Daniel Cressey Despite thousands of years of coexistence, exploitation and cheese, humanity seems to have missed an intriguing fact about cows: they like to point north. Or possibly south. An analysis of more than 8,000 cows claims they have a statistically significant preference to align themselves in a north-south direction. The team behind this study has also found a similar preference in deer, and believes the animals must be sensing the Earth's magnetic field. While 'magnetoreception' has been documented in insects, birds and some mammals, the idea that such a prominent example of it could have gone unrecognised for years comes as a surprise. What evolutionary advantage, if any, the cattle might accrue is unclear. "It is amazing that this ubiquitous conspicuous phenomenon apparently has remained unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years," write Sabine Begall, of the University of Duisberg-Essen in Germany, and colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Begall's team used satellite photos from Google Earth to analyse the orientation of 8,510 cattle at 308 sites around the globe. The photos were chosen to ensure the animals were clearly visible, standing on flat ground, and not close to water or feeding areas that would influence their position. "The whole search was quite time-consuming," says Begall. "Sometimes you find several pastures within minutes, and at other times you search and search without finding anything useful." © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 11972 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeremy Hsu "Carl, let me in," whispered actor-director Ben Stiller, grasping at empty air near a sullen teenage boy. "I want to know what makes my little nephew tick." The sketch at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards showcased Stiller's self-mocking attempt to promote his new comedy "Tropic Thunder" and get inside the head of his potential audience. But in reality, both Hollywood studios and neuroscientists are increasingly using technologies such as brain scans to peer inside the minds of moviegoers. That alliance promises to do more than just sell Hollywood's movies to the masses — it may revolutionize how filmmakers create movies to begin with. Story continues below ↓advertisement New York University's Film School has produced renowned directors ranging from Oliver Stone and Joel Coen to Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee. But perhaps the most interesting film development at the university today is unfolding inside the psychology department. "In the last four years or five years, we used movies in our experiments," said Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at NYU, "but we used movies basically to understand about the brain." © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 11971 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower There’s good news and, not surprisingly, bad news for children and teenagers grappling with the psychological aftermath of trauma. On the up side, research shows that certain interventions ease post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related problems in young people. On the down side, most mental-health practitioners use trauma treatments for kids and teens that lack scientific support. These conclusions come from an extensive research review conducted by the Task Force on Community Preventive Services, an independent group of 12 investigators partly funded by the federal government. Its findings appear in the September American Journal of Preventive Medicine. To make matters worse, pediatricians and school officials rarely screen children for past exposure to traumatic events and resulting psychological symptoms, the task force notes. Efforts are underway to develop web-based guides for parents and teachers to identify and help kids experiencing trauma-related problems. Although the review focuses on Western countries, research has also just started to explore the use of trained non-professionals to treat traumatized children in developing nations, where mental health workers are scarce. Kids with trauma-related psychological problems tend to do poorly in school if they remain untreated or are inadequately treated, remarks psychologist and social worker Marleen Wong of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11970 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KENNETH CHANG At the tip of the noses of mammals, including humans, is a ball of nerve cells known as the Grueneberg ganglion, named after Hans Grueneberg, the scientist who described the structure in mice in 1973. Grueneberg thought it was just a nerve ending. Only in last few years, after scientists devised strains of mice that glow green under fluorescent light, did they deduce that the Grueneberg ganglion is a component of the olfactory system. But they still did not know what the ganglion smelled. In the Aug. 22 issue of the journal Science, researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland report that they have figured it out, at least for the green-glowing mice. All sorts of organisms, including plants, insects and mammals, release “alarm pheromones” when they sense danger; the pheromones waft through the air to warn others. Very little is known about the alarm pheromones of mammals other than that they exist. Scientists have not identified the compounds; they do not know where in the body the pheromones are produced. Nonetheless, the Lausanne scientists could collect the pheromones by simply stressing mice and sucking up the air around them. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 11969 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Growing up with a pet dog could increase your chances of being a snorer later in life, claims a Swedish study. This is not just a potential annoyance - heavy snoring has been linked to early death, heart disease and stroke. The University Hospital Umea research, published in the BioMed Central, found being exposed to a dog as a newborn boosted the risk of snoring by 26%. They suggested allergic swelling could alter the shape of a person's airways for life. Just under one in five of the 15,556 people from Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Estonia reported "habitual snoring", described as loud and disturbing on at least three nights a week. The same questionnaire asked them to recall other facts about their home lives, and various factors seemed to increase the risk of snoring later in life. These included being hospitalised for a respiratory infection before the age of two, having recurrent ear infections as a child, and growing up in a large family. While there is no concrete evidence of a mechanism which might explain these findings, lead researcher Dr Karl Franklin, from University Hospital Umea, suggested that they could all "enhance inflammatory processes" and "alter upper airway anatomy early in life". These permanent changes would then increase the chances of noisy nights to come. Dr Franklin said that the problem extended beyond the prospect of sleep deprivation for the snorer and their partner. "People who snore run an increased risk of early death and cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attacks or strokes," he said. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 11968 - Posted: 08.23.2008

By Tina Hesman Saey Dopamine, a feel-good brain chemical, helps keep sleep-deprived people awake, researchers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse show in the August 20 Journal of Neuroscience. Dopamine is also required for activity of a drug that treats narcolepsy, Japanese and Chinese scientists report in the same issue of the journal. “Dopamine has been a forgotten neurotransmitter for sleep regulation,” says Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep researcher and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University. Increasing evidence is pointing toward dopamine as an important ingredient in the brain’s recipe for promoting wakefulness. The new findings suggest dopamine may naturally increase when a person is sleep-deprived, as a way to counteract a revved-up drive to sleep, says David Dinges of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dinges was not involved in the two new studies, but he has studied the effect of sleep deprivation on people. Sleep deprivation affects some people profoundly, impairing their ability to pay attention and lengthening their reaction times, Dinges says. Other people function nearly as well when mildly sleep-deprived as they do when well-rested. The extent to which dopamine rises in the brain after sleep loss may help explain some of the variability in people’s abilities to cope with sleep deprivation, Dinges says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11967 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Dear EarthTalk: Can those energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs that are popular now cause headaches because of the flickering they do? I converted my whole house over last fall and both my kids were complaining of headaches on and off. -- Sandy, Eugene, OR With a switch to energy efficient compact fluorescent (CFL) light bulbs already in full swing in the U.S. and elsewhere—Australia has banned incandescents, Britain will soon, and the U.S. begins a phase-out of incandescents in 2012—more and more complaints have arisen about the new bulbs causing headaches. Many experts say that the issue is being overblown, however, that there is no scientific evidence that the bulbs cause headaches and that a kind of hysteria has grown out of a small number of anecdotal reports. Industry experts acknowledge that day-to-day exposure to older, magnetically ballasted long tube fluorescent bulbs found mostly in industrial and institutional settings could cause headaches due to their noticeable flicker rate. The human brain can detect the 60 cycles per second such older bulbs need to refresh themselves to keep putting out light. However, modern, electronically ballasted CFLs refresh themselves at between 10,000 and 40,000 cycles per second, rates too fast for the human eye or brain to detect. “As far as I’m aware there is no association between headaches and the use of compact fluorescent lamps,” says Phil Scarbro of Energy Federation Incorporated (EFI), a leading distributor of energy efficiency-related products—including many CFLs. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Vision; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11966 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gisela Telis Scientists have pinpointed the region of the mammalian nose that detects the smell of fear--a discovery that solves a 35-year-old puzzle. A mysterious lump of cells called the Grueneberg ganglion appears to be a sensitive and specialized danger detector, picking up the alarm signals animals emit when they're distressed. Grueneberg ganglions were first spotted in 1973 in mice, then forgotten for decades until olfactory researchers stumbled across them again in 2005. The function of the ganglion remained unknown, but biologist Marie-Christine Broillet of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland suspected it might have something to do with sniffing out fear when electron microscopy revealed proteins associated with pheromone reception. So she and colleagues created three classes of mice: those that had undergone surgery to remove their ganglion, those that underwent surgery but whose ganglion was intact, and those that never saw the scalpel. They then pumped pheromones from stressed mice into the test mice's Plexiglas cages. Those pheromones should cause mice to "freeze or run away," Broillet explains. And that's just what mice with intact ganglions did. But the ganglion-lacking mice went on about their exploratory business, apparently unaware of the alarm pheromones around them. Other than that, their sense of smell seemed to be intact: All groups of mice were able to sniff out a cookie hidden in their cages' bedding, the team reports tomorrow in Science. Previous studies had linked fear signals and the olfactory system in a general way, but Broillet's is the first to show exactly what part of the system detects the signals. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11965 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Bohannon Are you for Obama or McCain in the U.S. presidential election? If you call yourself undecided, you may be fooling yourself. A study of decision-making suggests that your mind may be made up long before you think it is. When deciding between choices, people usually feel as if they're completely in control. They evaluate the criteria and weigh the available information before committing. And when that information doesn't seem to tip the balance, they report that they are undecided. But psychologists know that decision-making is strongly affected by the unconscious mind. Might the unconscious mind of an undecided person already know what it will choose? To find out, a team led by Silvia Galdi, a social psychologist at the University of Padova, Italy, asked 129 residents of Vicenza, Italy, about their attitude toward a controversial enlargement of a nearby U.S. military base. Most of the people already had a position for or against it, but 33 said they were undecided. To gauge the conscious basis of their decisions, the subjects answered a series of questions relevant to the issue, such as the environmental, economic, and political consequences of the base enlargement. For the unconscious analysis, the researchers had the volunteers watch images of the base and then rapidly choose from lists of positive or negative words. The same tests were repeated a week later. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 11964 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- The world's first known modern human was a tall, thin individual -- probably male -- who lived around 200,000 years ago and resembled present-day Ethiopians, save for one important difference: He retained a few primitive characteristics associated with Neanderthals, according to a series of forthcoming studies conducted by multiple international research teams. The extraordinary findings, which will soon be outlined in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution devoted to the first known Homo sapiens, also reveal information about the material culture of the first known people, their surroundings, possible lifestyle and, perhaps most startling, their probable neighbors -- Homo erectus. "Omo I," as the researchers refer to the find, would probably have been considered healthy-looking and handsome by today's standards, despite the touch of Neanderthal. "From the size of the preserved bones, we estimated that Omo I was tall and slender, most likely around 5'10" tall and about 155 pounds," University of New Mexico anthropologist Osbjorn Pearson, who co-authored at least two of the new papers, told Discovery News. Pearson said another, later fossil was also recently found. It too belonged to a "moderately tall -- around 5'9" -- and slender individual." "Taken together, the remains show that these early modern humans were...much like the people in southern Ethiopia and the southern Sudan today," Pearson said. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 11963 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Q. Choi Here's the new taste sensation — your tongue might be able to taste calcium. The capability to taste calcium has now been discovered in mice. With these rodents and humans sharing many of the same genes, the new finding suggests that people might also have such a taste. The four tastes we are most familiar with are sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Recently scientists have discovered tongue molecules called receptors that detect a fifth distinct taste — "umami," or savory. Story continues below ↓advertisement "But why stop there?" asked researcher Michael Tordoff, a behavioral geneticist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "My group has been investigating what we believe is another taste quality — calcium." So assuming the human palate can detect calcium, what does the mineral taste like? "Calcium tastes calcium-y," Tordoff said. "There isn't a better word for it. It is bitter, perhaps even a little sour. But it's much more because there are actual receptors for calcium, not just bitter or sour compounds." One way we might regularly perceive calcium is when it comes to minute levels found in drinking water. "In tap water, it's fairly pleasant," Tordoff said. "But at levels much above that, the taste becomes increasingly bad." © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11962 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Pregnant women who endure the psychological stress of being in a war zone may be more likely to give birth to a child who develops schizophrenia, psychiatry researchers say. Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and her colleagues analyzed medical records from more than 88,000 people who were born in Jerusalem from 1964 to 1976. Females born to women who were in their second month of pregnancy during the Six-Day War between Arabs and Israelis in June 1967 were 4.3 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than females born at other times, the team reported in Wednesday's online issue of the journal BMC Psychiatry. Males born to women at the same stage of pregnancy were 1.2 more likely to develop schizophrenia. "It's a very striking confirmation of something that has been suspected for quite some time," Malaspina said. "The placenta is very sensitive to stress hormones in the mother. These hormones were probably amplified during the time of the war." © CBC 2008

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 11961 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sunita Reed Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the U.S. and for chemist Michelle Gallagher, it hits close to home. “Skin cancer actually affects a lot of people in my family, so it really made me excited to know what they had been through in their diagnosis of skin cancer, that there could be in the future a much easier and less painful way to get their diagnosis,” says Gallagher. Today, Gallagher presented the first odor profile for skin cancer at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in Philadelphia. She conducted the study while working as a post-doctoral researcher under George Preti, also a chemist, at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. She now works for Rohm and Haas. Gallagher and Preti were inspired by previous research reports that dogs, with their superior sniffing abilities, could be trained to detect the scent of cancer. First they studied what compounds are released into the air by healthy skin. Using an instrument that looks like an upside down martini glass, the researchers sampled the air above healthy skin from volunteers who varied in age and gender. The device uses an absorbent fiber that’s exposed to the air above the skin for 30 minutes to collect a sample of the air. The researchers analyzed the chemicals in the samples using mass spectroscopy and detected 92 chemicals in all. ©2008 ScienCentral

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11960 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Josie Glausiusz A tangle of tubes and polyurethane pouches binds a naked man and woman—he, paunchy and unperturbed, she, slim and similarly unself-conscious. This setup is not some esoteric sex game; it’s “Smell Blind Date,” an installation created by artist James Auger on display this past spring in New York City as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. The PVC tubes—which run between the subjects’ chests, with outlets extending to pouches attached to their noses, armpits and genitals—allow the man and woman to inhale each other’s body odor through a wall that divides them. In theory, they are on a truly blind date, each undistracted by the other’s looks, assessing the other’s potential as a mating partner by his or her smell alone. The human sense of smell is often seen as insignificant, dismissed as a distant also-ran to our keen eyesight or sensitive hearing. But this sense is keener and more influential on our species than many people realize. In particular, as Auger’s fanciful art project illustrates, smell facilitates a variety of human social interactions, both casual and intimate. Indeed, people who lose their sense of smell often gain a new appreciation for its importance [see “When the Nose Doesn’t Know,” by Eleonore von Bothmer; Scientific American Mind, October/November 2006]. Much of this influence goes unnoticed because it falls under the radar of consciousness. For instance, research demonstrates that we subconsciously use smell to assess a person’s likability, sexual attractiveness and emotional state. Through scent, people can distinguish stranger from friend, male from female and gay from straight. Thus, olfaction may facilitate reproduction and prevent risky encounters. “If you look at nature, you see that every living organism has some form of chemosensory detection mechanism” that enables it to sense threats at a distance, explains neuroscientist Johan Lundström of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. By the same token, deficiencies in olfaction may contribute to social withdrawal, such as that which accompanies schizophrenia. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11959 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden The next time a fight breaks out at an ice hockey game, blame the guy with the wide face. Although the findings aren't quite that clear-cut, new research indicates that males with larger facial width-to-height ratios tend to be more aggressive--both on and off the field. When boys reach puberty, testosterone often lengthens and enlarges their jaws and makes their brow ridges more prominent. The hormone also increases their facial width-to-height ratio, a comparison of the distance between the cheekbones to the distance between the upper lip and brows. Last year, paleontologist Eleanor Weston of the Natural History Museum in London concluded from an analysis of skulls that this ratio is larger in males and that the difference is independent of the male-female inequality in body size. Intrigued by this finding, behavioral neuroscientist Cheryl McCormick and psychologist Justin Carré of Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, decided to see if the ratio correlated with aggressiveness, which also depends on testosterone levels. To find out, the researchers first measured facial width-to-height ratios in 88 male and female volunteers. They then gave the subjects a test that involved pushing buttons to gain points, to protect points from an opponent, or to take points away from the opponent. In the last instance, the player doesn't gain the point but merely gets the satisfaction of robbing the opponent. Males take points from opponents more often than do females, and psychologists regard the behavior as a reliable measure of aggressive tendencies. Results of the test didn't predict anything about faces for the women, but men with relatively wider faces tended to show more aggression; 15% of the individual differences in aggressive behavior could be explained by individual differences in facial ratios, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11958 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tony Scully It was three years ago that electrophysiologist Francisco Bezanilla heard that the squid were back. That summer he had already travelled from the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Woods Hole Marine Laboratory, Massachusetts, in pursuit of the creatures. Like other researchers, he spent two months there each year when the Atlantic or longfin inshore squid, Loligo pealeii, bred in local waters. He found their giant nerve cells the best biological preparation for studying the electrical signals that cross the cell membrane. But he still struggled to isolate the weak signal generated by the flow of potassium ions. So when Bezanilla heard what fellow Chilean Miguel Holmgren had to say, his ears pricked up. Holmgren, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, had word from family back home that the jumbo Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, were in plentiful supply at fish markets throughout Chile. Memories from more than 40 years ago came flooding back to Bezanilla: of his old mentor, Mario Luxoro; of the bustling Laboratory of Cell Physiology in Montemar, Chile, that lured scientists from all over the world; and of long summer days spent hunched over the squid's spaghetti-like nerve axons. Bezanilla and other researchers had been forced to leave Montemar when the Humboldt squid mysteriously disappeared from local waters in 1970. Bezanilla thought that the squid's return might allow him to resurrect the old laboratory, and that the squid's giant axons — on average twice the diameter of its Atlantic cousin and loaded with many more ion pumps — might generate the stronger potassium signal he sought. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11957 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford To most dieters, no fat is good fat. But in work published this week in Nature, an insight into the origin of a special class of calorie-burning fat cells could lead to new ways of boosting metabolism and combating obesity, researchers say. foodYou'll be needing some more brown fat after eating that lot.Punchstock The sworn enemy of the dieter is the 'white' fat cell. Such cells are little more than sacks of fat, storing energy and providing padding. Less known — and less reviled — is brown fat, made up of heat-producing cells chock full of fat and energy-generating structures called mitochondria. The iron attached to proteins in these mitochondria gives brown fat its characteristic colour. White fat is by far the more abundant of the two; adults carry many pounds of white fat, but only a few grams of brown fat, concentrated mainly in the front part of the neck and the upper chest. Brown-fat pads between the shoulder blades are thought to help newborns stay warm, but precisely what purpose the cells serve in adults is still unclear. What is clear is that brown fat burns a tremendous amount of energy: about 50 grams of brown fat could burn up 20% of a person's daily caloric intake, says Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and one of the researchers involved in the latest study. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11956 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain By Shaun Nichols Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free. This kind of anti-free will stance stretches back to 18th century philosophy, but the idea has recently been getting much more exposure through popular science books and magazine articles. Should we worry? If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility? In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix). Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage begins as follows: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11955 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An ambitious 'Janelia Farm-style' neuroscience institute to lead international efforts in understanding the brain and behaviour at the level of basic neural circuits is being planned for London. University College London (UCL) will host the new centre, after beating rival universities Oxford and Cambridge, Nature has learned. The £140-million (US$261-million) institute will be funded by the Wellcome Trust, the largest UK research charity, and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, founded by David Sainsbury, a British politician and businessman. The individuals involved declined to comment, but Richard Morris, head of neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust, says no decision has been made. The aim of the centre will be to "elucidate how neural circuits carry out information processing that underpins behaviour", according to the charities' letter to the universities competing for the project, sent earlier this year. The institute will take an interdisciplinary approach, combining state-of-the-art molecular and cellular biology with computational modelling. UCL may have beaten competitors because its 400-strong neuroscience department is one of the most productive in the country. And it already has a world-class computational neuroscience centre, also funded by the Gatsby foundation. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11954 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see. Here's the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a "higher cognitive" producer, like the brain's superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences. The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear. The study was published last week in the journal BMC Neuroscience. Researchers trained monkeys to locate a light flashed on a screen. When the light was very bright, they easily found it; when it was dim, it took a long time. But if a dim light made a brief sound, the monkeys found it in no time - too quickly, in fact, than can be explained by the old theories. Recordings from 49 neurons responsible for the earliest stages of visual processing, researchers found activation that mirrored the behavior. That is, when the sound was played, the neurons reacted as if there had been a stronger light, at a speed that can only be explained by a direct connection between the ear and eye brain regions, said researcher Ye Wang of the University of Texas in Houston. © 2002-2008 redOrbit.com.

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 11953 - Posted: 06.24.2010