Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News — Whether or not women really talk more than men, there may be one sure way to level the verbal playing field — fasting. The longer a woman fasts, the lower her voice gets and the less she uses it, according to Lebanese speech researchers who made use of Ramadan fasts to study how voices changed in 28 healthy women. "The subjects were tested when they were not fasting and while fasting after the first week of intermittent fasting during Ramadan," report Abdul-Latif Hamdan, Abla Sibai and Charcel Rameh of American University of Beirut. Their study appears in the July issue of Journal of Voice. All of the women had their voices acoustically analyzed and their larynxes inspected by video-endostroboscopy. They were also asked to describe how easy or difficult it was to speak. The biggest complaint, made by 23 of the women, was that it was simply harder to say anything while fasting. About half of the women also reported vocal fatigue, which also tended to reduce the amount they said. The next most common symptom was a lowering of the voice, which was seen in one-fifth of the fasting women. A few of the women also showed some harshening of their voices as well. © 2007 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Language; Obesity
Link ID: 10473 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SHERWIN B. NULAND Noga Arikha’s “Passions and Tempers” illustrates some of the rewards and some of the pitfalls of historical scholarship. To Arikha’s immense credit, she provides a thoroughly documented account of the ways in which a wrong-headed theory dominated medical thinking for more than 2,000 years, refusing to yield place at the bedside long after it had been proved erroneous by clear-eyed observation and the development of experimental science. One of Arikha’s contributions to the general reader’s knowledge, in fact, is to use the history of the humors — those bodily fluids once thought to hold the key to understanding human health and personality — to demonstrate the difficulty that physicians have always had in giving up outmoded ways of treating actual patients. This has almost invariably been the case, even when not only the theoretical but also the practical basis for a changed approach has already been established, sometimes by the very clinicians who cannot bring themselves to abandon the discredited practices. Arikha is hardly treading new ground here, but she does provide convincing and very specific evidence of a human failing that dogged the profession until at least the middle of the 20th century, and in certain ways continues to influence modern-day diagnosis and therapy. The complex of notions constituting the background of Arikha’s narrative would eventually form the basis from which Western scientific medicine emerged. Its preliminary formulations were brought together over the course of several centuries, in a body of writings that came to be associated with the name of Hippocrates, born on the Greek island of Kos around 460 B.C. But its ultimate codification was the work of the great physician Galen, who lived in the Roman Empire from about A.D. 130 to 201, leaving behind a multitude of texts with claims stated so authoritatively that his influence did not begin to dissipate until the 16th century. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 10472 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Evidence shows that a lack of sleep can have a negative impact on our health, increasing the risk for accidents as well as health problems like obesity, infections, and heart disease. Extensive research is beginning to give scientists clues as to why this might be so. Sleep plays a critical role in how well we concentrate and perform, helps consolidate memories and set the stage for learning, and may affect how the immune system responds to attack. Teasing apart patterns like these will help us understand why we sleep and how sleep helps keep us healthy. An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but can the same be said for 40 winks a day? Losing sleep can leave you more than just a little cranky. Evidence is building that sleep may have a fundamental role in keeping you healthy and in fighting off disease. Sleep is critical for concentration, memory, and coordination. People simply don't perform as well when they shortchange sleep. Studies show, for example, that truck drivers, doctors, and pilots are at greater risk of crashes and near misses as a result of sleep deprivation. In fact, sleep loss can have as big an effect on performance as drinking. One study showed that truck drivers who had gone 28 hours without sleep performed as poorly as if they had blood alcohol levels of 0.1 percent, which is above the legal limit in much of the world. © 2007 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 10471 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DAVID DOBBS If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition. The combination creates some memorable encounters. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, once watched as a particularly charming 8-year-old Williams girl, who was visiting Sacks at his hotel, took a garrulous detour into a wedding ceremony. “I’m afraid she disrupted the flow of this wedding,” Sacks told me. “She also mistook the bride’s mother for the bride. That was an awkward moment. But it very much pleased the mother.” Another Williams encounter: The mother of twin Williams boys in their late teens opened her door to find on her stoop a leather-clad biker, motorcycle parked at the curb, asking for her sons. The boys had made the biker’s acquaintance via C.B. radio and invited him to come by, but they forgot to tell Mom. The biker visited for a spell. Fascinated with how the twins talked about their condition, the biker asked them to speak at his motorcycle club’s next meeting. They did. They told the group of the genetic accident underlying Williams, the heart and vascular problems that eventually kill many who have it, their intense enjoyment of talk, music and story, their frustration in trying to make friends, the slights and cruelties they suffered growing up, their difficulty understanding the world. When they finished, most of the bikers were in tears. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Emotions
Link ID: 10470 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nora Schultz Who ever heard of a fish being in two minds about something? Yet it seems that like humans, fish process information - and perhaps emotions - on different sides of the brain. Fish growing up in the wild among predators use their left eye to look at novel objects, while their offspring raised in captivity use the right eye. This suggests that life experiences can affect which side of the brain fish use, and even, says Victoria Braithwaite of the University of Edinburgh, UK, that they have emotional mindsets, since different sides of the brain may correspond to a curious or suspicious attitude. "The lab-reared fish could process information about novel objects in the left brain [which means they are looking at things with their right eye] because they feel more comfortable, whereas their parents are more cautious." “Lab-reared fish could process information about novel objects in the left brain because they feel more comfortable”Humans use their left and right brain lobes differently, the most well-known consequence being handedness. Brain lateralisation has been found in an increasing number of other species in recent years. "Especially for animals that have to cope with many predators, it is an advantage if they can use one hemisphere to keep an eye on predators while they use the other hemisphere to do other things," says Culum Brown, now at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Laterality; Emotions
Link ID: 10469 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Fergus Walsh Scientists in Cambridge say they are moving a step closer to developing an artificial pancreas for people with diabetes. They are conducting trials in Cambridge with 12 youngsters aged five to 18. All have type-one diabetes which means their pancreas does not produce insulin - the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels. Jeremy Smith, who is studying for his A Levels, is one of the volunteers. The 17-year-old has had several overnight stays at the city's Addenbrookes hospital. Each time the diabetes care team fit him with a continuous glucose sensor which sits just under the skin. The idea then is for a computer program to work out the right dose of insulin, which is delivered via an insulin pump. The artificial pancreas would automate diabetes care and free people from the repeated need for finger prick blood tests and insulin injections. But the system has not gone live yet. Instead, Jeremy's glucose levels are checked every 15 minutes throughout the night and his insulin dose is altered manually. It will be another six months before the first automated, hands-free trial is conducted. The main stumbling block in the development of an artificial pancreas has been mathematical: no-one has perfected a computer program sophisticated enough to work out the right dose of insulin at any moment of the day. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10468 - Posted: 07.07.2007

By Christopher Mims It's commonly assumed that testosterone, that stereotypically male hormone, is intimately tied to violence. The evidence is all around us: weight lifters who overdose on anabolic steroids experience "roid rage," and castration—the removal of the source of testosterone—has been a staple of animal husbandry for centuries. But what is the nature of that relationship? If you give a normal man a shot of testosterone, will he turn into the Incredible Hulk? And do violent men have higher levels of testosterone than their more docile peers? "[Historically,] researchers expected an increase in testosterone levels to inevitably lead to more aggression, and this didn't reliably occur," says Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Indeed, the latest research about testosterone and aggression indicates that there's only a weak connection between the two. And when aggression is more narrowly defined as simple physical violence, the connection all but disappears. "What psychologists and psychiatrists say is that testosterone has a facilitative effect on aggression," comments Melvin Konner, an anthropologist at Emory University and author of The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. "You don't have a push-pull, click-click relationship where you inject testosterone and get aggressiveness." Castration experiments demonstrate that testosterone is necessary for violence, but other research has shown that testosterone is not, on its own, sufficient. In this way, testosterone is less a perpetrator and more an accomplice—one that's sometimes not too far from the scene of the crime. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10467 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer Men, it turns out, talk just as much as women. Sure, maybe guys talk more about cars and sports and the new iPhone, and women talk about their feelings, but at the end of the day, each sex uses an average 16,000 words a day, say researchers who studied the conversational habits of 396 men and women for six years. "I was a little surprised there wasn't any gender influence, because this stereotype of women talking more is such a powerful, popular idea," said Richard Slatcher, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Texas and one of the authors of the study. "But we were able to directly test the notion, and it's totally unfounded." The study, results of which were published today in the journal Science, debunks an age-old assumption that women aren't just the fairer sex, they're the chattier one, too. Tony Bennett sang about it in "Girl Talk" in the 1960s: "The weaker sex, the 'speaker' sex we mortal males behold, but though we joke, we wouldn't trade you for a ton of gold." The stereotype is so pervasive that even scientists have long assumed that women talk more, and they incorporated that assumption in psychological gender profiles. When UCSF psychiatrist Louann Brizendine published "The Female Brain" last year, one statistic in particular jumped off the pages and became the main talking point among radio-show hosts and Internet bloggers -- women, Brizendine wrote, use an average of 20,000 words a day; men use only 7,000. © 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 10466 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Janet Raloff Betty (not her real name) remembers the day 9 years ago when she fully experienced an orange. As she split the fruit's skin, the sections, citrus scents sprayed into the air and the 51-year-old woman experienced a sensory epiphany: "Whoa! This is an orange. My God, this is what an orange smells like." Even now, she says, recalling that day "makes me tear up because that orange was the very first thing I smelled." Ever. "There are probably around 25 million people in this country who have some olfactory problem," observes Barry Davis, who directs the taste and smell program at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Md. Few people lack all sense of smell. Among these, Davis notes, only a tiny share were either born that way, as Betty was, or lost olfaction so early that they can't recall being able to smell. More common is a gradual diminution of olfaction among seniors, notes Beverly J. Cowart, a sensory psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. By age 70, she says, "some degree of smell loss will be close to universal." Smell loss can also follow head trauma, arise as a complication of respiratory or brain disease, or signal pollutant poisoning of nasal cells. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 10465 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower There's more to the intelligence of autistic people than meets the IQ. Unlike most individuals, children and adults diagnosed as autistic often score much higher on a challenging, nonverbal test of abstract reasoning than they do on a standard IQ test, say psychologist Laurent Mottron of Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal and his colleagues. The same autistic individuals who score near or below the IQ cutoff for "low functioning" or "mental retardation" achieve average or even superior scores on a test that taps a person's ability to infer rules and to think abstractly about geometric patterns, Mottron's team reports in the August Psychological Science. "Intelligence has been underestimated in autistics," Mottron says. Autistic people solve problems and deploy neural resources in unusual ways, which are poorly understood and might contribute to problems with IQ tests, he asserts. Mottron regards autism as a variant of healthy neural development. For that reason, his group—including study coauthor Michelle Dawson, herself diagnosed as autistic—prefers the term "autistic" to "person with autism." The researchers studied 38 autistic children, ages 7 to 16; 13 autistic adults, ages 16 to 43; 24 nonautistic children, ages 6 to 16; and 19 nonautistic adults, ages 19 to 32. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Autism; Intelligence
Link ID: 10464 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Philip Ball A potential new drug for treatment of bipolar disorder (sometimes called manic depression) is being designed by researchers in Chicago and New York. The team hopes that their compound, which works as well in mice as do the currently prescribed drugs, will ultimately provide relief without the side-effects of present treatments. Bipolar disorder, which afflicts about 1% of adults, is typically treated with drugs called mood stabilizers, especially lithium and a compound called valproic acid. These medications can have unpleasant side effects, such as weight gain and excessive thirst, making it important to find alternatives. But although these drugs were discovered decades ago, nothing better has yet emerged. Mood stabilizers such as lithium are thought to act by blocking the function of an enzyme called glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) in the brain. Researchers have found other substances that can block GSK-3 elsewhere in the body for treatment of other conditions, but these can't combat bipolar disorder because they don't get into the brain. Alan Kozikowski of the University of Illinois in Chicago and his co-workers took a directed, rational approach to searching out a new drug candidate. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 10463 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Yawning may appear the height of rudeness, but in fact your body is desperately trying to keep you awake, according to research from the US. Psychologists who studied 44 students concluded that yawning sent cooler air to the brain, helping it to stay alert. Yawning therefore delays sleep rather than promotes it, the study in Evolutionary Psychology suggested. The desire to yawn when others do so may also be a mechanism to help a group stay alert in the face of danger. The common wisdom is that people yawn because they need oxygen, but the researchers at the University of Albany in New York said their experiments showed that raising or lowering oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the blood did not produce that reaction. Their evidence suggested instead that drawing in air helps cool the brain and helps it work more effectively. In a study of the 44 students, researchers found that those who breathed through the nose rather than the mouth were less likely to yawn when watching a video of other people yawning. This was because vessels in the nasal cavity sent cool blood to the brain, they said. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 10462 - Posted: 07.06.2007

By LIBBY SANDER CHICAGO, — Frustrated with the federal government’s response to the mental health needs of soldiers, Illinois officials announced on Tuesday that members of the state’s National Guard would be routinely screened for traumatic brain injuries after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. The mandatory program, which appears to be the first in the nation, will also offer the screening to other veterans in the state and will include a 24-hour hot line providing psychological counseling to veterans of all military branches. The program is expected to cost $10.5 million a year. “It’s been shown that the federal government simply was not prepared to deal with the number of war injured coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Tammy Duckworth, the director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs and a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot who lost both legs on active duty in Iraq. “This is a way that we in Illinois can react much more quickly,” Ms. Duckworth said at a news conference with Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat. There are currently 1,100 members of the Illinois Army National Guard serving, or preparing to serve, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Traumatic brain injuries afflict 14 percent to 20 percent of military service members, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a federally financed program. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 10461 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists are perfecting a test which they hope will confirm mad cow disease (vCJD) in humans. At present doctors test for the presence of abnormal proteins called prions which are thought to cause the disease by killing off brain cells. But this can only be definitively done at post mortem by examining the brain. An Edinburgh University team has found a way to boost prion numbers to confirm a diagnosis. Their work features in the Journal of Pathology. The technique, known as protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA), works by by mimicking and accelerating the replication of prions so they are more easily detected in test samples. It has so far been tested mainly in animal models. But the Edinburgh team has shown for the first time that it is possible to use the technique to amplify the number of vCJD prions in infected human brain tissue extracts by using normal blood cells (platelets) to drive the reaction. The sample is incubated with platelets and exposed to repeated rounds of ultrasound, which break the prions up into more numerous smaller particles. Further research is needed to establish whether the technique can be applied to other tissues, such as blood, that might be used in tests for vCJD. Professor James Ironside, of Edinburgh University's National CJD Surveillance Unit, said the test took too long to carry out to be used to obtain a rapid diagnosis in a blood donation centre. (C)BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 10460 - Posted: 07.06.2007

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Briefly: Who talks more? Man? Woman? Who Talks More? Conventional wisdom: women use 20,000 words a day, men 7,000. Come cocktail hour, hubby played out. Wife frustrated: 13,000 words to go, no takers. Bad for sex. But wisdom comes from populist 2006 book “The Female Brain.” Data shaky. Skeptics abound. Today, study published Science magazine: 396 subjects wear tiny microphones. Result: whoops. Women emit 16,125 words per day, men 15,669. Statistically, even-steven. But authors admit flaw: all 396 were college students — congenitally loquacious, no jobs, no commutes, no need for aphonic mesmerization by Monday Night Football. Despite flaw, says lead author, Matthias R. Mehl, University of Arizona psychologist, “Our paper puts to rest the idea that the female brain evolved to be talkative and the male brain evolved to be reticent.” But fact slyly not mentioned in Science study: after first printing of “Female Brain,” author, Louann Brizendine, began worrying that 20,000 vs. 7,000 figure was just invented by marriage counselors and removed it. Thirteen printings in 21 languages later, myth clings on anyway. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 10459 - Posted: 06.24.2010

From The Economist print edition FROM an evolutionary perspective, monogamy looks good for females and bad for males. For mothers, it means devotion as dad is going to be around to help look after the kids. For fathers it is more of a prison sentence, because it restricts a male's ability to inseminate lots of females at relatively low cost. In most circumstances, unless the young are likely to die without paternal support, a male has little incentive to stay with an individual female when he has so many other females to breed with. That, at least, was the conventional wisdom until fairly recently. But modern genetic techniques have shown that in many species females in apparently monogamous relationships often produce families that have more than one father. To explain this, biologists have theorised that these females are mating with males who are genetically superior to their regular mates, thus getting the benefit of parental assistance from a cuckold and good genes from a Lothario. Proving that, though, is a lengthy process. And it is only now that Aurélie Cohas and her colleagues at the University of Lyon, in France, seem to have done so. Their paper in July's edition of the Journal of Animal Ecology shows that for marmots, at least, a bit on the side can help a female's evolutionary chances no end. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10458 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden "Women's tongues are like lambs' tails--they are never still." --Old English saying From old adages to modern pop psychology, the notion that women yak more than men is pervasive. But according to a new study, the biggest to date, the two sexes are in fact pretty much neck and neck. Girls have a jump on boys in verbal fluency early in life, but research is confusing on the subject of whether they actually talk more than boys do as adults. One oft-cited statistic, whose origins are shrouded in the mists of time, has it that the average woman utters 20,000 words a day, compared to only 7000 issuing from the laconic male. But until now, there has been "no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for [an] extended period of time,” says psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin. To remedy that, Pennebaker, along with Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl and other colleagues equipped 396 college students--210 of them women--for several days with voice recorders that automatically turned on every 12.5 minutes to record for 30 seconds during their waking hours. All words spoken by the wearer were transcribed, counted, and extrapolated to estimate a daily word count. Pennebaker says the findings, appearing in today's issue of Science, should put the myths to rest: Both men and women averaged roughly 16,000 words a day. And there was no appreciable international difference either, at least in North America. U.S. students had about the same average as a sample of 51 students in Mexico. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 10457 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Krista Zala Rats given a helping paw are more prone to helping others--even complete strangers. This suggests that the animals' social life may be richer than we thought, according to the researchers whose new study revealed this rodent altruism. Many animals, including rats, demonstrate direct reciprocity--described as "I'll help you if you help me." But generalized reciprocity, in which individuals remember how they were treated in the recent past and apply it to others, including strangers, was thought to be a uniquely human trait, explains behavioral ecologist Claudia Rutte at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. However, she notes, previous studies haven't specifically looked for generalized reciprocity in other animals. To find out if rats have this capacity, Rutte and Michael Taborsky of the University of Bern in Switzerland trained rats to pull a lever that would deliver an oat flake reward to another rat on the other side of a wire mesh wall in a shared cage. Some of these rats were then put on the receiving side, paired for several days with either other rats trained to be helpful—-three different ones over the span--or with untrained rats that didn't pull the lever and provide food. After several days of living with such generous or not-so-generous neighbors, these test rats were then switched back to the lever side of the cage, paired with a new neighbor rat, and watched to see if they would provide food for it. Rats who had been paired with food-providing neighbors helped their new partner more often than those who had had unhelpful neighbors, the researchers report online this week in Public Library of Science Biology. Rutte's team also found that when a test rat was paired with one of the rats that had earlier provided it with oak flakes, it pulled the food lever even more--showing direct reciprocity. When the cage was empty of any neighbor rat, it barely pulled the food lever at all. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 10456 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Just as the Bee Gees' disco style sounds antique compared to hip-hop, birdsong can also go out of fashion. Such stylistic changes may help explain how mating barriers arise, eventually leading to new species. Behavioural ecologists have long known that some songbirds develop local dialects, and that individual birds respond more strongly to their own dialect than to a foreign one. Less is known about how, or how quickly, such differences arise. To study how a dialect changes over time, Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioural ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, compared recordings of male white-crowned sparrows' song from 1979 - when the Bee Gees topped the charts - and 2003. The modern song, she found, was slower and lower in pitch. This difference mattered to the birds. When Derryberry played the songs to 10 female and 20 male birds, she found that females solicit more copulations and males showed more aggressive territorial behaviour to the contemporary song than to the older ones - even though the recordings were of equal quality and no bird had ever met any of the recorded individuals (Evolution, DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00154.x). The result shows that meaningful differences in song styles can arise within just a few years, and thus that mating barriers can be erected quickly, says Derryberry. From issue 2611 of New Scientist magazine, 05 July 2007, page 17 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 10455 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Louis Buckley Orang-utans can solve a brain-teaser that would vex many human minds, researchers have found. Faced with a vertical transparent tube, a quarter filled with water, in which a peanut floats tantalizingly beyond reach, what should you do? Five orang-utans from Leipzig Zoo in Germany all came to the same conclusion. Taking mouthfuls of water from a nearby bottle, they spat into the tube until the peanut floated into reach. The apes' ingenuity amazed the study's leader, Natacha Mendes from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "Before we started we thought this was really complicated," she says. "If you asked someone in an office to solve this problem many people wouldn't be able to give a quick answer, and some probably wouldn't be able to figure it out at all." What made the task especially challenging is that the water was concealed inside a drinker, like a hamster's water bottle, and was some distance from the tube. This suggests that the orang-utans had to think at a more abstract level, says Mendes. "They have to have a mental image of the water in order to solve the problem." The results are reported in Biology Letters1. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group |

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 10454 - Posted: 06.24.2010