Helen Pearson In the name of science (and for a small fee), 35 brave individuals volunteered to take part in an extensive taste test of raw broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and 25 other bitter vegetables. The results help to explain why some people have a natural aversion to these veggies. Researchers previously knew that the tongue carries a receptor called TAS2R, which comes in several different forms. Only those people carrying a 'sensitive' form of this receptor have been found to be able to taste bitter chemicals such as phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), and researchers had suspected that these same people may be turned off vegetables that contain chemically similar compounds called glucosinolates. But this conclusion was uncertain: in vegetables, the taste of these compounds may be masked by other chemicals. Mari Sandell and Paul Breslin of Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, wanted to test the theory. They gave the willing victims 17 raw vegetables known to be rich in glucosinolates — a shopping list that includes some vegetables that have nauseated generations of school kids, such as broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, radish and turnips. The volunteers also swallowed 11 vegetables that are bitter but lack glucosinolates, including aubergine, bitter melon and spinach. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9355 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rowan Hooper Ever wondered how some people can “put themselves into another person's shoes” and some people cannot? Our ability to empathise with others seems to depend on the action of "mirror neurons" in the brain, according to a new study. Mirror neurons, known to exist in humans and in macaque monkeys, activate when an action is observed, and also when it is performed. Now new research reveals that there are mirror neurons in humans that fire when sounds are heard. In other words, if you hear the noise of someone eating an apple, some of the same neurons fire as when you eat the apple yourself. So-called auditory mirror neurons were known only in macaques. To determine if they exist in humans Valeria Gazzola, at the school of behavioural and cognitive neurosciences neuroimaging centre at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and colleagues, put 16 volunteers into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners and observed their brains as they were played different noises. The volunteers heard noises such as a sheet of paper being torn, or of someone crunching potato chips. Then the same subjects were scanned again, this time whilst tearing a piece of paper, or eating potato chips. “We combined the data from listening and execution and looked to see if the activity in the brain overlaps,” says Gazzola’s colleague Christian Keysers, also at the University of Groningen. Sure enough, it did overlap. Motor neurons associated with mouth actions (crunching) and hand actions (ripping) were activated in both cases. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9354 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BY ALEX WILLIAMS A FEW days after the terror arrests in London last month, a small commuter plane with three tourists was banking off the coast of Costa Rica when a sudden sound, like a muffled explosion, shattered the calm. The rear door of the plane, improperly shut, had blown open. There was a moment of panic for two of the passengers. But Roger Knox, a graphic designer making a connecting flight before boarding a jetliner home to San Francisco, was not worried. He had just doubled his usual preflight dose of Ativan, a prescription anti-anxiety drug, in anticipation of the ride on the small plane. Mr. Knox, 46, said he is generally so drug-phobic that he doesn’t take aspirin for a headache. But he is also a white-knuckle flier, and over the last few years, with advice from his doctor, he has experimented with drugs to massage his nerves before flying. “My meds never give me a feeling of being high or stoned,” Mr. Knox said. “They can make me a bit drowsy, but for someone used to adrenaline-pumping, think-I’m-going-to-freak-out anxiety, that’s a welcome change.” Terror alerts. Long security lines. Overstuffed transcontinental jets. It’s all more tolerable with a prescription drug to round off the edges, many people have found. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9353 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi An experimental cancer drug has slowed muscular dystrophy in mice with the disease, raising hopes that a simple pill could one day treat the fatal condition in humans. “The results the researchers are reporting are very dramatic and impressive,” says Jeff Chamberlain at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, US. The researchers caution that the results are preliminary, but say that the approach might offer advantages over other medicines for muscular dystrophy currently in clinical trials. There are many forms of the muscle-wasting disease, but no cure for any of them. The most common form of the illness among children, known as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, involves a mutation for a muscle protein known as dystrophin. Without functioning copies of this protein, muscles weaken, leading to breathing problems and, ultimately, death in the victims' teens or early twenties. Pier Puri at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California and colleagues tried to boost muscle function in mice carrying a mutation in the dystrophin gene, by treating the animals with a cancer drug called trichostatin A (TSA). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Muscles; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 9352 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Argentine ants, those aggressive unstoppable pests that invade homes and farms throughout California and many other states, live in peace and harmony with each other inside their enormous colonies, but scientists are finally discovering how to make those ants destroy their own relatives in spasms of chemical warfare. In laboratory experiments, researchers have found that when they alter the chemical coding those common household ants carry on the skeletons outside their bodies, all hell breaks loose. The ants, unable to recognize their altered nest mates, will tear the strangers' legs apart, rip off their sensitive antennae and battle them to the death. The research is only in its earliest stages, but the scientists who conducted the experiments say they could be on track to finding a method to wipe out the common Argentine ants without harming any other benign creatures that share their environment. The key to the scientists' research is the unique chemicals the ants carry on the exoskeletons that cover their bodies. The chemicals enable the insects to recognize each other as genetically similar, but when researchers interfered with those recognition signals, the untreated ants became bitter enemies of the ants whose chemical coatings were altered. ©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Aggression
Link ID: 9351 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Blackburn If you've ever wondered why the same pint of beer makes you feel slightly more buzzed in the summer than it does in the winter, scientists may finally have your answer. Work with drunk fruit flies suggests that the same molecular mechanisms that help control the body's response to temperature are also involved in alcohol tolerance. Just like in humans, too much alcohol has a toxic effect on a fly. Once imbibed, alcohol--ethanol, actually--makes its way to cell membranes, for example in the nervous system, where it increases their fluidity, much like milk makes cereal soggy. This somehow disrupts the cell's function, translating into what we feel as an alcohol buzz. A cell's membrane fluidity also depends on temperature, becoming more solid as it cools. To keep things from getting too rigid, the cell cranks up its production of fatty acids, which squeeze into the membrane and loosen it up. Because these fatty acids are regulated by proteins that are also involved in ethanol detoxification, evolutionary geneticist Kristi Montooth of Brown University came up with an idea: The regulatory proteins activated during cold weather might help flies better cope with ethanol. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9350 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new vaccine being tested in a human clinical trial holds a great deal of promise for treating type 1 diabetes, a disease that newly afflicts 35,000 children each year. The research that established the foundation for this vaccine was conducted in UCLA research laboratories. The drug is still being tested and is not likely to be available for at least a few years. "It's the only thing so far that really slows this disease down without adverse side effects," Allan J. Tobin, a UCLA professor emeritus of physiological science and neurology, said about the new drug. "The amazing thing about this emerging story, however, is that it started from basic research on the brain." Tobin, whose laboratory conducted critical neuroscience research in the late 1980s and 1990s, is a member and former director of UCLA's Brain Research Institute. Type I diabetes — also known as insulin-dependent diabetes or juvenile diabetes (because it usually begins in childhood or adolescence) — afflicts more than 1 million Americans. It is characterized by a failure of the body to produce insulin because the immune system attacks and destroys the body's insulin-producing cells of the pancreas. On Sunday, Sept. 17, at a meeting in Copenhagen of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, Johnny Ludvigsson — pediatrics professor at Sweden's University Hospital, Linköping University — will present results from the phase II study conducted in eight hospitals in Sweden in collaboration with Diamyd Medical (www.diamyd.com), a life science company located in Stockholm, Sweden.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 9349 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new study directed by Mount Sinai School of Medicine extends and strengthens the research that experimental dietary regimens might halt or even reverse symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The study entitled "Calorie Restriction Attenuates Alzheimer's Disease Type Brain Amyloidosis in Squirrel Monkeys" which has been accepted for publication and will be published in the November 2006 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, demonstrates the potential beneficial role of calorie restriction in AD type brain neuropathology in non-human primates. Restricting caloric intake may prevent AD by triggering activity in the brain associated with longevity. "The present study strengthens the possibility that CR may exert beneficial effects on delaying the onset of AD- amyloid brain neuropathology in humans, similar to that observed in squirrel monkey and rodent models of AD," reported Mount Sinai researcher Dr. Pasinetti and his colleagues, who published their study, showing how restricting caloric intake based on a low-carbohydrate diet may prevent AD in an experimental mouse model, in the July 2006 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. "This new breakthrough brings great anticipation for further human study of caloric restriction, for AD investigators and for those physicians who treat millions of people suffering with this disease" says Giulio Maria Pasinetti, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Director of the Neuroinflammation Research Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "The findings offer a glimmer of hope that there may someday be a way to prevent and stop this devastating disease in its tracks."

Keyword: Alzheimers; Obesity
Link ID: 9347 - Posted: 09.16.2006

Susan Milius Anybody who's ever mused that the world would be better if men got pregnant needs to talk to Nico Michiels. And so does anybody who's asked—or sung—"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Michiels has seen that world, or at least a version of it, and he's even got pictures to show. It's not pretty, he says. Many snails, slugs, and worms are so-called internally fertilizing, simultaneous hermaphrodites. In any encounter, such creatures can deliver sperm, receive it for fertilizing eggs internally, or do both. Michiels, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, offers the striking example of hermaphroditic polyclad flatworms called Pseudobiceros bedfordi. When two of these small, speckled sea worms meet to mate, there's no taking turns. Each worm, 2 to 6 centimeters long, wields its pair of side-by-side penises like a weapon. One worm tries to fertilize the other by ejaculating anywhere on its partner's body, splashing it with sperm in a cocktail that dissolves flesh. After the brew eats a hole through the skin, the sperm work their way through various tissues until they reach the eggs. In many P. bedfordi encounters, only one member of the pair gets its sperm to the other's eggs. The recipient of the sperm eventually deposits clutches of hundreds of eggs on some suitable surface and glides away. The holes and wrinkly streaks on many worms' bodies are ejaculate burns, says Michiels. ©2006 Science Service

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9346 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PAUL SCOTT FOR a runner, Alex DeVinny wasn’t all that skinny on the day that she won a state track title in 2003. At 17, she was 5-foot-8 and weighed 125 pounds. Few people watching her run the 3,200 meters in 10 minutes 53 seconds would have guessed that she had had symptoms of an eating disorder since age 9 and that she had yet to start menstruating. Her coach didn’t know. The college recruiters certainly did not know. She was never going to run for those colleges. The summer after she won the title, Ms. DeVinny, from Racine, Wis., began to run even harder and eat even less. When she came out for cross-country in the fall, she looked frail and underweight. Her coach was concerned enough to prevent her from competing in several meets, but he allowed her to do two-thirds of her training. He never asked about her menstrual periods and did not know about her anorexia. Ms. DeVinny sneaked in extra workouts, but her dazzling window of athleticism had already begun to close. “Her body kind of broke down during her senior year,” said her sister Gabby Fekete, 27. “She had lived on adrenaline.” Last March, Ms. DeVinny died from cardiac arrest related to her starvation. She was 20 and weighed roughly 70 pounds. Looking back, her coach, Dan Jarrett, questions himself. “I did not understand how someone with anorexia would be capable of making decisions that weren’t in their best interest,” he said. “I totally failed to grasp what it meant.” He is so troubled by her death that he has since quit coaching girls. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 9345 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD An international team of scientists thinks it has solved the ultimate mystery of the Neanderthals: where and when they made their last stand before extinction. It was at Gibraltar 28,000 years ago, the scientists say, about 2,000 years more recently than previously thought. The archaeologists and paleontologists reported yesterday finding several hundred stone tools in Gorham’s Cave, on the rugged Mediterranean coast near the Rock of Gibraltar. They were made in the Mousterian stoneworking style, usually associated with Neanderthals. So far, no fossil bones of the cave occupants have been uncovered. The researchers said, however, that the tools established the survival of a population of Neanderthals, a people closely related to human ancestors, in the southernmost point of Western Europe long after they disappeared elsewhere. These were, they concluded, the last Neanderthals “currently recorded anywhere.” The scientists, led by Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum, announced the discovery at a news conference at the museum. Their report was simultaneously published on the Web site of the journal Nature, www.nature.com. It will appear in the journal at a later date. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 9344 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Psychologists have launched a study to find out why some people who hear voices in their head consider it a positive experience while others find it distressing. The University of Manchester investigation - announced on World Hearing Voices Day (Thursday, 14 September) - comes after Dutch researchers found that many healthy members of the population there regularly hear voices. Although hearing voices has traditionally been viewed as 'abnormal' and a symptom of mental illness, the Dutch findings suggest it is more widespread than previously thought, estimating that about 4% of the population hear voices. That would be equivalent to 100,000 people in Greater Manchester. Researcher Aylish Campbell said: "We know that many members of the general population hear voices but have never felt the need to access mental health services; some experts even claim that more people hear voices and don't seek psychiatric help than those who do. "In fact, many of those affected describe their voices as being a positive influence in their lives, comforting or inspiring them as they go about their daily business. We're now keen to investigate why some people respond in this way while others are distressed and seek outside help." Although the voices heard by psychiatric patients and members of the general population seem to be of the same volume and frequency, the former group tend to interpret the voices as more distressing and negative.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 9343 - Posted: 09.15.2006

By Tom Avril For the millions of Americans who take drugs to treat mental illness, about the only way psychiatrists can tell whether the medications are working is through observation and asking patients how they feel. And even when doctors do find the right drugs, they can't explain exactly why the meds are effective. It's the glaring void at the heart of mental health treatment. No one, from the scientists developing drugs to those who prescribe them, is able to examine the diseased tissue: the cells of the human brain. Enter Nancy Rawson, a cell biologist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. She does it through the nose. Working with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University, Rawson takes advantage of a scientific curiosity: The sensory cells in the nose, unlike those elsewhere in the body, are very similar to neurons in the brain, Rawson says. And they can be easily plucked out for study, a few hundred at a time, because they grow back. In recent years, researchers have developed several methods to probe the mind, from analysis of spinal fluid to imaging methods such as MRIs and PET scans. But looking at olfactory neurons - located high in the nose, directly connected to the brain through a porous plate in the skull - is the only way to examine living neurons short of surgery.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 9342 - Posted: 09.15.2006

By Robert Sanders BERKELEY – While it is widely accepted that the output of nerve cells carries information between regions of the brain, it's a big mystery how widely separated regions of the cortex involving billions of cells are linked together to coordinate complex activity. A new study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and neurosurgeons and neurologists at UC San Francisco (UCSF) is beginning to answer that question. UCSF neurosurgeons place 64-electrode grids on the surface of the brain's temporal and frontal lobes to locate regions where epileptic seizures originate. These grids allowed UC Berkeley neuroscientists to study the interaction of brain waves during simple tasks, such as word recognition or hand movements. (Images courtesy the Knight Lab) "One of the most important questions in neuroscience is: How do areas of the brain communicate?" said Dr. Robert Knight, professor of psychology, Evan Rauch Professor of Neuroscience and director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. "A simple activity like responding to a question involves areas all over the brain that hear the sound, analyze it, extract the relevant information, formulate a response, and then coordinate your lips and mouth to speak. We have no idea how information moves between these areas." Copyright UC Regents

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 9341 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Arran Frood We need to study the effect of powerful hallucinogens such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and psilocybin, the active ingredient in 'magic' mushrooms, on debilitating cluster headaches, researchers say. Their study, which points towards the effectiveness of these drugs, is published in the journal Neurology1. It is the first formal look at reports of LSD's therapeutic benefits in nearly 40 years, says Andrew Sewell of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. LSD was used extensively in psychiatric research in the 1960s, but as mainstream attitudes swung against 'acid', prohibitive measures made researching the beneficial effects of hallucinogens extremely difficult. Cluster headaches are characterized by excruciating pain that lasts from fifteen minutes to up to three hours if left untreated. In the chronic form, attacks can happen up to eight times a day, with no period of remission lasting longer than a month. The condition is not fatal, but for some sufferers it is so horrific they commit suicide. There is no cure, but sufferers are often given supplemental oxygen to ease an attack. Some are prescribed migraine drugs, but these may not work and the side effects are often extreme. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 9340 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Marijuana can improve the effectiveness of drug therapy for hepatitis C, a potentially deadly viral infection that affects more than 3 million Americans, a study has found. The work adds to a growing literature supporting the notion that in some circumstances pot can offer medical benefits. Treatment for hepatitis C involves months of therapy with two powerful drugs, interferon and ribavirin, that have severe side effects, including extreme fatigue, nausea, muscle aches, loss of appetite and depression. Because of those side effects, many patients do not finish treatment and the virus ends up destroying their livers. Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco and at an Oakland substance abuse center tracked the progress of 71 hepatitis C patients taking the difficult therapy. Tests and interviews indicated that 22 smoked marijuana every day or two during the treatment period while 49 rarely or never did. At the end of the six-month treatment, 19 (86 percent) of those who used marijuana had successfully completed the therapy -- meaning they took at least 80 percent of their doses over at least 80 percent of the period. Only 29 (59 percent) of the nonsmokers achieved that goal. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 9339 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR THE FACTS If the stress of a pink slip or the strain of physical exertion can set off a heart attack, then why not the emotion associated with birthdays? Although typically a time of celebration, birthdays for some can be filled with intense pressure and even anguish, a day of silent despair or expectations unfulfilled. That, scientists say, is particularly true with the elderly, who are more likely on birthdays to begin to think of their lives in terms of how much time is left, rather than how much time has passed. One extensive examination of the claim was conducted by Canadian researchers and published in the journal Neurology this year. In the study, the researchers tracked more than 50,000 patients, with an average age about 70, who were treated for heart failure at hospitals in Ontario in a two-year period. What they found was a strong relationship between birthdays and the onset of so-called vascular events. Strokes, acute myocardial infarctions and transient ischemic attacks were 27 percent more likely to occur on birthdays than on other days of the year. Still, there was no corresponding increase for other types of illness, like appendicitis, head trauma or symptoms of asthma, suggesting that heart attacks were unique. The scientists attributed the phenomenon largely to anxiety and other “psychosocial stressors,” but other factors may be involved. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 9338 - Posted: 06.24.2010

One of the memorable moments in the film "Meet the Parents" was Ben Stiller's profusely sweating brow as he sat strapped into a polygraph http://www.polygraph.org/faq.htm during his soon-to-be father-in-law's invasive questioning. Sweating, along with blood pressure, respiration, and heart rate are all physiologic conditions measured by polygraphs, with the idea being that they might reveal deception-induced anxiety. Now, rather than focusing on the potential end-result of lying, Temple University scientists Scott Faro and Feroze Mohamed are developing a way to detect deception by looking directly at people's brain activity using MRI brain scanners. "We are going to the source, we are going to the region of the brain which is actually formulating a response," says Mohamed, the MRI physicist on the team. As Faro and Mohamed point out, because polygraphs only measure end-result changes in the sympathetic nervous system, tricking a polygraph might be achieved by simple relaxation. On the flipside, just being anxious about the test can generate a false positive. In fact, say the researchers, false positives are common. "About 25 percent of the time, if you're innocent, the polygraph is going to say that you're either guilty or it's indeterminate," says Faro, professor and vice-chairman of radiology at Temple. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 9337 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DALLAS – Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center, working with mice, have shown how the body's own natural stress hormone can help lastingly decrease the fearful response associated with reliving a traumatic memory. Days after experiencing a traumatic event – a mild electrical shock – mice in the study still showed a fearful response when re-exposed to the place where it happened, a condition that could be a model for post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. But mice receiving the hormone corticosterone at the time they "relived" the event experienced a significant drop in that fear. "Corticosterone appears to enhance new memories that compete with the fearful memory thereby decreasing its negative emotional significance," said Dr. Craig Powell, senior author and assistant professor of neurology and psychiatry at UT Southwestern. "When an animal or human is exposed to or relives an aversive scenario, a process called extinction creates a competing memory." "We're not erasing memories," said Dr. Robert Greene, professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern and another author of the study. "What the steroid does is attenuate the fear memory by helping the mice to learn that these contexts should no longer be perceived as dangerous." The study is being published online and in the Sept. 13 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Keyword: Stress; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9336 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DURHAM, N.C. -- Nicotine may improve the symptoms of depression in people who do not smoke, Duke University Medical Center scientists have discovered. The finding does not mean that people with depression should smoke or even start using a nicotine patch, the researchers caution. They say that smoking remains the No. 1 preventable cause of death and disability in the United States, and that the addictive hazards of tobacco far outweigh the potential benefits of nicotine in depression. But the finding suggests that it may be possible to manipulate nicotine's effects to safely reap its potential medical benefits, according to the researchers. As an example of the drug's potential, they said, pharmaceutical companies already are developing compounds for treating other brain disorders by mimicking the beneficial properties of nicotine while avoiding its addictive nature. "The hope is that our research on nicotine will spur the development of new treatments for depression, which is a huge public health problem," said lead study investigator Joseph McClernon, Ph.D., an assistant research professor of medical psychiatry and researcher at the Duke Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research. "Our study also provides evidence that smokers may indeed smoke, in part, to improve their mood -- a notion that has been quite controversial in the field," he said. © 2001-2006 Duke University Medical Center.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9335 - Posted: 06.24.2010