obese women gain more weight than is recommended during pregnancy. Over all, “fewer than 40 percent of pregnant women gain only the recommended amount of weight during their pregnancy,” Dr. Sylvia R. Karasu and Dr. T. Byram Karasu report in their new book “The Gravity of Weight.” While genes play a role in weight issues for some people, recent studies indicate that genetics is not the main reason babies are born too fat. Rather, the new evidence suggests that in addition to gaining significantly more weight than is recommended during pregnancy, more women now start out fatter before they become pregnant. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14428 - Posted: 09.07.2010

Liz Else, Associate editor Are differences between men and women hard-wired in the brain? Two new books argue that there's no solid scientific evidence for this popular notion Few things are more likely to have us all frothing at the mouth than discussions about differences between the sexes - a close companion to race, IQ and climate change in the too-hot-to-talk-about stakes. Why? Surely in 2010 science should be able to take a lot of the heat out of such an emotive, highly politicised issue. There is, after all, a constant flow of research findings from neuroscientists, endocrinologists, evolutionary researchers and psychologists. Yet synthesising all this stuff into theories, testing and revising them, going back to the drawing board - it all takes, well, as long as it takes. In the meantime, we must remind ourselves to stay alert to the unintended biases and unexamined assumptions which have a habit of creeping into the best-conducted research or the mind of the best-intentioned reader. While the science is bedevilled by such problems, should we be calling for a moratorium on popular books about differences between the sexes, as the psychologist Anne Campbell wondered in these pages two years ago? On balance, no. Two new books, Delusions of Gender by psychologist Cordelia Fine and Brain Storm by socio-medical scientist Rebecca Jordan-Young, remind us why sometimes we do need to follow the twists and turns as the ideas develop. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14427 - Posted: 09.07.2010

by Michael Marshall Humans, apes and monkeys have their mothers to thank for their large brains. It takes a lot of energy to make and run a brain, so large ones should only have developed in animals with fast metabolisms. But according to Vera Weisbecker of the University of Cambridge and Anjali Goswami of University College London, that's only part of the story. The pair looked at the brains of 197 marsupials and 457 placental mammals, and could find a link between metabolic rate and brain size only in placental mammals. This suggests that parenting strategies play a key role. "Placental babies are connected to their mothers via the placenta for a long time," says Weisbecker. "So if she has a high metabolic rate, the baby is more likely to benefit." By contrast, marsupial babies are born while they are still very small, then spend a long time feeding off their mothers' milk – a slower way to grow a large brain. Placentas offer a continuous supply of rich nutrients. However, the pair found no difference in the average brain sizes of marsupials and placental mammals – as long as they excluded primates. These, it seem, got their disproportionately large brains from a double maternal boost. They are supplied with large amounts of energy by their mothers during gestation, and then receive additional months or even years of care after birth. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906486107 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 14426 - Posted: 09.07.2010

By Bruce Bower Toddlers get a kick out of giving adults a hard time. True to form, these wobbly-legged knowledge-sponges learn virtually nothing from best-selling DVDs that their parents believe will boost vocabulary and trigger academic superstardom. Young children who viewed a popular DVD regularly for one month, either with or without their parents, showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it, according to a study slated to appear in Psychological Science. “The degree to which babies actually learn from baby videos is negligible,” says psychologist and study director Judy DeLoache of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Still, adults who initially liked the DVD thought that their children learned many words by watching it. DeLoache suspects that some parents mistakenly assume that educational DVDs such as Baby Einstein prompt the spike in word learning that naturally occurs between 12 and 24 months of age (SN: 4/25/98, p. 268). Annual sales of Baby Einstein products now reach about $200 million in the United States. Other companies sell competing educational DVDs in what is now an international business. DeLoache calls the educational DVD she used in her new study “one of the best available” but wouldn’t identify the brand. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14425 - Posted: 09.06.2010

by Jessica Griggs IT'S a big skull. No, wait, it's two people under an arch. Hold on, it's a skull again. Two very different images can be perceived in the trick picture Blossom and Decay (see right). Now we are one step closer to working out how the brain spontaneously flips between such views, with the discovery of what may be the relevant brain region. The precise neural mechanism that provokes the brain to switch its view of a scene is unknown, but it is thought to play a major role in perception by acting as a sort of reality check, says Ryota Kanai of University College London. "We need a trigger to prompt possible different interpretations so that we don't get stuck with a potentially incorrect interpretation of the world." To find out which part of the brain might be involved, Kanai and colleagues asked 52 volunteers to watch a video of a revolving sphere and press a button when the rotation of the sphere appeared to change direction. Crucially, the sphere was not changing direction; it could simply be perceived to be rotating in either direction. How long each rotation-direction was perceived for was recorded and an average "switch rate" assigned to each of the volunteers. The team then used structural magnetic resonance imaging to search for active brain regions during this task. This pointed to the superior parietal lobes (SPL), two areas towards the back of the head known to control attention and process three-dimensional images. People whose cortex was thicker and better connected in this region had faster switch rates. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 14424 - Posted: 09.06.2010

by David Robson You think more words than you speak – perhaps because language really does shape the way we navigate the world THERE I go again, talking to myself. Wherever I am, and whatever I'm doing, words bounce around my head in an incessant chatter. I am not alone in my internal babbling. Measuring the contents of people's minds is difficult, but it seems that up to 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal. Indeed, the extent of our interior monologue may vastly exceed the number of words we speak out loud. "On average, 70 per cent of our total verbal experience is in our head," estimates Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University in California. The sheer volume of unspoken words would suggest that language is more than just a tool for communicating with others. But what else could it be for? One answer to that question is emerging: language helps us to think and perceive the world. Boroditsky and other researchers are finding that words bring a smorgasbord of benefits to human cognition, from abstract thinking to sensory perception. These effects may even explain why language evolved in the first place. The idea that language guides human thinking and shapes perception has a long and turbulent history. Philosophers have toyed with it for centuries, but its reputation became tarnished before modern psychologists could begin putting flesh on its bones. This fall from grace can be traced to the demise of a controversial hypothesis known as "linguistic relativity", put forward in the first half of the last century by Edward Sapir at Yale University and his student Benjamin Whorf. They suggested that if language really is fundamental to the way we think, then speakers of different languages should experience the world in very different ways. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 14423 - Posted: 09.06.2010