By Georgie Binks, CBC News Most people complain about their teens' sleeping habits and shake their heads. Toronto school trustee Cathy Dandy, a mother of two teens, is one of them. "With my older son and now my daughter, it's a battle," she says. "I've tried everything from tickling, shouting and bribing, to figuring out if there's anything happening that day that would give them the incentive to get up. It's just constant badgering." In 2006, the U.S. National Sleep Foundation released a poll showing only one in five teenagers was getting enough sleep at night. While teenagers need about nine hours of sleep nightly, the poll showed that kids in Grades 11 and 12 were getting about 6.9 hours. (George Nikitin, AP) But Dandy has a plan she thinks may help solve those early morning battles. Instead of trying to figure out new ways to get her teens out of bed bright and early for school each day, in October 2007 she persuaded her fellow trustees to consider later start times for classes. She says a high school in the east end will be chosen for a pilot project in which classes would run from 10:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. Dandy is hoping the project will take effect next year. Teenagers' sleep habits — particularly their penchant for sleeping in — have long been considered simple laziness by many, but researchers say that's not the case. In 2006, the National Sleep Foundation in the U.S. released a poll showing only one in five teenagers was getting enough sleep at night. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11170 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, -- A 1997 episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" featured a group of extraterrestrial dinosaurs that managed to survive Earth's mass extinction event 65 million years ago. Safe on another planet, they evolved into a highly intelligent new "race" called the Saurians. Such impressive dinosaur intelligence may exist in fiction, but new research is shaking up preconceived notions about just how smart many dinos actually were. The truth seems to be that these now-extinct animal wonders ran the intellectual gamut from slow-witted to somewhat smart. Made of soft tissue, brain matter isn't ideal for historical preservation. The organic matter that made up dinosaur brains decayed millions of years ago. Paleontologists, however, are recreating the basic features of dino brains based on endocraniums, or the inside surfaces of dinosaur skulls. A new paper published in this month's Palaeoworld, for example, describes the basic endocranial contents, and activity, of psittacosaurs. These two-footed dinosaurs possessed unique parrot-like beaks and occurred in the Early Cretaceous period in East Asia around 123 million years ago. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 11169 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Wild Scientists have discovered that taking a sugar pill is more effective than routine medications in treating aggression in people with intellectual disabilities. Until now, patients with intellectual disabilities have been prescribed antipsychotic drugs — normally given to people with a psychiatric disease like schizophrenia — to treat aggressive behaviour such as head banging. But evidence for the drugs' effectiveness has been thin. “Antipsychotic drugs are widely used because they are cheap and at high doses they sedate people,” says Eric Emerson at Lancaster University, an expert in the behaviour of intellectually disabled people. Peter Tyrer, based at Imperial College London, led an international research project looking at 86 people with intellectual disability at clinics across England, Wales and at one centre in Australia. Patients being treated for aggressive behaviour randomly received one of two antipsychotic drugs — respiridone or haloperidol — or a placebo. The drugs don't work © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11168 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Elizabeth Pennisi Being a soccer goalie is a tough job, requiring split-second assessments of an incoming ball's speed, direction, and altitude, along with an instantaneous response to intercept the shot. But researchers have now shown that, despite having much less brainpower than humans, fish are capable of this kind of complex tracking and rapid reaction. Archerfish are freshwater fish that spit jets of water as far as 2 meters to knock potential prey off twigs suspended above the water (ScienceNOW, 7 September 2004). They must act fast and accurately to snare the prey as it lands, or risk losing it to other fish. It's a skill they get better at with practice. This ability--and the quick thinking it involves--piqued the curiosity of neuroscientist Stefan Schuster and graduate student Thomas Schlegel, both of the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, who are interested in how brains make decisions. Schuster and Schlegel placed insects on platforms, out of view of the fish, then blew the insects into the water using bursts of air. To make the task harder for the fish, the scientists sometimes used multiple platforms and other times multiple insects. In each experiment, the researchers measured the time it took for the fish to turn and move to the prey. No matter how complicated things got, the archerfish stayed on target. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11167 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Catherine Brahic A beautiful butterfly is able to fool ants into rearing its young by masking them with the ants' own smell, say researchers. Caterpillars of the alcon blue butterfly have developed an outer coat that tricks ants into believing the young are its own, duping the ants into carrying the larvae back to their colonies to care for. But what is more, the ant seems to "recognise" that it is being duped and one population appears to be engaging in an evolutionary arms race with the butterfly, says the team led by David Nash at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The Maculinea alcon butterfly has a parasitic relationship with two species of Myrmica ants in Denmark. The butterfly's caterpillars begin life feeding off a plant, then, still as caterpillars, they drop to the ground where they wait to be picked up by passing Myrmica ants, who take them back to their nests. It had been suggested that the ants mistake the caterpillars for one of their own larvae because their waxy waterproof coating carry similar chemicals. The ants "taste" the caterpillar's coat with their antennae, recognise it, and treat it as one of their own young. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11166 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sarah C. Williams The mice in Jan-Åke Gustafsson's lab are obese, their bones are brittle, and their spleens are unusually big. The female mice produce fewer and smaller litters than normal mice. They also are more likely to develop high blood pressure and a disease that resembles human leukemia. In fact, problems of one sort or another afflict almost every major organ system in their fragile, overweight bodies. What these mice lack is the gene for an important molecule needed to fully respond to the hormone estrogen. Known as estrogen receptor beta (ERb), this molecule mediates most of the effects of estrogen not traditionally associated with the hormone. By genetically engineering both male and female mice without the receptor, researchers are digging up clues to its many important roles in people. Discovered only a decade ago, the beta receptor has been found to protect against cancer, keep the immune system in check, help serious trauma patients survive their injuries, and keep people from being too anxious. A recent spate of studies on the receptor could lead to a new generation of hormone-based drugs for infertility, breast cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, and a myriad of other conditions. "Estrogen receptor beta, in particular, is involved in many, many tissues. It shows that estrogens are extremely important not only in reproduction, which everybody knows, but in other aspects of health as well," says Gustafsson, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. ©2008 Science Service

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11165 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ker Than Stitching together personal details gets harder as we get older.GETTYOld age does more than stealthily steal away our most cherished memories: it also seems to diminish our ability to imagine things. This finding, detailed in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science 1, supports the ‘prospective brain’ hypothesis, the idea that imagining the future and remembering the past rely on the same neural machinery. “One implication of this study is that imagining is quite closely related to, and dependent on, remembering, perhaps more so than we previously realized,” says Dan Schacter of Harvard University. In the study, Schacter and his team asked groups of young and old participants, with average ages of 25 and 72, respectively, to recount a personal episode from their past or imagine a personal experience in their future in response to cue words. Details in the participants’ narratives were categorized as either 'internal' or 'external'. Internal memories are similar to scenes from a movie: they contain specific subjects and take place in particular settings and time periods. External memories consist mostly of general facts about the world, such as 'the sky is blue'. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11164 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A mysterious case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) has raised fears more people than thought could be at risk. New Scientist magazine reports the genetic make-up of a 40-year-old woman who may have died from variant CJD was different to all other patients so far. But the University College London study's lead researcher said it was too early to say for sure. And a government advisor on CJD said many cases needed to emerge to confirm a new wave and people should not panic. CJD is a fatal brain condition, with dozens of cases every year. However, the BSE crisis in cattle in the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of a new form of the disease. A small number of people who ate infected material from cattle at that time went on to develop variant CJD, a similar and equally lethal illness, which often did not emerge until years after the infected meat was eaten. After a slaughtering programme removed infected cattle from the food chain, deaths from variant CJD were thought to have peaked in the first half of this decade, falling steadily since 2003. However, the latest find opens a small possibility that the "incubation period" for some people may be longer, and that there could be a second upsurge in deaths to come. Every person who has died from variant CJD before this point has one thing in common - they carry a gene variant called MM. About four in 10 people has this variant, and some experts believed it was possible that in humans, only these people may ever have been vulnerable to variant CJD. The latest death is the first recorded involving a different variant - VV - found in approximately one in 10 Britons. (C)BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 11163 - Posted: 01.03.2008

The basis for laughter may have originated in an ancient primate ancestral to both humans and modern apes, a study suggests. Scientists found that orang-utans had a sense of empathy and mimicry which forms an essential part of laughter. Facial expressions, such as the open, gaping mouth resembling laughter, were picked up and copied by orang-utans. The speed with which they were mimicked suggests these expressions were involuntary, Biology Letters reports. In other words, the "laughter" was contagious. Dr Marina Davila Ross, from the University of Portsmouth and Professor Elke Zimmermann at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany, studied the play behaviour of 25 orang-utans aged between two and 12 at four primate centres around the world. When one of the orang-utans displayed an open, gaping mouth, its playmate would often display the same expression less than half a second later. (C) BBC

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 11162 - Posted: 01.03.2008

Jennifer Viegas -- With their chattering, scampering ways, squirrels would seem to lead rather carefree lives, but a new study has found they can feel stress, and that its effects on the fluffy rodents are similar to its effects on people. A certain amount of stress, which can cause a burst of energy, appears to improve reactions and learning ability, but too little or too much makes individuals -- both squirrels and humans -- go rather loopy. The jittery vibe might even be the same. "The feeling that comes with adrenaline when a cop's lights flash behind us is probably similar to the feeling a squirrel has when a hawk suddenly flies over, or when they hear an alarm call," Jill Mateo, author of the study, told Discovery News. Mateo, an assistant professor in the University of Chicago's Department of Comparative Human Development, studied groups of Belding's ground squirrels at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory. By placing cortisol in peanut butter and wheat germ treats, she artificially raised or lowered stress potentials in squirrels. Cortisol is a hormone naturally produced by the body that raises blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Other studies indicate it provides energy to the brain, prompting the storage and retrieval of memories, Mateo said. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11161 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford Fruit flies get amorous under the influence of constant booze.GETTYFrom the annals of insect biology comes a cautionary tale for those recovering from their post-New Year’s celebration: heavy boozing has been shown to send male fruitflies, like their human counterparts, into a lusty fog. In the flies, hypersexuality caused by chronic alcohol exposure has the effect of making the males chase anything with wings — other males included. Although sexual preference in humans is obviously a complex phenomenon not replicated by the fly work, the findings could be used to further establish a fly model system for the study of alcoholism, observers say. Although it may seem a bit of a stretch to study alcoholism in fruitflies, intoxicated insects bear many similarities to intoxicated humans, says Ulrike Heberlein, who studies alcohol and cocaine responses in fruitflies at the University of California, San Francisco. As the concentration of ethanol in the body rises, flies begin to become uncoordinated and oblivious to their surroundings: they get tipsy. “They bump into each other. They bump into the walls,” says Heberlein. Add more alcohol and the flies become sedated. Add still more and the soused flies die. Remarkably, even the concentrations of ethanol that induce these behaviours are nearly the same in flies and humans, says Heberlein. Flies also develop a tolerance to alcohol, and can develop withdrawal-like symptoms. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11160 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Teenagers who smoke, or whose mother smoked in pregnancy, are at higher risk of hearing problems and understanding what is being said, a US study says. In tests on 67 teenagers, Yale University found those exposed to smoke had trouble focusing and interpreting sounds when there was a distraction. And the team said scans showed exposure changed the brain's white matter, responsible for transmitting messages. The findings were reported in New Scientist magazine. The team carried out brain scans on the teenagers and found those exposed to smoke were more likely to have more white matter. Previous research has shown that children with overdeveloped white matter have problems transmitting and interpreting sound because the white matter it is out of sync with the rest of the brain. The researchers believe the over-production of the white matter is caused by nicotine stimulating a chemical compound called acetylcholine. Further evidence was also provided by the computer tests the teenagers, aged 13 to 18, completed where they were asked to recognise words while being distracted by visual images or background noise. Among the boys who were tested, those exposed to smoke got 77% right, whereas those not exposed got 85% right. In girls, the breakdown was 84% to 90%. The researchers said the results were "quite significant". Lead researcher Leslie Jacobsen said: "Individuals affected will have problems in settings where there is a distraction. This could certainly be the case in classrooms where there may be other people talking and lots of things going on. Coupled with other conditions, such as behavioural disorders, this may tip a pupil towards failing at school." (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Hearing
Link ID: 11159 - Posted: 01.03.2008

by Paul Austin The patient was lying placidly on the stretcher with her eyes closed when I introduced myself. “I’m Paul Austin, one of the ER doctors. Can you open your eyes and talk with me?” She raised her eyebrows a few millimeters, not even enough to wrinkle her forehead. Her right eye remained shut, and her left eye opened just enough to expose a narrow sliver of white. She turned her face toward me, her eyes still closed. I looked at her paperwork. She was a 63-year-old woman who said she couldn’t keep her eyes open, had difficulty swallowing, and had fallen four times the day before. She also had complaints of general weakness for about two years. That bothered me. The possible causes of overall weakness could fill a textbook. Yet in cases that have gone on for two years without a diagnosis, doctors often find no physical cause. Her chart noted that she had recently been hospitalized for schizo-affective disorder, which causes symptoms of both schizophrenia and a mood disorder, and had recently been discharged. That concerned me as well. When a psychiatric diagnosis is present, it can distract doctors from looking for an organic cause of symptoms. “Can you open your eyes for me?” I asked again. Her eyebrows moved a millimeter up. “Open them all the way.” Using her index fingers she raised both her upper eyelids. She stared at me, holding her eyelids up with her fingers, her elbows sticking out at her sides.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 11158 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Fenella Saunders The simple act of bending a knee requires the coordination of more strings than a symphony orchestra. Each muscle cell is made up of many tiny filaments of proteins. When a muscle contracts, these fibers change shape and slide past one another, creating vibrations. "It's like plucking a string, and the sound can tell you about the elastic properties of the muscle," says Karim Sabra, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Sabra is measuring the noise from healthy muscles in the hope that this baseline information could be used in the future to help diagnose muscular diseases or injuries. It's possible to hear muscular noise for yourself. If you place your thumbs gently over your ear openings so they completely cover your ear canals, then with your elbows raised tighten your hands into fists, you will hear a sound that resembles distant rolling thunder, which becomes louder the tighter the fist is made. This phenomenon was first described in the late 1600s. Leg muscle sounds were first observed in the 1800s. During contraction, the overall volume of a muscle fiber stays the same. So in order to shorten, the fiber has to expand in width. The muscles become harder during this process. "Sound travels faster through stiffer muscles, and slower through softer ones," explains Sabra. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Muscles; Parkinsons
Link ID: 11157 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Robert M. Sapolsky It used to be thought that humans were the only savagely violent primate. "We are the only species that kills its own," narrators intoned portentously in nature films several decades ago. That view fell by the wayside in the 1960s as it became clear that some other primates kill their fellows aplenty. Males kill; females kill. Some use their toolmaking skills to fashion bigger and better cudgels. Other primates even engage in what can only be called warfare—organized, proactive group violence directed at other populations. Yet as field studies of primates expanded, what became most striking was the variation in social practices across species. Yes, some primate species have lives filled with violence, frequent and varied. But life among others is filled with communitarianism, egalitarianism, and cooperative child rearing. Patterns emerged. In less aggressive species, such as gibbons or marmosets, groups tend to live in lush rain forests where food is plentiful and life is easy. Females and males tend to be the same size, and the males lack secondary sexual markers such as long, sharp canines or garish coloring. Couples mate for life, and males help substantially with child care. In violent species, such as baboons and rhesus monkeys, the opposite conditions prevail.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 11156 - Posted: 06.24.2010

New research in mice has revealed that as little as a week of eating a high fat diet disrupts the body's biological, or circadian clocks, causing the animals to eat at inappropriate times. A week in the mouse lifespan equals about six months to a year for humans. Researchers led by Joe Bass showed that the fatty diet actually altered the functioning of the clock at the genetic level. "This clock, which is actually composed and encoded by a set of genes in the body, tells us when to wake up each day, it has something to do with when we go to sleep, and it also is involved in determining when it is during the day that we get hungry and how well we can metabolize the food in response to meals at different times during the day," says Bass, who is an assistant professor of Medicine and Neurobiology and Physiology at Northwestern University, as well as division head in Endocrinology at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare. Previous research by Bass, along with Fred Turek and Joseph Takahashi, and others, had already shown that mice with mutated clock genes not only experienced sleep and activity disorders, they also had an increase in susceptibility to obesity and the complications that go along with it, such as insulin resistance and cardiovascular problems. That led Bass to wonder if there was "a reciprocal relationship" -- in other words, whether diet could affect the clock. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008

Keyword: Obesity; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 11155 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SUZANNE BOHAN SAN MATEO, Calif. | Researchers investigating the brain for genetic factors behind alcoholism discovered one more piece in the complex puzzle of the condition, according to a study published this week. Scientists with a research center run by the University of California at San Francisco found that a genetic variation, which produces lower-than-normal levels of the feel-good brain chemical dopamine, were strongly linked to impulsivity — one of the hallmarks of alcoholism. Howard Fields, a neurologist who was one of the study authors and who works at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center, focused on the biological basis of alcohol and substance abuse. The article was published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience. “With this gene variation, you have almost double the chances of being impulsive,” Fields said. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that induces pleasurable feelings. It is sometimes called “the courier of addiction,” because many disorders, such as alcoholism and narcotics abuse, are linked to a powerful urge to create a “dopamine rush” by imbibing or injecting.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11154 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Clint Witchalls The Guardian, In a laboratory in Switzerland, a group of neuroscientists is developing a mammalian brain - in silicon. The researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in collaboration with IBM, have just completed the first phase of an ambitious project to reproduce a fully functioning brain on a supercomputer. By strange coincidence, their lab happens to lie on the same shores of Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley dreamt up her creation, Dr Frankenstein. In June 2005, Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project, announced his intention to build a human brain using one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. "The critics were unbelievable," recalls Markram. "Everybody thought we were crazy. Even the most eminent computational neuroscientists and theoreticians said the project would fail." Some of Markram's peers said there simply wasn't enough data available to simulate a human brain. "There is no neuroscientist on the planet that has the authority to say we don't understand enough," says Markram. "We all know a tiny slice. Nobody even knows how much we know." Markram was not dissuaded by the negative reaction to his announcement. Two years on, he has already developed a computer simulation of the neocortical column - the basic building block of the neocortex, the higher functioning part of our brains - of a two-week-old rat, and it behaves exactly like its biological counterpart. It's something quite beautiful when you watch it pulse on the giant 3D screens the researchers have constructed. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11153 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE One morning seven years ago, Sherrilyn Roush woke to discover that the left side of her body had gone numb. The cause was obvious, according to Dr. Roush, now 42 and a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley: the day before, she had been given a prescription decongestant with an ingredient suspected of causing strokes in young women. Five months later, the Food and Drug Administration took the drug off the market. But Dr. Roush, then starting her career at Rice University in Houston, did not realize that her stroke would lead to sensations that few people have ever experienced. A year and a half after the stroke, caused by a lesion the size of a lentil in a region of her midbrain, Dr. Roush began to feel tingling on her body in response to sounds. Today, more than ever, she feels sounds on her skin. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 11152 - Posted: 12.29.2007

"I couldn't live the way I was living. It was just too intense," says Nathan Klein. The married freelance television producer and father of two was 45 years old when he found out that that his tremors and loss of motor control were symptoms of Parkinson's disease. He tried various treatments and medications, including dopamine drugs. Explains Klein, "The symptoms don't get better. They get worse. And the pills you take eventually don't help out. So, you know, what's there to look forward to? Nothing." So Klein researched experimental therapies and four years ago decided to enroll in a clinical trial to assess the safety of an experimental gene therapy for Parkinson's. He became the first person in the world to undergo the procedure. Neurosurgeon Michael Kaplitt of Weill Cornell Medical Center operated on Klein. He injected viruses carrying the therapeutic genes directly into the overactive area of his brain, the subthalamic nucleus, that controls movement. Because of the experimental nature of the study, the twelve participants were only treated on one side of the brain. The study was a joint endeavor with The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Long Island. © ScienCentral, 2000-2007

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11151 - Posted: 06.24.2010