By Stephanie Reitz AMHERST, Mass. - One gray squirrel, its bushy tail twitching, barked a warning as another scrounged for food nearby. It was an ordinary spring day at Hampshire College, except that the rodent issuing the warning was powered by amps, not acorns. Dubbed "Rocky'' after the cartoon character, the robo-squirrel is working its way into Hampshire's live-squirrel clique, controlled by researchers several yards away with a laptop computer and binoculars. Sarah Partan, an assistant professor in animal behavior at Hampshire, hopes that by capturing a close-up view of squirrels in nature, Rocky will help her team decode squirrels' communication techniques, social cues and survival instincts. Rocky is among many robotic critters worldwide helping researchers observe animals in their natural environments rather than in labs. The research could let scientists better understand how animals work in groups, court, intimidate rivals and warn allies of danger. © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Animal Communication; Aggression
Link ID: 11592 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rob Stein Rocco Turso was injecting himself with insulin three times a day, swallowing pills twice daily and restricting his diet. But his diabetes was still out of control, blurring his vision, making his feet numb and sapping his energy. So he decided to try an experimental operation. Within days, his blood sugar was normal and he was off all his medications. "It's been truly amazing," said Turso, 62, a construction superintendent from Harrison, N.Y. "I use the word 'miracle.' The diabetes was killing me. It's given me back my life." Turso is one of a handful of Americans who have undergone a novel procedure that proponents say appears to offer the most important advance since the discovery of insulin in treating one of the most common chronic diseases. "It's extremely promising," said Madhu Rangraj, chief of laparoscopic surgery at the Sound Shore Medical Center in New Rochelle, N.Y., who performed the operation bypassing part of Turso's small intestine in March. "It's a surgical solution to diabetes." While many surgeons share Rangraj's enthusiasm, and some diabetes experts agree that the operation and similar ones may lead to fundamental new insights into the disease, other experts remain cautious. Much more research is needed, they say, to validate the effectiveness of the procedures. They worry that the operations will start to proliferate before their long-term safety and effectiveness have been proven, as often occurs with novel surgeries. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11591 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANET RAE-DUPREE HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation. So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks. Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives. But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11590 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin The number of fat cells in your body remains constant throughout your adult life, a new study has found. The discovery suggests that the process of weight gain may be fundamentally different in adults and in children. Adults who gain or lose weight may do so through changes in the size of the fat cells, also called adipocytes, that constitute fatty deposits in the body. Children, on the other hand, may put on extra fat by increasing the overall number of these cells in the body. This may mean that people who got fat during childhood may find it more difficult to shift the weight later in life, compared to those who piled on the pounds as adults, suggests Kirsty Spalding of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who led the new research. Although the number of fat cells remains constant in adulthood, Spalding and her team found that it is not the same cells persisting for ever. There is a dynamic process of cell death and replenishment. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11589 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A special high-fat diet helps to control fits in children with epilepsy, a UK trial suggests. The number of seizures fell by a third in children on the "ketogenic" diet, where previously they had suffered fits every day despite medication. The diet alters the body's metabolism by mimicking the effects of starvation, the researchers reported in the Lancet Neurology. The researchers called for the diet to be more widely available on the NHS. It is the first trial comparing the diet with routine care, even though it has been around since the 1920s. Children are given a tailored diet very high in fat, low in carbohydrate and with controlled amounts of protein. It is not exactly clear how it works but it seems that ketones, produced from the breakdown of fat, help to alleviate seizures. A total of 145 children aged between two and 16 who had failed to respond to treatment with at least two anti-epileptic drugs took part in the study. Half started the diet immediately and half waited for three months. The number of seizures in the children on the diet fell to two-thirds of what they had been, but remained unchanged in those who had not yet started the diet, the researchers reported. Five children in the diet group saw a seizure reduction of more than 90%. However, there were some side-effects including constipation, vomiting, lack of energy and hunger. Professor Helen Cross, study leader and consultant in neurology at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, said the diet had been around for a long time but had fallen out of favour because it was thought to be too difficult to stick to. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 11588 - Posted: 05.03.2008

By KATIE HAFNER SAN FRANCISCO — When David Bunnell, a magazine publisher who lives in Berkeley, Calif., went to a FedEx store to send a package a few years ago, he suddenly drew a blank as he was filling out the forms. “I couldn’t remember my address,” said Mr. Bunnell, 60, with a measure of horror in his voice. “I knew where I lived, and I knew how to get there, but I didn’t know what the address was.” Mr. Bunnell is among tens of millions of baby boomers who are encountering the signs, by turns amusing and disconcerting, that accompany the decline of the brain’s acuity: a good friend’s name suddenly vanishing from memory; a frantic search for eyeglasses only to find them atop the head; milk taken from the refrigerator then put away in a cupboard. “It’s probably one of the most frightening aspects of the changes we undergo as we age,” said Nancy Ceridwyn, director of educational initiatives at the American Society on Aging. “Our memories are who we are. And if we lose our memories we lose that groundedness of who we are.” At the same time, boomers are seizing on a mounting body of evidence that suggests that brains contain more plasticity than previously thought, and many people are taking matters into their own hands, doing brain fitness exercises with the same intensity with which they attack a treadmill. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11587 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PAULINE JELINEK and LOLITA BALDOR WASHINGTON -- Senior military officers could be talking about their emotional struggles on YouTube and MySpace this year, in a Pentagon campaign to urge troops into counseling for wartime mental problems. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Thursday that getting therapy "is not going to count against" troops when they apply for national security clearances. A new policy on security clearances and the idea of a planned national awareness campaign on mental illness are efforts by a Defense Department struggling to care for the many thousands of troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with emotional wounds. Part of the problem is changing a military culture that equates such problems with weakness and so stigmatizes those getting treatment. "It's time for leaders of all stripes to step forward and lead by example, when it comes to mental health issues," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen told a Pentagon press conference. "You can't expect a private or a specialist to be willing to seek counseling when his or her captain or colonel or general won't do it," he said. © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11586 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Yoav Gilad People can smell thousands—perhaps even millions—of different scents. Yet scientists know that in the nose, there are only about 400 different types of odor receptors—proteins that capture scented molecules so that smells can be identified. Thus, there isn’t, obviously, one type of receptor that responds to a rose, while another jumps for jasmine. So how can we smell so much, with so few types of receptors? The answer is that cells mix and match. Each nerve cell in the nose can sense more than one odor, but picks up the smell to a different degree. An odor's unique signature depends on which cells respond to it, and how intensely. What happens when you inhale a rose is that a group of cells is stimulated, and that group sends a combination of signals to the olfactory bulb—the site at the very front of the brain where smell perception takes place. This unique combination of signals tells the brain the odor is the smell of a rose. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11585 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Short on sleep? Besides the bags under your eyes, you may have difficulty remembering names, phone numbers, and other stuff you store in short-term memory. Brain researchers at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute can't do much for tired-looking faces, but they're now exploring a method for refreshing your sleep-deprived brain. By using magnetic fields to stimulate certain brain regions of sleep-deprived volunteers, Sarah Lisanby and her team found that they could improve people's performance on a short-term memory test. "We looked to see whether that would help these people become more resilient to sleep deprivation. And our study, our results, suggested just that," Lisanby says. The technique, called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS, gives a magnetic wake-up call to specific regions of the brain. TMS delivered to sleepy subjects improved their speed as they tried to recall what letters had flashed on a computer monitor seven seconds earlier. TMS is still experimental, but it's also shown promise in the treatment of depression and is being tested for other conditions including anxiety disorders and schizophrenia. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11584 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Anti-depressants could help people suffering from inflammatory bowel disease, as new research points to a link between the condition and depression. Inflammatory bowel disease describes two medical conditions called Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, which affect the digestive system and cause the intestinal tissue to become inflamed, form sores and bleed easily. Symptoms include abdominal pain, cramping, fatigue and diarrhea, according to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of Canada. Bouts of IBD can be triggered by certain foods, stress and medications. Researchers at McMaster University have found that depression may have a very detrimental effect on IBD. "The gut is intimately connected to the brain, more than any other organ in the body," Jean-Eric Ghia, lead researcher and a post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University in Hamilton, said in a release. In the study, mice were given medications for symptoms of depression, such as reserpine, which depleted their bodies of noradrenalin, adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin — hormones that influence mood. Colitis, or the inflammation of the colon, was also induced through the administration of two other medications. To combat the depression, the mice were given the anti-depressant desmethylimipramine. The researchers found that this treatment reduced the inflammation in the intestines and restored normal intestinal function. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 11583 - Posted: 06.24.2010

In this nascent age of “neurolaw,” “neuromarketing,” “neuropolicy,” “neuroethics,” “neurophilosophy,” “neuroeconomics,” and even “neurotheology,” it becomes necessary to disentangle the science from the scientism. There is a host of cultural entrepreneurs currently grasping at various forms of authority through appropriations of neuroscience, presented to us in the corresponding dialects of neuro-talk. Such talk is often accompanied by a picture of a brain scan, that fast-acting solvent of critical faculties. Elsewhere in this issue, O. Carter Snead offers a critique of the use of brain scans in the courtroom in which he alludes to, but ultimately brackets, questions about the scientific rigor of such use. For the sake of argument, he proceeds on the assumption that neuroimaging is competent to do what it is often claimed to do, namely, provide a picture of human cognition. But there are some basic conceptual problems hovering about the interpretation of brain scans as pictures of mentation. In parsing these problems, it becomes apparent that the current “neuro” enthusiasm should be understood in the larger context of scientism, a pervasive cultural tendency with its own logic. A prominent feature of this logic is the overextension of some mode of scientific explanation, or model, to domains in which it has little predictive or explanatory power. Such a lack of intrinsic fit is often no barrier to the model nonetheless achieving great authority in those domains, through a kind of histrionics. As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown in another context (that of social science), all that is required is a certain kind of performance by those who foist the model upon us, a dramatic imitation of explanatory competence that wows us and cows us with its self-confidence. At such junctures, the heckler performs an important public service.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11582 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Siri Carpenter "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments. Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other. Such bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. That is emphatically not to say that explicit prejudice and discrimination have evaporated nor that they are of lesser importance than implicit bias. According to a 2005 federal report, almost 200,000 hate crimes—84 percent of them violent—occur in the U.S. every year. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11581 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Mitchell For people, ultraviolet B (UVB) is an invisible, cancer-causing ray to be blocked with sunscreen and dark glasses, but for a species of jumping spider, the light sets a romantic mood. In the first evidence of an animal having the ability to see UVB, researchers have found that the ornate jumping spider uses the light in mating displays. The finding raises the possibility that other animals can see this wavelength, which researchers have long assumed no creature could detect. Several insects, crustaceans, birds, fish, and mammals can see ultraviolet A light, but researchers took it for granted that no animal could perceive UVB because their eyes do not appear capable of detecting this slightly shorter wavelength, which packs more energy and can cause skin cancer and eye damage. However, while working last year on a species of jumping spider that uses UVA in mating displays (Science, 26 January 2007), a team led by Daiqin Li, an arachnologist at the National University of Singapore, made the surprising discovery that males of another jumping spider species (Phintella vittata) in China have patches on their abdomens that reflect UVB light and are used in mating displays. Could these spiders see the light, so to speak? To put this notion to the test, Li’s team placed 20 male spiders in glass cages lined with light filters. Female spiders in cages next to the males spent more time ogling the guys’ mating displays when UVB light was allowed in than when the wavelength was blocked. In a separate experiment, the researchers took 14 pairs in which the females had responded positively to the male’s courtship display under normal lighting conditions and placed them in cages separated by the UVB-blocking filter. Eleven of the 14 females now no longer showed an interest in the males’ come-hither dance, confirming that seeing UVB light--and not the male’s particular display--was essential, the researchers report online today in Current Biology. Li’s team doesn’t yet know how the spiders see UVB or whether their eyes are somehow protected from the damaging effects of the light. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11580 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway Baby talk might be more than the mutterings of child who hasn't yet grasped language. A study of zebra finches finds that their brains use babbling to polish their calls into the perfect tune. Bird songs aren't so different from human speech, says Dmitriy Aronov, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US, who led the study. "We have this magnificent transformation from highly imperfect infant behaviour to highly complex adult behaviour," he says. Young zebra finches learn their complex tunes by copying their fathers. After a month of doing little more than squawking for food, young zebra finches spend the next 2 months experimenting with song. It sounds awful at first – a 9-year old's first clarinet lesson would be the human equivalent. But gradually the birds sculpt their random chirps into a perfect copy of their father's tune. Neuroscientists mapped out the brain area responsible for the adult song, which controls muscles in the zebra finch mouth. Most researchers assumed that young birds babbled because they were still learning to develop the nerves of the "motor pathway" that controls these muscles. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11579 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A woman's voice becomes more alluring when she is at her most fertile, according to US research. Recordings of women taken at different points in their menstrual cycle were played to people of both sexes. New Scientist magazine reports that the voices rated as most attractive belonged to women at peak fertility. The study suggests sex hormones can alter the workings of the voice box, but the change may be too subtle to pick up in many situations. Human reproduction differs from reproduction in other mammals in that there are no obvious signs that a woman is at her fertile phase. However, scientists have suggested that very subtle changes caused by the rise and fall of different sex hormones can be detected by men, who then perhaps find a woman more attractive without necessarily even realising why. The latest research, from the State University of New York at Albany and originally published in the journal Human Evolution and Behavior, involved taking recordings of women counting from one to 10 at four points during the menstrual cycle and then played them back to male and female students. The missing link here is finding out how this works in plain conversation - in a bar, for example. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 11578 - Posted: 05.01.2008

Administering a hormone contained in contraceptive pills can treat brain injuries, suggests new research out of two Chinese universities. Researchers at Hangzhou Normal University and Zhejiang University have found that giving the hormone progesterone to people with severe brain injuries seems to improve their cognitive function. Previous studies have shown that progesterone can reduce inflammation and have a protective effect on the brain when injured. The Chinese researchers studied 159 patients with acute brain injury, half of whom were given progesterone and the other half placebo for five days following their injury. Patients were classified as having favourable outcomes (good recovery or moderate disability), or unfavourable outcomes (severe disability, vegetative state or death). The randomized double-blind trial revealed that significantly more patients who received progesterone had favourable outcomes at three and six-month intervals than those who received placebo. Forty-seven per cent of the patients who received progesterone and 31 per cent of the placebo group had favourable outcomes and 53 per cent of the progesterone and 70 per cent of the placebo patients had unfavourable outcomes. Copyright © CBC 2008

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11577 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jasmin Aline Persch Female canaries adore a good old-fashioned love song that abides by rigid musical rules. Mature males always follow the rules. Curiously, young males will go against convention — and rock out to tunes that would not impress the ladies. But the feathery punks will shape up when it counts. In a study by scientists at Rockefeller University in New York City, young male canaries isolated in soundproof cages learned to imitate computer-generated compositions in the first half of their youth. Come spring mating season, they changed their tune to the good old-fashioned canary love song — even though they’d never heard it before. The Rockefeller University researchers were surprised the young male canaries broke steadfast tradition. But the quick turnaround to the conventional emphasizes how crucial the recognizeable canary love song is to coupling. It encourages females to build nests, produce eggs and find a soul mate. Scientists continue to decipher birdsong. They're also studying the musical talents of apes, humpback whales, bats and mice. Listen (above) and learn (below) about these up-and-coming mammal musicians. © 2008 MSNBC Interactive

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11576 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Catherine Brahic It has been debated for nearly four decades but no one has yet been able to prove it is chemically possible. Now good evidence suggests that birds can actually "see" the lines of the Earth's magnetic field. Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois, proposed forty years ago that some animals – including migratory birds – must have molecules in their eyes or brains which respond to magnetism. The problem has been that no one has been able to find a chemical sensitive enough to be influenced by Earth's weak geomagnetic field. Now Peter Hore and colleagues at the University of Oxford have found one. Cryptochromes are a class of light-sensitive proteins found in plants and animals, and are thought to play a role in the circadian clock, in regulating plant growth, and timing coral sex. A few years ago, Henrik Mouritsen of the University of Oldenburg in Germany showed that they were present in the retinal neurons of migratory garden warblers, and that these cells were active at dusk, when the warblers were performing magnetic orientation. Cryptochromes have not yet been made in the lab and obtaining them is difficult, but Hore's team has now shown that a related molecule – a carotenoid-porphyrin-fullerene triad – with similar chemical properties to cryptochromes is sensitive to weak magnetism. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Animal Migration
Link ID: 11575 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CRAIG S. SMITH PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102. The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann’s 1979 book “LSD: My Problem Child.” Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid. He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11574 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Q. Choi An analysis of century-old bottles of absinthe — the kind once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso to enhance their creativity — may end the controversy over what ingredient caused the green liqueur's supposed mind-altering effects. The culprit seems plain and simple: The century-old absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof kick. In comparison, most gins, vodkas and whiskeys are just 80- to 100-proof. In recent years, the psychedelic nature of absinthe has been hotly debated. Absinthe was notorious among 19th-century and early 20th-century bohemian artists as "the Green Fairy" that expanded the mind. After it became infamous for madness and toxic side effects among drinkers, it was widely banned. The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe's reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation. Still, others have pointed at a chemical named thujone in wormwood, one of the herbs used to prepare absinthe and the one that gives the drink its green color. Thujone was blamed for "absinthe madness" and "absinthism," a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial tics, numbness and dementia. © 2008 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11573 - Posted: 06.24.2010