Roxanne Khamsi The reason why even professional basketball and soccer players sometimes miss an easy shot may be partly explained by spontaneous fluctuations of electrical activity within the brain, a study suggests. An experiment conducted by researchers at Washington University, in Missouri, US, found that fluctuations in brain activity caused volunteers to subconsciously exert slightly less physical force when pressing a button on cue. Crucially, this activity is independent of any external stimulus and does not appear related to attention or anticipation. The scientists involved say it is the first direct evidence that internal instabilities – so-called "spontaneous brain activity" – may play an important role in the variability of human behaviour. From the mid-1990s onwards, brain-scanning techniques have revealed variable brain activity that appears unrelated to external stimuli and occurs even when a person is asleep or anaesthetized. But just how such fluctuations in neuronal firings may influence physical behaviour has proven different to untangle. To explore the issue, Michael Fox at Washington University and colleagues designed an experiment that involved monitoring volunteers' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they performed a simple finger-tapping task. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 10830 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE Doctors are writing a new prescription for menopause: the antidepressant. It’s not that all menopausal women are depressed. Instead, the antidepressant has emerged as the drug of choice among women searching for new ways to cool the hot flash. There is no way to track how often antidepressants are prescribed to treat hot flashes, the unpredictable, sticky wave of heat that for many women is the defining symptom of menopause. None are specifically approved for hot flashes, and doctors who prescribe them are doing so “off label.” Menopause researchers say antidepressant use is becoming increasingly common as both women and doctors seek alternatives to menopause hormones. The use of hormone drugs has fallen precipitously since 2002, when a government study linked hormone use in older women to stroke and breast cancer. It isn’t clear why antidepressants seem to cool hot flashes, at least in some women. The link was made by chance in studies of women with breast cancer. Some cancer drugs set off hot flashes, and researchers noticed that women who were also taking the antidepressants known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors had fewer flashes. Studies looking at the use of these and other serotonin-altering drugs to treat hot flashes in healthy menopausal women have been disappointing. Two, Wyeth’s Effexor and GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, have shown a meaningful benefit in high-quality controlled studies, according to a review published last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 10829 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Royal is a cantankerous old male baboon whose troop of some 80 members lives in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana. A perplexing event is about to disturb his day. From the bushes to his right, he hears a staccato whoop, the distinctive call that female baboons always make after mating. He recognizes the voice as that of Jackalberry, the current consort of Cassius, a male who outranks Royal in the strict hierarchy of male baboons. No hope of sex today. But then, surprisingly, he hears Cassius’s signature greeting grunt to his left. His puzzlement is plain on the video made of his reaction. You can almost see the wheels turn slowly in his head: “Jackalberry here, but Cassius over there. Hmm, Jackalberry must be hooking up with some one else. But that means Cassius has left her unguarded. Say what — this is my big chance!” The video shows him loping off in the direction of Jackalberry’s whoop. But all that he will find is the loudspeaker from which researchers have played Jackalberry’s recorded call. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10828 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sandra G. Boodman An avid hockey player since age 6, Lucio "Lou" Battista is no stranger to pain. "He has a very high tolerance," his mother, Liz Battista, said of her only child. Last year while playing defense for his roller hockey team, Lou, then 15, was body-slammed from behind and hurled chest first into the board that separates the rink from spectators, then played two more games before realizing something was wrong. The blow was so forceful it fractured the hyoid bone in his neck, tore his esophagus and forced air into the space in the chest between his lungs, endangering his heart. He spent five days in the hospital and has fully recovered from injuries that could have been fatal. But that experience, he said, paled in comparison with his ordeal last May, when he developed eye pain so searing it literally made him weep. "It was unbearable," recalled Lou, a high school senior in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., who will turn 17 in two weeks. Unlike the hockey injuries, which were diagnosed quickly, it took doctors a week to figure out the reason for the stabbing pain and why his left eye went from 20/20 vision to being legally blind in a matter of days. His doctors were baffled in part because an array of sophisticated tests -- CT scans, MRIs, a spinal tap and extensive blood work -- were all normal. It was a pediatric neurologist, the second he had seen, who quickly diagnosed the problem and within hours initiated treatment that stopped the pain and restored his sight. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 10827 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sandra G. Boodman The titles lure aspirational parents eager to do what's best for their infants: Baby Einstein, Baby Galileo, Baby Shakespeare and even Brainy Baby with its original motto, "a little genius in the making." But do these enormously popular and profitable videos and DVDs devised for viewers too young even to sit up provide educational enrichment, as supporters contend? Or are they a skillful marketing scheme for products that may actually impede cognitive development, as critics say? Those questions have been reignited by a highly publicized study by veteran child development researchers at the University of Washington. The Seattle team surveyed more than 1,000 families in February 2006 and found that infants between 8 and 16 months who regularly watched Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby videos knew substantially fewer words -- six to eight out of 90 -- than infants who did not watch them, according to parental reports. The deficit, which increased with each hour of video viewing, was not seen among babies who watched other programming, such as "Sesame Street" or "SpongeBob SquarePants" or adult shows such as "Oprah." © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 10826 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Charles Glatt For centuries, philosophers, theologians and biologists have debated the relative roles of inborn traits versus environmentally defined experiences in determining what and who we are. This nature-nurture debate carries fundamental implications for our understanding of self-determination, or free will. Indeed, as research has begun to identify genetic risk factors for certain behavioral traits, these risk factors have already been used in court (see here and here)to argue that punishment should be lessened for convicted felons -- the presumption being that their genes made them inherently more likely to misbehave. The importance and challenge of the nature-nurture debate in behavior has recently spawned a new area of research that looks at the interaction between genetic risk factors and experience in the development of psychopathology. A study led by Joan Kaufman and Joel Gelernter, both of Yale, and published in Biological Psychiatry, has demonstrated what many of us have intuitively concluded, which is that both nature and nurture contribute to who we are. In this particular study, genetic and environmental factors interact to determine risk for depression. In their study, "Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor-5-HTTLPR Gene Interactions and Environmental Modifiers of Depression in Children," Kaufman, Gelernter and colleagues found distinct gene-environment interactions in the risk for depressive symptoms. Other studies have found similar interactions, but looked mainly at interactions between single genetic and single environmental risk factors. This study ups the ante by examining various interactions among two genetic and two environmental factors, including a four-way interaction with two genetic and two environmental variables. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10825 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Next time you whisper sweet nothings to the object of your affections as they peacefully doze off, don't be surprised if they can't remember a word of it the next morning. Neuroscientists have shown that the brain's pathways for deciphering speech, and forming memories of it, switch off as anaesthetized patients begin to nod off. They suspect the same holds true for normal, non-drug-induced sleep. Researchers led by Matt Davis of the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, studied 12 volunteers under the influence of varying amounts of an anaesthetic called propofol, which induced varying levels of drowsiness. They played them recordings of speech or other sounds, and monitored their brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging. The volunteers' brains were more active in response to speech than to generic noise, suggesting that they still recognised spoken words. But the part of the brain involved with the more subtle job of untangling words that can have alternative meanings depending on context or spelling (such as 'bark', or 'pear/pair') showed no activity in the drowsiest volunteers. Neither did the part involved with forming memories of speech. © 2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sleep
Link ID: 10824 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MICHELE MORGAN BOLTON MIDDLEBOROUGH, Mass., — The big news in this struggling southeastern Massachusetts community is a proposed $1 billion casino complex that many hope will bring financial salvation. But for a small group of residents, the hope for economic revival is overshadowed by health concerns. They are awaiting a report later this year that could reveal whether the dozens of cases of Lou Gehrig’s disease centered around a downtown industrial area were caused by pollution. The cases, which both state and federal officials call a disease cluster, are located within a mile of Everett Square — a densely settled neighborhood adjacent to the town’s onetime factory row. It is now home to two Superfund sites. The study, which was financed by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and conducted by state health scientists, will be followed by the creation of a statewide registry to track cases of the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the cause of which is not fully understood. State Senator Marian Walsh, a Democrat from West Roxbury, said it was understandable that most residents were more interested in the prospect of obtaining a casino, which would be built by the Mashpee Wampanoag Indians and is expected to create as many as 10,000 jobs. “It’s human nature that we move toward pleasure and away from pain,” Ms. Walsh said. “But here, if we can understand the genesis, the registry will bring in money, information and resources that will help get to a cure.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 10823 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The Canadian Press Female students who leave home to attend first-year university or college are significantly more likely to start binge eating than peers who stay home to attend school — a behaviour that puts them at risk for more serious eating disorders in the future, new research suggests. A study of University of Alberta students found that females in their inaugural year were three times more likely to binge eat if they had left their parents' home to obtain post-secondary education. Repeated bouts of eating large amounts of food at a single sitting can also pack on the pounds over time, setting the stage for obesity, diabetes and other health problems, says the study. (CBC) As well, female students who reported higher levels of dissatisfaction with their bodies had a three-fold greater risk of binge eating episodes, say the researchers, whose study is published in the October issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Lead researcher Erin Barker, who earned her PhD in developmental psychology at the Edmonton-based university, said young women who scored low on social adjustment also were more apt to binge eat. © The Canadian Press, 2007

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 10822 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALEX BERENSON Eli Lilly yesterday added strong warnings to the label of Zyprexa, its best-selling medicine for schizophrenia, citing the drug’s tendency to cause weight gain, high blood sugar, high cholesterol and other metabolic problems. For the first time, Zyprexa’s label now acknowledges that the drug causes high blood sugar more than some other medicines for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, called atypical antipsychotics. Lilly previously argued that Zyprexa had not been proved to cause high blood sugar at a more frequent rate than its competitors. Concern about Zyprexa’s side effects has been increasing since at least 2004, and Zyprexa’s prescriptions and market share have fallen sharply over the period. As a result, the new warnings may have only a moderate impact among doctors and patients, said S. Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Bipolar Disorder Research Program at Emory University. “The knowledge has been out there, and it’s already impacted prescribing patterns a great deal,” Dr. Ghaemi said. The new label will also indicate that patients who take Zyprexa may keep gaining weight for as long as two years after starting therapy. That contradicts earlier public statements by Lilly that weight gain on Zyprexa tends to plateau after a few months of use. One in six patients who take Zyprexa will gain more than 33 pounds after two years of use, the label says. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 10821 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DALLAS - Fertility rates in birds can get a lift if the male anticipates that a sexual encounter is just around the corner, researchers from the University of Texas reported on Thursday. The unorthodox study involved 28 male quails, 14 female quails, and two chambers: a green one near a noisy room and a white one on an isolated table. The males were put into each of the chambers for a brief period daily over a period of five days. Half were given access to a female immediately after their time in the green chamber but not the white: for the other half it was the opposite. The male quails therefore came to associate one chamber with the act of copulation. "We can take anything and make it a romantic setting if there is the anticipation of sex," said Michael Domjan, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. "We concluded the experiment by pairing the males with single females. One male would go into the romantic chamber and then have access to the female, then one would go into the non-romantic chamber and then have access to the same female," Domjan, one of the authors of the study, told Reuters by telephone. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10820 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers--women who work in strip joints and, for cash, gyrate in the laps of seated men--earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear. Women, unlike many mammals, don't come into heat or estrus, a state of obvious fertility that attracts potential mates. Common wisdom has it that estrus was lost as humans evolved. The notion is that women evolved "concealed ovulation" along with around-the-month sexual receptivity the better to manipulate males by keeping them in the dark, says Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. But now Miller and colleagues have found evidence that a woman’s state of fertility may not be so secret after all. The researchers used ads and flyers to sign up 18 lap dancers from local clubs. Each woman was asked to log on to a Web site and report her work hours, tips, and when she was menstruating. Lap dancers generally work 5-hour shifts with 18 or so 3-minute performances per shift. They average about $14 per "dance"--all of which is called a "tip" because it is illegal to pay for sex in New Mexico. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10819 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Two gene variations appear frequently in depressed patients who contemplate killing themselves during treatment with a common antidepressant medication, a new study finds. In the study, reports of suicidal thoughts occurred from 2 to 15 times as often in antidepressant-treated patients with the key gene variations as in patients without them, say psychiatrist Gonzalo Laje of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., and his colleagues. Participants received citalopram, a widely prescribed antidepressant related to medications such as fluoxetine (Prozac). "These findings need to be replicated before we can devise a genetic test to determine who's at risk for suicidal thoughts during antidepressant treatment," Laje says. The study identifies two crucial genes that contribute to the formation of cell receptors for glutamate, a chemical messenger in the brain that has been implicated in antidepressant effects. Variants of these genes apparently promote suicidal thinking only in depressed people taking antidepressants, the researchers conclude in the October American Journal of Psychiatry. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10818 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Elizabeth Quill Carbon dioxide may deserve blame for more than just the panic over global warming. New research involving healthy people inhaling the gas indicates that the brain's reaction to carbon dioxide helps explain panic attacks and other anxious feelings, independent of rising world temperatures. This new insight, reported 3 October in PLoS One, could help physicians prevent the development of depression and other anxiety disorders. It's long been known that anxiety-prone individuals often experience panic attacks when they breathe in carbon dioxide. Psychiatrists have theorized that emotional distress reflects a built-in response to suffocation. The "false suffocation alarm theory" suggests that the brain has a carbon dioxide sensor and that it is oversensitive in some people, mistakenly spurring panic attacks. Such a sensor could have evolved to alert oxygen-breathing organisms of impending death. Eric Griez, an experimental psychiatrist at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands, came up with a test for the false-alarm theory. If it is valid, he surmised, healthy individuals should show some sensitivity to carbon dioxide as well. So he and his colleagues recently asked 64 volunteers to inhale two deep breaths of four mixtures of compressed air containing 9%, 17.5%, 35%, or no carbon dioxide. After inhaling each mixture, the volunteers continuously rated their level of fear and discomfort on a scale from 1 to 100 using a touch screen and rated their panic using a questionnaire that listed 13 common symptoms of panic attacks. As the dose of carbon dioxide increased, so did fear and discomfort. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 10817 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists are hopeful that they have found a way to halt the progression of motor neurone disease (MND). A team at Bath University discovered a causal link between the gene involved in the formation of blood vessels and the development of some forms of MND. Mutant versions of the gene's product - angiogenin - are toxic to motor neurones, so blocking this process may stop the disease, they say. The latest UK work is published in the journal Human Molecular Genetics. There are about 5,000 people suffering with MND at any one time in the UK. The condition affects men more than women and one or two people in every 100,000 will be newly diagnosed with MND each year. In MND, over time, the cells responsible for transmitting the chemical messages that enable muscle movements become injured and subsequently die. Ultimately, the disease fatally interferes with those muscles involved in breathing. Last year, scientists discovered that some patients with MND have a mutated version of the human angiogenin gene. Since then, experts have been trying to find out what role angiogenin plays in the maintenance and development of motor neurones. Lead researcher Dr Vasanta Subramanian said: "We have found that mutated versions of this molecule are toxic to motor neurones and affect their ability to put out extensions called the axons. (C)BBC

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 10816 - Posted: 10.05.2007

By Charles Q. Choi A three-way sex struggle resembling the game rock-paper-scissors may have existed for 175 million years or more in lizards, research now suggests. The reptilian triads may be far more common than previously recognized — and may even shape the way humans behave, the scientists said "You either cooperate, or take by force, or take by deception," said researcher Barry Sinervo, a behavioral geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's one of those basic games that structures life." The scientists investigated European common lizards (Lacerta vivipara), devoting five years to studying the lizards at five sites in the Pyrenees mountain range on the border of France and Spain. They captured more than 250 lizards per year and followed their successes and failures. Sinervo and his colleagues found males adopt one of those three strategies when pursuing females. A quick look at their gaudy-colored bellies reveals which line of attack they will pursue. Orange-bellied males are brutes that invade other lizards' territories to mate with any female they can hold. But while they're gone, yellow-bellied males sneak deceptively onto the vacant territory and mate with undefended females. White-bellied males guard their mates closely and ally with other white-bellied lizards to keep the yellows at bay. Thus the analogy to rock-paper-scissors — orange force defeats white cooperation, cooperation defeats yellow deception and deception defeats force. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10815 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Juan Uriagereka • Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years—an eye-blink of evolution. Why are humans the only species to have suddenly hit upon the remarkable possibilities of language? If speech is a product of our DNA, then surely other species also have some of the same genes required for language because of our basic, shared biochemistry. One of our closest relatives should have developed something that is akin to language, or another species should have happened upon its attendant advantages through parallel evolution. A quasi-paradox has persisted within the field of linguistics, because the sudden emergence of such a complex, limitless system in a single species is hard to rationalize in terms of standard evolution. Its rapid spread makes language seem more like a viral epidemic that swept through the human population rather than a trait inherited through the typical dynamics of evolution. © Copyright 2005-2007 Seed Media Group, LLC.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 10814 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nora Schultz Tiny cameras attached to New Caledonian crows' tail feathers are offering new insights into the birds' behaviour in the wild. The crows, famous for their impressive tool-making and using abilities, are also notoriously difficult to observe in their native environment because they live in forests and are very shy. Working together with Jonathan Watts, who has previously constructed cameras worn by eagles for the BBC television series Animal Camera, Christian Rutz and colleagues from the University of Oxford developed cameras weighing only 14 grammes that can be worn by the crows without disturbing their natural behaviour. "We attach the camera to the tail feathers so the lens pokes out under the belly," says Rutz. "This allows us to see the crow's head whenever it bends forward." The camera also contains a simple radio transmitter that reveals the crows' location. This lets the researchers track them at a distance of few hundred metres, so that they can catch the camera's video signal with a portable receiving dish. Up to 70 minutes of footage can be broadcast by the camera's chip, and the camera is shed once the bird moults its tail feathers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 10812 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith An anaesthetic method that kills pain without producing numbness or preventing movement has been developed. Current local anaesthetics work by indiscriminately blocking all the channels in a nerve cell, so they can block movement and sensation as well as pain. However, the new technique involves using a combination of two compounds to home in on pain-sensing nerves in a specific area, leaving other functions unaffected. It could prove useful for situations where patients require anaesthetic, but also need to be able to move or control muscles, such as in childbirth and in some dental procedures. Bruce Bean of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues targeted the pain by taking advantage of an ion channel called TRPV1, which is only present in pain-sensing nerve cells. This channel opens when it senses capsaicin, the active ingredient in chilli peppers. Working on cultures of neurons, the researchers used capsaicin to open the ion channel, allowing their painkiller of choice — a local anaesthetic called QX-314 — to enter the cell. QX-314 is similar to the commonly-used local anaesthetic lidocaine, but, unlike lidocaine, it has no effect unless it is acting from within a cell. The team found that capsaicin did indeed allow the anaesthetic to only enter pain-sensing neurons, where it could then dampen the action of these cells. © 2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10811 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sally Squires Pregnant and breast-feeding women should eat at least 12 ounces of fish and seafood per week to ensure their babies' optimal brain development, a coalition of top scientists from private groups and federal agencies plans to declare today in a public advisory that marks a major break with current U.S. health advice. The scientists' conclusion is at odds with the standard government advice issued in 2001 that new mothers and mothers-to-be should eat no more than 12 ounces of seafood per week because of concerns about mercury contamination. Shifting data and advice on how women's consumption of fish and seafood affects brain development of fetuses and infants, the most vulnerable groups, have produced one of the more vexing nutritional dilemmas of recent years. In the short term, at least, today's statement, drafted by scientists affiliated with multiple medical organizations, is likely to deepen the dilemma for many women, especially since the Food and Drug Administration indicated that it will study the new information but is not prepared to change the advice it reiterated in 2004. © Copyright 1996-2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10810 - Posted: 06.24.2010