By Deborah Mitchell CHICAGO (Reuters Health) - Physicians, nurses and other health care providers should be aware that patients receiving intravenous treatment with the antifungal drug voriconazole may develop a range of neurological side effects, including auditory and visual hallucinations, according to a report presented at the 47th annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Voriconazole, sold under the trade name Vfend, is a relatively new drug used to treat serious fungus infections, such as invasive mold infections and invasive candidiasis. Many of these patients are extremely ill and are receiving several different drugs, which makes it difficult to distinguish the side effects of specific drugs from the symptoms of the underlying illness. To estimate the frequency and seriousness of voriconazole side effects, Dr. Dimitrios Zonios and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, evaluated patients in an ongoing prospective study that was assessing voriconazole toxicity. The researchers focused on side effects of the central nervous system, which are not well characterized for the drug. Between March 2006 and June 2007, the researchers evaluated 66 cancer patients who were being treated with intravenous voriconazole at their institution. Careful interviews and toxicity evaluations were conducted for each patient. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 10769 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brian Vastag Zakir Ramazanov first encountered Rhodiola rosea in 1979 as a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan. A comrade often received boxes full of the yellow-flowered mountain herb from his home in Siberia and would prepare and share a sweet-smelling tea from the root. Ramazanov found that the drink seemed to quicken his hiking and speed his recovery after a taxing mission. After Ramazanov left the army, he forgot about the Siberian herb. Despite having a good job, he felt depressed, and flashbacks from the war interfered with his daily tasks. After trying various drugs and natural remedies to ease his symptoms, he happened upon a lecture about rhodiola. He learned that the Soviets had been studying the herb since the 1940s, feeding it to Olympic athletes and cosmonauts. Government scientists had noted that rhodiola boosted the body's response to stress. If it was good enough for weight lifters and space travelers, it was good enough for him, Ramazanov thought. He began taking rhodiola extracts, and after a month his symptoms lifted. He had more energy during the day and could finally sleep at night. The horrific war images faded and his concentration improved. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ramazanov moved to New York State, began translating Russian rhodiola research, and started a small business to import the herb. A few years later, Richard Brown, a psychiatrist at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, heard about rhodiola from two of his patients. They independently mentioned that the herb, sold as a dietary supplement in the United States by a company affiliated with Ramazanov, had eased their depression. ©2007 Science Service

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10768 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower The earliest known human ancestors that trekked from Africa into Asia possessed legs, feet, and spines much like ours, even as they sported relatively apelike arms and small brains, according to an analysis of 1.77-million-year-old fossils unearthed in the central Asian nation of Georgia. A team led by David Lordkipanidze of the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi recovered 33 lower-body bones from at least three adults and one teenager at a site called Dmanisi. The researchers had previously found four skulls and four lower jaws, as well as simple stone tools, in the same sediment (SN: 5/13/00, p. 308). In several cases, skull and lower-body remains come from the same individual. The researchers classify these ancient finds as early Homo. The fossils might be from an early form of Homo erectus that left eastern Africa for the Asian hinterlands, but a definitive species identity remains unclear, Lordkipanidze cautions. A description of the new finds appears in the Sept. 20 Nature. "The Dmanisi individuals weren't the first hominids [fossil ancestors of humans] to leave Africa," Lordkipanidze says. "They must have had more-primitive ancestors that passed through the Near East before reaching Georgia." ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10767 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan The phrase "Mozart Effect" conjures an image of a pregnant woman who, sporting headphones over her belly, is convinced that playing classical music to her unborn child will improve the tyke's intelligence. But is there science to back up this idea, which has spawned a cottage industry of books, CDs and videos? A short paper published in Nature in 1993 unwittingly introduced the supposed Mozart effect to the masses. Psychologist Frances Rauscher's study involved 36 college kids who listened to either 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata in D-major, a relaxation track or silence before performing several spatial reasoning tasks. In one test—determining what a paper folded several times over and then cut might look like when unfolded—students who had listened to Mozart seemed to show significant improvement in their performance (by about eight to nine spatial IQ points). Rauscher—whose work, unlike most scientists, is sometimes cited on the liner notes of CDs—remains puzzled as to how this narrow effect of classical music extended from a paper-folding task to general intelligence and from college students to children (and fetuses). "I think parents are very desperate to give their own children every single enhancement that they can," she surmises. In addition to a flood of commercial products in the wake of the finding, in 1998 then-Georgia governor Zell Miller mandated that mothers of newborns in the state be given classical music CDs. And in Florida, day care centers were required to pipe symphonies through their sound systems. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hearing
Link ID: 10766 - Posted: 06.24.2010

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. - Before they leave for Iraq, thousands of troops with the 101st Airborne Division line up at laptop computers to take a test: basic math, matching numbers and symbols, and identifying patterns. They press a button quickly to measure response time. It’s all part of a fledgling Army program that records how soldiers’ brains work when healthy, giving doctors baseline data to help diagnose and treat the soldiers if they suffer a traumatic brain injury — the signature injury of the Iraq war. “This allows the Army to be much more proactive,” said Lt. Col. Mark McGrail, division surgeon for the 101st. “We don’t want to wait until the soldier is getting out of the Army to say, ’But I’ve had these symptoms.”’ The mandatory brain-function tests are starting with the 101st at Fort Campbell and are expected to spread to other military bases in the next couple of months. Commanders at each base will decide whether to adopt the program. The tests provide a standard, objective measurement for each soldier’s reaction time, their short-term memory and other cognitive skills. That data would be used when the soldiers come home to identify mild brain trauma that can often go unnoticed and untreated. © 2007 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Stress; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10765 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Christie Nicholson About three years ago Eva Salem got into some trouble with a crocodile. It snapped her hand in its jaws. In a panic, she managed to knock out the crocodile and free herself. Then, she woke up. "I imagine that's what it's like when you're on heroin. That's what my dreams were like—vivid, crazy and active," she says. Salem, a new mother, had been breast-feeding her daughter for five months before the croc-attack dream, living on four hours of sleep a night. If she did sleep a full night, her dreams boomeranged, becoming so vivid that she felt like she wasn't sleeping at all. Dreams are amazingly persistent. Miss a few from lack of sleep and the brain keeps score, forcing payback soon after eyelids close. "Nature's soft nurse," as Shakespeare called sleep, isn't so soft after all. "When someone is sleep deprived we see greater sleep intensity, meaning greater brain activity during sleep; dreaming is definitely increased and likely more vivid," says neurologist Mark Mahowald of the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. The phenomenon is called REM rebound. REM refers to "rapid eye movement," the darting of the eyes under closed lids. In this state we dream the most and our brain activity eerily resembles that of waking life. Yet, at the same time, our muscles go slack and we lie paralyzed—a toe might wiggle, but essentially we can't move, as if our brain is protecting our bodies from acting out the stories we dream. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 10764 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Robin Hilmantel, USA TODAY Whenever Leslie Lipton was handed a menu, she'd freeze. She suddenly would feel that all eyes were upon her, noticing and judging her eating habits. This was something she couldn't quite swallow when she was a teenager. "I'd sit there, and I'd wait, and I'd see what everyone else was ordering before I ordered," says Lipton, now 21 and a student at Barnard College in New York City. Lunch in the high school cafeteria felt like a competition. "Everyone would be looking at everyone else's tray to see what everyone else was eating," says Lipton. "If you eat less, at least the comparisons are good." Lipton says this reluctance to eat in public was the prologue to her anorexia, the starvation eating disorder from which she has since recovered. But, she says, many girls across the country avoid food in public even if they eat normally at home. This self-conscious group is convinced that without the classical symptoms of an eating disorder, such as extreme weight loss, there's no problem. But parents and friends are often left wondering at what point such behavior indicates that an eating disorder is brewing. Lipton, who now speaks to girls across the country about eating disorders and her recovery, says the phenomenon is "rampant." The author of Unwell: A Novel, which was published last year, Lipton blames society's emphasis on thinness. "People don't seem to look at girls as needing food," she says. Copyright 2007 USA TODAY,

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 10763 - Posted: 09.21.2007

The developing nervous system is a seemingly chaotic and exceedingly complex jumble of cells with specialized missions, unique architectures, and stereotyped patterns of neuronal connections, or synapses. How neurons' dendrites and axons weave themselves into precise neural circuits during development remains a challenging question in neurobiology. What are the molecular tags on the surface of neurons that allow them to distinguish between each other? A single gene capable of producing more than 38,000 cell surface proteins is an essential tool in assuring the assembly of precise neural circuits in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Now, two teams of researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have demonstrated how these closely related proteins establish the specificity that allows them to serve as identification tags for individual neurons. In work published in the September 21, 2007, issue of the journal Cell, research teams led by HHMI researchers S. Lawrence Zipursky of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and David Baker of the University of Washington worked together to describe how each of 18,048 different versions of the Dscam protein is able to recognize and bind only to an identical form of the protein. © 2007 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10762 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATASHA SINGER CONTROVERSIAL new procedures in cosmetic medicine, like genital rejuvenation or buttock implant surgery, tend to take hold on the West or East Coasts and then move inland. But, during the last two years, a procedure called lipodissolve, which uses injections of a drug compound to target unwanted fat deposits, has captured the attention of thousands of cosmetic patients in Missouri and Kansas. “Two years ago, nobody in St. Louis had heard of it,” said Laurie Calzada, a petite blond self-help author who last year completed a series of anti-fat shots on her outer thighs and abdomen. “But now lipodissolve is practically a household word.” Anti-fat injections are one of the most hotly debated procedures in cosmetic medicine because they are spreading faster than the science behind them. Unlike mesotherapy, a process that entails superficially injecting vitamins and other substances into the skin, lipodissolve involves deeper injections of a compound drug that is supposed to break down cells in the fatty layer under skin. But the Food and Drug Administration has not approved any drug to be used cosmetically in anti-fat injections. Neither the drug formula used in lipodissolve nor the method of treatment is standardized. And researchers disagree whether the shots eliminate fat cells, or merely liquefy fat so that it shifts around in the body, raising the possibility of long-term consequences such as the aggravation of heart disease. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10761 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By AMY LORENTZEN DES MOINES, Iowa -- An Iowa researcher is studying a little-known eating disorder that some doctors may miss: purging disorder. Though similar to women with bulimia, patients who fit this description don't binge-eat. Yet they feel compelled to purge, usually by vomiting, even after eating only a small or normal amount of food, said Pamela Keel, the University of Iowa researcher who led a study on the subject. Keel, a psychology professor, and colleagues from Iowa and the Harvard Medical School describe their research in this month's issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. "Purging disorder is new in the sense that it has not been officially recognized as a unique condition in the classification of eating disorders. But it's not a new problem," Keel said. "Women were struggling with purging disorder long before we began studying it." If further study supports that it is a distinct disorder, Keel said the American Psychiatric Association could revise its criteria for diagnosing eating disorders. That's important because doctors could then better screen these patients and identify treatments for them. Otherwise, they might be missed because they are normal weight and don't report binge-eating, she said. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 10760 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A pioneering experiment to scan the brains of babies has shown there is much more going on in their little heads than scientists had realised. For more than a decade, scientists have used a range of technologies to scan the brain as it works, highlighting the regions that are most active compared with when the brain is idle. But today's study by Peter Fransson and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has studied the baby brain in a resting state, that is, not performing a specific task, and found activity that might help them to recognise their mother and feed, though probably not to daydream. Work published last year by an Anglo-Dutch team showed that around 10 circuits are always active in the adult brain, where different parts have spontaneous synchronised activity, notably to coordinate the right and left sides of the body, generally for hearing and vision. In the dozen babies who took part, the Swedish team found that far from being a blank slate, the babies' brains were abuzz with activity. The findings are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In all, there were five networks of spontaneous brain activity, said Dr Fransson. "The newborn brain is far from being a 'blank slate'," he said. © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2007

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10759 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Elizabeth Pennisi A gene implicated in the evolution of human language may have also helped bats make sounds of their own. Various bat species that emit high-frequency squeaks to detect prey and avoid obstacles share a high degree of variation in the FOXP2 gene, according to a new study, suggesting that genetic changes in the gene helped promote the evolution of this ability. FOXP2 codes for a protein that seems to influence coordination between mouth movements and speech. The gene first attracted wide attention in 2001 when it was linked to speech and language disorders (ScienceNOW, 3 October 2001). A year later, researchers discovered that FOXP2 likely played a key role in the development of spoken language (ScienceNOW, 14 August 2002). Mice use the gene as well: Those without it cannot communicate using ultrasonic sounds (ScienceNOW, 21 June 2005). Geneticist Stephen Rossiter of Queen Mary, University of London, and his colleagues wondered whether bats also rely on FOXP2. These mammals make human speech look simple: In a behavior called echolocation, a bat must coordinate its nose, mouth, ears, and larynx to emit and receive calls, all the while executing flight maneuvers guided in part by these signals. Working with Rossiter, Gang Li and Shuyi Zhang, both from East China Normal University in Shanghai, and their colleagues sequenced the entire FOXP2 gene in 13 bats from six families, including some that use echolocation and some that do not. They also looked at the gene in 23 other mammals, including the platypus, as well as in two birds and a reptile. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10758 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rex Dalton A trove of the oldest human skeletal bones outside Africa is reported in Nature this week — a find that will help researchers to improve their understanding of the biology of the 1.8-million-year-old hominins. The work, led by researchers from the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, describes three-dozen fossils from the skeletons of four primitive Homo erectus individuals found in recent years at Dmanisi in Georgia, central Asia. H. erectus is thought to have migrated across Asia after coming out of Africa, where the oldest relative of man is traced to nearly 7 million years ago. H. erectus fossils have been found from Africa across Asia as far as Indonesia. Typically there are only a few scattered fossils at one location. A single site with so many bones from so many individuals is rare. And they date back to very soon after H. erectus's exodus from Africa. "Dmanisi is a real gift, because nothing in the world exists like this for this time," says lead author David Lordkipanidze. "The really important point is you have multiple individuals from the same time and location," adds Tim White, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10757 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Debora MacKenzie The menopause may be an ordeal for women experiencing a 'hot flash', but new research suggests it had a good evolutionary cause – freeing women to be good grandmothers. Data from Africa indicates that the menopause creates grandmothers without young children of their own that can improve the survival chances of their daughters' offspring. Human female reproductive functions stop around age 50, and start tapering off even earlier. In other mammals, female reproduction simply stops because of ageing, at a variety of ages. But in humans the shutdown is deliberate and early. And it is genetically controlled, meaning the genes responsible were selected by evolution. However, since winning at evolution equals reproductive success, scientists have puzzled over what advantage giving up reproducing could have. Two hypotheses have been proposed: the first is that the difficulty of human childbirth is more likely to kill older women, so a woman who stops getting pregnant at 50 will still have time to raise her last child. The second is that the process allows a woman to help take care of her grandchildren – who she knows are carrying her genes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10756 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Motluk The brains of people with seasonal depression may be too efficient at bundling away a key chemical, a new study suggests. The finding in people with (SAD) backs the prevailing theory about the biochemical causes of depression, and could give clues into new ways to treat the condition. The prevailing theory of depression is that affected people do not have enough of certain neurotransmitters called monoamines – serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine – in the spaces between neurons. Most modern antidepressants work by blocking the absorption of these neurotransmitters back into the cell. However, there is little agreement on why levels are inadequate in the first place. It could be that depressed people produce lower volumes of the neurotransmitters, or they could break them down too rapidly. Or it could be that the neurotransmitters are removed from the junction between neurons, called the synaptic cleft, too quickly. Matthaeus Willeit and Harald Sitte at the University of Vienna in Austria and their colleagues now have evidence for the last of these – that serotonin is being removed too efficiently. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 10755 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Being green is a lifestyle. Turns out, each of your neurons is deeply committed to that green lifestyle - and you didn't even know it. In just a thousandth of a second, a neuron can dump up to 5,000 molecules of its chemical messenger - a neurotransmitter - into the synapse, where it will trigger an impulse in a neighboring nerve cell. The neuron is a recycler par excellence when it comes to these neurotransmitters. Neurons must not only ready neurotransmitter receptors to receive the signals coming fast and furious, but they must also recycle receptors that have been used. And you thought you had recycling problems? Researchers have now determined the identity of one of the more significant features of a neuron's green architecture. They identified a cellular anchor that keeps the recycling machinery in place in the cell membrane so that it can recycle spent neurotransmitter receptors. The anchor is critical; without it, neurons would not be able to remove used receptors and install new ones in the cell membrane. And beyond being a mere anchor, the protein is part of a larger ensemble of proteins that help neurons adjust and maintain the strength of their signaling connections. Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Michael Ehlers and his colleagues published their discovery in the September 20, 2007, issue of the journal Neuron. Ehlers and his research team at Duke University Medical Center collaborated on the study with scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. © 2007 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10754 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Sometimes the maturity of a field of science can be measured by the heft of its ambition in the face of the next daunting unknown, the mystery yet to be cracked. Neurobiology probes the circuitry of the brain for the secrets of behaviors and thoughts that make humans human. High-energy physics seeks and may be on the verge of finding the so-called God particle, the Higgs boson thought to endow elementary particles with their mass. Cosmology is confounded by dark matter and dark energy, the pervasive but unidentified stuff that shapes the universe and accelerates its expansion. In the study of human origins, paleoanthropology stares in frustration back to a dark age from three million to less than two million years ago. The missing mass in this case is the unfound fossils to document just when and under what circumstances our own genus Homo emerged. The origin of Homo is one of the most intriguing and intractable mysteries in human evolution. New findings only remind scientists that answers to so many of their questions about early Homo probably lie buried in the million-year dark age. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10753 - Posted: 09.19.2007

By David Biello Sons are tough on their mothers. Whether it is heavier birth weights, amplified testosterone levels or simple, hair-raising high jinks, boys seem to take an extra toll on the women who gave birth to them. And by poring over Finnish church records from two centuries ago, Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England can prove it: sons reduce a mother’s life span by an average of 34 weeks. The 33-year-old Finnish evolutionary biologist, aided by genealogists, has scoured centuries-old tomes (and decades-old microfiche) for birth, marriage and death records—and clues about the influence of evolution on human reproduction. Historians, economists and even sociologists have long used such tactics to explore their fields, but Lummaa is among the first biologists to enlist Homo sapiens as an animal whose population can be followed over time. After all, humans are relatively easy to track and offer the signal advantage of occasionally keeping detailed records. “I always wanted to work on primates,” Lummaa says. “But if I wanted to collect a similar data set on wild chimps, I would be struggling. I’ve decided to study another primate in the end.” Of late, one of her subjects has been premodern mothers among the Sami people of Finland, who are famous for their reindeer herding. Among this group, she found that those who bore sons had shorter life spans than those who gave birth to daughters. This discrepancy has to do with birth weight—male babies are typically larger—as well as testosterone. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10752 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks. Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television. New research, reported yesterday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers. The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic and at languagehotspots.org. In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10751 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sue Major Holmes, Associated Press — Rex Jung says researchers need to understand how the brain is put together to better understand how it unravels. To that end, Jung — a research scientist at the Mind Research Network — and psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California Irvine's School of Medicine scoured the neuroscience literature and analyzed studies of reasoning and measures of intelligence to put together a theoretical model aimed at letting researchers study intelligence in a more systematic way. There's a lot of interest in measuring intelligence and how people solve tasks that require reasoning, said Jung. "The terms intelligence and IQ are just so infused in our culture. ... We like to know fundamentally how our brains differ from others," he said. Intelligence — the capacity of the brain to function well in a given setting — can be affected by such diseases as schizophrenia or Alzheimer's. "Understanding how the brain produces intelligent behavior may allow us to address the cognitive decline associated with some of these devastating diseases," Jung said. © 2007 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 10750 - Posted: 06.24.2010