DURHAM, N.H. -- Keeping track of one set of keys is difficult enough, but imagine having to remember the locations of thousands of sets of keys. Do you use landmarks to remember where you put them? Do you have a mental map of their locations? Scientists at the University of New Hampshire hope to learn more about memory and its evolution by studying the Clark’s nutcracker, a bird with a particularly challenging task: remembering where it buried its supply of food for winter in a 15-mile area. Like many animals preparing for the winter, every fall the Clark’s nutcracker spends several weeks gathering food stores. What makes it unique is that it harvests more than 30,000 pine nuts, buries them in up to 5,000 caches, and then relies almost solely on its memory of where those caches are located to survive through winter. Brett Gibson, a scientist studying animal behavior, began studying Clark’s nutcrackers in graduate school and is continuing his research into memory and the behavior of nutcrackers as an assistant professor in UNH’s psychology department. “Nutcrackers are almost exclusively dependent upon cache recovery for their survival so if they don’t remember where they’ve made those caches, then they are in trouble,” Gibson says. “During winter, their cache locations are covered with snow so many of the small local features in the landscape during fall are no longer available to them. What’s clear is that they are using spatial memory to recover these caches. They are remembering these caches based on landmarks and other features of the terrain.”

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9455 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Pilcher Diving headfirst into a tank of chilly water would cause even the most stoic of us to shiver, but not the hooded seal (Cystophora cristata). Although the plucky marine mammals shiver on cold, dry land, they stop as they plunge into nippy waters — a strategy that probably helps them to conserve oxygen and minimize the brain damage that could result from long dives. Researchers have spent decades trying to fathom the seemingly impossible diving physiology of seals. The animals, which can spend up to 2 hours underwater in one dive, don't seem to be able to hold enough oxygen to allow them to survive this feat. "Stopping shivering is just one of the tricks that lets these animals dive for long periods of time," says Lars Folkow and colleagues from the University of Tromsø, Norway, who reported his findings at The American Physiological Society conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia yesterday. Folkow's team took muscle, heart rate and body temperature recordings from a dozen captive-reared hooded seals trained to lie still on a specially designed board. When the board was above water and the room temperature was lowered to an icy -35°C, the animals shivered vigorously in an attempt to keep warm. But when the board was lowered into a chilly saltwater pool, they stopped shivering instantly. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 9454 - Posted: 06.24.2010

TUESDAY, (HealthDay News) -- The brain chemical dopamine plays an important role in regulating sleep and brain activity associated with dreaming, a Duke University Medical Center study finds. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that carries signals between neurons (brain cells). The Duke team found that mice with dramatically reduced dopamine levels could not sleep. When dopamine levels were boosted, the mice showed brain activity associated with dreaming while being awake. The scientists said the same processes likely occur in humans and the findings offer new insight into the sleep problems commonly experienced by people with Parkinson's disease, in which brain cells containing dopamine become injured or die. "Our study may lead to development of new diagnostic tools for the early detection of Parkinson's disease based on the sleep disturbances that are often associated with motor symptoms of the disease," senior investigator Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neuroscience, said in a prepared statement. The research may also help explain the causes of hallucinations and other symptoms experienced by schizophrenic and psychotic patients, Nicolelis said. The study was slated for publication in the Oct. 11 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. © Forbes.com Inc.™

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 9453 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DANIEL GOLEMAN A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more. Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite dire prognoses to the contrary. My friend was the sort of college professor students remember fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest in them — in their studies, their progress through life, their fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a steady stream of visitors to their home. Though no one could ever prove it, I suspect that one of many ingredients in his longevity has been this flow of people who love him. Research on the link between relationships and physical health has established that people with rich personal networks — who are married, have close family and friends, are active in social and religious groups — recover more quickly from disease and live longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of how people’s brains entrain as they interact, adds a missing piece to that data. The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9452 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE What can stand on its hind legs and duke it out with its front feet, boxing and tussling like a four-armed pugilist? The answer: a strain of laboratory fruit flies bred for shameless aggressiveness toward their own kind. These miniature gladiators flail at each other with a zeal and tempo that make professional boxers look like milquetoasts. A video, available here, shows a Drosophilan version of Mike Tyson forcing an opponent to fly the court. The fighting flies have been bred by Herman A. Dierick and Ralph J. Greenspan, two biologists at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. Their goal is to discover the neural circuits that are genetically modified when flies develop aggressive behavior. Fruit flies in the wild are quite hostile toward one another. Males will fight off other males from prize real estate, like a rotten peach, where females like to congregate. But when kept in the laboratory, subsequent generations soon become domesticated. Dr. Dierick and Dr. Greenspan figured that since this behavior was easily lost, it should be easy enough to regain if the right selective pressure were applied. So they took a laboratory strain of tame fruit flies and set up pots of food that could be protected by single males. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9451 - Posted: 10.10.2006

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Head growth in fetal life and infancy is associated with later intelligence, new research hints. Moreover, catch-up increases do not appear to compensate for poor early growth. "Brain growth in early life may be important in determining not only the level of peak cognitive function attained but also whether such function is preserved in old age," the study team writes in the journal Pediatrics. "Older people with a larger head circumference tend to perform better on tests of cognitive function and may have reduced risks of cognitive decline and of Alzheimer's disease." Several studies in children have shown that those with larger brains, measured with imaging studies or as head circumference, tend to score higher on tests of cognitive function. Similar associations have been found in adults. For their study, Dr. Catharine R. Gale, of the University of Southampton, UK, and colleagues examined the effect of head growth in fetal life, infancy, and childhood on brain power at the ages of 4 and 8 years. Included in the study were 633 term children who had their head circumference measured at birth and at regular intervals thereafter. By age 1, mean head circumference increased from 34.9 cm at birth to 46.6 cm. Head growth after infancy was slower. Mean head circumference increased to 50.9 cm by 4 years and to 53.4 cm by 8 years. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 9450 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CHARLES SIEBERT ‘We’re not going anywhere,” my driver, Nelson Okello, whispered to me one morning this past June, the two of us sitting in the front seat of a jeep just after dawn in Queen Elizabeth National Park in southwestern Uganda. We’d originally stopped to observe what appeared to be a lone bull elephant grazing in a patch of tall savanna grasses off to our left. More than one “rogue” crossed our path that morning — a young male elephant that has made an overly strong power play against the dominant male of his herd and been banished, sometimes permanently. This elephant, however, soon proved to be not a rogue but part of a cast of at least 30. The ground vibrations registered just before the emergence of the herd from the surrounding trees and brush. We sat there watching the elephants cross the road before us, seeming, for all their heft, so light on their feet, soundlessly plying the wind-swept savanna grasses like land whales adrift above the floor of an ancient, waterless sea. Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left bumper, a huge female emerged — “the matriarch,” Okello said softly. There was a small calf beneath her, freely foraging and knocking about within the secure cribbing of four massive legs. Acacia leaves are an elephant’s favorite food, and as the calf set to work on some low branches, the matriarch stood guard, her vast back flank blocking the road, the rest of the herd milling about in the brush a short distance away. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Stress
Link ID: 9449 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ipke Wachsmuth Our body movements always convey something about us to other people. The body "speaks" whether we are sitting or standing, talking or just listening. On a blind date, how the two individuals position themselves tells a great deal about how the evening will unfold: Is she leaning in to him or away? Is his smile genuine or forced? The same is true of gestures. Almost always involuntary, they tip us off to love, hate, humility and deceit. Yet for years, scientists spent surprisingly little time studying them, because the researchers presumed that hand and arm movements were mere by-products of verbal communication. That view changed during the 1990s, in part because of the influential work of psycholinguist David McNeill at the University of Chicago. For him, gestures are "windows into thought processes." McNeill's work, and numerous studies since then, has shown that the body can underscore, undermine or even contradict what a person says. Experts increasingly agree that gestures and speech spring from a common cognitive process to become inextricably interwoven. Understanding the relationship is crucial to understanding how people communicate overall. Most of us would find it difficult and uncomfortable to converse for any extended period without using our hands and arms. Gestures play a role whenever we attempt to explain something. At the very least, such motions are co-verbal; they accompany our speech, conveying information that is hard to get across with words. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 9448 - Posted: 06.24.2010

La Jolla, CA -- Ever watch a jittery video made with a hand-held camera that made you almost ill? With our eyes constantly darting back and forth and our body hardly ever holding still, that is exactly what our brain is faced with. Yet despite the shaky video stream, we usually perceive our environment as perfectly stable. Not only does the brain find a way to compensate for our constantly flickering gaze, but researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found that it actually turns the tables and relies on eye movements to recognize partially hidden or moving objects. Their findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of Nature Neuroscience. "You might expect that if you move your eyes, your perception of objects might get degraded," explains senior author Richard Krauzlis, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Systems Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute. "The striking thing is that moving your eyes can actually help resolve ambiguous visual inputs." Our eyes move all the time, whether to follow a moving object or to scan our surroundings. On average, our eyes move several times a second – in fact, in a lifetime, our eyes move more often than our heart beats. "Nevertheless, you don't have the sense that the world has just swept across or rotated around you. You sense that the world is stable," says Krauzlis.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 9447 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The goal of our inaugural project, the Allen Brain Atlas, is to create a detailed cellular-resolution, genome-wide map of gene expression in the mouse brain. The completion of the sequencing of the mouse brain and the availability of techniques to probe gene expression amenable to scale-up and automation have made this an achievable, albeit ambitious, goal. The Allen Brain Atlas has created an automated platform for high-throughput in situ hybridization (ISH) that allows a highly systematic approach for analyzing gene expression in the brain. Our data can be viewed through our publicly accessible ABA Application located at www.brain-map.org. By mid 2006, the Atlas project will have completed mapping gene expression in approximately 20,000 genes all of which will be available through our site. In addition to the ABA Application, and subsequent software tools for comparing and navigating the image data and the extensive gene expression database, the Atlas project aims to further scientific discovery in the field of neuroscience through the development and public release of the ABA Reference Atlases—these brain atlases provide greater than 400 structure detail in both the sagittal and coronal planes, both of which can be viewed through the application. The Atlas project has also designed and developed the ABA data pipeline. This pipeline encompasses both wet lab and in silico processes from probe design through to the digital images presented within the Application. This data pipeline demonstrates a capability of processing data from approximately 4,000 genes per month. (C) 2004 - 2005 Allen Institute for Brain Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9446 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. LAWRENCE, Kan. — Pinching a bright orange butterfly in one hand and an adhesive tag the size of a baby’s thumbnail in the other, the entomologist bent down so his audience could watch the big moment. “You want to lay it right on this cell here, the one shaped like a mitten,” the scientist, Orley R. Taylor, told the group, a dozen small-game hunters, average age about 7 and each armed with a net. “If you pinch it for about three seconds, the tag will stay on for the life of the butterfly, which could be as long as nine months.” Dr. Taylor, who runs the Monarch Watch project at the University of Kansas, is using the tags to follow one of the great wonders of the natural world: the annual migration of monarch butterflies between Mexico and the United States and Canada. The northward migration this spring was the biggest in many years, raising hopes of butterfly enthusiasts throughout North America. But a drought in the Dakotas and Minnesota meant that not nearly as many butterflies started the return trip. And without the late-summer hurricanes that normally soak the Texas prairies and sprout the nectar-heavy wildflowers where the monarchs refuel, many are presumably finding that leg of the journey a death march. Dr. Taylor has already halved his prediction for the size of the winter roosts in central Mexico, to 14 acres from 30. Nevertheless, the 4,000-mile round trip made by millions of monarchs holds a central mystery that Dr. Taylor and a network of entomologists are trying to solve. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 9445 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A major science prize was today awarded to a researcher who is looking for the region of the brain that helps us to hear someone in a noisy place, such as a party or bar, and is responsible for "training" the brain to hear better in these situations. Not being able to hear a person's voice in a noisy room and follow conversations is one of the most common problems for Britain's nine million people with a hearing impairment. Deafness Research UK, the leading medical charity, has awarded the 2007 Pauline Ashley Prize to Sam Irving, a young researcher at the MRC Institute for Hearing Research in Nottingham. Most people with a hearing impairment have trouble picking out what someone is saying when they're in a noisy room. Parties or bars are some of the worst places because the level of background noise is high, and so scientists call this the "cocktail party effect". To see what this was like, Irving wore an earplug in one ear for a week which gave him a one-sided hearing loss. He said: "It was hell - especially when I was in the pub with friends. The background hubbub of the bar seemed to be the same level as the people I was talking to so I could barely hear what they were saying and it took a huge effort of concentration to follow any conversation. During the week, I gave up and spent a lot of time at home on my own because it was so distressing and tiring to be with lots of people or in a noisy place."

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 9444 - Posted: 10.07.2006

For the past five years, Dr. Erika Dyck has been unearthing some intriguing facts related to a group of pioneering psychiatrists who worked in Saskatchewan, Canada in the '50s and '60s. Among other things, the University of Alberta history of medicine professor has found records of the psychiatrists' research that indicate a single dose of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, provided in a clinical, nurturing environment, can be an effective treatment for alcoholism. Her findings are published this month in the journal Social History of Medicine. After perceiving similarities in the experiences of people on LSD and people going through delirium tremens, the psychiatrists undertook a series of experiments. They noted that delirium tremens, also know as DTs, often marked a "rock bottom" or turning point in the behavior of alcoholics, and they felt LSD may be able to trigger such a turnaround without engendering the painful physical effects associated with DTs. As it turns out, they were largely correct. "The LSD somehow gave these people experiences that psychologically took them outside of themselves and allowed them to see their own unhealthy behavior more objectively, and then determine to change it," said Dyck, who read the researchers' published and private papers and recently interviewed some of the patients involved in the original studies--many of whom had not had a sip of alcohol since their single LSD experience 40 years earlier.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9443 - Posted: 10.07.2006

Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press — Deer probably spread a brain-destroying illness called chronic wasting disease through their saliva, concludes a study that finally pins down a long-suspected culprit. The key was that Colorado researchers tested some special deer. Chronic wasting disease is in the same family of fatal brain illnesses as mad cow disease and its human equivalent. There is no evidence that people have ever caught chronic wasting disease from infected deer or elk. But CWD is unusual because, unlike its very hard-to-spread relatives, it seems to spread fairly easily from animal to animal. Scientists were not sure how, primarily because studying large wild animals is a logistical nightmare. The sheer stress of researchers handling a deer caught in the wild could kill it. Likewise, animals deliberately exposed to infections must be kept indoors so as not to spread disease, another stress for deer used to roaming. So Colorado State University researcher Edward Hoover turned to fawns hand-raised indoors in Georgia, which has not experienced chronic wasting disease. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 9442 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nathan Seppa People with a relentless eye disease now have a better-than-average prospect of recovering some vision, thanks to a new drug that takes a lesson from an anticancer strategy, two studies show. Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. In the less common, wet form of the disease, rogue blood vessels escape normal growth control and leak fluid into the macula, the area at the center of the retina that enables a person to see fine detail. As a result of fluid disrupting their sight, people with the condition often see straight lines as crooked. This form of macular degeneration can lead to legal blindness within months. Cancer researchers have developed a drug to stop the similarly aberrant blood vessel growth that's often present in tumors. The new eye studies showcase a drug called ranibizumab, which is a fragment of the cancer drug. Both drugs inhibit a protein essential to blood vessel growth, says David M. Brown, a retina surgeon at Methodist Hospital in Houston who worked on both trials. Preliminary studies of ranibizumab convinced the Food and Drug Administration in June to approve the drug to treat wet macular degeneration. The two new large trials, reported in the Oct. 5 New England Journal of Medicine, establish that ranibizumab reverses the disease in many patients. ©2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 9441 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have discovered a gene mutation in fruit flies that alters sensitivity to alcohol. The findings, reported in the October 6 issue of the journal Cell, may have implications for human studies seeking to understand innate differences in people’s tolerance for alcohol. The research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The study was authored by Adrian Rothenfluh, Ph.D., and colleagues in the laboratory of Ulrike Heberlein, Ph.D., at UCSF, in collaboration with researchers at the Ernest Gallo Clinic & Research Center. The scientists examined the behavior of fruit flies (Drosophila) exposed to alcohol. Ordinarily, at low doses of alcohol fruit flies increase their activity, while high doses have a sedative effect. However, the researchers found some fruit flies were much more resistant to alcohol sedation. These flies continued to move about much longer than typical fruit flies exposed to the same amount of alcohol. The scientists subsequently identified key differences in a particular gene associated with this behavior. The mutation also altered the flies’ sensitivity to cocaine and nicotine as well. Because this gene variant affected the behavioral response to substances of abuse, the researchers dubbed it white rabbit — a reference to the title of a 1960s song about drug-induced changes.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9440 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have identified a misfolded, or incorrectly formed, protein common to two devastating neurological diseases, frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), according to a report in the Oct. 6, 2006, issue of Science. The findings suggest that certain forms of FTD, ALS and possibly other neurological diseases might share a common pathological process. Virginia Lee, Ph.D., and John Trojanowski, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, led an international team of scientists in this discovery. The work was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and was done at the NIA-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Institute on Aging. “This exciting basic science discovery provides the first molecular link between a dementia—FTD—and a motor neuron disease—ALS. It will advance understanding of the pathological processes of FTD and ALS, and possibly of other neurological disorders,” says NIA director Richard J. Hodes, M.D. Improved understanding of underlying disease processes is critically important in pointing researchers toward the development of therapies for FTD, ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases, Hodes and the study authors note. FTD affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. People with FTD may exhibit uninhibited and socially inappropriate behavior, changes in personality and, in late stages, loss of memory, motor skills and speech. After Alzheimer’s disease, it is the most common cause of dementia in people under age 65.

Keyword: Alzheimers; ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 9439 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jim Giles All societies rely on individuals to police each other: if we think someone is behaving unfairly, we say so. Such rebukes rein in selfish behaviour and provide social glue. But where does the desire to stop the cheats come from? A team of economists and neuroscientists has now identified a brain region that seems to play a critical role. As well as shedding light on how we cooperate, researchers say the finding could have implications for our understanding of economics and mental disorders. The finding, published online in the journal Science1, describes the results from an adaptation of a famous experiment called the ultimatum game. One participant in the game — the proposer — is given 20 Swiss francs and told to pick an amount to share with the other player. The catch is that if that second player — the responder — turns down the offer, then neither player gets any money. The game is interesting because it tests the conflict between our willingness to punish selfish actions and rational economic behaviour. In a single round of the game, the most rational decision is to accept whatever is offered, because the alternative is to receive nothing at all. But players often view very low offers as insultingly unfair; most choose to punish the proposer and refuse the money if less than 5 Swiss francs is offered. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9438 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin When depressed or chronically anxious people are prescribed drugs to treat their condition, it can take weeks before they know whether the pills have worked or not. Now psychiatrists have laid the foundations for a genetic test that could bypass that trial-and-error process by identifying patients who will not respond to particular drugs. The researchers focused on a brain mutation that predisposes humans to depression and related disorders. They engineered mice to express the same mutation and found that the mice displayed classic signs of rodent anxiety. What's more, when given the widely prescribed drug fluoxetine, also called Prozac, the mice showed little improvement. If the same happens in humans, it might help to explain why around 60% of patients given drugs for depression do not respond to the first medication that they are prescribed, say the researchers, led by Francis Lee, of Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York. A range of drugs called selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are widely used to treat depression. They all work by increasing the amount of serotonin, a chemical linked to emotional state, available to neurons in the brain. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9437 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Phillips A brain region that curbs our natural self interest has been identified. The studies could explain how we control fairness in our society, researchers say. Humans are the only animals to act spitefully or to mete out "justice", dishing out punishment to people seen to be behaving unfairly – even if it is not in the punisher's own best interests. This tendency has been hard to explain in evolutionary terms, because it has no obvious reproductive advantage and punishing unfairness can actually lead to the punisher being harmed. Now, using a tool called the “ultimatum game”, researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for punishing unfairness. Subjects were put into anonymous pairs, and one person in each pair was given $20 and asked to share it with the other. They could choose to offer any amount – if the second partner accepted it, they both got to keep their share. In purely economic terms, the second partner should never reject an offer, even a really low one, such as $1, as they are still $1 better off than if they rejected it. Most people offered half of the money. But in cases where only a very small share was offered, the vast majority of "receivers" spitefully rejected the offer, ensuring that neither partner got paid. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9436 - Posted: 06.24.2010