By MIKE STOBBE ATLANTA -- The parents of a girl who won a government settlement described how their hearts were broken as they watched their healthy, red-haired toddler transformed into an irritable, odd-behaving child after she got several childhood shots. "Suddenly my daughter was no longer there," said Terry Poling, the girl's mother, in a news conference Thursday. She and her husband Jon said their daughter Hannah, now 9, has been diagnosed with autism. The government has agreed to pay the Polings from a federal fund that compensates people injured by vaccines. The amount of the settlement hasn't been set yet. U.S. officials reject the idea that vaccines cause autism, but they say that in this case the shots worsened an underlying disorder that led to autism-like symptoms. The Polings said five simultaneous vaccinations in July 2000 led to Hannah's autistic behavior. She was about 18 months at the time. U.S. health officials have consistently maintained that vaccines are safe, and the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that there was no change in that position. "Nothing in any of this is going to change any of our recommendations" about the importance of vaccines for children, said Dr. Julie Gerberding. "Our message to parents is that immunization is lifesaving." © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 11384 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Arran Frood Scientists have discovered that a drug already used to control a type of epileptic seizure can also prevent future seizures in rats. Although many medications are used to control the symptoms of epilepsy, this is the first time that a drug has successfully halted progression of the disease. Epilepsy is a chronic disease characterized by sudden, recurring seizures that can occur at any time. The condition manifests in many different ways. About 17% of children with epilepsy have 'absence seizures', or petit mal — short periods of vacant staring during which they are unresponsive to the outside world. This type of epilepsy is often inherited, and although it eventually disappears in many children, others go on to develop more severe forms of the disease. Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut looked at rats that had been genetically engineered to develop absence seizures and an anticonvulsant drug already approved to treat this condition, called ethosuximide. They gave one group of rats ethosuximide from the age of 21 days, before any epileptic symptoms had started, until the rats were 8 months old; a second group received the drug until the rats were only five months old; and a third control group received unmedicated water. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 11383 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jonah Lehrer • Posted March 3, 2008 05:50 AM In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain. The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there." Before the Blue Brain project launched, Markram had likened it to the Human Genome Project, a comparison that some found ridiculous and others dismissed as mere self-promotion. When he launched the project in the summer of 2005, as a joint venture with IBM, there was still no shortage of skepticism. Scientists criticized the project as an expensive pipedream, a blatant waste of money and talent. Neuroscience didn't need a supercomputer, they argued; it needed more molecular biologists. Terry Sejnowski, an eminent computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, declared that Blue Brain was "bound to fail," for the mind remained too mysterious to model. But Markram's attitude was very different. "I wanted to model the brain because we didn't understand it," he says. "The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch." © Copyright 2005-2008 Seed Media Group, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics; Intelligence
Link ID: 11382 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan File this under futuristic (and perhaps a little scary): In a step toward one day perhaps deciphering visions and dreams, new research unveils an algorithm that can translate the activity in the minds of humans. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, report in Nature today that they have developed a method capable of decoding the patterns in visual areas of the brain to determine what someone has seen. Needless to say, the potential implications for society are sweeping. "This general visual decoder would have great scientific and practical use," the researchers say. "We could use the decoder to investigate differences in perception across people, to study covert mental processes such as attention, and perhaps even to access the visual content of purely mental phenomena such as dreams and imagery." The scientists say that previous attempts to extract "mental content from brain activity" only allowed them to decode a finite number of patterns. Researchers would feed image to an individual (or ask them to think about an object) one at a time and then look for a corresponding brain activity pattern. "You would need to know [beforehand], for each thought you want to read out, what kind of pattern of activity goes with it," says John-Dylan Haynes, a professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences that was not affiliated with the new work. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Vision
Link ID: 11381 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Our level of happiness throughout life is strongly influenced by the genes with which we were born, say experts. An Edinburgh University study of identical and non-identical twins suggests genes may control half the personality traits keeping us happy. The other half is linked to lifestyle, career and relationships. However, another expert said despite the research in the journal Psychological Science, we can still train ourselves to be more content. Psychologists have developed several methods to assess a person's personality type - and even their level of happiness. The Edinburgh study, in conjunction with researchers at the Institute for Medical Research in Queensland, Australia, looked at results from 900 pairs of twins. The idea behind twin studies is that, because identical twins are genetically exactly the same, while fraternal twins are not, it is possible, by comparing the results from the two groups to calculate how strongly influenced a particular trait is by genetics. In this case, the researchers looked for people who tended not to worry, and who were sociable and conscientious. All three of these separate characteristics have been linked by other research to an overall sense of happiness or well-being. The differences between the results from the identical and fraternal twins suggested that these traits were influenced up to 50% by genetic factors. Dr Alexander Weiss, from Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, who led the research, said: "Together with life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness is a core human desire. (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11380 - Posted: 03.06.2008

By Nikhil Swaminathan Scientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skills of girls, but the biological reason why has remained a mystery until now. Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise. The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method. The team was able to pinpoint the differences between the sexes by monitoring brain activity in a group of children (31 boys and 31 girls, ranging in age from nine to 15) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the kids tackled language tasks. In the exercises, two words were either flashed in front of, or spoken to them; they had to determine whether the pair was spelled similarly (omitting the first consonant, as in "pine" and "line") and whether the words rhymed, such as "gate" and "hate" or "pint" and "mint." In some cases, the words fit neither criterion: "jazz" and "list" being an example. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11379 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Devin Powell The butterfly has become a favorite cliché for a fresh start in life. Despite the drastic metamorphosis, however, scientists have disagreed about whether a butterfly makes a clean break with its caterpillar past. New research suggests that butterflies and moths come with mental baggage, painful memories left over from their lives as larvae. The tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta) is a green caterpillar that eats the leaves of tobacco plants across the United States. After 3 weeks of feeding, the larva secretes a hard brown shell around itself--a pupa--and spends 18 to 24 hours as anatomical soup, breaking down and remodeling everything from its digestive tract to its central nervous system. The brown-and-yellow moth that finally emerges is seemingly brand-new inside and out, with wings, complex eyes, and a taste for flowers. Studies in fruit flies--which also spend their youth as larvae--have shown that the memories and neural connections of some insects can survive such a dramatic physical overhaul. It's not so clear-cut in the hornworm. Efforts to demonstrate persistent memory in M. sexta have relied on showing that adult moths retain a preference for the food they ate as larvae. Skeptics suggest that the moths are influenced not by their memories but by traces of food that cling to the pupae and come into contact with the emerging adults. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11378 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Human parents may worry about the effects of TV violence on their kids, but among male crayfish, watching a fight appears to actually chill aggression. That finding adds to the growing body of evidence that individuals, particularly males, of many species watch competitive encounters. Viewing such events either seems to stimulate further aggression, or lessen it. "Think about the problems some countries have during soccer matches," said Paul Moore, who co-authored the crayfish study. "Observing the competition, especially if there are a lot of fouls, tends to [intensify] the aggression in the audience." "The concept of watching fights and having this experience change the potential outcome of the next encounter is something that matches with both studies and anecdotal evidence," added Moore, who is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Bowling Green State University. Moore and colleagues Thomas Zuland and Rebecca Zuland-Schneider chose to study crayfish because the aggressive shellfish form dominance hierarchies and engage in ritualized fighting. © 2008 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 11377 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jim Giles JUST as the dispute over whether vaccines cause autism was dying down at last, a US government decision has added fresh fuel to the fire. Last week it emerged that the federal government is to compensate a couple who say that the regular childhood vaccines, given to their baby daughter in 2000, caused her to develop autism. Damages have not yet been set, but could exceed $1 million. Significantly, the government's decision says nothing about whether vaccines cause autism. Instead, government lawyers concluded only that vaccines aggravated a pre-existing cellular disorder in the child, causing brain damage that included features of autism. Nonetheless, anti-vaccination campaigners are claiming vindication. "It's official," wrote one autism blogger. "The sky has fallen. The fat lady has sung. Pigs are flying." Autism experts say it is unclear why compensation is being paid. Almost 5000 other families have lodged similar claims which are being considered by the court, but decades of research have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism and few experts thought that the government would pay up. “It's unclear why compensation is being paid. Decades of research have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism”Scientists say there is nothing in the medical history of the child in question to change that thinking. "I'm stunned that they decided to settle," says Jay Gargus, a paediatrician at the University of California, Irvine. Exactly why the US government did so is still being debated, as details of the decision have been sealed and the Department of Health and Human Services won't comment. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 11376 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith Scientists have developed a way of ‘decoding’ someone’s brain activity to determine what they are looking at. “The problem is analogous to the classic ‘pick a card, any card’ magic trick,” says Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley, who led the study. But while a magician uses a ploy to pretend to ‘read the mind’ of the subject staring at a card, now researchers can do it for real using brain-scanning instruments. “When the deck of cards, or photographs, has about 120 images, we can do better than 90% correct,” says Gallant. The technique is a step towards being able to see the contents of someone’s visual experiences. “You can imagine using this for dream analysis, or psychotherapy,” says Gallant. Already the results are helping to provide neuroscientists with a more accurate model of how the human visual system works. If the work can be broadened to developing more general models of how the brain responds to things beyond visual stimuli, such brain scans could help to diagnose disease or monitor the effects of therapy. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging; Vision
Link ID: 11375 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JULIA MOSKIN IN 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote a rather lighthearted letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China) might be to blame. The consequences for the restaurant business, the food industry and American consumers were immediate and enormous. MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally driven underground by a new movement toward natural, whole foods. “It was a nightmare for my family,” said Jennifer Hsu, a graphic designer whose parents owned several Chinese restaurants in New York City in the 1970s. “Not because we used that much MSG — although of course we used some — but because it meant that Americans came into the restaurant with these suspicious, hostile feelings.” Even now, after “Chinese restaurant syndrome” has been thoroughly debunked (virtually all studies since then confirm that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people), the ingredient has a stigma that will not go away. But then, neither will MSG. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11374 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY In marketing as in medicine, perception can be everything. A higher price can create the impression of higher value, just as a placebo pill can reduce pain. Now researchers have combined the two effects. A $2.50 placebo, they have found, works better one that costs 10 cents. The finding may explain the popularity of some high-cost drugs over cheaper alternatives, the authors conclude. It may also help account for patients’ reports that generic drugs are less effective than brand-name ones, though their active ingredients are identical. The research is being published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The investigators had 82 men and women rate the pain caused by electric shocks applied to their wrist, before and after taking a pill. Half the participants had read that the pill, described as a newly approved prescription pain reliever, was regularly priced at $2.50 per dose. The other half read that it had been discounted to 10 cents. In fact, both were dummy pills. The pills had a strong placebo effect in both groups. But 85 percent of those using the expensive pills reported significant pain relief, compared with 61 percent on the cheaper pills. The investigators corrected for each person’s individual level of pain tolerance. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11373 - Posted: 06.24.2010

JERUSALEM - When Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, he may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant, according to a new study by an Israeli psychology professor. Writing in the British philosophy journal Time and Mind, Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University said two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared. The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an “altered state of awareness,” Shanon hypothesized. “In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings,” Shanon wrote. “On such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being ... many identify this power as God.” © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11372 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HENRY FOUNTAIN To the long list of the unintended effects of environmental contaminants, add one — eating polluted worms affects the songs of male starlings. Researchers from Cardiff University in Wales report in the open-access online journal PLoS One that male starlings that consume estrogen and similar compounds, chemicals normally found in sewage, showed brain and behavioral changes related to singing. Shai Markman, now at the University of Haifa in Israel; Katherine L. Buchanan, now of Deakin University in Australia; and colleagues studied wild starlings foraging at sewage treatment works in southwestern Britain. The birds eat small worms found in huge quantities along filter beds. The worms accumulate natural estrogen excreted in human waste and estrogenlike compounds from plastics manufacturing. The chemicals are known to disrupt endocrine function, with anatomical and behavioral effects. Dr. Buchanan said he was not certain of the effects the chemicals might have on the birds’ songs. With some contaminants toxic to neural development, a result might be less complex songs. “But if you have estrogenic chemicals, that could affect song complexity in the opposite direction,” she said. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 11371 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rex Dalton The ‘hobbit’ could be a cretin, Australian scientists say. But this latest assertion in the ongoing row over the identity of the small human skeleton found on the island of Flores in Indonesia is already being challenged — not least because the Australians used only cast images and never examined the actual skeleton. And they misinterpret a crucial skull component, according to three researchers who created casts of the remains. Peter Obendorf of RMIT University in Melbourne and his colleagues say1 that the cast shows an impression (called a fossa) of an enlarged pituitary gland at the base of the skull behind the nasal region. This, they say, is evidence that the skeleton is not from a new species (called Homo floresiensis ) but from a H. sapiens with cretinism — a condition in which a person is born with a deficient thyroid gland. Untreated, such people often have an enlarged pituitary gland as well as severely stunted growth and a small brain. The Australians call their idea “a tentative hypothesis”, although Obendorf says he thinks they “are on the right track”. They now are seeking access to the original specimen. But Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee who was the lead author on the first analysis of the skull cast2, says that the pituitary fossa is small. “There is no way they can reach the conclusions they did,” she argues. And Ralph Holloway, a neuroanatomist at Columbia University in New York who has a cast created from data from the original skull, says that his model also shows a small pituitary. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11370 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists believe they may have found a potential new way to treat obesity by stopping the stomach from expanding. They have identified two cell proteins that relax the gut and help accommodate a big meal. In theory, a drug which blocked this relaxation would reduce a person's ability and desire to gorge on excessive amounts of food. The University College London study appears in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. The two proteins identified by the researchers - P2Y1 and P2Y11 - control both fast and slow relaxations of the gut. The human stomach has a "resting" internal volume of 75 millilitres, but by relaxing its muscular wall can expand to an internal volume of two litres or more. This expansion is controlled by nerves inside the stomach wall which release molecules that stimulate P2Y1 and P2Y11, which are embedded in muscle cells, also in the gut wall. Researcher Dr Brian King said: "The mechanism of slow relaxation of the stomach might represent a future drug target in the fight to control weight gain and reverse obesity. "We are looking to identify drugs that would block the P2Y11 receptor and, therefore, prevent slow relaxation of the stomach. "As a result of blocking the P2Y11-based mechanism, meal size would be smaller, offering the person a better chance of regulating their food intake." Dr King said this would represent a new approach to weight control. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11369 - Posted: 03.04.2008

Older men with lower levels of the male sex hormone testosterone in their blood may be more prone to depression, a study suggests. A study of about 4,000 men aged over 70 found those with lowest testosterone were three times more likely to be depressed than those with the most. Researchers suspect the hormone may affect levels of key brain chemicals. The study, by the University of Western Australia, features in Archives of General Psychiatry. Research has found that women are more likely to be depressed than men until the age of 65, when the difference between the genders almost disappears. Testosterone levels decline with age - but there is wide variation. The Australian team studied 3,987 men over the age of 70. Each gave blood samples and took part in tests to determine whether they were depressed. In total 203 of the participants were assessed as being depressed. They had significantly lower levels of both total testosterone, and free testosterone, which is not bound to proteins. The researchers then adjusted the data to take account of factors such as educational attainment and body fat levels. They found those men whose level of free testosterone was in the bottom 20% were three times more likely to be depressed than those in the top 20%. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 11368 - Posted: 03.04.2008

By BENEDICT CAREY “It’s indisputable that autism is on the rise among children,” Senator John McCain said while campaigning recently in Texas. “The question is, What’s causing it? And we go back and forth, and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.” With that comment, Mr. McCain marked his entry into one of the most politicized scientific issues in a generation. Mr. McCain is correct that autism diagnoses have increased in recent decades; no one disputes that. He is on much shakier ground when talking about the preservative as a cause. While some parents’ groups and lawmakers assert that the preservative, which contains mercury and is called thimerosal, has caused an epidemic of new autism cases, most mainstream researchers strongly disagree. Several large-scale studies have found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism, and medical groups including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Pediatrics have publicly stated as much. In January, California reported an increase in autism cases, despite the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 11367 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Huget Are you beat? Tuckered out? Dragging, flagging or just plain pooped? Or maybe you're just tired of hearing others complain about how tired they are. In this era of burning candles at both ends (whoever works the longest hours wins), with stops only for caregiving and a few stolen winks, most everyone gets tired now and then. Sometimes all you need to recover is a solid night's sleep or an actual vacation, sans BlackBerry. But in some instances, tiredness moves to the next realm and becomes the soul-sucking, energy-draining condition called fatigue. And whereas sleepiness is generally remedied by sleep, fatigue can maintain its grip even when you sleep for hours on end. Fatigue makes you feel exhausted just thinking of paying the bills or walking the dog. It makes you want to bury your head under your pillow, even though you're sitting in your cubicle at work and there's no pillow in sight. Kevin Ferentz, director of clinical operations in the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Department of Family Medicine, cites a 1994 study showing that fatigue is the primary reason for between 1 and 7 percent of all medical office visits made by adults, and another study published in 2000 that calls fatigue the seventh most common complaint in primary care. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11366 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR Medical experts have been saying for years that caffeine acts as a potent diuretic. Consume too many caffeinated beverages, and you end up drinking yourself into dehydration. But research has not confirmed that notion. Most studies have found that in moderate amounts, caffeine has only mild diuretic effects — much like water. One report, by a scientist at the University of Connecticut who reviewed 10 previous studies, appeared in June 2002 in The International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. Investigations comparing caffeine with water or placebo seldom found a statistical difference in urine volume, the author wrote. “In the 10 studies reviewed, consumption of a caffeinated beverage resulted in 0 to 84 percent retention of the initial volume ingested, whereas consumption of water resulted in 0 to 81 percent retention.” Another study, in the same journal in 2005, involved scientists following 59 active adults over 11 days while controlling their caffeine intake. They were given caffeine in capsule form on some days and on other days were given a placebo. Researchers found no significant differences in levels of excreted electrolytes or urine volume. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11365 - Posted: 06.24.2010