By James Dao NEW YORK — The government is preparing to issue new rules that will make it substantially easier for veterans who have been found to have posttraumatic stress disorder to receive disability benefits for the illness, a change that could affect hundreds of thousands of veterans from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. The regulations from the Department of Veterans Affairs— which will take effect as early as Monday and cost as much as $5 billion over several years, according to congressional analysts — will essentially eliminate a requirement that veterans document specific events like bomb blasts, firefights, or mortar attacks that might have caused post-traumatic stress disorder, an illness characterized by emotional numbness, irritability, and flashbacks. For decades, veterans have complained that finding such records was extremely time consuming and sometimes impossible. And in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, veterans groups assert, the current rules discriminate against tens of thousands of service members — many of them women — who did not serve in combat roles but nevertheless suffered traumatic experiences. Under the new rule, which applies to veterans of all wars, the department will grant compensation to those with the illness if they can simply show that they served in a war zone and in a job consistent with the events that they say caused their conditions. They would not have to prove, for instance, that they came under fire, served in a front-line unit, or saw a friend killed. © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14241 - Posted: 07.08.2010

By Lindsey Tanner Want happier, more alert teenagers? Let them sleep in a little. A new study reveals that delaying the school day by 30 minutes results in teens who are less sleepy and depressed. Scientists say that teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn, when they typically need to arise for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy. Giving teens 30 extra minutes to start their school day leads to more alertness in class, better moods, less tardiness, and even healthier breakfasts, a small study found. "The results were stunning. There's no other word to use," said Patricia Moss, academic dean at the Rhode Island boarding school where the study was done. "We didn't think we'd get that much bang for the buck." The results appear in July's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The results mirror those at a few schools that have delayed starting times more than half an hour. Researchers say there's a reason why even 30 minutes can make a big difference. Teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn -- when they typically need to arise for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy, especially since they also tend to have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m. © 2010 Associated Press/AP Online

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14240 - Posted: 07.08.2010

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS What goes on inside your brain when you exercise? That question has preoccupied a growing number of scientists in recent years, as well as many of us who exercise. In the late 1990s, Dr. Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute in San Diego elegantly proved that human and animal brains produce new brain cells (a process called neurogenesis) and that exercise increases neurogenesis. The brains of mice and rats that were allowed to run on wheels pulsed with vigorous, newly born neurons, and those animals then breezed through mazes and other tests of rodent I.Q., showing that neurogenesis improves thinking. But how, exactly, exercise affects the staggeringly intricate workings of the brain at a cellular level has remained largely mysterious. A number of new studies, though, including work published this month by Mr. Gage and his colleagues, have begun to tease out the specific mechanisms and, in the process, raised new questions about just how exercise remolds the brain. Some of the most reverberant recent studies were performed at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. There, scientists have been manipulating the levels of bone-morphogenetic protein or BMP in the brains of laboratory mice. BMP, which is found in tissues throughout the body, affects cellular development in various ways, some of them deleterious. In the brain, BMP has been found to contribute to the control of stem cell divisions. Your brain, you will be pleased to learn, is packed with adult stem cells, which, given the right impetus, divide and differentiate into either additional stem cells or baby neurons. As we age, these stem cells tend to become less responsive. They don’t divide as readily and can slump into a kind of cellular sleep. It’s BMP that acts as the soporific, says Dr. Jack Kessler, the chairman of neurology at Northwestern and senior author of many of the recent studies. The more active BMP and its various signals are in your brain, the more inactive your stem cells become and the less neurogenesis you undergo. Your brain grows slower, less nimble, older. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 14239 - Posted: 07.08.2010

The undersea world isn't as quiet as we thought, according to a New Zealand researcher who found fish can "talk" to each other. Fish communicate with noises including grunts, chirps and pops, University of Auckland marine scientist Shahriman Ghazali has discovered according to newspaper reports Wednesday. "All fish can hear, but not all can make sound -- pops and other sounds made by vibrating their swim bladder, a muscle they can contract," Ghazali told the New Zealand Herald. Fish are believed to communicate with each other for different reasons, including attracting mates, scaring off predators or orienting themselves. The gurnard species has a wide vocal repertoire and keeps up a constant chatter, Ghazali found after studying different species of fish placed into tanks. On the other hand, cod usually kept silent, except when they were spawning. "The hypothesis is that they are using sound as a synchronization so that the male and female release their eggs at the same time for fertilization," he said. Some reef fish, such as the damselfish, made sounds to attempt to scare off threatening fish and even divers, he said. But anyone hoping to strike up a conversation with their pet goldfish is out of luck. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 14238 - Posted: 07.08.2010

by Linda Geddes, Amsterdam When children learn to read and write, they often get things back to front: confusing the letters "b" and "d", and sometimes even writing their entire names in the mirror image. This strange phenomenon might be a consequence of children "recycling" an area of the brain that recognises shapes and patterns as they learn to read, says Stanislas Dehaene of INSERM, the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Saclay, France. Previous studies in macaques have shown that individual neurons in an area of the brain's left hemisphere fire in response to pictures and patterns. We also know that animals and human infants alike find it hard to distinguish between mirror images of the same picture. Still other studies have established that this brain region, called the visual word form area (VWFA), is activated as people learn to read. To investigate what happens in the VWFA when humans look at words and pictures and their mirror images, Dehaene used functional magnetic resonance imaging to record the brain activity of adults when they were shown pictures, written words and letters both in the normal and the reverse orientation. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Dyslexia
Link ID: 14237 - Posted: 07.08.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Little things can make a big difference in the brain. Case in point: A tiny snippet of RNA may help guard cocaine-using rats against addiction to the drug, a new study shows. The minuscule molecular guard is a hairpin-shaped piece of RNA known as a microRNA. Raising levels of a microRNA called miR-212 in the brains of cocaine-using rats led the animals to take less of the drug than rats with normal microRNA levels, researchers report in the July 8 Nature. Similarly, blocking the microRNA’s action increased the rats’ cocaine use. If the results hold true in people, researchers may be able to develop new therapies for treating addiction to cocaine and other drugs of abuse. “Once you get out of whack, this is something that might help bring you back,” says Yale neuroscientist Marina Picciotto, who was not involved in the study. It’s unlikely that the research will lead to gene therapy to raise levels of microRNAs in people’s brains. But small-molecule drugs that mimic the microRNA’s action might be helpful. Just 21 to 23 RNA units long, microRNAs are major regulatory molecules (SN: 3/1/08, p. 136) that govern part of the process by which instructions contained in DNA are transformed into proteins. The molecules generally block protein production. So it was a surprise to find levels of a protein called CREB increase with rising levels of miR-212, says Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14236 - Posted: 07.08.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Aggressive teenagers with severe behavioural problems may have developed a biological abnormality in their brain, causing them to be aggressive and anti-social, a study has found. Scientists believe they have discovered the first hard evidence showing that conduct disorder in adolescents has a biological basis connected with brain chemistry, rather than being the result of the desire in teenagers to ape their badly-behaved peers. The findings suggest that it may be possible to diagnose a predisposition to conduct disorder in early childhood so that child psychologists could intervene before the behaviour starts to deteriorate. Conduct disorder affects five per cent of teenagers and costs society millions of pounds in terms of remedial education. "Detecting conduct disorder in adolescence may be too late to do anything about it. Early identification of a biological abnormality may be a route to take in terms of early intervention," said Andy Calder of the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, where the study was carried out. "These are pretty severe kids. They are frequently excluded from school over and over again. Some of them will go into young offenders institutions, so they are not just badly behaved kids," Dr Calder said. "Psychiatrists in the past have not really considered conduct disorder as a medical condition. This is research that's saying that actually it has a biological basis and this is soomething we should consider as a medical issue," he said. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Aggression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14235 - Posted: 07.06.2010

By Patrick House What if I told you that last week I predicted all eight winners of a round of the World Cup? And that instead of rankings or divination all I did was look up how many people in each team's home country had a tiny parasite lurking in their amygdalas? Would you believe me? A decade ago, Discover Magazine concluded that parasites ruled the world, and now I'm going to try to tell you that, at the very least, parasites rule the World Cup. Toxo is one of the most successful parasites in the world and is found in almost every type of mammal. Goats, cows, pigs, sheep, humans. But it spends its time trying to get into the stomach of a cat, the only place where it can successfully reproduce. Thus the organism has evolved an unusual lifecycle relating to the brains of rats and mice. Rodents ingest little bits of Toxo from cat feces and Toxo goes straight to their heads. Once there, it scrambles the neurons around and reverses the animals' natural aversion to cat urine. Soon after, a recently relieved cat returns to the scene and takes its supper. In other words, the rat plays taxi to the parasite, finding it a new feline host and completing the Toxo lifecycle. Livestock fields are full of fertilizer made from, you guessed it, bits of cat feces. When the cows and goats graze, they ingest Toxo, and it sneaks its way into their brains. Eat one of these livestock uncooked and you'll get Toxo in your brain, too. Thanks to the urbanization of cats (and their feces), almost a third of the human population now has a chronic, latent, and seemingly innocuous Toxo infection. This is, of course, an average: Rates vary a great deal from one country to another, from 6 percent in South Korea to 92 percent in Ghana. © Copyright 2010 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14234 - Posted: 07.06.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER I was walking through the neighborhood one afternoon when, on turning a corner, I nearly tripped over a gray squirrel that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, eating a nut. Startled by my sudden appearance, the squirrel dashed out to the road — right in front of an oncoming car. Before I had time to scream, the squirrel had gotten caught in the car’s front hubcap, had spun around once like a cartoon character in a clothes dryer, and was spat back off. When the car drove away, the squirrel picked itself up, wobbled for a moment or two, and then resolutely hopped across the street. You don’t get to be one of the most widely disseminated mammals in the world — equally at home in the woods, a suburban backyard or any city “green space” bigger than a mousepad — if you’re crushed by every Acme anvil that happens to drop your way. “When people call me squirrely,” said John L. Koprowski, a squirrel expert and professor of wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona, “I am flattered by the term.” The Eastern gray tree squirrel, or Sciurus carolinensis, has been so spectacularly successful that it is often considered a pest. The International Union for Conservation of Nature includes the squirrel on its list of the top 100 invasive species. The British and Italians hate gray squirrels for outcompeting their beloved native red squirrels. Manhattanites hate gray squirrels for reminding them of pigeons, and that goes for the black, brown and latte squirrel morphs, too. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14233 - Posted: 07.06.2010

By SINDYA N. BHANOO It takes an elephant much longer to notice a fly and flick it away than it takes a shrew, and the reason is not that the elephant’s great brain is too busy with philosophy, or that it simply does not concern itself with flies. It’s a matter of round-trip travel time — in the nervous system. The trip from the elephant’s skin to the brain and back again to the muscles to flick the tail is 100 times as long as the same trip in a shrew, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The nervous system acts like an information superhighway, sending messages back and forth from the brain throughout the body. The bigger the animal, the greater the distance traveled. Nerves have a maximum speed limit of about 180 feet per second, said Maxwell Donelan, the study’s lead author. “It makes sense that in a large animal, like an elephant, messages have a longer way to travel,” he said. Dr. Donelan believes that large animals may have to compensate for this handicap by thinking ahead, and avoiding risky situations. “That’s what we want to study next,” he said. “It could be that the nervous systems of large animals have evolved to become excellent predictive machines.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14232 - Posted: 07.06.2010

By SINDYA N. BHANOO When it comes to singing, male zebra finches outdo prima donnas, singing over a wide range that starts almost an octave above middle C but soars higher than any coloratura soprano. Female zebra finches, on the other hand, are limited to a few one-note low frequency calls. The vocal range is critical for males during mating season, when they use their songs to attract females. Scientists have known that the vocal muscles in a male bird’s syrinx, or voice box, are about twice the size of those in a female bird’s. Now, a study finds that male birds are able to better control their vocal muscles than female birds. It is this ability that allows them such a wide range. The study appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE. Researchers operated on male and female birds, cutting the nerves that control vocal muscles in the syrinx. The males still sang, but they could no longer produce high frequencies in their songs. Instead, they had the same low frequency range of females. Further research into how the vocal muscles of zebra finches remain strong and hardy over time may help lead to treatments for humans who use their vocal chords extensively, said Tobias Riede, a biologist at the University of Utah and the study’s lead author. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14231 - Posted: 07.06.2010

by Bob Holmes, Eugene, Oregon EXTROVERTS are born not made - or at least, that's what they say. But what if it's more subtle than that? What if we tailor our personalities to our surroundings to make the most of our genes? Conventional comparisons between identical and fraternal twins indicate that nearly half of individual differences in personality traits have some underlying genetic cause. So people have tended to think of personality traits as largely determined by genes, says evolutionary psychologist Aaron Lukaszewski of the University of California at Santa Barbara. He felt there was a flaw in this thinking: if personality were rigidly determined, individuals could end up with the "wrong" personality type for their circumstances. Being extrovert, for instance, exposes people to social conflict. Wimpy men are more likely to suffer in such encounters, while hunkier men may benefit from putting good genes on display. To avoid mismatches, Lukaszewski reasoned, evolution must have favoured a more flexible system. To test this idea, he measured the strength of 85 male and 89 female students and asked them to rate their own attractiveness relative to their peers. Then he gave each a standard personality test to measure how extrovert they were. Sure enough, stronger and more attractive men, and more attractive women, were more extrovert, Lukaszewski reported at a June meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Eugene, Oregon. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14230 - Posted: 07.06.2010

Genetic engineers, move over: the latest scheme for creating children to a parent’s specifications requires no DNA tinkering, but merely giving mom a steroid while she’s pregnant, and presto—no chance that her daughters will be lesbians or (worse?) ‘uppity.’ Or so one might guess from the storm brewing over the prenatal use of that steroid, called dexamethasone. In February, bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University and two colleagues blew the whistle on the controversial practice of giving pregnant women dexamethasone to keep the female fetuses they are carrying from developing ambiguous genitalia. (That can happen to girls who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disorder in which unusually high prenatal exposure to masculinizing hormones called androgens can cause girls to develop a deep voice, facial hair, and masculine-looking genitalia.) The response Dreger got from physicians and scientists who were outraged over this unapproved use of dexamethasone caused her to dig deeper into the scientific papers of the researcher who has promoted it. The result of that digging is a discovery that is much less outrageous than the PR push, and some media coverage, would have you believe, but one that nonetheless raises important questions about gender, sexuality, and research on unknowing patients. In an essay titled “Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb?” and posted on the bioethics forum of The Hastings Center, a think tank in Garrison, N.Y., Dreger and her colleagues pluck numerous brow-raising statements from the writings of pediatric endocrinologist Maria New of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who has long promoted prenatal dexamethasone to treat CAH. But if that position is controversial (as I’ll explain below), what Dreger and her colleagues claim to have uncovered is even more so. New, they say, wants to use dexamethasone to prevent CAH girls from becoming lesbians, from rejecting motherhood, and from choosing traditionally masculine careers. © 2010 Newsweek, Inc

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14229 - Posted: 07.06.2010

by Michael Balter Want to live a long life? Have lots of friends. Studies in humans have made clear that people with stronger social networks have greater longevity. Now a new analysis shows the same is true for baboons. The research adds to growing evidence that friendship is an adaptation with deep evolutionary roots. Little is known about how social bonds influence longevity in nonhuman animals, in part because tracking animal relationships over many years is very difficult. Nevertheless, recent evidence shows that social bonding enhances reproductive success, an important indicator of evolutionary fitness. A study last year of female horses, led by Elissa Cameron, a zoologist at the University of Pretoria, showed that mares with the weakest social ties had about half as many surviving foals as those who were most sociable. And in 2006, a team led by University of California, Los Angeles, anthropologist Joan Silk reported that the infants of female baboons with close social ties to unrelated females survive longer than those that do not have such ties. In the new work, a team led by Silk looked at the correlation between social bonding and longevity, another important indicator of fitness. Silk studied wild baboons in Botswana's Moremi Game Reserve, teaming up with a long-term project led by University of Pennsylvania biologist Dorothy Cheney and psychologist Robert Seyfarth. From 2001 to 2007, the researchers closely watched 44 female baboons, recording how often they approached each other, how long they groomed each other, and other measures of social interaction. (The researchers looked at females because, in many species, only females form these kinds of social bonds, whereas males are off doing other things and are competitive with each other rather than cooperative.) From these data, the researchers determined each baboon's top three partners in any given year. Thus the team could estimate the strength of each baboon's relationships with its closest partners over the years and the extent to which each baboon stuck to her best buddies. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 14228 - Posted: 07.03.2010

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue. Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity. "The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile." "Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation. On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal — until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse. Copyright 2010 NPR

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 14227 - Posted: 07.03.2010

By Christine Soares A restful night’s sleep might make a cup of coffee less of a desperate need first thing in the morning. But pharmaceutical companies are looking into whether the latest pills to promise sound, natural sleep could also play an active role in overcoming even the most powerful addictions. The new sleep aids block the activity of brain peptides called orexins. These tiny proteins keep us wide awake and attentive during the day, and they also govern some stimulating effects of addictive drugs. Orexins do not cause addiction or relapse directly, but neither happens without the peptides’ participation. The intriguing connection between sleep and addiction has long been observed in people who suffer from narcolepsy—a disorder that causes sudden-onset sleep. Although narcoleptics were sometimes treated with potent amphetamines to help them stay awake, they never became addicted to the drugs. By 1998 genetic detective work had traced the cause of narcolepsy to mutations in the genes for orexins or their receptors—discoveries that revealed both the peptides’ existence and their critical role in keeping the brain awake. Efforts to turn those insights into novel insomnia treatments have led to several compounds that are now in late-stage clinical trials. The same companies developing these sleep aids are also investigat-ing orexins’ role in addiction through research in animals. In a recent study Davide Quarta and his co-workers at Glaxo­SmithKline Medicines Research Center in Verona, Italy, confirmed that when the company’s experimental orexin blocker SB-334867 was admin­istered to rats along with amphetamine their brains released less dopamine and they became less sensitized to the stimulant than controls did, even with repeated doses. Sensitized neurons grow extra receptors for the craved drug, demanding more of it to achieve stimulation, thereby fueling a cycle that leads to addiction. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sleep
Link ID: 14226 - Posted: 07.03.2010

By Bruce Bower Botox treatment to erase unsightly frown lines may cause unforeseen emotional wrinkles. First-time Botox patients become slower at evaluating descriptions of negative emotions, possibly putting the patients at a social disadvantage, a new study indicates. For more than a century, scientists have posited that facial expressions trigger and intensify relevant feelings, rather than simply advertise what an individual already feels. Botox patients provide a novel line of support for this idea, as well as for the notion that facial expressions activate links between brain regions responsible for emotions and language, says psychology graduate student David Havas of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Botox is short for botulinum toxin-A, a neurotoxic protein that causes temporary muscle paralysis beginning one to three days after an injection and lasting for three to four months. Two weeks after their first Botox injections, 40 women took an average of about one-third of a second longer to read sentences describing angry and sad situations than they did immediately before the procedure, Havas and his colleagues found. Critically, Botox patients show no decline in the speed with which they read sentences about happy situations, Havas’ team reports in an upcoming Psychological Science. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14225 - Posted: 07.03.2010

by Bob Holmes Which face is more attractive? If you chose the face on the left, you share the tastes of most heterosexual men. It is a composite face, or "morph", made from the faces of eight women with unusually small feet. The face on the right is a morph of eight women with unusually large feet. It's quite a difference, isn't it? Women with smaller feet have prettier faces, at least according to the men who took part in this study. So do women with longer thigh bones and narrower hips, as well as women who are taller overall. And the contest isn't even a close one. "These are the most strikingly different morphs I've ever seen," says Jeremy Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University at Albany, New York. Atkinson and his colleague Michelle Rowe measured hand length, foot length, thigh length and hip width on 60 white female college students, then adjusted each measurement to account for individual differences in overall height. For each of 16 body-part measurements, they selected the eight women with the shortest lengths and the eight with the longest, and constructed morphs of their faces. These morphs were then rated for attractiveness by 77 heterosexual male students. The men were three-and-a-half times as likely to pick the short-footed morph as more attractive, and almost 10 times as likely to say it was more feminine, Atkinson and Rowe found. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14224 - Posted: 07.03.2010

by Laurie Rich, Jane Bosveld, Andrew Grant, Amy Barth The brain is a castle on a hill. Encased in bone and protected by a special layer of cells, it is shielded from infections and injuries—but also from many pharmaceuticals and even from the body’s own immune defenses. As a result, brain problems are tough to diagnose and to treat. To meet this challenge, researchers are exploring unconventional therapies, from electrodes to laser-light stimulation to mind-bending drugs. Some of these radical experiments may never pan out. But, as frequently happens in medicine, a few of today’s improbable approaches may evolve into tomorrow’s miraculous cures. 1. Man Meets Machine In a sense, cyborgs already walk among us: Nearly 200,000 deaf or near-deaf people have cochlear implants, electronic sound-processing machines that stimulate the auditory nerve and link into the brain. But even by the fanciful science fiction definition, the age of cyborgs is just around the corner. In the last decade, researchers have become increasingly skilled at detecting and interpreting brain signals. Technologies that allow people to use their thoughts to control machines—computers, speaking devices, or prosthetic limbs—are already being tested and could soon be available for widespread applications.

Keyword: Robotics; Hearing
Link ID: 14223 - Posted: 07.03.2010

Martin Enserink It was just a snippet of news, reported by an obscure journal in the Netherlands. And yet it lit up the Internet. Twitter was all atwitter, scientists' mailboxes on both sides of the Atlantic began filling up, and dozens of bloggers started jubilating. "It's happened. I cannot tell you all how this changes the world as we have known it for 25+ years," one patient wrote on her blog. "Now to work on the vindication part!" The reason for all the excitement? Scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were reported to have confirmed the link, first published in Science last year, between a human retrovirus and the elusive condition called chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Earlier this year, three other groups reported being unable to replicate such a connection. That federal scientists now confirmed it was a huge mood-lifter for patients, many of whom are desperate to find a biological cause, and a cure, for their debilitating ailment. But the story wasn't as simple as that. Science has learned that a paper describing the new findings, already accepted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has been put on hold because it directly contradicts another as-yet-unpublished study by a third government agency, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That paper, a retrovirus scientist says, has been submitted to Retrovirology and is also on hold; it fails to find a link between the xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and CFS. The contradiction has caused "nervousness" both at PNAS and among senior officials within the Department of Health and Human Services, of which all three agencies are part, says one scientist with inside knowledge. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14222 - Posted: 07.03.2010