By Arran Frood "Doc, I am ready to play ball." It had been years since Jeff (not his real name) had touched a basketball. Living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Jeff feared contamination from dirt and germs which prevented any part of his body from touching the ground, save for the soles of his shoes. But whilst taking part in a small clinical study to investigate the effects of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in 'magic' mushrooms, on people with OCD, Jeff's bare feet lay on the floor and he expressed a willingness to engage in an activity, playing with a ball, that just hours before he would have been considered abhorrent. Although Jeff's symptoms gradually returned, other patients also experienced transient relief from their OCD symptoms and one entered an extended period of remission lasting more than six months. Lead researcher Dr Francis Moreno, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said: "I really think that participating in the study influenced the patient's remission." It was the first to investigate the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin to be published for more than 30 years. But critics say the study's flawed methodology means that conclusions cannot be made about the drug's efficacy against OCD, and some question whether it should have taken place at all. Professor Jeremy Schwartz, of the University of California, Los Angeles, said: "This study is going to receive a lot of attention and it will create a desire on behalf of a patient population that is suffering and hoping for a 'magic bullet'." (C)BBC

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9736 - Posted: 12.12.2006

By DAN HURLEY After years of colicky debate over which method is best for getting babies to fall asleep by themselves, experts have a soothing new message: just about all the techniques work, so pick one you are comfortable with and stick with it. Despite their apparent differences, most of the behavioral approaches reviewed in the October issue of the journal SLEEP were supported by evidence that they resulted in infants and toddlers learning to fall asleep independently at bedtime and when they woke during the night. Of the 52 studies examined in the review, 49 showed positive results, with 82 percent of the infants and young children in the studies benefiting significantly. “The key to this whole thing is parents being consistent,” said the senior author of the review, Dr. Jodi A. Mindell, a psychology professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and chairwoman of the task force organized by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to assess the techniques. She added, “They need to pick a plan they can absolutely follow through on.” Even Dr. Richard Ferber of Children’s Hospital Boston — so strongly linked in the popular imagination with the so-called cry-it-out method that it has come to be known as “Ferberizing” — agreed in an interview that no single approach worked for all children. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 9735 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY Some graduate students grind out their dissertations in late-night sessions, alone with their thoughts in the wasted fluorescent glow of a windowless lab. Others spend those same hours drinking in bars, “discussing” their thesis over a round or drinks or three. Leonard Lee, a recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, managed to do both at the same time. A few times a week for about six months, Mr. Lee spent his evenings at an on-campus watering hole, either the Thirsty Ear or the Muddy Charles, buying fellow patrons beer, as part of a study of taste. In an interview Dr. Lee, now an instructor at the Columbia University business school, swore that this exercise was not a ruse to meet women or an effort to stick M.I.T with his bar tab. And he has a published paper to back him up: “The Influence of Expectation, Consumption and Revelation on Preferences for Beer,” appearing in the December issue of Psychological Sciences, one of the field’s leading research journals. In the study, Dr. Lee and two M.I.T. researchers, Shane Fredrick and Dan Ariely, found that they could change beer drinkers’ taste preferences by telling them about a secret ingredient in a beer before they drank it. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 9734 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By INGFEI CHEN Thirty years ago, Nick Patterson worked in the secret halls of the Government Communications Headquarters, the code-breaking British agency that unscrambles intercepted messages and encrypts clandestine communications. He applied his brain to “the hardest problems the British had,” said Dr. Patterson, a mathematician. Today, at 59, he is tackling perhaps the toughest code of all — the human genome. Five years ago, Dr. Patterson joined the Broad Institute, a joint research center of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His dexterity with numbers has already helped uncover startling information about ancient human origins. In a study released in May, scientists at the Broad Institute scanned 20 million “letters” of genetic sequence from each of the human, chimpanzee, gorilla and macaque monkey genomes. Based on DNA differences, the researchers speculated that millions of years after an initial evolutionary split between human ancestors and chimp ancestors, the two lineages might have interbred again before diverging for good. The controversial theory was built on the strength of rigorous statistical and mathematical modeling calculations on computers running complex algorithms. That is where Dr. Patterson contributed, working with the study’s leader, David Reich, who is a population geneticist, and others. Their findings were published in Nature. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9733 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY Until two months ago, Todd McGee, 34, was a healthy man in top physical condition — a builder, surfer and devoted father of a 15-month-old. The last person anyone would expect to have a stroke. Yet a stroke has left him nearly unable to speak, with months, maybe years, of therapy ahead. Partly because of his age and partly because of the lack of a hospital with an M.R.I. machine where he lives, no one recognized the symptoms of a stroke until it was too late to administer a treatment that could have limited the damage and speeded his recovery. This treatment, with a drug called t-PA (for tissue plasminogen activator), can help dissolve a brain-damaging clot in the 80 percent of victims who have strokes caused by them. But it must be administered within three hours of a stroke to be effective, and the sooner the better. About only one stroke victim in five who could benefit from t-PA receives it, primarily because people don’t realize a stroke is happening and wait too long to get to the hospital. Knowing who is at risk of a stroke, recognizing the symptoms and getting prompt medical help can make a great difference in whether those afflicted live or die and, if they live, how severe the consequences will be. Although about 90 percent of strokes occur in people over 55, they affect young adults, children and even babies. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 9732 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Although biologists are still far from answering this question, scattered evidence for a possible gene influencing sexual orientation has recently encouraged scientists to map out a guide to future research. Because many possibilities for such a gene exist, scientists Sergey Gavrilets and William Rice have recently developed some theoretical guidelines and testable predictions for explaining the evolutionary causes of homosexuality. “During the 1990s there was a short surge of interest by a small number of labs in finding major genes that might mediate homosexuality,” Rice told PhysOrg.com. “However, for a variety of reasons, this effort waned by the turn of the century. I think that—when studying humans—many people shy away from studying sexual phenotypes in general and homosexuality in particular. Much of Sergey's and my motivation in writing our paper was to rekindle an interest in studying the genetic basis of homosexuality. I personally think that if a firm genetic foundation for homosexuality in humans were established, then many people would view this fascinating human phenotype more objectively.” During the past several decades, scientists have discovered some interesting patterns that may point toward genetic causes of homosexuality. Among the findings is that male homosexuality appears to be inherited more often from the mother than the father (Pillard). Also, natural selection might maintain a gene that may decrease the fecundity of one sex because the same gene also increases the fecundity of the other sex. In fact, recent data shows that female maternal relatives of gay men have higher than average reproduction capacity (Camperio-Ciani). © PhysOrg.com 2003-2006

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9731 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Don Babwin, Associated Press — Squirrels hit the genetic lottery with their chubby cheeks and bushy tails. It's hard to imagine picnickers tossing peanuts and cookies at the rodents if they looked like rats. But good looks alone don't get you through Chicago winters. Nor do they help negotiate a treacherous landscape of hungry cats, cars and metal traps. So how do they do it? And why do they search, huddle, dart, and sometimes forget where they hid their nuts? Joel Brown aims to find out. "We're trying to get a glimpse of what your life is like if you are a city squirrel," said Brown, a biologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He and a team of students will trap squirrels in Chicago and its suburbs this winter, taking skin samples for DNA analysis. They'll strap collars on them and watch what they do. And they'll attach threads to acorns and hazelnuts, then see where the squirrels take them and when they eat them. While the methods aren't unlike those used to study animals in exotic lands, little attention has been paid to those in human neighborhoods. It is, after all, a lot sexier to track gorillas in Africa than a squirrel on Main Street. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9730 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Not a morning person? Take solace — new research suggests that "night owls" are more likely to be creative thinkers. Scientists can't yet fully explain why evening types appear to be more creative, but they suggest it could be an adaptation to living outside of the norm. "Being in a situation which diverges from conventional habit — nocturnal types often experience this situation — may encourage the development of a non-conventional spirit and of the ability to find alternative and original solutions," lead author Marina Giampietro and colleague G.M. Cavallera wrote in a study to be published in the February 2007 issue of Personality and Individual Differences. The researchers, who are both in the Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy, studied 120 men and women of varying ages. A self-report questionnaire evaluated degrees of morning and evening dispositions. In fact, true morning and evening-oriented people are actually rare, since most of us fall somewhere in between. Once the subjects were categorized into either morning, evening or intermediate types, they underwent three tests designed to measure creative thinking. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 9729 - Posted: 06.24.2010

John Pickrell People with many younger siblings are more likely to develop brain tumours, according to a new study. Those with four or more siblings have twice the risk of brain cancer compared to only-children, the study found. The finding suggests that an infectious agent, such as a virus, may be involved in some brain cancers, say the researchers, who compared over 13,000 incidences of the disease. The study also found there was a two- to fourfold increase in brain tumour rates among children younger than 15 who had three or more younger siblings compared to children of the same age who had no siblings. But there was no association between the number of older siblings and brain tumours. "We know very little about why people develop brain tumours," says epidemiologist Andrea Altieri, who led the study at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg. The only previously established risk factors for brain tumours are large doses of radiation, a family history of brain cancer and rare genetic disorders, he says, but these together only explain about 5% of cases. Other studies have shown a link between the number of siblings and cancers such as lymphomas and leukaemia. Sibling number is thought to be a so-called "indirect marker" of infection in childhood, says Altieri. “The number of siblings a person has indicates the level of exposure they had to infection at an early age, since children come in close contact with each other and thereby share exposures to many infectious agents.” © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 9728 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith You might think it's obvious when someone is sleepy: drooping eyelids, a wide yawn and a nodding head tend to give it away. But researchers have added another layer of precision to the picture, by finding an enzyme that increases with sleepiness. The discovery could help to unpick some of the biological mechanisms behind sleep, and represent a novel way to develop on-the-spot tiredness tests for drivers, pilots and doctors working long or irregular hours. It has proven challenging to find accessible markers of sleepiness — most current efforts involve using overt signs, such as fluttering eyelids. But 'sleepy' behaviour varies a lot from person to person. To come up with a more definitive marker, Paul Shaw at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues studied flies subjected to sleep deprivation. They found that levels of an enzyme called amylase, which is involved in breaking down starch, gets higher and higher the longer the flies are awake. When they tested sleep-deprived humans, levels of amylase in saliva were also higher the longer the volunteers went without sleep. It isn't clear why this is: amylase isn't known to have any sleep-related functions, although it is related to stress. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 9727 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Half of young people using cannabis suffer side effects such as paranoia and blackouts, a UK survey suggests. More than 80% of the 727 young people in their teens and early 20s polled by YoungMinds had tried the drug - the vast majority before they were 18. The charity is calling for urgent research on the effects of cannabis on the developing teenage brain. It is releasing guidance for young people and professionals on the effects cannabis may have on mental health. Barbara Herts, YoungMinds chief executive, said: "Many young people are experimenting with cannabis from a young age. We are extremely concerned that there is still very little known about the effects of cannabis on the developing teenage brain and it is crucial that more studies are carried out in this area." She said virtually all of the research on both short and longer-term cognitive effects has been conducted on adults. This is a problem as the young, developing brain could be much more vulnerable to its effects, she explained. Ms Herts said studies show young people who use cannabis regularly or heavily are at least twice as likely to develop a psychotic mental disorder by young adulthood than those who do not smoke. Psychosis is a type of mental health problem, which includes conditions like schizophrenia, that can seriously affect the way you think, feel and behave. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 9726 - Posted: 12.11.2006

By DEBORAH SOLOMON Q: As a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, you’ve drawn some strange conclusions about “The Female Brain,” to borrow the title of your debut book, which argues that a woman’s brain structure explains a good deal of her behavior, including a penchant for gossiping and talking on the phone. The hormone of intimacy is oxytocin, and when women talk to each other, they get a rush of it. For teen girls especially, when they’re talking about who’s hooking up with whom, who’s not talking to whom, who you like and don’t like — that’s bedrock, that excites the girl’s brain. You make it sound as if female friendship and affection is just a search for oxytocin. Sixth-grade teachers will tell you that girls get up and go to the bathroom together; girls say they have to go at the same time. They need to go off and intimately exchange the important currency of their day, which increases their oxytocin and dopamine levels. Your book cites a study claiming that women use about 20,000 words a day, while men use about 7,000. The real phraseology of that should have been that a woman has many more communication events a day — gestures, words, raising of your eyebrows. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9725 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Druin Burch Years ago, New Scientist invited readers to propose Standard International units for beauty. A “Helen” was the most popular suggestion, with a “milli-Helen” defined as enough beauty to launch a single ship. Like beauty, pain is not a sense to which objective units can be applied, units of heat or light, pressure or frequency. It used to be widely believed that nerve cells were hollow tubes through which packets of “sensation” passed. A lump of sound travelled along an auditory nerve, a portion of light along a visual one. Pain was usually considered to be an excess of another sensation – the eyes hurt when they received too much light, a punch felt unpleasant because the sense of touch was overwhelmed. But early in the twentieth century, all sensory nerves were shown to transmit largely uniform pulses of electrical depolarization. Sensory stimuli, regardless of their nature, are in fact transduced by nerve cells into waves of electrical charge that are conducted towards the brain. Whether a person becomes conscious of the impulse depends on the context. Tread on a pin while running for your life from an axe-wielding maniac and you may not feel it, just as rugby players occasionally manage to break bones without immediately knowing. But stand on the pin while walking in a relaxed fashion to the bathroom and you are likely to notice. In both cases, the sensory impulse from your foot will have been the same. Pressure sensors will have picked up the force of the pin, but they can only lead to an experience of pressure, not pain. There is nothing in the electrical depolarization itself that can clue the brain in to understanding something about the modality of sensation: that depends on labelled-line coding. Copyright 2006 The Times Literary Supplement Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 9724 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For half a century, Marvin Minsky has tried to mechanize the mind. In his new book, The Emotion Machine, the AI pioneer posits that anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling. The idea will surely stir up controversy. But Minsky – who cofounded MIT's AI Lab and advised director Stanley Kubrick during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey – wants to make us think. His groundbreaking tome The Society of Mind, published in 1986, argued there's no central conductor of operations in your head, just agents working together to create awareness. In the spirit of collective consciousness, Wired challenged Minsky to a meeting of the minds with philosopher Daniel Dennett, codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and the author of several seminal brain books with heady titles like Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea. WIRED: What's wrong with the traditional approach to how the brain works? Minsky: Physics gives us about five laws that explain almost everything. So we keep looking for those kinds of simple laws to apply to the brain. The idea in my new book is that you shouldn't be looking for a single explanation of how thinking works. Evolution has found hundreds of ways to do things, and when one of them fails, your mind switches to another. That's resourcefulness. In The Emotion Machine, you argue that feelings result from switching on or off certain "mental resources." Minsky: The traditional view of emotions is that they are something extra, like adding color to a black-and-white photograph. But to me, emotions are what happens when you remove other resources. Anger means you've turned off your social graces, you've turned off your cautiousness, you've turned off your long-range plans and most of your ambition, and you've turned on things that make you act more rapidly and less deeply. Recognizing this complexity adds dignity to the theory. © 1993-2006 The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9723 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Derry Mainwaring-Knight holds a special place in the annals of con artistry. Fresh out of an English prison in 1984 after serving time for a rape conviction, Mainwaring-Knight convinced a church rector to enlist in his battle against the spread of devil worshippers. The articulate, ingratiating ex-convict offered to start an organization that would purchase and destroy artifacts linked to satanism and black magic. Within a few months, the dazzled rector had emptied his own pockets and obtained money for Mainwaring-Knight's campaign from many devout church members, including prominent politicians and businesspeople. Mainwaring-Knight collected nearly $400,000 as well as a Rolls-Royce automobile. He spent the money on himself and his girlfriends. In 1986, the satanic bubble burst. Mainwaring-Knight was hauled into court on 19 counts of fraud. Denying any wrongdoing, he argued that he had no need to trick people out of their money since he made a great living running a prostitution ring. After his conviction, his mother revealed that he had also duped her out of a large sum of cash. Mainwaring-Knight wasn't just a con man. By all accounts, he had a psychopathic personality. Psychopaths lack a conscience and are incapable of experiencing empathy, guilt, or loyalty. Descriptions of psychopaths callously manipulating, intimidating, or harming others go back hundreds of years. ©2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 9722 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Katharine Sanderson The molecules that make octopus skin so successful as a dynamic camouflage could provide materials scientists with a new way to make super-reflective materials. Octopus, squid and cuttlefish have developed sophisticated skins so they can hide in an ocean full of hungry predators. Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts and colleagues took a close look at this skin and identified a new group of proteins with remarkable properties. Hanlon's team discovered that the bottom layer of octopus skin, made up of cells called leucophores, is composed of a translucent, colourless, reflecting protein. "Protein reflectors are very odd in the animal kingdom," says Hanlon, who is a zoologist. What's even more odd is just how reflective these proteins are — they reflect all wavelengths of light that hit at any angle. "This is beautiful broadband reflection," Hanlon told the Materials Research Society at their meeting in Boston last month. The result is a material that looks startlingly white in white light, and blue in the bluish light found beneath the waves. "These cells also match the intensity of the prevalent light," says Hanlon's research associate Lydia Mathger. All this helps the creatures to blend into their surroundings. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 9721 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Debora MacKenzie A third person in the UK has caught variant CJD from another human, in a blood transfusion. Many more people may be at risk of this human form of BSE, experts warn. Three of eight people tested so far in the UK are now confirmed to have been infected with vCJD through blood transfusions, autopsies have revealed. A total of 66 people in UK are known to have received transfusions from blood donors who later went on to develop vCJD. Of those, 34 later died from other causes. The remaining 24 people have been informed that they may be at high risk of developing vCJD, but are not reported to have been tested. In each of the three cases, the victims received blood from someone who went on to develop vCJD between 18 and 40 months after donating blood, which shows that apparently healthy blood donors can pose a threat of infection, at least in the late stages of incubation. Many carriers, unaware of their infection, may have transmitted the mutant prion in donated blood, experts say. For that reason, it was “prudent” in 2004, once the first transfusion-related case was discovered, for the UK to ban transfusion recipients from later donating blood, say Kumanan Wilson and Maura Ricketts of Toronto General Hospital and the Public Health Agency of Canada. They penned a commentary on the case in the medical journal The Lancet, which reported the third case this week (see vCJD death linked to blood transfusion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 9720 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LYNETTE CLEMETSON Her mother called it a negotiable proposition. But to Jean Lynch-Thomason, a 17-year-old with bipolar disorder who started college this fall, her mom’s notion to fly from their home in Nashville to her campus in Olympia, Wash., every few weeks to monitor Jean’s illness felt needlessly intrusive. “I am so totally aware of the control you have over me right now,” Jean said, sitting in her parents’ living room one evening last June, before coolly reminding her mother of her upcoming 18th birthday. “In a few months the power dynamic is going to be different.” For Chris Ference, 19, who is also bipolar, the fast-approaching autonomy of his freshman year held somewhat less appeal. His parents had always directed every aspect of his mental health care. Last summer, over Friday night pizza at his home in Cranberry Township, Pa., he told them that assuming control felt more daunting than liberating. “If it was up to me, I would just have it so you could make those decisions for me up until I was like, 22,” he said. “I mean, you’ve raised me well up to now. You know me better than anyone.” The transition from high school to college, from adolescence to legal adulthood, can be tricky for any teenager, but for the increasing number of young people who arrive on campus with diagnoses of serious mental disorders — and for their parents — the passage can be particularly fraught. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 9719 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Predicting the onset of mental illness could soon be as simple as smelling a scratch-and-sniff card loaded with the aroma of roses or a whiff of petrol. Scientists have taken the same technology popular in children's books and designed a test to help diagnose brain disorders before the onset of any symptoms. The test can be used for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia, as well as some illnesses affecting adolescents. It originated in a discovery by Melbourne University researchers of a link between these illnesses and a poor ability to identify smells. To test their theory, they developed a set of 40 scratch-and-sniff cards and asked people to identify the smell from a list of four possibilities, such as coffee, roses, oranges and petrol. Professor Warwick Brewer, from the university's Orygen Research Centre, said the people who later went on to develop a brain disorder had demonstrated difficulty correctly answering more than half the questions. He said the simple test also could be used by relatives of people with these conditions. © 2006, APN Holdings NZ Ltd

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Alzheimers
Link ID: 9718 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Aging cats can develop a feline form of Alzheimer's disease, a new study reveals. Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Bristol and California have identified a key protein which can build up in the nerve cells of a cat's brain and cause mental deterioration. In humans with Alzheimer's disease, this protein creates 'tangles' inside the nerve cells which inhibit messages being processed by the brain. The team says that the presence of this protein in cats is proof that they too can develop this type of disease. By carrying out post-mortem examination of cats which have succumbed naturally to the disease, scientists may now be able to uncover vital clues about how the condition develops. This may eventually help scientists to come up with possible treatments. Scientists already thought cats were susceptible to dementia because previous research had identified thick, gritty plaques on the outside of elderly cats' brain cells which are similar to those found in humans. But, by pinpointing this second key marker, the Edinburgh-led team says we can be sure that cats can suffer from a feline form of Alzheimer's. Dr Danielle Gunn-Moore, at the University of Edinburgh's Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, said: "This newly discovered protein is crucial to our understanding of the aging process in cats. We've known for a long time that cats develop dementia, but this study tells us that the cat's neural system is being compromised in a similar fashion to that we see in human Alzheimer's sufferers. The gritty plaques had only hinted that might be the case -- now we know.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9717 - Posted: 12.08.2006