Jennifer Viegas, -- Spotted hyenas are well known for their laughs, but scientists have just determined that the carnivores communicate with their cubs using the hyena version of baby talk: melodic groans. The find highlights what a complicated vocal repertoire these very social animals possess. In addition to the laughing, each hyena has its own "whoop" sound that identifies individuals, so "whoop" in hyena speak is somewhat equivalent to a person yelling out his or her name. "Their lifestyle requires recognizing individuals within their social groups and adjusting their behavior accordingly," co-author Steve Glickman told Discovery News. "Communication is central to complex, flexible social organization," Glickman, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, added. For the study, presented at the Acoustics08 conference in Paris last week, Glickman and his colleagues focused on hyena groans. To elicit the sounds, the researchers presented hyenas at the Berkeley Field Station for Behavioral Research with three things: meaty bones, unfamiliar spotted hyena cubs and an empty transport cage used to contain bones or cubs during other experiments. The adults groaned more at the cubs than the objects, with cub groans sounding much more melodic and gentle. When the animals groaned at the bones and the cage, the vocalizations were less tonal and had a lower identified frequency. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11787 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rachel Nowak Love is blind, said Shakespeare. Now it seems there may be some truth in the bard's words. Researchers have found that people who are in love pay less visual attention to attractive people of the opposite sex. Jon Maner at Florida State University in Tallahassee, US, and colleagues asked 57 students in heterosexual relationships to write about occasions they felt extreme love towards their partner. Another 56 students wrote about feeling extreme happiness. The students then viewed 500 microsecond flashes of 60 photos, comprising equal numbers of highly attractive men, highly attractive women, average-looking men, and average-looking women. As the faces disappeared, a square or a circle appeared elsewhere on the screen. The students were instructed to identify the object as quickly as possible – a measure of a person's visual attention at a subconscious level. Students primed with thoughts of love took significantly less time to identify shapes after viewing an attractive face of the opposite sex, compared with those who had written essays on happiness. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11786 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Atul Gawande It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’ southern shore. She worked for thirteen years in health care, becoming the director of a residence program for men who’d suffered severe head injuries. But she and her husband began fighting. There were betrayals. By the time she was thirty-two, her marriage had disintegrated. In the divorce, she lost possession of their home, and, amid her financial and psychological struggles, she saw that she was losing her children, too. Within a few years, she was drinking. She began dating someone, and they drank together. After a while, he brought some drugs home, and she tried them. The drugs got harder. Eventually, they were doing heroin, which turned out to be readily available from a street dealer a block away from her apartment. One day, she went to see a doctor because she wasn’t feeling well, and learned that she had contracted H.I.V. from a contaminated needle. She had to leave her job. She lost visiting rights with her children. And she developed complications from the H.I.V., including shingles, which caused painful, blistering sores across her scalp and forehead. With treatment, though, her H.I.V. was brought under control. At thirty-six, she entered rehab, dropped the boyfriend, and kicked the drugs. She had two good, quiet years in which she began rebuilding her life. Then she got the itch. Copyright © 2008 CondéNet.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11785 - Posted: 06.24.2010

If you haven’t read the recent New Yorker article, “The Itch,” by Dr. Atul Gawande, then you should stop reading this post now and go read it. But if you did read “The Itch,'’ then you, like me, are probably still thinking about it. “The Itch” tells the story of a chronic itch experienced by a patient called M. and details her subsequent suffering. The article also explores how the brain interprets various stimuli and includes fascinating insights into the phantom limb sensations of amputees. But mostly, it’s about itching. Many people who read the article, however, were disappointed by the end, which left them hanging about what happened to patient M.’s itch. Other readers on this blog have expressed disbelief about some of the more shocking aspects of the story. I e-mailed Dr. Gawande, who kindly agreed to answer a few of your questions about “The Itch.'’ Q. A reader on the blog states that it would be impossible for M. to scratch through her skull with her fingernail. What is your response to that concern? A. As for being able to scratch through one’s skull — it’s the same thing the doctors thought when they saw her. And they therefore kept surmising that she had used some kind of metal implement to scratch. But gradually what they figured out was that the open skin wound had allowed bacteria in. This led to osteomyelitis — infection of the skull — and that softened the skull to the point of allowing her to gradually scratch through. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11784 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg A tiny, eyeless, roundworm that lives underground can see the light. Research reported in the July 6 Nature Neuroscience identifies several nerve cells that appear to act as the worm’s light receptors and elucidates how these light-sensitive cells pass environmental information to the worm. It turns out that the lowly roundworm trips the light fantastic via a cellular messaging system that is similar to the light-sensing pathway in vertebrates. This finding suggests that the worm’s light-sensitive nerve cells are possible precursors to receptors found in vertebrate eyes, says Russell Fernald of Stanford University, who was not involved in the research. “This is really quite interesting,” he says. The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a soil-dwelling nematode, is transparent and has only 302 nerve cells, making it the teacher’s pet of researchers trying to understand nervous system genetics and development patterns in animals. But while C. elegans has been the subject of intense scrutiny, no one had looked closely at the worm’s relationship to light. Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 11782 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SCOTT ANDERSON “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus wrote, “and that is suicide.” How to explain why, among the only species capable of pondering its own demise, whose desperate attempts to forestall mortality have spawned both armies and branches of medicine in a perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, there are those who, by their own hand, would choose death over life? Our contradictory reactions to the act speak to the conflicted hold it has on our imaginations: revulsion mixed with fascination, scorn leavened with pity. It is a cardinal sin — but change the packaging a little, and suicide assumes the guise of heroism or high passion, the stuff of literature and art. Beyond the philosophical paradox are the bewilderingly complex dynamics of the act itself. While a universal phenomenon, the incidence of suicide varies so immensely across different population groups — among nations and cultures, ages and gender, race and religion — that any overarching theory about its root cause is rendered useless. Even identifying those subgroups that are particularly suicide-prone is of very limited help in addressing the issue. In the United States, for example, both elderly men living in Western states and white male adolescents from divorced families are at elevated risk, but since the overwhelming majority in both these groups never attempt suicide, how can we identify the truly at risk among them? Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 11781 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LINTHICUM, Md. — Military binoculars may soon get information directly from the brains of the soldiers using them. With the idea that that the brain absorbs and assesses more visual information than it lets on — and that it could make more sense out of what's visible through high-power binoculars if it stopped filtering that information — the Pentagon has awarded contracts to two defense firms to develop brainwave-aided binoculars. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, is betting that intelligent binoculars can tap into the brain's ability to spot patterns and movement and help soldiers detect threats from miles farther away than they can with traditional binoculars. Electrodes on the scalp inside a helmet will record the user's brain activity as it processes information about high-resolution images produced by wide-angle military binoculars. Those responses will train the binoculars over time to recognize threats. "You need to present the soldier with many images and then use the person's brain to figure out what is of interest," said Yuval Boger, CEO of Sensics, a Baltimore-based maker of panoramic head-mounted displays. Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Vision; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11780 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Oh what a tangled web we weave, when trying to determine who deceives. Virtually everyone, even those experienced at dealing with deceivers, detect others’ lies no better than would be expected by chance. Those sobering conclusions come from the first large-scale analysis of individual differences in deception detection. It takes two to tangle in deceptive encounters, note Charles Bond Jr. of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The two psychologists say their analysis of the findings to date suggest some people are relatively easy to read, while others shroud their intentions in mystery. A person’s perceived credibility, as reported by volunteers on questionnaires, rather than honesty, plays a major role in whether that person gets branded as a liar, Bond and DePaulo report in the July Psychological Bulletin. Certain people appear either honest or dishonest from the get-go, whether or not they’re telling the truth, the psychologists assert. Earlier research has found that baby-faced people seem credible whereas people who look nervous or avert their gaze typically get labeled untrustworthy. The new analysis shows that participants more often believe liars perceived as high in credibility than truth-tellers regarded as low in credibility. “When all the evidence is statistically analyzed, deception judgments depend more on the liar than the judge,” Bond says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 11779 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have known for a long time that sweet taste activates pleasure pathways in the brain. So, does consuming diet drinks really satisfy you? No, says Duke University neuroscientist Albino Oliveira-Maia; your brain can sense the missing calories. "Satisfaction that we take from eating and from food depends on a second pathway other than the taste," says Oliveira-Maia, "This pathway is a result of the caloric content — of the calories that are in the food that we are eating." He gave sugar water or water sweetened with sucralose (the non-caloric sweetener Splenda®) to specially-bred mice that could not taste sweetness. They used probes that recorded brain activity and matched that to special "lickometer" reading that recorded mouse licks from liquid dispensers. As reported in the journal Neuron, the researchers saw a response in the reward centers of animals that got sugar, but not in those fed the "diet" water. Oliveira-Maia says that "the dopamine system, which is involved in all kinds of reward — it's involved in taste — people have known for many years now that it's involved in addiction. It's also involved in how calories are impacting the brain reward system." © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11778 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Victoria Stern The deadliest and most common type of brain cancer has a strange bedfellow: cytomegalovirus, a kind of herpes present in about 80 percent of the U.S. population. Now scientists are exploiting this coincidence to treat the cancer with a vaccine that targets the virus and slows tumor regrowth. In 2002 scientists showed that cytomegalovirus, or CMV, was active in the brain tumors but not the surrounding healthy tissue of all 27 patients they tested who had glioblastoma multiforme. CMV is dormant and undetectable in most people. Neuroscientist Duane Mitchell of Duke University Medical Center and his colleagues confirmed in 2007 that CMV is active in at least 90 percent of glioblastoma tumors. Now Mitchell’s team has developed an experimental vaccine that triggers the immune system to attack CMV, thereby attacking its tumor tissue home. As reported at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in June, the vaccine, together with radiation and chemotherapy, prevented the brain tumor from reemerging after surgery for 12 months as compared with the typical six to seven months with no vaccine. Patients’ average life span increased from 14 months to more than 20. So does this herpes virus cause cancer? The answer is unclear: tumor cells may simply be a fertile ground for growing the virus, as cells such as these often lack the normal immune functions that suppress CMV reproduction. But University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers reported in May that the virus has the ability to take over a cell’s braking mechanism and cause uncontrolled reproduction. Even so, the numbers do not seem to add up: four of five Americans has CMV, but only about one in 30,000 ends up with glioblastoma. And a small number of glioblastoma patients do not have CMV in their tumors. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Glia; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 11777 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Hub systems may be frustrating for airline travelers, but a central hub keeps the brain connected and humming, a first-ever wiring diagram of the human brain reveals. Nearly all of the information transmitted from one brain region to another passes through a core located in the center and back of the brain along the crack that separates the two hemispheres, an international group of researchers reports in the June 30 PLoS Biology. Earlier research pinpointed an area of the brain called the default network — a group of brain regions that are active when a person is thinking about nothing in particular. The new map of the brain’s anatomy showed that, in fact, the default network also resides in this physical hub, the core of the brain. “Our map is a very crude one,” says Olaf Sporns, a computational neuroscientist at Indiana University in Bloomington. But the wiring diagram is a first step toward understanding how the brain is structured and how it communicates. Such diagrams could help therapists design strategies to improve recovery of stroke victims or people with other brain injuries. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Stroke; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11776 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Amber Dance Mice engineered to have abnormal brain chemistry surprised researchers with their unpredictable deaths -- and may be one of the best models yet for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), also known as cot death. In a new study published in Science1, researchers changed the control of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, in the mice. Serotonin is important in the autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious functions such as heart beat and digestion. The engineered mice showed symptoms that mirror human SIDS: sudden drops in heart rate and frequent deaths in early life. The majority of them died before reaching three months of age. Cot death often claims its victims while napping, which could suggest future lines of research into serotonin and sleep.PunchstockSIDS is the label for unexplained deaths in babies less than one year old, and is the leading cause of death in infants aged 1–12 months in the developed world. Previous research suggested that serotonin played a role in SIDS, and the new study adds weight to that theory. Cornelius Gross and colleagues at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, in Monterotondo, Italy, created mice with excess levels of the serotonin 1A receptor (Htr1a). Htr1a is like a thermostat for serotonin levels — when the receptor binds serotonin, it dampens serotonin production, keeping levels from getting too high. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11775 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Almost half of all women in their 90s are suffering from dementia, Californian research suggests. The analysis of more than 900 people aged 90 or over, published in the journal Neurology, found it was far less likely in men of the same age. The reasons are not clear - although older women are more prone to stroke and heart disease, both risk factors for dementia. There are fears dementia could place a great strain on health services. There have been few studies looking specifically at dementia in very old people, even though increases in life-expectancy mean that this is a fast-growing group. Other studies have shown that dementia prevalence increases for both men and women between the ages of 65 and 85. However, the Californian research found that the likelihood of having dementia doubled every five years in women after reaching 90, but not in men. A total of 45% of the women had dementia, compared with 28% of men. It also suggested that women who had received higher education were much less likely to develop dementia than those with a lower level of education. Dr Maria Corrada, who led the study, said: "As more and more people reach age 90, our findings provide further evidence that more needs to be done to provide adequate resources to care for the increasing number of very old people with memory problems." A recent report by the King's Fund suggested that the burden of dementia in the UK was likely to rise sharply over the next two decades as the population aged. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11774 - Posted: 07.03.2008

A fascinating case of foreign accent syndrome recently cropped up in southwestern Ontario, says a new report published by researchers at McMaster University. The rare syndrome affects people who have had a stroke, causing them to speak in a different accent than the one they had before the stroke. It is usually occurs after a stroke damages the areas of the left hemisphere of the brain related to speech production, such as Broca's area, pre-motor and motor areas and the basal ganglia. Broca's area is a section of the brain found in the frontal lobe that's connected to speech, while the basal ganglia is responsible for movement. Rosemary Dore, 50, of Windsor, Ont., had a left-sided stroke that left her with an accent similar to the Canadian East Coast accent, though she had formerly had a southern Ontario accent. Dore had lived in southern Ontario all of her life and only travelled to Florida on vacation. She had never been to the East Coast nor did she have any family members with East Coast accents. Her case is the first of its kind reported in Canada, the McMaster researchers said, and one of fewer than 20 cases reported worldwide. Researchers gave Dore a CT scan, which revealed various changes in the brain consistent with an ischemic stroke. One month after the stroke, she was tested and found to have 100 per cent speech intelligibility. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Stroke; Language
Link ID: 11773 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. What makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when we perform a certain action—such as smiling or reaching for a cup—and when we observe someone else performing that same action. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. In recent years, Iacoboni has shown that mirror neurons may be an important element of social cognition and that defects in the mirror neuron system may underlie a variety of mental disorders, such as autism. His new book, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others, explores these possibilities at length. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Iacoboni about his research. LEHRER: What first got you interested in mirror neurons? Did you immediately grasp their explanatory potential? IACOBONI: I actually became interested in mirror neurons gradually. [Neuroscientist] Giacomo Rizzolatti and his group [at the University of Parma in Italy] approached us at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center because they wanted to expand the research on mirror neurons using brain imaging in humans. I thought that mirror neurons were interesting, but I have to confess I was also a bit incredulous. We were at the beginnings of the science on mirror neurons. The properties of these neurons are so amazing that I seriously considered the possibility that they were experimental artifacts. In 1998 I visited Rizzolatti’s lab in Parma, I observed their experiments and findings, talked to the anatomists that were studying the anatomy of the system and I realized that the empirical findings were really solid. At that point I had the intuition that the discovery of mirror neurons was going to revolutionize the way we think about the brain and ourselves. However, it took me some years of experimentation to fully grasp the explanatory potential of mirror neurons in imitation, empathy, language, and so on—in other words in our social life. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Vision; Emotions
Link ID: 11772 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By: Robert Kunzig If there is one thing that has always seemed obvious about homosexuality, it's that it just doesn't make sense. Evolution favors traits that aid reproduction, and being gay clearly doesn't do that. The existence of homosexuality amounts to a profound evolutionary mystery, since failing to pass on your genes means that your genetic fitness is a resounding zero. "Homosexuality is effectively like sterilization," says psychobiologist Qazi Rahman of Queen Mary College in London. "You'd think evolution would get rid of it." Yet as far as historians can tell, homosexuality has always been with us. So the question remains: If it's such a disadvantage in the evolutionary rat race, why was it not selected into oblivion millennia ago? Twentieth-century psychiatry had an answer for this Darwinian paradox: Homosexuality was not a biological trait at all but a psychological defect. It was a mistake, one that was always being created anew, in each generation, by bad parenting. Freud considered homosexuality a form of arrested development stamped on a child by a distant father or an overprotective mother. Homosexuality was even listed by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder, and the idea that gays could and should be "cured" was widely accepted. But modern scientific research has not been kind to that idea. It turns out that parents of gay men are no better or worse than those of heterosexuals. And homosexual behavior is common in the animal kingdom, as well—among sheep, for instance. It arises naturally and does not seem to be a matter of aloof rams or overbearing ewes. © Copyright 1991-2008 Sussex Publishers, LLC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11771 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway With jam-packed schedules and a video feed to Earth, astronauts enjoy precious little privacy as it is. Soon, doctors might peek into an astronaut's last bastion of solitude, thanks to a portable brain scanner that could one day go into orbit. Mission control could use the device to remotely monitor astronauts for signs of brain injury, depression and even mental fatigue that could compromise their ability to make a critical repair of equipment. "If you had a magic cap to say, 'Are you good to go?' that might be valuable," says Jonathan Clark of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) in Houston, Texas, US, which funds the work. "Think of it like a breathalyser for the brain." But the scanner, currently under development at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, must prove its worth and safety before NASA even considers sending a brain scanner into orbit, Clark tells New Scientist. Unlike the hulking, tunnel-like MRI machines that peer into the brain with super-strong magnets, the space brain scanner resembles a large remote control tethered to a Velcro headband by long, thin wires. Yet the technology – called near-infrared optical spectroscopy – works something like functional MRI, which equates changes in blood flow to brain activity.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 11770 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller More than a year after taking a hallucinogenic drug in a carefully controlled experiment, most people rate the experience among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives, researchers report online today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Such findings are helping to renew interest in research with hallucinogens, a field whose reputation long suffered from the psychedelic excesses of the 1960s. The new study follows up with 36 volunteers who participated in earlier experiments led by psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The researchers monitored the mostly middle-aged subjects while they took a strong dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. All of the volunteers had indicated at least some participation in religious or spiritual activities--such as meditating or going to church--and the researchers instructed them to direct their attention inward while under the drug's sway. None had previous experience with hallucinogens. On questionnaires completed after the drug had worn off, and again 2 months later, they rated the experience as highly significant, the researchers reported in a 2006 paper in Psychopharmacology. Volunteers frequently described a sense of greater truth or a sense of the unity of all things while on the drug, for example. The experience remained highly significant to most of the volunteers 14 months later, the researchers now report: 58% rated it among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives and 67% rated it among the five most spiritually significant. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11769 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott The director of a top laboratory in Germany has charged that two of his former research students took data from his laboratory without his permission and published scientifically incorrect interpretations of them against his advice. One of the two editors-in-chief of Human Brain Mapping, Peter Fox of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, told Nature that the paper was correctly refereed, but declined to add details. Logothetis is furious about the publication of data, which he believes will mislead the field, and about the fact that the authors of the paper allege that he tried to stop them publishing the data for personal reasons. The affair began in the spring, when Amir Shmuel, who worked in Logothetis's laboratories from 2002 to 2007 and is now at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University in Canada, asked Logothetis for permission to use data generated there. Although he agreed at first, Logothetis withdrew his permission when he realized that the data — from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies on monkey brains — were being used to support a theory about spontaneous brain activity. The data had been collected when monkeys were looking at a grey but flickering LED screen. “The protocol was just inappropriate for analysis of spontaneous brain activity,” says Logothetis. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group –

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 11768 - Posted: 06.24.2010

-- Thanks to salt and hot chili peppers, researchers have found a calculus-computing center that tells a roundworm to go forward toward dinner or turn to broaden the search. It's a computational mechanism, they say, that is similar to what drives hungry college students to pizza. These behavior-driving calculations, according to a paper published in the July 3 issue of the journal Nature, are done "in a tiny, specialized computer inside a primitive roundworm," says principal investigator Shawn Lockery, a University of Oregon biologist and member of the UO Institute of Neuroscience. In their paper, the researchers documented how two related, closely located chemosensory neurons, acting in tandem, regulate behavior. The left neuron controls an on switch, while the opposing right one an off switch. These sister neurons are situated much like the two nostrils or two eyes of mammals. Together these neurons are known as ASE for antagonistic sensory cues. It's possible, Lockery said, that the discovery someday could help research aimed at treating at least some of the 200,000 people in the United States who annually seek medical treatment, according to records of the National Institutes of Health, for problems involving taste and smell. © University of Oregon

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11767 - Posted: 06.24.2010