by Paul Marks EVERY generation has some form of relationship with the internet, but for the older members of society, boosted computer use may have a surprise benefit: it could provide a warning that they may be experiencing the subtle early signs of dementia. Lisa Vizer and colleagues at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, say the first signs of age-related cognitive problems, or a degenerative condition like Alzheimer's, might be detectable using software that monitors telltale variations in an individual's typing patterns. The researchers say that warnings of a possible cognitive dysfunction could improve diagnosis and treatments in time to minimise or delay serious impairment (International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2009.07.005). But how to do it? The UMBC team knew that an individual's typing rhythm is distinctive and reasonably stable over time, but that it can change when we are under temporary stress. They wanted to find out if the mental stress of a cognitive or physical condition would also be detectable. An individual's typing rhythm is distinctive and reasonably stable over time So they hired 24 volunteers with an average of 12 years' experience of typing. After having them perform a number of keyboard exercises, such as writing emails on any topic they liked, they undertook either mental mathematics tasks to stress them cognitively, or intense physical exercise to stress them physically. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 13207 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Celeste Biever YOU might expect the brain of someone with a mental disorder to be disorganised. But it's the nature of the disorganisation that's important - a finding that one day could help early diagnosis of different types of dementia. We already know that the different regions of healthy brains are linked in a so-called small-world network, which makes communication very efficient. For people with Alzheimer's or other types of dementia, however, it's a different story. In small-world networks - which also emerge, for example, in social networks - each node is connected to a lot of nearby nodes, but also has a few links to distant ones. Because of this, any node can communicate with almost any other in just a few hops. This may explain the brain's formidable ability to process masses of information rapidly. "A small world, in theoretical terms, is the optimal network," says Willem de Haan of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. De Haan's team used scalp electrodes to measure the brain activity of resting volunteers, of whom 20 had mild to moderate Alzheimer's, 15 had a rare form of dementia called frontal temporal lobe dementia (FTLD), and 23 were healthy. The researchers figured out the underlying network structure of the volunteers' brains from the electrical activity in different regions over time. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 13206 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael L. Anderson Psychology generally approaches the study of the mind by starting with behavior, and trying to infer the hidden mechanisms that produce it. Neuroscience, in contrast, begins by examining the smallest, deepest parts of the mechanism--genes and neurons--and tries to determine which behaviors these help produce. Ideally, the "outside-in" and "bottom-up" approaches are complementary, but each suffers from some inherent limitations. In psychology, the trouble is that for every piece of observed behavior, there are innumerable mechanisms that could have produced it. Similarly, the neurosciences have been hampered by the dearth of technologies allowing them to observe the brain in action. Knowing how the brain's smallest parts operate isn't the same as knowing how those parts interact to generate behavior. Advanced imaging technologies have long promised to help bridge the gap between psychology and neuroscience by allowing us to peer "inside the box" and observe the living, working brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging has been among the most important of these, but since fMRI doesn't measure brain function directly--it detects changes in blood oxygenation levels from which we infer neural activity--it leaves us in roughly the same position as a psychologist observing behavior. But thanks to a new way of using MRI scanners to take a different kind of picture--a technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging--things have just gotten a lot more interesting. By tracking the motion of water molecules in the brain, DTI allows you to see where nerve fibers lead and to map the fiber bundles wiring together various parts of the cortex. Such a map is called a "connectome." 2009 Forbes.com LLC

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 13205 - Posted: 08.27.2009

By Christian DeBenedetti It's official. Today, the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office reported that Michael Jackson died of an overdose of propofol, an anesthetic most often used during major surgery. Why he was using this drug at home is still unanswered, though reports indicate that the pop superstar hadn't properly slept for years, maybe even decades. Is it possible that Jackson's quest for shuteye may have ended his life? The same questions surround Heath Ledger, who died last year of a prescription-drug overdose. At one point, the young actor told The New York Times he was only getting two hours a night. Director Terry Gilliam told Vanity Fair that Ledger was overusing prescription sleep aids in search of rest. "It was a combination of exhaustion, sleeping medication … and perhaps the aftereffects of the flu," said the director, speculating about Ledger's death. "I guess his body just stopped breathing." We've all suffered from a poor night's sleep. According to the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, vast numbers of Americans (30-40 percent) report suffering from one or more nights of insomnia during any given year. But can insomnia get so bad that you actually die from it? There's very little research on what happens to the human body when it goes for extended periods without sleep—after all, no lab in the country would sign off on such experiments. From what we do know, it's highly likely that one's body would eventually just shut down. But what's more common, and troubling, is chronic insomnia, bouts of brief, fitful sleep—an hour here, three hours there—lasting beyond three weeks into months or years at a time. About 10-15 percent of Americans suffer from chronic insomnia, and while this type of condition is not deadly in and of itself, it can lead to a whole host of other disturbing mental and physical effects. © 2009 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13204 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Liz Kowalczyk Massachusetts General Hospital is creating one of the first comprehensive programs in the nation to provide specialized medical care to adults with autism, a group whose numbers are poised to surge as tens of thousands of children diagnosed with the developmental disorder grow up. The hospital plans to announce Tuesday that it will receive $29 million, the fourth- largest gift in its history, from Nancy Lurie Marks and her family foundation in Wellesley, in part to add a major adult component to its pediatric autism program. The money will also allow the hospital to expand its services for children with autism, who now wait up to a year for an appointment, conduct extensive research, advocate for patients, and train physicians. Foundation staff and autism specialists said many physicians are hesitant or unsure how to talk to and examine adult autistic patients. Their behavior can include rocking and repeating stock phrases - or not speaking at all - and that can lead to serious gaps in care and an over-reliance on psychiatric medications. Autism “is treated as a childhood disorder but it’s lifelong,’’ said Clarence Schutt, director of the Wellesley foundation, which is a leading funder of autism research and whose grant to Mass. General is its largest ever. Many adults with autismcontinue to see their pediatricians well into their 40s, while others go long periods without a physical or dental exam. Still others are misdiagnosed, with doctors missing complications such as sleep apnea or gastrointestinal pain because the patient cannot communicate the problem, doctors and families said. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13203 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. That is the surprising conclusion of Stanford University researchers, who found multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking. "The huge finding is, the more media people use, the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked," Clifford Nass, a professor in Stanford's communications department, said in a telephone interview. The researchers studied 262 college undergraduates, dividing them into high and low multitasking groups, and comparing such things as memory, ability to switch from one task to another and being able to focus on a task. Their findings are in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When it came to such essential abilities, people who did a lot of multitasking didn't score as well as others, Nass said. Still to be answered is why the folks who are worst at multitasking are the ones doing it the most. Is poor multitasking learned? It's sort of a chicken-or-egg question. "Is multitasking causing them to be lousy at multitasking, or is their lousiness at multitasking causing them to be multitaskers?" Nass wondered. "Is it born or learned?" © CBC 2009

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13202 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ian Graham Scientists are to investigate whether human-engineered nanoparticles which are found in sunscreen have any links with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Professor Vyvyan Howard, a pathologist and toxicologist, and Dr Christian Holster, an expert in Alzheimer's, have been awarded £350,000 from the European Union to carry out a three-year research project. Their study at the Biomedical Sciences Institute in Coleraine, Co Londonderry, is part of a worldwide project called NeuroNano, which also involves scientists at Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh universities, among others. The team from the University of Ulster will look specifically at the nanoparticles present in the chemicals found in sunscreens, and in an additive to some diesel fuels – titanium dioxide and cerium oxide – and consider their links to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Professor Howard said yesterday: "There is now firm evidence that some engineered nanoparticles entering intravenously or via lungs can reach the brains of small animals. "Indeed, they lodge in almost all parts of the brain and there are no efficient clearance mechanisms to remove them once there." There were also suggestions that nanoscale particles arising from urban pollution had reached the brains of animals and children living in Mexico City, he added. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Alzheimers; Parkinsons
Link ID: 13201 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Does loss of hearing with age afflict men and women to the same degree? A. From 20 to 69, men are about twice as likely as women to suffer hearing loss, said Howard J. Hoffman, an epidemiologist with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. After 70, men continue to have somewhat higher rates of hearing loss, Mr. Hoffman said, but starting at about 80, both men and women have very high, and approximately equal, rates of poor hearing. The figures are based on national studies involving interviews about hearing problems and examinations, he said. “Aging alone is a major risk factor for hearing loss,” Mr. Hoffman said. “We know that other chronic conditions are associated with hearing impairment, such as diabetes and perhaps hypertension, but these do not account for the gender-specific differences.” Men are more than twice as likely to report long-term exposure to loud noise, Mr. Hoffman said, “so this is probably an important reason why men have worse hearing, on average, as working-age adults.” Interestingly, Mr. Hoffman said, among young adults with hearing impairment, more women than men wear hearing aids, but in those over 70, men are about 50 percent more likely to wear hearing aids than women of comparable age with hearing loss. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13200 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press -- Women with more testosterone tend to behave more like men when taking financial risks, according to a new study. "Women with higher levels of testosterone turn out to be less risk averse, more willing to take risks," Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago said in a telephone interview. Known as the male sex hormone, testosterone occurs in both men and women, but at higher levels in men. It has long been associated with competitiveness and dominance, reduction of fear, and with risky behaviors like gambling and alcohol use. Co-author Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University noted that women in general are less likely than men to take financial risks. "For example, in our sample set, 36 percent of female MBA students chose high-risk financial careers such as investment banking or trading, compared to 57 percent of male students. We wanted to explore whether these gender differences are related to testosterone, which men have, on average, in higher concentrations than women." Previous research in England showed that higher levels of testosterone seem to boost short term success at finance. Researchers there tested male traders morning and evening, and found that those with higher levels of testosterone in the morning were more likely to make an unusually big profit that day. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 13199 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Stoners may be trading sexual highs for the chemical kind. Males who smoke marijuana daily are four times more likely to have trouble reaching orgasm than men who don't inhale, finds a new study of 8,656 Aussies. Other smokers had the opposite problem, experiencing premature ejaculation at nearly three times the rate of non-smokers, find a team led by Marian Pitts at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Her team analysed data collected as part of a 2005 telephone survey of 16 to 64-year-olds. Overall, 8.7 per cent of respondents said they had gotten high in the last year, with twice as many men (11.2 per cent) admitting to marijuana use as women (6.1 per cent). People under 36 were more likely to smoke marijuana than older participants. Even though many male smokers experienced sexual problems, they reported more partners than non-smokers. Marijuana users were twice as likely to have had two or more sex partners in the previous year than men who didn't smoke pot. Smoking in bed Pitts' team found an even stronger trend for increased sexual activity among female smokers, who were also seven times more likely to have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection in the last year than non-smokers. However, female smokers had no more problems in the bedroom than abstainers, Pitts' team found. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13198 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Nora Schultz BRAIN regions key to cognition are smaller in older people who are obese compared with their leaner peers, making their brains look up to 16 years older than their true age. As brain shrinkage is linked to dementia, this adds weight to the suspicion that piling on the pounds may up a person's risk of the brain condition. The brains of elderly obese people looked 16 years older than the brains of those who were lean Previous studies suggested that obesity in middle age increases the risk of dementia decades later, which is accompanied by increased brain shrinkage compared with leaner people. Now brain scans of older people have revealed the areas that are hardest hit, as well as the full extent of brain size differences between obese people and those of average weight. From brain scans initially carried out for a different study, Paul Thompson from the University of California in Los Angeles and colleagues selected 94 from people in their 70s who were still "cognitively normal" five years after the scan. This was to exclude people with disorders that might have confused the results. The researchers then transformed these scans into detailed three-dimensional maps. People with higher body mass indexes had smaller brains on average, with the frontal and temporal lobes - important for planning and memory, respectively - particularly affected (Human Brain Mapping, DOI: 10.1002/hbm.20870). While no one knows whether these people are more likely to develop dementia, a smaller brain is indicative of destructive processes that can develop into dementia. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Obesity; Brain imaging
Link ID: 13197 - Posted: 06.24.2010

TUNA dive fast and deep twice a day because they use an internal compass to navigate, a new study suggests. It has long been known that tuna dive around dawn and dusk but no one has been quite sure why. To find out, Jay Willis at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, and colleagues attached tags to 21 southern blue fin tuna (Thunnus maccoyii) and used them to monitor water temperature, time, depth and light levels for 135 days (Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, DOI: 10.1007/s00265-009-0818-2). The team found that the tuna initiated these "spike dives" when the sun was precisely 6 degrees below the horizon, 30 minutes before dawn and 30 minutes after sunset. At this time of day magnetic interference created by the solar wind is at its lowest. Since some fish can detect and navigate using magnetic fields, Willis thinks that diving at this time may help tuna to get a clearer magnetic signal. As surface wind and waves also cause interference, Willis suggests that they dive deep to "fine-tune their personal compass". Others are not so sure. "There may be other reasons besides geolocation at work here, namely keeping track of food," says Molly Lutcavage of the University of New Hampshire in Durham. She points out that tuna's prey migrate to depth at around the same time. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 13196 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Memo to zoo visitors making faces at the chimps and gorillas on the other side of the glass: they know what you're thinking. Or, more precisely, feeling. The extent and limits of ape intelligence is a hot area in science, but most of the research has focused on cognition. Now a team of scientists has turned the spotlight on emotions, and how well apes can read the human kind as displayed in our facial expressions. Earlier studies had shown that apes understand people's goals and perceptions. But whether apes understand our emotional expressions was pretty much a mystery, even though there are striking similarities between the facial expressions that we and our more hirsute cousins make, as researchers as far back as Darwin noted. Both human babies and newborn chimps make a pouting face to get mom’s attention, for instance, and bare their teeth in something like a smile in order to make nice—or "achieve social bonding," as primatologists put it. A cool paper in the September issue of the journal Developmental Science describes studies on 17 chimps, five bonobos, five gorillas and five orangutans from the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig, Germany. In the first test, a researcher sat at a table on one side of a plexiglass panel while an ape sat on the other side. Two opaque boxes rested on the table. The scientist opened one box (making sure the ape could not see inside) and smiled with pleasure. He next opened the other and made a disgusted face. The ape was then allowed to reach through one of the holes in the panel and pick one box. Which would he choose? © 2009 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 13195 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Thirteen-year-old Andrea Levy ticked off a mental list of rules to follow when her guest arrived: Greet her at the door. Introduce her to the family. Offer a cold drink. Above all, make her feel welcome by letting her choose what to do. ''Do you want to make pizza now or do you want to make it later?'' the lanky, raven-haired teen rehearsed in the kitchen, as her mother spread out dough and toppings. This was a pivotal moment for Andrea, a girl who invited just one acquaintance to her bat mitzvah. Andrea has autism, and socializing doesn't come naturally. For the past several weeks, she's gone to classes that teach the delicate ins and outs of making friends -- an Emily Post rules of etiquette for autistic teens. For Andrea, this pizza date is the ultimate test. The bell rings. The door opens. Can she remember what she needs to do? More important, will she make a friend? Even for socially adept kids, the teen years, full of angst and peer pressure, can be a challenge. It's an especially difficult time for kids with autism spectrum disorders, a catchall term for a range of poorly understood brain conditions -- from the milder Asperger's syndrome to more severe autism marked by lack of eye contact, poor communication and repetitive behavior such as head-banging. Copyright 2009 The Associated Press

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13194 - Posted: 08.24.2009

By Matthew Perrone WASHINGTON - Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline used a sophisticated ghostwriting program to promote its antidepressant Paxil, allowing doctors to take credit for medical journal articles mainly written by company consultants, according to court documents obtained by the Associated Press. An internal company memo instructs salespeople to approach physicians and offer to help them write and publish articles about their positive experiences prescribing the drug. Known as the CASPPER program, the paper explains how the company can help physicians with everything from “developing a topic’’ to “submitting the manuscript for publication.’’ The document was uncovered by the Baum Hedlund PC law firm of Los Angeles, which is representing hundreds of former Paxil users in personal injury and wrongful death suits against GlaxoSmithKline. The firm alleges the company downplayed several risks connected with its drug, including increased suicidal behavior and birth defects. A spokeswoman for London-based Glaxo said the published articles made note of any assistance to the main authors. “The program was not heavily used and was discontinued a number of years ago,’’ said Mary Anne Rhyne. According to the memo, which dates from April 2000, the CASPPER program was designed to “strengthen the product positioning and overcome competitive issues.’’ © Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13193 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALICE DREGER The only thing we know for sure about Caster Semenya, the world-champion runner from South Africa, is that she will live the rest of her life under a cloud of suspicion after track and field’s governing body announced it was investigating her sex. The I.A.A.F.’s process for determining whether Caster Semenya, second from left, is a woman will involve at least a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a gynecologist and a psychologist. Why? Because the track organization, the I.A.A.F., has not sorted out the rules for sex typing and is relying on unstated, shifting standards. To be fair, the biology of sex is a lot more complicated than the average fan believes. Many think you can simply look at a person’s “sex chromosomes.” If the person has XY chromosomes, you declare him a man. If XX, she’s a woman. Right? Wrong. A little biology: On the Y chromosome, a gene called SRY usually makes a fetus grow as a male. It turns out, though, that SRY can show up on an X, turning an XX fetus essentially male. And if the SRY gene does not work on the Y, the fetus develops essentially female. Even an XY fetus with a functioning SRY can essentially develop female. In the case of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, the ability of cells to “hear” the masculinizing hormones known as androgens is lacking. That means the genitals and the rest of the external body look female-typical, except that these women lack body hair (which depends on androgen-sensitivity). Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13192 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower In one scene of the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project, three film students searching for a legendary creature hike for hours only to end up at the spot where they had started. Their misfortune is not just a suspenseful twist in a fictional world, says psychologist Jan Souman of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. Given no external cues to direction, people trying to walk straight over unfamiliar terrain end up doing intermittent loop-de-loops, Souman and his colleagues report in a paper published online August 20 in Current Biology. Circular walking occurs when people have to rely solely on bodily cues, such as rotational shifts and joint movements, to estimate the location of “straight ahead,” Souman hypothesizes. As random errors in bodily feedback accumulate, a person eventually drifts to one side or the other. A walker dependent on bodily cues may first make a circle to the right, drift back to a straight-ahead direction, start to zigzag and then make a circle to the left. “You may think that you’re walking in a straight line, but in fact the direction you’re walking in is drifting more and more away from straight ahead, making you walk in circles,” Souman says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 13191 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jenny Lauren Lee Nostrils usually get along great. But when they smell conflicting scents, those nose holes become deadly rivals. When one nostril smells something different from the other, the brain chooses between the two scents instead of combining them, researchers report online August 20 in Current Biology. The authors argue that their study is the first to demonstrate this phenomenon, which they call two-nostril, or binaral, rivalry. Studying the rivalry between the nares may help scientists understand how the brain processes smells, says study coauthor Denise Chen of Rice University in Houston. “It’s an interesting article,” says neuroscientist Jay Gottfried of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “It shows something that has not been appreciated much before.” Scientists have known about rivalry between the eyes and between the ears for years. When a subject’s right eye views an image that is incompatible with the image that the left eye views, the subject reports seeing the images alternating rather than superimposed upon each other. Similarly, in two-ear rivalry, when each ear hears a different tone, the brain switches back and forth between them. To test whether the same phenomenon exists for smell, Chen and Rice University colleague Wen Zhou exposed12 volunteers to two different scents, one in each nostril. One nostril was connected by a tube to a bottle of phenylethyl alcohol, which smells like rose petals. The other was connected to a bottle of n-butanol, which pongs of marker pen. During each whiff, the volunteers breathed in both scents. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 13190 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Humans have long enjoyed crowing about their intellectual superiority in the animal kingdom. But just as some studies—of tool-wielding birds and language-discerning rodents—have begun to chip away at our cognitive place in the sun, others have set their sights on two human groups whose intelligence might have been underestimated—the very young and the very old. Babies first: "Generations of psychologists and philosophers have believed that babies and young children were basically defective adults—irrational, egocentric and unable to think logically," Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), wrote in a New York Times editorial last week. But her research—and that of others—has gone on to show that rather than being one crayon short of a full box, "In some ways, they are smarter than adults," she says. Gopnik's research at the University of California, Berkeley, has shown young children (of the 5-and-under set) to be fully capable of reasoning and assessing probability. But babies' tendency to be interested in just about everything has led many adults to assume their lack of focus is indicative of unintelligence, Gopnik noted. "Babies explore; adults audit," she says. On the other end of the spectrum, even older adults without an impairing disease such as Alzheimer's are often assumed to have experienced some cognitive slippage. While that may be true in some respects, new research is proving that seniors are perfectly competent in learning new concepts—and remembering them. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13189 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carl Zimmer Some of the common words we use are frozen mistakes. The term influenza comes from the Italian word meaning “influence”—an allusion to the influence the stars were once believed to have on our health. European explorers searching for an alternate route to India ended up in the New World and uncomprehendingly dubbed its inhabitants indios, or Indians. Neuroscientists have a frozen mistake of their own, and it is a spectacular blunder. In the mid-1800s researchers discovered cells in the brain that are not like neurons (the presumed active players of the brain) and called them glia, the Greek word for “glue.” Even though the brain contains about a trillion glia—10 times as many as there are neurons—the assumption was that those cells were nothing more than a passive support system. Today we know the name could not be more wrong. Glia, in fact, are busy multitaskers, guiding the brain’s development and sustaining it throughout our lives. Glia also listen carefully to their neighbors, and they speak in a chemical language of their own. Scientists do not yet understand that language, but experiments suggest that it is part of the neurological conversation that takes place as we learn and form new memories. If you had to blame one thing for the mistaken impression about glia, it would have to be electricity. The 18th-century physiologist Luigi Galvani discovered that if he touched a piece of electrified metal to an exposed nerve in a frog’s leg, the leg twitched. He and others went on to show that a slight pulse of electricity moving through the metal to the nerve was responsible. For two millennia physicians and philosophers had tried to find the “animal spirits” that moved the body, and Galvani discovered that impetus: It was the stuff of lightning.

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 13188 - Posted: 06.24.2010