By NATASHA SINGER HOW can you get a faster high from sustained-release pain pills like OxyContin? Let me count some of the ways. People have crushed them using bookends, hammers, mortars and pestles, and then snorted the powder, according to doctors who study addiction. They’ve chewed and swallowed fistfuls of pills. They’ve minced the pills in blenders, pulverized them in coffee grinders, dissolved them in water and then injected the liquid. Even for those of us who don’t inhale, the misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers called opioids should matter because, putting moral and ethics aside for the moment, it’s costing us billions of dollars. In a 2008 federal survey, an estimated 4.7 million Americans were found to have used prescription pain relievers for nonmedical reasons in the previous month. The abuse of opioids now costs at least $11 billion annually in excess medical care including overdoses by adults and accidental ingestion by children, said Howard G. Birnbaum, a health economist with the Analysis Group in Boston. Corporate America loves a void, and now some pharmaceutical companies are developing innovative opioids intended to deter tampering and meet the market’s need. Some pills under development are rubberlike and harder to crush. Others contain ingredients that cause unpleasant reactions in the body, like flushing or itching, if the pill is adulterated. Taking a cue from exploding ink packets that can render stolen money unusable, some pills have an outer opioid layer and an inner core that, if tampered with, releases a drug that counters the high of the pain reliever. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13287 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carolyn Y. Johnson It started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier. Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos or overripe profiles that attract so much consternation from parents and potential employers. Instead, they wondered whether the basic currency of interactions on a social network - the simple act of “friending” someone online - might reveal something a person might rather keep hidden. Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep. “When they first did it, it was absolutely striking - we said, ‘Oh my God - you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” said Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT who co-taught the course. © Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13286 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Patients with severe brain damage who do not appear to have signs of consciousness still seem able to learn, a Cambridge University study suggests. Researchers tested for Pavlovian-like responses in 22 people in a persistent vegetative state by playing a noise prior to a puff of air to the eye. Some subjects learnt to anticipate the puff of air causing the eye muscles to twitch, Nature Neuroscience reported. The team hopes it may lead to tests to determine which patients could recover. Study leader Dr Tristan Bekinschtein from the University of Cambridge said the consensus had been that learning to link one stimulus with another - in this case a noise and a puff of air - was dependent on explicit awareness of the association. But the study, where up to 70 puffs of air were delivered over a 25 minute period, showed that this sort of conditioning is possible even in patients who, by all other measures, are not conscious. Electrodes positioned by the eyes picked up whether the muscles began to respond or not. And a control experiment doing the same tests on people under general anaesthesia did not produce the same responses, suggesting that the learning does not happen when truly unconscious, and that some patients may have some level of consciousness not apparent on traditional tests. Dr Bekinschtein, who began the work as a PhD student in Argentina, said they also found that patients who started to anticipate the puff of air were more likely to show signs of recovery later on, in terms of increased ability to communicate. Although the results are reported in 22 patients, some of whom were in what is termed a "minimally conscious state", the team has since used the test in many more and is planning a large clinical trial with colleagues in the US and Belgium. (C)BBC

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13285 - Posted: 09.21.2009

Ian Sample, science correspondent People who are left wheelchair-bound by spinal cord injuries could regain some of their mobility through a rehabilitation programme being developed by scientists. Guardian neuroscience stories have found that a combination of drugs, muscle stimulation and treadmill exercises helps paralysed rats to recover the ability to walk normally. The animal tests pave the way for clinical trials in humans, which scientists hope to begin in the US and Switzerland within five years. The treatment, developed by neurologists at the University of Zurich and the University of California in Los Angeles, taps into neural circuits in the spinal cord that control the muscles used for walking. In able-bodied people, these "walking circuits" spring into action when they receive a signal from the brain, but if the spinal cord is damaged, the message from the brain never arrives. When contact with the brain is lost, the circuits shut down. "We've known for more than a century that there are networks of neurons in the spinal cord that generate the rhythmic activity needed for walking," said Grégoire Courtine at the Experimental Neurorehabilitation laboratory in Zurich. "Our study suggests that the brain mostly sends a go or no-go signal." A team led by Courtine used drugs known as serotonin agonists to awaken the walking circuits in paralysed rats whose spines had been severed. The researchers then used tiny electrodes to stimulate the animals' spinal circuitry, according to a report in the journal Nature Neuroscience. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 13284 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BILL FINLEY Martha Maxine might seem like an ill-fitting name for a 5-year-old male horse, but there is an explanation. He used to be a she. Martha Maxine will be a favorite in Saturday’s Tony Maurello Stakes. He won the filly division last year. Martha Maxine will be among the favorites Saturday in the $125,000 Tony Maurello Stakes at Balmoral Park outside Chicago, the same harness racing track where he won the filly division of the same race a year ago. He will make his fourth start since tests determined the horse was intersex, with male sex chromosomes. Complicated questions about possible intersex athletes have come up in human sports, including one recently in track and field, but those athletes typically have an opportunity to challenge any findings. In the case of Martha Maxine, the harness racing authorities took conclusive action. In June, the horse was reclassified as a male by the United States Trotting Association and barred from female-only races. The trainer and co-owner Erv Miller never suspected there was anything different about Martha Maxine; the horse had an uneventful but productive 2008 campaign. Still officially a female, Martha Maxine won 13 races last year, earning $193,891. “The only thing I ever noticed was that she was a very muscular mare,” Miller said. “She carried a lot of muscle tone, like a male does. Other than that, there was nothing different about her. When you think you’ve seen everything in this business, something else comes along. That’s what happened here.” Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 13283 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Alexis Madrigal Email Author Neuroscientist Craig Bennett purchased a whole Atlantic salmon, took it to a lab at Dartmouth, and put it into an fMRI machine used to study the brain. The beautiful fish was to be the lab’s test object as they worked out some new methods. So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.” The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.” methodsIf that were all that had occurred, the salmon scanning would simply live on in Dartmouth lore as a “crowning achievement in terms of ridiculous objects to scan.” But the fish had a surprise in store. When they got around to analyzing the voxel (think: 3-D or “volumetric” pixel) data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon’s tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown. “By complete, random chance, we found some voxels that were significant that just happened to be in the fish’s brain,” Bennett said. “And if I were a ridiculous researcher, I’d say, ‘A dead salmon perceiving humans can tell their emotional state.’” © 2009 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 13282 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Two male squirrel monkeys now see the world in a whole new way — in full color. Female squirrel monkeys can see in color, but male squirrel monkeys are normally red-green colorblind because they lack pigments in the retina that detect those wavelengths of light. Now, researchers have performed gene therapy that allowed two male squirrel monkeys named Sam and Dalton to produce proteins that detect red light. As soon as the red-light-harvesting protein was made in the monkeys’ eyes, the animals were able to discriminate between red and green spots in color vision tests, Jay Neitz of the University of Washington in Seattle and his collaborators report online September 17 in Nature. The experiment wasn’t supposed to work, Neitz says. People born with cataracts don’t develop nerve connections that help the brain make sense of messages sent by the eye. If the defect isn’t corrected early, these people remain essentially blind even if their eyes return to full function later. Because there was no reason to assume color vision was different from other types of vision, the team had assumed it would not be possible to reverse the deficit in an adult animal. Neitz polled experts in the vision field on whether they thought producing photoreceptors in colorblind adult monkeys could give color vision. “Every single person said, ‘absolutely not.’” But the researchers decided to move forward with the experiment to see if they could get the pigment protein to be made in the eye. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13281 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Young children's exposure to lead in the environment is harming their intellectual and emotional development, according to UK researchers. The researchers say the toxic effects of lead on the central nervous system are obvious even below the current so-called safe level of lead in the blood. They are recommending the threshold should be halved. A spokesman for the Health Protection Agency said levels of exposure should be kept to the minimum. Lead has been removed from paint and petrol by law in the UK, but it is still widespread in the environment. The study from the University of Bristol Centre for Child and Adolescent Health set out to see if there was any effect on the behaviour and intellectual development of children who had ingested just below the so-called safe level of 10 microgrammes per decilitre (or tenth of a litre) of blood. The study is published in the journal, Archives of Diseases in Childhood. The Bristol researchers took blood samples from 582 children at the age of 30 months. They found 27% of the children had lead levels above five microgrammes per decilitre. They followed the children's progress at regular intervals and then assessed their academic performance and behavioural patterns when they were seven to eight years old. After taking account of factors likely to influence the results, they found that blood lead levels at 30 months showed significant associations with educational achievement, antisocial behaviour and hyperactivity scores five years later. With lead levels up to five microgrammes per decilitre, there was no obvious effect. But lead levels between five and 10 microgrammes per decilitre were associated with significantly poorer scores for reading ( 49% lower) and writing (51% lower). A doubling in lead blood levels to 10 microgrammes per decilitre was associated with a drop of a third of a grade in their Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs). And above 10 microgrammes per decilitre children were almost three times as likely to display antisocial behaviour patterns and be hyperactive than the children with the lower levels of lead in their blood. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 13280 - Posted: 09.17.2009

by Nora Schultz, Berlin NEUROSCIENCE could do for schools what biomedical research has done for healthcare. That's the conclusion of the Decade of the Mind (DOM) symposium last week in Berlin, Germany, to discuss how the latest findings could be used to improve education. "In medicine, we have an excellent system in place to go from basic research to clinical practice, while in neuroscience we have the basic understanding of how the brain learns but still need to figure out how to translate this into the classroom," says Manfred Spitzer of the University of Ulm in Germany, one of the conference organisers. With brain imaging and, increasingly, genetic studies now complementing psychology research, a host of new findings could inform teachers about the conditions in which our brains can be primed to learn best. One of the main themes emerging at the DOM meeting was that the foundation of successful learning is improving executive function - a collection of cognitive processes important for self-control and focusing on the task at hand. Brain-imaging studies have mapped executive function to several regions, including the anterior cingulate gyrus, which also lights up during error detection and when children learn numeracy and literacy. Various studies presented at the meeting showed that improving a child's executive function could be achieved with relatively small changes, for example, by altering the timetabling of exercise sessions or encouraging the learning of a musical instrument (see "Stretch and learn" and "The Stephen King effect") Improving a child's ability to focus on the task at hand can be achieved with relatively small changes © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13279 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jesse Bering It’s my impression that many straight people believe that there are two types of gay men in this world: those who like to give, and those who like to receive. No, I’m not referring to the relative generosity or gift-giving habits of homosexuals. Not exactly, anyway. Rather, the distinction concerns gay men’s sexual role preferences when it comes to the act of anal intercourse. But like most aspects of human sexuality , it’s not quite that simple. I’m very much aware that some readers may think that this type of article does not belong on this website. But the great thing about good science is that it’s amoral, objective and doesn’t cater to the court of public opinion. Data don’t cringe; people do. Whether we’re talking about a penis in a vagina or one in an anus, it’s human behavior all the same. The ubiquity of homosexual behavior alone makes it fascinating. What’s more, the study of self-labels in gay men has considerable applied value, such as its possible predictive capacity in tracking risky sexual behaviors and safe sex practices. People who derive more pleasure (or perhaps suffer less anxiety or discomfort) from acting as the insertive partner are referred to colloquially as “tops,” whereas those who have a clear preference for serving as the receptive partner are commonly known as “bottoms.” There are plenty of other descriptive slang terms for this gay male dichotomy as well, some repeatable (“pitchers vs. catchers,” “active vs. passive,” “dominant vs. submissive”) and others not—well, not for Scientific American , anyway. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13278 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Is addiction to nicotine stronger than addiction to cocaine? A. The two addictions are believed to involve similar brain pathways, and craving for both drugs has been found in one study to be reduced by mecamylamine, a drug used to block the rewarding effects of nicotine. But a 2006 study in the journal Addiction by Jack E. Henningfield, a researcher for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, examined the strength of the addictions on several measures and concluded that nicotine addiction could not be considered stronger than cocaine addiction. All drugs of abuse stimulate the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This is believed to be involved in producing feelings of pleasure and reward, and eventually in cravings for the drug when it is withdrawn. Nicotine, like cocaine, activates nerve cells in the brain’s mesolimbic system that contain dopamine. In the study comparing addictions to the two, the researchers considered several lines of evidence — including patterns of use, mortality and potential for physical dependence — and found that while both are highly addicting drugs, current evidence does not show nicotine to be more addicting than cocaine. For both, the study said, patterns of use and dependence are strongly influenced by factors like availability, price, regulations and social pressures, as well as pharmacological characteristics. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13277 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Some mental disorders aren’t merely common—they’re the norm. Depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol dependence and marijuana dependence affect roughly twice as many people as had previously been estimated, a new study finds. Nearly 60 percent of the population experiences at least one of these mental disorders by age 32, say study directors and psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, both of Duke University in Durham, N.C. That figure probably gets higher by the time people reach middle age, Moffitt suggests, as additional people develop at least one of these four ailments for the first time. In a paper published online September 1 and in an upcoming Psychological Medicine, Moffitt and Caspi present results from a study of more than 1,000 New Zealanders assessed for mental disorders 11 times between ages 3 and 32. This study took a prospective approach, following people as they aged, and assessed prevalence rates based on long-term data. Moffitt’s team focused most intensely on the period from age 18 to 32, when these disorders first start to appear. Earlier prevalence estimates for mental disorders in the United States and New Zealand relied on self-reports and therefore adults’ ability to remember and willingness to recount their own past emotional problems. “Like flu, if you follow a cohort of people born in the same year, as they age almost all of them will sooner or later have a serious bout of depression, anxiety or a substance abuse problem,” Moffitt says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13276 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE The first words ever spoken, so fable holds, were a palindrome and an introduction: “Madam, I’m Adam.” A few years ago palindromes — phrases that read the same backward as forward — turned out to be an essential protective feature of Adam’s Y, the male-determining chromosome that all living men have inherited from a single individual who lived some 60,000 years ago. Each man carries a Y from his father and an X chromosome from his mother. Women have two X chromosomes, one from each parent. The new twist in the story is the discovery that the palindrome system has a simple weakness, one that explains a wide range of sex anomalies from feminization to sex reversal similar to Turner’s syndrome, the condition of women who carry only one X chromosome. The palindromes were discovered in 2003 when the Y chromosome’s sequence of bases, represented by the familiar letters G, C, T and A, was first worked out by David C. Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues at the DNA sequencing center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. They came as a total surprise but one that immediately explained a serious evolutionary puzzle, that of how the genes on the Y chromosome are protected from crippling mutations. Unlike the other chromosomes, which can repair one another because they come in pairs, one from each parent, the Y has no evident backup system. Nature has prevented it from recombining with its partner, the X, except at its very tips, lest its male-determining gene should sneak into the X and cause genetic chaos. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13275 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeanna Bryner Some animals are more thoughtful than others, according to a comparative psychologist who says evidence is mounting that dolphins, macaque monkeys and other animals share our ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind. J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo notes that humans are capable of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. "Humans can feel uncertainty. They know when they do not know or remember, and they respond well to uncertainty by deferring response and seeking information," Smith writes in the September issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. And accumulating research, he says, suggests metacognition is not unique to humans. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here "The idea is that some minds have a cognitive executive that can look in on the human's or the animal's thoughts and problem-solving and look at how its going and see if there are ways to guide it or if behavior needs to pause while more information is obtained," Smith told LiveScience. Robert Hampton, assistant professor of psychology at Emory University in Georgia, who studies neuroscience and animal behavior, agrees that some animals show metacognition. "Work with primates has shown many parallels with human metacognitive performance," said Hampton, who was not involved in the current review study. "In particular, some of the studies done by Dr. Smith and colleagues have shown close correspondence between the performance of humans and monkeys in nearly identical metacognitive tests." © 2009 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13274 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Daniele Seiss I did it, I thought in disbelief, and I even sprinted at the end. Did anyone notice, I wondered. I somehow managed to find it in me to sprint across the finish line. Then I tried not to collapse right there on the road. My body ached, and after hours of sweating, I was quickly becoming chilled in the 50-degree wind. Desperately trying to keep moving, I suddenly found myself in a crowd of post-marathoners shuffling slowly, cattlelike, along a barricaded corridor, as volunteers handed out water and enshrouded us with thin mylar blankets and then others handed us medals, all alike, to commemorate our run. This should have been my greatest hour. After all, I had secured the grail of marathons, the holy Boston, something I had been dreaming about for years. Yet it seemed strangely pointless, so after-the-fact, so anticlimactic. And then it dawned on me. Finishing the Boston Marathon was nothing in comparison to the real hurdle I'd been able to surmount and the one that had turned me into a runner in the first place: major lifelong depression. Long before Boston, in fact, running had saved my life. I can't even say for certain when dark thoughts started to take control of my life. But I remember, when I was just 6 years old, crying every day. I didn't sleep at night. When I did, I had nightmares. I stopped eating. When I did eat, I often couldn't keep the food down. I felt that something terrible was going to happen, to my parents or to me. I was soon plagued by bad headaches. The condition became severe, and I began to develop paranoid thoughts and panic attacks, though at the time no one, including me, would recognize that's what was going on. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13273 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon From polite petitions to fierce fires, activists opposed to animal research have made their position clear in the U.S. and abroad for many years. But now, medical researchers are being encouraged to press on—and speak out. Two new commentaries, published online today in The Journal of Neuroscience, highlight recent threats that have befallen some researchers who perform research on animals. "We have seen our cars and homes firebombed or flooded, and we have received letters packed with poisoned razors and death threats via e-mail and voicemail," Dario Ringach of the David Geffen School of Medicine and J. David Jentsch of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) wrote in one of the papers. "These threats do not endanger just these individuals alone, but also the scientific community at large and the health and well-being of millions affected by their research," Thomas Carew, president of The Society of Neuroscience (SfN), said in a prepared statement responding to the commentaries. "Today, it is unacceptable that in the pursiut of better health and understanding of disease, researchers, their families, and their communities face violence and intimidation by extremists." "Responsible research has played a vital role in nearly every major medical advance of the last century, from heart disease to polio, and is essential to future advances," Carew continued. Animal rights groups, however, maintain that most drugs developed and tested on animals never pass human safety or efficacy trials and never make it to market. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 13272 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Depression can damage a cancer patient's chances of survival, a review of research suggests. The University of British Columbia team said the finding emphasised the need to screen cancer patients carefully for signs of psychological distress. The study, a review of 26 separate studies including 9,417 patients, features in the journal Cancer. It found death rates were up to 25% higher in patients showing symptoms of depression. In patients actually diagnosed with major or minor depression, death rates were up to 39% higher. The increased risks remained even after other clinical characteristics that might affect survival were taken into consideration. However, the researchers said more research was needed before any definitive conclusions could be drawn, as it was difficult to rule out the impact of other factors. They also stressed that, overall, the increased risk of dying from cancer due to depression was small - so patients should not feel they had to maintain a positive attitude to beat their disease. The studies looked at by the British Columbia team focused on a range of survival times, from one year to 10 years. The researchers could find no firm evidence to show that depression impacted on the progression of disease - although the number of studies which specifically looked at this was very limited. Research on animals has suggested that stress can have an effect on tumour growth and the spread of cancer to other parts of the body. It is possible that depression could have an impact on hormones or the immune system, or that depressed people tend to engage in behaviour which might affect how long they live. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13271 - Posted: 09.14.2009

From left are Matt Birk, Lofa Tatupu and Sean Morey, who agreed to donate their brains after death to a Boston University medical school program that studies sports brain injuries.From left are Matt Birk, Lofa Tatupu and Sean Morey, who agreed to donate their brains after death to a Boston University medical school program that studies sports brain injuries. (Associated Press) Three active NFL players will donate their brains after death to a Boston University medical school program that studies sports brain injuries. Centre Matt Birk of the Baltimore Ravens, linebacker Lofa Tatupu of the Seattle Seahawks and receiver Sean Morey of the Arizona Cardinals join 40 retired NFL players already in the program's brain donation registry, the university announced Monday. "One of the most profound actions I can take personally is to donate my brain to help ensure the safety and welfare of active, retired, and future athletes for decades to come," Morey said. The program takes brain and spinal cord tissue donations so researchers can better understand the long-term effects of repeated concussions. Brain trauma is a growing health concern, after the discovery of the neurodegenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a number of athletes. The condition can lead to memory loss, emotional instability, erratic behaviour, depression and impulse control problems, and can gradually lead to dementia and in some cases death. The disease results from repetitive trauma to the brain. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 13270 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Terry J. Allen Researchers investigating a deadly disease cluster near a New Hampshire lake are tracking clues that stretch from a delicacy eaten on Guam to a 3.5 billion-year-old type of bacteria and the green scum that coats many New England waters. The scum - blooms of cyanobacteria often misnamed blue-green algae - produces a toxin that doctors at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., suspect might have triggered cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis along the north shore of nearby Mascoma Lake. Using patient records and mapping software, the Dartmouth-Hitchcock team looked for ALS clusters in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Their preliminary data suggest that the disease, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is about 2.5 times more prevalent among people who live within a half-mile of water bodies with past or current cyanobacteria colonies. The incidence of ALS was highest near Mascoma Lake, where nine patients have been diagnosed since 1990, all but one since 2000 - a rate at least 10 times the US average of two in 100,000 people diagnosed annually. The neurodegenerative disease eventually immobilizes patients and, inevitably, destroys their ability to swallow and breathe. In one survey, doctors said ALS is the diagnosis they most dread giving. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 13269 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Siri Carpenter Early birds may get the best worms—or at least the best garage sale deals—but they also tire out more quickly than night owls do. In a new study researchers Christina Schmidt and Philippe Peigneux, both at the University of Liège in Belgium, and their colleagues first asked 16 extreme early risers and 15 extreme night owls to spend a week following their natural sleep schedule. Then subjects spent two nights in a sleep lab, where they again followed their preferred sleep patterns and underwent cognitive testing twice daily while in a functional MRI scanner. An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift. Peigneux says faster activation of sleep pressure appears to prevent early birds from fully benefiting from the circadian signal, as evening types do. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Attention
Link ID: 13268 - Posted: 06.24.2010