By NICHOLAS WADE Scientists have gained a new window for peering into the brain, courtesy of a $41 million project financed by Paul G. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. The Allen Brain AtlasThe project is an electronic atlas that shows which genes are switched on in neurons throughout the brain of a mouse. Instead of looking at one gene at a time in one or a few neurons, researchers can now study all the brain genes systematically. And instead of having to visualize each gene experimentally, everything is available online. “I am using it all the time,” said Catherine Dulac, who studies mouse behavior at Harvard. “It’s an extraordinary resource.” Marc Tessier-Lavigne, an expert on neuronal signaling and vice president for research at Genentech, said he would put the new brain atlas “on a par with the human genome project.” Both are members of the scientific advisory board overseeing the project. Thomas M. Jessel, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, said after looking at the atlas that it was of high quality and would complement other available brain maps. “It is likely to be the standard source for the next few years” for people interested in the pattern of gene activation in the brain,” Professor Jessel said. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 9395 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Conlon CHICAGO (Reuters) - Smokers of menthol cigarettes find it harder to quit than those smoking regular cigarettes, researchers said on Monday, perhaps explaining why blacks in the United States suffer disproportionately from smoking-related ailments. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, including targeted advertising, about 70 percent of black smokers smoke menthol cigarettes such as Kool or Newport compared to about 30 percent of white smokers, said the study, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. This, combined with the difficulty in kicking the menthol cigarette habit, could help researchers figure out why blacks in the United States have higher rates of cancer, heart disease and other smoking-related illnesses even though they generally smoke less, the study said. The study, which looked at the smoking habits of 1,535 people over 15 years, did not determine why menthol cigarettes were harder to kick than regular tobacco cigarettes, said Dr. Mark Pletcher of the University of California, San Francisco, the lead author of the study. "Beyond the obvious, that they're sort of more pleasant to smoke, there is some evidence that it (menthol) inhibits the metabolization of nicotine, the addictive component," he said in an interview. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9394 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Max Planck scientists have decoded the molecular details of a genetic defect that disrupts signal transmission in the brain and causes autism Using an animal model, brain researchers in Göttingen have examined the effects of mutations that cause autism in humans. These are mutations in the genes which carry the building instructions for proteins in the neuroligin family. The study published in the scientific journal Neuron (September 21, 2006) shows that neuroligins ensure that signal transmission between nerve cells functions. In the brain of genetically altered mice without neuroligins, the contact points at which the nerve cells communicate, the synapses, do not mature. The researchers assume that similar malfunctions are experienced by autistic patients. Autism is one of the most common psychiatric illnesses. Around 0.5 percent of all young children have a syndrome belonging to the "autistic spectrum". The main symptoms of this developmental malfunction are delayed language development or no language development at all, disturbed social behaviour and repetitive behaviour patterns. In many patients, the disease is accompanied by mental disability. Autistic individuals exhibiting high intelligence or outstanding skills in a particular area, called "savants", such as the main character in the film "Rain Man", are rare. Even up to the middle of the last century, exceptionally cold emotional behaviour on the part of the mother was given as the cause for autism. However, the "refrigerator mom" theory has now been refuted.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9393 - Posted: 06.24.2010

New Haven, Conn.--A Yale School of Medicine study shows for the first time that a high level of testosterone, such as that caused by the use of steroids to increase muscle mass or for replacement therapy, can lead to a catastrophic loss of brain cells. Taking large doses of androgens, or steroids, is known to cause hyperexcitability, a highly aggressive nature, and suicidal tendencies. These behavioral changes could be evidence of alterations in neuronal function caused by the steroids, said the senior author, Barbara Ehrlich, professor of pharmacology and physiology. "Next time a muscle-bound guy in a sports car cuts you off on the highway, don't get mad, just take a deep breath and realize that it might not be his fault," said Ehrlich. Testosterone is the main male hormone and it plays fundamental roles in development, differentiation, and cellular growth. In neurons, testosterone acts as a neurosteroid and can induce changes at the cellular level, which in turn lead to changes in behavior, mood and memory. Both neuroprotective and neurodegenerative effects of androgens have been reported. The researchers showed that high levels of testosterone triggered programmed cell death in nerve cells in culture. Cell death, or apoptosis, is critical in many life processes, including development and disease. It is characterized by membrane instability, activation of caspases, which are the executioner proteins in apoptosis, change in membrane potential, and DNA fragmentation.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 9392 - Posted: 09.27.2006

— A map of the mouse brain down to details of individual cells has been completed, the first project of an institute funded by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul G. Allen, it was announced Tuesday. The new Allen Brain Atlas is being made available online without cost to neuroscientists studying brain circuits and chemistry, a potential boon to cancer and other disease research because of similarities between the brains of mice and human beings, according to a statement issued by the Allen Institute of Brain Science. "We want people to use this and make discoveries," Dr. Allan Jones, the institute's chief scientific officer, told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A formal announcement was planned in Washington, D.C., with Allen and Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash, and Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. Because more than 90 percent of the same genes are found in mice and humans, the mouse brain map can be compared with genetic findings related to human neurological disorders. Moreover, the mapping project has shown that 80 percent of the body's genes are switched on in the brain, compared with 60 percent to 70 percent in previous scientific estimates, Jones said. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9391 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Katharine Sanderson If you always thought there was something the matter with your tone-deaf friends, research has now backed you up: they seem to be lacking some brain material. Scientists in Montreal, Canada, and Newcastle in the United Kingdom have identified the part of the brain that causes some people to sing like larks — and others to make you run for your earplugs as soon as they pick up the karaoke microphone. Krista Hyde at the Montreal Neurological Institute and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of tone deaf, or amusic, people and compared the images with others from people with normal musical ability. The studies from both countries used identical methods and each set of results highlighted an area in the front of the brain — the right inferior frontal gyrus — which contains less white matter in amusic people than in the musically normal. White matter is responsible for information transmission in the brain, and the deficiency seen by Hyde probably hampers communication in the brain's right hemisphere, the researchers suggest, making music comprehension difficult. Musical 'behaviour' is often quantified by standard tests for six different abilities, including a sense of metre, the ability to remember a tune, and the ability to decipher changes in key, pitch, pitch direction and rhythm. © 2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 9390 - Posted: 06.24.2010

When people are made to think quickly, they report feeling happier as a result. They also say they are more energetic, more creative, more powerful, and more self-assured. In short, they reported a whole set of experiences associated with being "manic." Fast thinking, or "racing thoughts," is most commonly known as a symptom of the clinical psychiatric disorder of mania (and of the manic part of bipolar disorder or "manic-depression"). But, according to Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin, most healthy people also have experienced racing thoughts at some point in time--perhaps when they are excited about a new idea they have just learned, or when they are brainstorming with a group of people, or even when they lie in bed unable to fall asleep. Pronin and her Harvard colleague Daniel Wegner decided to explore whether inducing people to think fast might lead them to feel some of the other experiences also associated with the manic experience. To examine this question, they experimentally manipulated the pace at which participants read a series of statements. Half of participants read the statements at a fast pace (about twice as fast as normal reading speed) and the other half read the statements at a slow pace (about twice as slow as normal reading speed). They then completed a questionnaire assessing their mood, energy level, self-esteem, etc., using standard psychological measures. As an added twist, some of the participants read statements that were very depressing in content (e.g., I want to go to sleep and never wake up) while others read statements that were very elating in content (e.g., Wow! I feel great!). The researchers found that regardless of the content of the statements, people felt happier, more energetic, more creative, more powerful, and more grandiose when they read the statements at a fast rather than a slow pace.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Emotions
Link ID: 9389 - Posted: 09.27.2006

John Pickrell Linguists are calling for an online public database, similar to the human genome project, that would allow researchers to collaboratively share different studies of language impairment. By gathering together studies of developmental disorders that cause communication impairments – such as autism or Down’s syndrome – they hope to provide new clues about the origins of language. Such a database might also help treat language disorders or help people learn foreign tongues, they say. Language is one of the defining characters of our species, but we know virtually nothing about where it came from. "We have a lot of theories, but we don’t have a lot of data," admits NYU's Gary Marcus. The biological basis of how people speak, listen and comprehend – and how all of this mental equipment evolved – is largely mysterious. With many psychological abilities, researchers can study animals to gain insights, but this is not possible with language as no animal communication systems are anywhere near as complex as ours. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 9388 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Igor Stravinsky once characterized his music as being "best understood by children and animals." Though some people might not agree with it, Stravinsky's claim highlights an intriguing evolutionary question: Is our appreciation for music innate? And, if so, would that appreciation be shared by our evolutionary ancestors? A new study slated for publication in the journal Cognition reports that our ancestors may not, in fact, be audiophiles. Non-human primates appear to prefer silence to music, suggesting that musical appreciation may be uniquely human. "We're really in the first stages of looking into these things," said Josh McDermott, a perceptual scientist at MIT and coauthor of the study. "But everything we've done suggests fairly striking differences in the way that humans hear music and the way that animals do." McDermott and Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser found in earlier studies that tamarin and marmoset monkeys have the ability to discriminate between different types of music to the point of noticing pieces written by different composers. © Copyright 2006 Seed Media Group, LLC.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 9387 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jane Elliott When Owain Morgan needed to come up with a design to help people who had suffered a stroke, he turned to his own family for inspiration. His grandmother and uncle had both had strokes and talking to them he realised something as simple as a device to help them tear toilet and kitchen paper with one hand could make a big difference to their lives. "It didn't really occur to me before talking to them that this might be a problem for people - that something so simple could help," said 18-year-old Owain, an apprentice from South Wales. There are more than 450,000 people living in the UK who, as a result of a stroke, need to rely on others to help with simple everyday tasks like these. In a bid to raise awareness of the problem and do something to help those who have had a stroke, the UK defence and aerospace group, BAE Systems set their apprentices the challenge of designing devices to make lives easier. The teams had either to develop a mechanical aid to help people who had paralysis of a limb to do everyday activities, or design an electrical aid to help those with speech problems (dysphasia) communicate in everyday situations. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 9386 - Posted: 09.25.2006

By Shankar Vedantam Whenever my editor approaches me, I quickly size up his body language before he has said a word. If he looks genial and relaxed, he probably liked my story. If his face looks set and determined, I know a wrangle over copy is probably ahead. Human beings are exquisitely attuned to social cues and the behavior of others. Such signals tell us what is ahead and give us time to prepare. They tell us about many things that are never explicitly articulated in everyday life. Much of the time, in fact, we do not appreciate how skilled we are at reading social situations. We only realize how ingrained our ability to read social cues is when we see people with serious deficits in social awareness, such as people with autism or schizophrenia. One of the most intriguing theories to emerge in recent years about how our brains perform these feats -- far beyond the ability of the most powerful supercomputers -- is that we have neurons in our brains that essentially act as mirrors of people around us. When we see someone scratch his head or furrow her brow, we instantly have a sense of their mental state, because those actions trigger an equivalent pattern of neural activity in our own minds and allow our brains to quickly deduce the other person's mental state. "These mirror systems give us a fast and intuitive idea of what is going on," said neuroscientist Christian Keysers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 9385 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ELIZABETH WEIL When Brian Sullivan — the baby who would before age 2 become Bonnie Sullivan and 36 years later become Cheryl Chase — was born in New Jersey on Aug. 14, 1956, doctors kept his mother, a Catholic housewife, sedated for three days until they could decide what to tell her. Sullivan was born with ambiguous genitals, or as Chase now describes them, with genitals that looked “like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.” Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical terminology of the day, was actually a girl. Brian was renamed Bonnie, her “nubbin” (which was either a small penis or a large clitoris) was entirely removed and doctors counseled the family to throw away all pictures of Brian, move to a new town and get on with their lives. The Sullivans did that as best they could. They eventually relocated, had three more children and didn’t speak of the circumstances around their eldest child’s birth for many years. As Chase told me recently, “The doctors promised my parents if they did that” — shielded her from her medical history — “that I’d grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and give them grandchildren.” Sullivan spent most of her childhood and young-adult life extremely unhappy, feeling different from her peers though unsure how. Around age 10, her parents told her that she had had an operation to remove a very large clitoris. They didn’t tell her what a clitoris was but said that now things were fine. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9384 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The human brain must constantly screen incoming stimuli for relevance. Without such screening, the brain would quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer number of stimuli we experience every day. Some of the most profound stimuli--such as other people's faces--trigger an emotional response, but there are times when fear or even happiness must be kept at bay as the brain works to solve a problem. New research has shown how the brain goes about accomplishing this task. The brain structure known as the amygdala plays a key role in generating and perpetuating emotions such as fear by sending signals into the hypothalamus, which controls the sympathetic nervous system. The amygdala's neighbors in the brain include the anterior cingulate cortex, which neuroscientists think controls various so-called executive processes, such as deciding where attention should be focused. The rostral region of this portion of the cortex (the area on the bottom toward the front) connects directly with the amygdala, and some had speculated that the former might play a role in monitoring emotional states, allowing them to flourish when appropriate but suppressing them when not. Designing a test of this hypothesis, however, had proved challenging. Amit Etkin of Stanford University and his colleagues turned to a classic study of conflict in the brain--the Stroop task--in which the name of a color and the color of the letters in that name either match or not. They tweaked it to create an emotional conflict: pairing faces displaying particular emotional states with words written across them that either identified that state or not, such as “fear” displayed on a smiling face. While being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 19 subjects stared at 148 versions of these pairings, clicking a button to indicate whether that person was happy or afraid. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9383 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Andreas K. Engel, Stefan Debener and Cornelia Kranczioch As cognitive neuroscientists, we would like to know what is behind such phenomena: What happens in our brains when we deliberately concentrate on something? Does some mechanism inside our heads decide which information reaches our consciousness--and which does not? And do our intentions, needs and expectations influence what we perceive? Recent research offers some fascinating insights. Psychologists began seeking answers to such questions as long ago as 1890, when American philosopher and psychologist William James wrote about important characteristics of attention in The Principles of Psychology. James concluded that the capacity of consciousness is limited, which is why we cannot pay attention to everything at once. Attention is much more selective: it impels consciousness to concentrate on certain stimuli to process them especially effectively. James and others also distinguished between types of attention. Some of them are "self-created": a penetrating odor, a loud siren, a woman in a bright red dress amid people clad in black. (Many researchers now call this process "bottom-up," because the stimuli battle their way into our consciousness automatically because they are so striking.) Alternatively, we can actively and deliberately control our focus (called "top-down," because higher brain regions are involved at the outset). For example, at a noisy party, we can tune out background noise to listen to the conversation at the next table. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 9382 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Diane Garcia Healthy males often take chances when they're looking for mates, putting on cocky displays, for example. It makes sense that these exploits would tend to attract predators as well, thereby raising the risk of death. But there have been few data to support this theory until a new study of Utah prairie dogs published in next month's issue of the American Naturalist. Utah prairie dogs (Cynomys parvidens) were once an abundant source of food for many grassland predators, including American badgers, coyotes, and golden eagles. But disease, poisoning, and habitat destruction have driven the prairie dogs to the edge of extinction. Behavioral ecologist John Hoogland of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg and colleagues have been assessing the impact of predation on prairie dog survival for 11 years. They have observed a 200-member colony in Bryce Canyon National Park, where the team spends each spring perched in 4-meter-high observation towers from dawn to dusk. After marking the prairie dogs with black dye and ear tags, the researchers track their status and behaviors via binoculars and person-to-person radio communication. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9381 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller Almost all animals that communicate vocally do it by instinct. The zebra finch is one exception: Young males learn their love songs from their fathers. Now a research team reports the identification of 33 genes related to singing in this songbird. Experts say the work harbingers a new era of using powerful genomic tools to probe the biology of vocal learning--and perhaps reveal the secret of why so few animals do it. Many researchers see parallels between the way birds learn songs and humans learn language. Over the years, they've identified the regions of the zebra finch brain that are involved in song learning and examined the electrical activity of the neurons therein. These studies have yielded many insights into the biological mechanisms of vocal learning, but not at the molecular level. Hoping to take the next step, a team of 20 researchers led by Kazuhiro Wada and Erich Jarvis at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, cataloged more than 4000 genes expressed in the zebra finch brain. By attaching snippets of these genes to glass slides, they created DNA microarrays that allowed them to compare gene activity in the brains of zebra finches that sang shortly before being killed with gene activity in zebra finches that weren't singing. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9380 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower As fossil hunters crossed a dusty slope of Ethiopia's Dikika region on Dec. 10, 2000, one noticed a child's face bones poking out of the ground. Now, after years of painstaking work to remove the ancient individual's skull and some of the other bones from sandstone, researchers have announced that this discovery represents the oldest and most complete fossil child in our evolutionary family. The nearly complete skeleton, missing only the pelvis and a few other bones, comes from a 3-year-old Australopithecus afarensis female who died about 3.3 million years ago, say Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues. "This [new fossil] is something you find once in a lifetime," says Zeresenay. The Dikika child's skeleton has not yet been entirely removed from the surrounding rock. Zeresenay's team plans to compare it with Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton of an adult female A. afarensis, which was unearthed in 1974. The researchers found the child's skeleton between previously dated volcanic-ash layers. A flood apparently covered the child's body in sand and pebbles, protecting it during fossilization. Comparisons of the youngster's teeth with those of people and chimpanzees yielded the estimate of age. ©2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 9379 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mt. Sinai School of Medicine epidemiologist Avi Reichenberg and his colleagues compared more than 300,000 parent-child records, and found that men older than 40 were nearly six times more likely to have children with autism than fathers under 30 years old. For men over 40, this translates to a risk of 32 autistic children out of 10,000. For fathers under 30, the risk is 6 out of 10,000, and overall risk was 8.3 cases out of 10,000. Reichenberg stresses that these results show only an increased risk and not a guarantee of autism in children. Reichenberg says that they did not find any link between mothers' ages and autism in their children. Autism is a developmental disorder where children have trouble communicating, find it difficult to socialize with peers, and exhibit repetitious behaviors. According to the Autism Society of America, the disorder is known to affect as many as 1.5 million Americans. Previous research has shown increasing rates of autism, and in his study Reichenberg notes that part of this may be due to improved awareness and detection of the syndrome and part may be a real increase in the autism cases. Some research has looked into a possible link between autism and childhood vaccinations, but a 2004 report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences showed no such link. Recent research has focused on the genetic causes of autism and trying to pinpoint the specific location for the gene. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9378 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gretchen Vogel Sociable fruit flies apparently need more sleep than their isolated siblings. The find, reported tomorrow in Science, provides clues about why flies and other animals sleep and what our brains do while we are in dreamland. Although animals of all sorts need sleep to survive, it is still a mystery why we require regular shut-eye. Studies in humans, rats, and other animals have suggested that sleep plays a role in learning and memory--students who have a full night's sleep between training sessions for a new skill learn faster than those who don't, for example (ScienceNOW 14 April, 1998). To see if they could find a link between sleep and nervous-system stimulation, neuroscientist Indrani Ganguly-Fitzgerald of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, and her colleagues compared the sleep habits of flies housed in groups of 30 or more to those of flies kept in isolation. Despite their simple appearance, flies have rich social lives, she says: "They mate, they fight. They form memories about the interactions they've had, and they make decisions." And, the researchers found, the socialized flies slept significantly more during the day than their isolated counterparts. In fact, the bigger the group, the more sleep the flies needed. Ganguly-Fitzgerald argues that the difference is due to the flies' social life. All that extra stimulation requires extra down-time to process, she says. When the scientists tested flies that couldn't see or smell--and therefore received less sensory input in the socialized conditions--there was no difference between socialized and isolated insects. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 9377 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Proteins taken from the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and injected into the brains of genetically engineered mice trigger Alzheimer’s-like lesions in the mouse brains, researchers report. The findings suggest that the malformed protein clumps associated with Alzheimer’s disease can “seed” themselves in a way reminiscent of the missfolded proteins in prion diseases such as “mad cow” disease. The exact causes of Alzheimer’s remain a mystery, but it appears that beta-amyloid proteins contribute to the formation of disruptive plaques in the brain. The neurological damage accumulates over years, causing loss of memory, language and other crucial mental skills. Experts studying how beta amyloid might promote plaque formation have speculated that this might happen in a process similar to that in prion diseases. Prion illnesses, such as mad cow disease, are special in that proteins apparently act as the infectious agents, rather than genetic material or a microorganism. In laboratory tests, animals that receive prion proteins develop brain plaques and eventually die as a result. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Prions
Link ID: 9376 - Posted: 06.24.2010