By JUDITH SHULEVITZ How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for? Nicholas Wade’s book “The Faith Instinct” is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. According to Wade, a New York Times science writer, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources. Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution (or, if you’re a dyspeptic atheist, an unhappy one). He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 13607 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Liz Kowalczyk Busy Americans are famous for claiming they don’t need much sleep, disregarding years of medical advice that eight hours is best. President Bill Clinton boasted that he required just four hours of shut-eye a night. Martha Stewart reportedly bakes and decorates on four to five hours, while inventor Thomas Edison spent just three or four hours in bed, believing sleep was wasted time. Well, as it turns out, some - but just some - of these super-productive types might be right. A growing body of research suggests that certain people may be able to withstand sleep deprivation better than others, and that the ability to perform relatively well on little sleep - at least for a short period - could be an inherited trait, like eye color and height. At least two laboratories have reported discovering genes that might bestow an ability to thrive on less-than-average sleep, and more are searching for such genes. “Some people tolerate a lack of sleep, while others fall apart,’’ said Dr. Christopher Landrigan, a sleep researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Researchers have found, however, that just because a person thinks he or she can function on little or no sleep does not necessarily mean that it’s true. During studies in sleep labs, some people who claim they need only a few hours a night did poorly on performance tests, and vice versa. “There is a huge discrepancy between self-assessment and how alert people actually are,’’ said Dr. Elizabeth Klerman, who also studies sleep at the Brigham. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13606 - Posted: 06.24.2010

US scientists believe they have uncovered one of the mechanisms that enables the brain to form memories. Synapses - where brain cells connect with each other - have long been known to be the key site of information exchange and storage in the brain. But researchers say they have now learnt how molecules at the site of the synapse behave to cement a memory. It is hoped the research, published in Neuron, could aid the development of drugs for diseases like Alzheimer's. The deteriorating health of the synapses is increasingly thought to be a feature of Alzheimer's, a disease in which short-term memory suffers before long-term recollections are affected. A strong synapse is needed for cementing a memory, and this process involves making new proteins. But how exactly the body controls this process has not been clear. Now scientists at the University of California Santa Barbara say their laboratory work on rats shows the production of proteins needed to cement memories can only happen when the RNA - the collection of molecules that take genetic messages from the nucleus to the rest of the cell - is switched on. Until it is required, the RNA is paralysed by a "silencing" molecule - which itself contains proteins. When an external signal comes in - for example when one sees something interesting or has an unusual experience - the silencing molecule fragments and the RNA is released. Kenneth Kosik of the university's neuroscience research institute said: "One reason why this is interesting is that scientists have been perplexed for some time as to why, when synapses are strengthened, you have the degradation of proteins going on side by side with the synthesis of new proteins. So we have now resolved this paradox. We show that protein degradation and synthesis go hand in hand. The degradation permits the synthesis." (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13605 - Posted: 12.24.2009

By Nathan Seppa Text messaging while driving leads to slowed reaction time, unplanned lane changes and more collisions, according to a new study published online December 21 in Human Factors. The finding bolsters other research showing that texting and even using MP3 players don’t mix well with driving. This finding might seem like a no-brainer, and in some states texting while driving is illegal. But the effects of texting while driving have not been extensively studied, says study coauthor Frank Drews, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The practice is certainly widespread among young drivers. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that one-fourth of adolescents age 16 or 17 reporting having texted while driving and nearly half of teenagers of all ages report having been in a car while the driver was texting. To identify whether texting while driving is inherently dangerous, Drews and his colleagues enrolled 20 pairs of friends who ranged in age from 19 to 23 and averaged nearly five years of driving experience. These friends commonly texted each other and read text messages while driving. Nearly all had sent text messages while behind the wheel. Each volunteer took a turn “driving” in a simulator that replicated 32 miles of urban and rural freeway with on- and off-ramps, overpasses and cars passing on the left. The drivers were instructed to obey traffic rules and follow a car in front of them in the right lane. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13604 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Boonsri Dickinson Four years ago, when Lawrence Summers suggested that the scarcity of prominent female scientists and engineers was in part because there are fewer women on the extremes of the range of innate math ability—fewer geniuses and fewer duds—he stirred up a lot of misguided arguments about gender differences in the brain. Although the former president of Harvard University and current director of the National Economic Council may have been right on a few details, he was wrong on his major point. Men’s and women’s brains are different, but those distinctions are much smaller than we typically think, and few of them are innate. Rather, the slight asymmetries present at birth, shaped and molded by interests, predilections, and the cues of parents and teachers, grow into more significant gender gaps in adulthood. This divergence is an example of plasticity, the brain’s marvelous ability to adapt and change. “Most differences in behavior develop through experience,” says neuroscientist Lise Eliot of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago. “Nature sets the ball rolling, biasing boys and girls toward different interests, but the gaps themselves are largely due to learning and plasticity.” In her new book, Pink Brain Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It, Eliot dispels many myths about male and female brain development. “In parenting literature, there’s a lot of stuff that’s made up,” she says. When the toddler son of peaceniks pines for a toy army truck, she argues, he is expressing an inborn tendency toward active, physical play that has been shaped by social influences, not by the effects of a “gun gene” on the Y chromosome. Until about 1 year of age, boys and girls are equally drawn to dolls; it is only later, when boys become more active, that they strongly prefer balls and cars. Parents also play a role in shaping their children’s interests, often in ways that they may not be fully aware of.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13603 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Leeaundra Keany On the scorecard the play is marked simply as an “error.” But that hardly conveys the magnitude of the blunder committed by Chicago Cubs outfielder Milton Bradley. It is June 12, 2009, in a home game against the Minnesota Twins. Top of the eighth, one out. Bradley catches a routine fly ball. Thinking he has just ended the inning, he tosses the ball into the stands and poses for pictures. Only then does he remember that there are three outs in an inning, not two. The Twins score a run. The Cubbies eventually lose the game. A rookie mistake? Actually, Bradley was a seasoned pro executing moves he had performed thousands of times. Rather, it is a classic example of a brain fart—an inexplicably stupid error in a straightforward task made by someone with abundant skill and experience. We are all prone to them, although most brain farts are less spectacular (and less humiliating) than Bradley’s—calling your spouse by your ex-spouse’s name, for instance, or zipping straight past the freeway exit that you take every day on your way home from work. Neuroscientists, a more refined bunch, call these episodes “maladaptive brain activity changes.” But they wonder the same thing we all do: Why does the brain fail to execute on something that should be so easy?

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13602 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jon Cohen When primatologist Jill Pruetz found herself threatened by wildfires in the savannas of Fongoli, Senegal, in 2006 she had two options: stay with the chimpanzees she was studying, or run. She chose the chimps. The primates were calm, and--with her in tow--they carefully made their way around the blaze. "I was very surprised at how good they were at judging the threat and predicting the behavior of fire," says Pruetz. The chimps' actions, she would later report, set them apart from other nonhuman animals--and they may reveal the evolutionary origins of how we came to master fire. According to Pruetz, who works at Iowa State University in Des Moines and has studied the Fongoli chimps since 2001, there are three steps to mastering fire: conceptualizing it, starting it, and containing it. Most animals fail the first step, reacting by instinct. West African reed frogs flee at the sound of fire, brush-tailed bettongs in Australia become dazed and confused, and stress hormones jump in African elephants. Chimps, on the other hand, take a more nuanced approach. Pruetz witnessed the primates calmly moving around wildfires on two occasions. Other times, the chimps rested and groomed while smoke began to obscure the sun. They seem to realize, says Pruetz, that fire has a behavior--just like another forest animal--and that its movements can be predicted. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13601 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Philip Yam The man who could recite whole books by heart but could not button his own shirt has died. Kim Peek, born November 11, 1951 (on a Sunday, he will tell you) passed away last weekend from a heart attack. The inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's autistic character in the movie Rain Man, Peek provided scientists with an extraordinary window into the human brain and the nature of memory. Peek suffered from many developmental problems--besides the inability to button up, he also walked with a sideways gait, could not handle the mundane tasks of everyday life and had trouble with abstraction: once told as a child to lower his voice, he slumped deeper into his chair to move his voice box physically lower. Yet he displayed phenomenal abilities. He memorized thousands of books, could read a page in 10 seconds or less and could recite passages verbatim after just one reading. Peek's brain had several abnormalities, the strangest being the lack of a corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that enable the left and right hemispheres of the brain to communicate with each other. Just how that abnormality may have conferred savant syndrome to Peek is not known. An absent corpus callosum is not unique, and some people lacking the structure suffer no disabilities. In savant cases, it's not clear if brain damage stimulates compensatory development in some other neural area or whether it enables otherwise latent abilities to emerge. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Autism; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13600 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Darold A. Treffert and Daniel D. Christensen Editor's Note: The main text of this story, originally published in the December 2005 issue of Scientific American, is being made available in light of the recent death of Kim Peek. When J. Langdon Down first described savant syndrome in 1887, coining its name and noting its association with astounding powers of memory, he cited a patient who could recite Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire verbatim. Since then, in almost all cases, savant memory has been linked to a specific domain, such as music, art or mathematics. But phenomenal memory is itself the skill in a 54-year-old man named Kim Peek. His friends call him “Kim-puter.” He can, indeed, pull a fact from his mental library as fast as a search engine can mine the Internet. He read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October in one hour and 25 minutes. Four months later, when asked, he gave the name of the Russian radio operator in the book, referring to the page describing the character and quoting several passages verbatim. Kim began memorizing books at the age of 18 months, as they were read to him. He has learned 9,000 books by heart so far. He reads a page in eight to 10 seconds and places the memorized book upside down on the shelf to signify that it is now on his mental “hard drive.” Kim’s memory extends to at least 15 interests—among them, world and American history, sports, movies, geography, space programs, actors and actresses, the Bible, church history, literature, Shakespeare and classical music. He knows all the area codes and zip codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide Yahoo-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Autism; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13599 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Twomey Jack and Beverly Wilgus, collectors of vintage photographs, no longer recall how they came by the 19th-century daguerreotype of a disfigured yet still-handsome man. It was at least 30 years ago. The photograph offered no clues as to where or precisely when it had been taken, who the man was or why he was holding a tapered rod. But the Wilguses speculated that the rod might be a harpoon, and the man’s closed eye and scarred brow the result of an encounter with a whale. So over the years, as the picture rested in a display case in the couple’s Baltimore home, they thought of the man in the daguerreotype as the battered whaler. In December 2007, Beverly posted a scan of the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing Web site, and titled it “One-Eyed Man with Harpoon.” Soon, a whaling enthusiast e-mailed her a dissent: that is no harpoon, which suggested that the man was no whaler. Months later, another correspondent told her that the man might be Phineas Gage and, if so, this would be the first known image of him. Beverly, who had never heard of Gage, went online and found an astonishing tale. In 1848, Gage, 25, was the foreman of a crew cutting a railroad bed in Cavendish, Vermont. On September 13, as he was using a tamping iron to pack explosive powder into a hole, the powder detonated. The tamping iron—43 inches long, 1.25 inches in diameter and weighing 13.25 pounds—shot skyward, penetrated Gage’s left cheek, ripped into his brain and exited through his skull, landing several dozen feet away. Though blinded in his left eye, he might not even have lost consciousness, and he remained savvy enough to tell a doctor that day, “Here is business enough for you.” Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/78437017.html#ixzz0aS9xDjNH

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 13598 - Posted: 06.24.2010

JoNel Aleccia For every woman who has ever obsessed that her chin was too long or that her eyes were set too close together, scientists appear to have a new message: You might be right. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, claim they’ve discovered the ideal alignment of female facial features, a pair of measurements that explain why one woman is perceived as attractive and the other, well, isn’t. It all has to do with the horizontal distance between the eyes and the vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth, says Pamela M. Pallett, a researcher who believes she has identified new “golden ratios” for facial beauty. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here That may be bad news for gals who don’t conform, but the upside, says Pallett, is that even if your face isn’t perfectly proportioned, a strategic haircut can help. “Everybody can achieve these golden ratios,” said Pallett. “For most people, it might be just as simple as pulling your hair back, or having it hang down in front of your ears. If they have bangs, that can affect the length you perceive of the face.” Faces were judged as most attractive when the distance between the eyes was 46 percent of the face’s width and when the distance from eyes to mouth was 36 percent of the face’s length, according to the study published in the most recent issue of the journal Vision Research. © 2009 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13597 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence. In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.” But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 13596 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JASCHA HOFFMAN Psychologists have many ways to get inside our heads: they can give us questionnaires, track our eyes, time how long we take to respond to cues and measure the blood flow to our brains. But how close can these methods get to the texture of our inner lives? Russell T. Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent decades refining another way to study the mind. Dr. Hurlburt, a former aeronautical engineer, took up the study of psychology while playing trumpet at military funerals during the Vietnam War. Frustrated by the lack of attention to everyday experiences in the field of psychology, he arrived at the university in 1976 with an unconventional plan to investigate the mental lives of his subjects: ask them for descriptions. In “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic” (M.I.T. Press, 2007), Dr. Hurlburt, 64, presents the case of Melanie, a young woman who was fitted with a beeper that randomly prompted her to record everything in her awareness several times a day. In later interviews, she reconstructed these moments, often under rigorous cross-examination. The resulting mental freeze-frames are remarkably diverse. On the third day of Melanie’s experiment, as her boyfriend was asking her a question about insurance, she was trying to remember the word “periodontist.” On the fourth day, she was having a strong urge to go scuba diving. On the sixth day, she was picking flower petals from the sink while hearing echoes of the phrase “nice long time” in her head. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13595 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carolyn Butler Of all the relationships in my life, by far the most on-again, off-again has been with coffee: From that initial, tentative dalliance in college to a serious commitment during my first real reporting job to breaking up altogether when I got pregnant, only to fail miserably at quitting my daily latte the second time I was expecting. More recently the relationship has turned into full-blown obsession and, ironically, I often fall asleep at night dreaming of the delicious, satisfying cup of joe that awaits, come morning. While I love the mere ritual of drinking coffee, I have definitely come to rely on the caffeine to make me feel more alert, energetic and often just plain better, every single day. And yet because I don't like feeling dependent on anything, I occasionally wonder whether I should give it up for good, especially when I have a particularly jittery afternoon. Can something that tastes and feels this good not be bad for you? Rest assured: Not only has current research shown that moderate coffee consumption isn't likely to hurt you, it may actually have significant health benefits. "Coffee is generally associated with a less health-conscious lifestyle -- people who don't sleep much, drink coffee, smoke, drink alcohol," explains Rob van Dam, an assistant professor in the departments of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He points out that early studies failed to account for such issues and thus found a link between drinking coffee and such conditions as heart disease and cancer, a link that has contributed to java's lingering bad rep. "But as more studies have been conducted -- larger and better studies that controlled for healthy lifestyle issues -- the totality of efforts suggests that coffee is a good beverage choice." © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13594 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor The ancient Egyptian pyramids, the Parthenon of Athens, Mona Lisa’s face and the head of George Clooney all have one thing in common. Their attractiveness is said to be based on the “golden ratio”, which is supposed to be the most aesthetically pleasing shape to the human eye. The golden ratio, also known as the divine proportion, produces a shape similar to a widescreen television or a cinema screen and describes a rectangle with a length roughly one and half times its width. The proportion is said to pervade art, architecture and nature. The modernist architect Le Corbusier used the golden ration for conferring harmonius proportions on everything from door handles to high-rise buildings, whereas the surrealist painter Salvadore Dali deliberately incorporated the rule into his painting Sacrament of the Last Supper. Now a theoretical mathematician has come up with what he believes is a possible reason why the human eye finds shapes in these proportions so particularly appealing. It comes down to how easy it is for the eye and the brain to scan such an image for important details, based on our evolutionary history. Professor Adrian Bejan of Duke University in North Carolina said that the golden ratio – which was first identified mathematically by Euclid in 3rd Century BC – just happens to be the most efficient shape for visual scanning, which could explain why it is behind so many works of art and architectural wonders. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 13593 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tom Wilkinson Here is what can, and does, happen: The child gets out of bed and climbs out a window. Or gets out of bed, walks down a hallway, perhaps goes down a flight of stairs, navigates through a room or two, opens a door, walks out on the patio and, maybe, steps into the backyard swimming pool. The child is sleepwalking. According to some estimates, up to 17 percent of children have a sleepwalking experience between ages 4 and 12, peaking between ages 8 and 12. It is less prevalent among adults, affecting perhaps 4 percent of that population, although it can be more hazardous in that group. Sleepwalking has been part of the human experience probably since there has been a human experience -- it was mentioned in literature before Hippocrates -- but not much is known about it even now. How it happens, yes; why, not so much. It usually occurs during the first third of the night's sleep, and the characteristics are similar: Sleepwalkers often have open eyes, although they have a confused or glassy look. They might talk, although not clearly. Waking them will result in serious confusion, so experts say it is best not to. "Monitor it, but let it run its course, unless they are headed out the front door," said Jodi Mindell, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. It can help to guide them back to bed, where they will probably fall back asleep and have no memory of what transpired after they wake up. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13592 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY SAN DIEGO — On a gray Wednesday afternoon here in early December, scientists huddled around what appeared to be a two-gallon carton of frozen yogurt, its exposed top swirling with dry-ice fumes. As the square container, fixed to a moving platform, inched toward a steel blade mounted level with its surface, the group held its collective breath. The blade peeled off the top layer, rolling it up in slow motion like a slice of pale prosciutto. “Almost there,” someone said. Off came another layer, another, and another. And then there it was: a pink spot at first, now a smudge, now growing with every slice like spilled rosé on a cream carpet — a human brain. Not just any brain, either, but the one that had belonged to Henry Molaison, known worldwide as H. M., an amnesiac who collaborated on hundreds of studies of memory and died last year at age 82. (Mr. Molaison agreed to donate his brain years ago, in consultation with a relative.) “You can see why everyone’s so nervous,” said Jacopo Annese, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of California, San Diego, as he delicately removed a slice with an artist’s paintbrush and placed it in a labeled tray of saline solution. “I feel like the world is watching over my shoulder.” And so it was: thousands logged on to view the procedure via live Webcast. The dissection marked a culmination, for one thing, of H. M.’s remarkable life, and of more than a year of preparation for just this moment, orchestrated by Suzanne Corkin, a memory researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had worked with Mr. Molaison for the last five decades of his life. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13591 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SEAN B. CARROLL Have you ever tried to think up the worst meal you could imagine? How about blue-ringed octopus, floral egg crab, basket shell snails and puffer fish. Sure, some people may think these are delicacies, and puffer fish is certainly treated as such in parts of Asia. But each dish has something more important in common: they are all deadly. Each of these animals is chock full of a powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin. First isolated from the puffer fish, tetrodotoxin is among the most potent toxins known. It is 100 times as toxic by weight as potassium cyanide — two milligrams can kill an adult human — and it is not destroyed by cooking. Just half an ounce of the fish liver, known as fugu kimo in Japan and eaten by daring connoisseurs, can be lethal. When ingested, the toxin paralyzes nerves and muscles, which leads to respiratory failure and, in some cases each year, death. In 1975, the Kabuki actor Bando Mitsugoro VIII ordered four fugu kimo in a restaurant in Kyoto, claiming he could resist the poison. He was wrong. Tetrodotoxin is found in more than just marine creatures. It is present in high concentrations in the skin of certain newts in North America and Japan, and in several kinds of frogs in Central and South America and Bangladesh. The widespread occurrence of tetrodotoxin poses some intriguing riddles. First, how is it that such different animals, belonging to separate branches of the animal kingdom, have all come to possess the same deadly poison? And how is it that they are able to tolerate high levels of tetrodotoxin while others cannot? Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 13590 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carina Storrs Clinical depression can zap the pleasure out of an enjoyable meal or the thrill out of winning a prize, among other symptoms. Not surprisingly, a region of the brain involved in reward and motivation, called the nucleus accumbens, has been associated with depression. But up to now, it had been unclear what went wrong with this region in the brains of people suffering from clinical depression. A study in the December 21 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the problem is not merely a lack of activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). This region still became activated after depressed participants looked at images associated with positive emotions. But, after looking at a series of both positive and negative images, NAcc activity eventually faded, suggesting that the reward center cannot sustain happiness in depressed people. To arrive at this finding, a research team led by Richard J. Davidson at the University of Wisconsin in Madison examined the levels of activation in the brains of 27 depressed and 19 healthy individuals via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During 37-minute fMRI sessions, participants viewed an assortment of 72 positive images for 10 seconds each. To try to simulate the combination of daily "highs" and "lows" that are typically experienced, the researchers randomly intermixed those 72 images with 72 negative photos. The researchers asked the participants, four seconds into each viewing, either to enhance, suppress or sustain (aka, not change) their response to the image. For example, "in response to a stunning natural scene, a participant might imagine being in that scene or one of their own choosing" to enhance his or her reaction, the authors wrote. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13589 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A now deceased NHL player had a brain condition linked to concussions — the first time a professional hockey player has been diagnosed with the disease. Reggie Fleming played 13 crushing seasons as a defenceman and forward during the 1960s and 1970s. Fleming was one of the National Hockey League's hardest hitters in the days before helmets. After Fleming died on July 11 at the age of 73, he became the first NHL player to have his brain examined by the Sports Legacy Institute, which is studying the long-term impact of concussions. "We discovered that Mr. Fleming was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy when he died," said Chris Nowinski, co-director of the institute in Boston. "It's a progressive degenerative disease." Chronic traumatic encephalopathy CTE is characterized by a build-up of a toxic protein called tau — the same abnormal protein found in Alzheimer's disease. At first, the abnormal protein impairs normal brain function and eventually kills brain cells. The symptoms — memory impairment, emotional instability, erratic behaviour, depression and problems with impulse control and eventually dementia — are similar to Alzheimer's, which is why athletes may be misdiagnosed. But the proteins are distributed in different parts of the brain. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Alzheimers
Link ID: 13588 - Posted: 06.24.2010