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

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM ON a brisk autumn afternoon, in the shadow of the marble arch in Washington Square Park, a couple visiting from Ohio walked along holding hands like two teenagers going steady, decades after “going steady” went out of vogue. Locked in People moving in tandem across the city. Some see hand-holding as a public announcement that a couple is approaching. Others see the maneuver as an ideal way to snake through a crowd. When a stranger asked why they had chosen to join hands during their stroll, the man, Dave Findlay, looked at his wife of seven years and answered in a word: “Connection.” Or as the Beatles sang back in 1963: “When I’ll feel that something, I want to hold your hand.” Those simple lyrics turned an expression of teenage longing and first romantic steps into a No. 1 hit. Yet today, when Justin Timberlake is at the top of the charts with “SexyBack” and the digital airwaves are filled with steamy lyrical declarations (“I’m into havin’ sex, I ain’t into makin’ love” sang 50 Cent in “In da Club”), couples like Dave and Carey Findlay still intertwine fingers, kiss palms and link pinkies as they meander through parks, cross streets and snake through crowds. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9435 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Species respond far more dynamically to disturbances in their environment than we think. This is the conclusion of Dutch researcher Olga Alda Alvarez following her research into the stress response of nematodes, tiny worms that occur in large numbers in the soil. The outcomes of this study are important for further research into the consequences of climate change and pollution on the stability of the ecosystem. Alda Alvarez investigated how two species of nematodes responded to pollution of their environment with toxic substances and changes in the ambient temperature. As bacteria eaters, nematodes play an important role in the decomposition process in the soil. They are also easy to study in the laboratory. The researcher discovered that how nematodes respond to pollution is related to their life cycle. Sexually-reproducing strains are more pollution sensitive than hermaphroditic strains. This in turn has a negative effect on the population growth rate. Alda Alvarez also observed that following the pollution, the toxicity of the nematodes does not increase but is variable. Additionally from a genetic viewpoint, nematodes quickly adapt to environmental factors such as the ambient temperature. For example a temperature rise from 16 to 24 degrees Celsius, results in a significant change in the composition of the genome and the interaction between the genes. The gene regulation network is therefore strongly dependent on the ambient temperature.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 9434 - Posted: 10.05.2006

By John Bohannon When it comes to climate change, what's love got to do with it? A lot, according to a study of shifts in bird migrations in response to global warming. Competition for females may be helping some species adapt to climate change more quickly. The timing of bird migrations appears to be extremely sensitive to climate change. Many migrating species have been arriving earlier by the year as warmer springs thaw the snows ever sooner than in the past. But wWhat remains to be explained is why some species of birds are far more affected than are others in the same geographic range. Answering this question could help scientists better anticipate global warming's impact on biodiversity and allow them to prioritize conservation efforts. What differs between birds that might explain their varying reactions to climate change? One possibility, scientists believe, is sexual selection. In species where males compete fiercely for the attention of choosy females, migrating early actually works in the male’s favor, giving him easy access to females that arrive at their destination ahead of schedule. To test this theory, a team led by Claire Spottiswoode, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Cambridge, U.K., analyzed the history of birds on two islands off the coasts of Germany and Denmark. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 9433 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Cancer survivors, take note. The mental fog and forgetfulness of "chemo brain" are no figment of your imagination. A new UCLA study shows that chemotherapy causes changes to the brain's metabolism and blood flow that can linger at least 10 years after treatment. Reported Oct. 5 in the online edition of the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, the findings may help to explain the disrupted thought processes and confusion that plague many chemotherapy patients. "People with 'chemo brain' often can't focus, remember things or multitask the way they did before chemotherapy," explained Dr. Daniel Silverman, head of neuronuclear imaging and associate professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Our study demonstrates for the first time that patients suffering from these cognitive symptoms have specific alterations in brain metabolism." Silverman and his colleagues used positron emission tomography (PET) to scan the brains of 21 women who had undergone surgery to remove breast tumors five to 10 years earlier. Sixteen of them had been treated with chemotherapy regimens near the time of their surgeries to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence. The team compared PET images evaluating the chemotherapy patients' brain function to PET scans from five breast-cancer patients who underwent surgery only, and 13 control subjects who did not have breast cancer or chemotherapy.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9432 - Posted: 10.05.2006

Heidi Ledford In the rough and tumble world of insect love, having a Zeus bug for a boyfriend just sucks. The girls haul the boys around on their backs for weeks at a time, feeding them all the while from a special gland located right where his royal head rests. Why do they put up with it? Scientists now say a female shows this behaviour because if she doesn't provide her freeloading boyfriend with enough glandular treats, he's more likely to crawl up her back, lean down over her head and steal the dinner right out from under her proboscis. The male Zeus bug violates a time-honoured tradition within the animal kingdom — the male is supposed to give the female gifts, and not the other way around. Take the male spider Pisaura mirabilis, for example, which gives a gift of prey — wrapped in silk, of course — to distract its mate while he copulates. Or the male striped ground cricket, which allows his mate to chew on his own leg for a nourishing treat. Males provide the gifts because they are competing for limited resources: eggs. In contrast, says ecologist Gören Arnqvist from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, getting enough sperm is rarely a problem for females. Viewed in that light, it simply doesn't make sense for the female Zeus bug to donate valuable resources to her mate. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9431 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The results of two large, randomized clinical trials published October 5, 2006, in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrate that the drug ranibizumab is an effective treatment for neovascular macular degeneration, a complication of age-related macular degeneration that leads to the vast majority of legal blindness associated with the disorder. In an accompanying editorial, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Edwin M. Stone at the University of Iowa contends that now that these trials have shown the drug's “miraculous” effects on patients' eyesight, a crucial next step is to compare ranibizumab to a related drug, bevacizumab. Although it is not FDA-approved for use in the eye, bevacizumab also appears to be effective in treating neovascular macular degeneration. Importantly, a single dose of bevacizumab costs less than $150, compared to more than $2,000 per dose for ranibizumab. Both ranibizumab and bevacizumab work by inhibiting a protein known as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which promotes blood vessel growth. Bevacizumab was originally designed to block blood vessel growth in tumors, halting cancer cells' growth by eliminating their oxygen supply. In 2004, bevacizumab, which is marketed by Genentech under the brand name Avastin, was approved by the FDA for the treatment of metastatic colon cancer. © 2006 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 9430 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Breastfed babies are smarter because their mothers are clever in the first place, not because of any advantage of breastfeeding itself, a study suggests. Researchers found breastfeeding mothers tended to be more intelligent, more highly educated, and likely to provide a more stimulating home environment. However, they stressed that there were still many advantages to breastfeeding. The British Medical Journal study was carried out by the Medical Research Council and University of Edinburgh. Lead researcher Geoff Der said: "This question has been debated ever since a link between the two [high IQ and breastfeeding] was first discovered in 1929. Breastfed children do tend to score higher on intelligence tests, but they also tend to come from more advantaged backgrounds." The researchers analysed data from more than 5,000 children and 3,000 mothers in the US. They found that mothers who breastfed tended to be more intelligent, and when this fact was taken into account, most of the relationship between breastfeeding and the child's intelligence disappeared. The rest was accounted for by other aspects of the family background. The researchers also looked at families where one child was breastfed and another was not. This confirmed the earlier results - the breastfed child was no more intelligent than his or her sibling. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 9429 - Posted: 10.04.2006

By DENISE GRADY “Thank you for being a part of our study,” said a questionnaire given to surgery patients at Duke University. “We are going to ask you how you feel about postoperative nausea and vomiting.” Most people could answer with a few choice words, especially anyone who has ever woken up in a recovery room, wretched and retching. Not surprisingly, the patients in the Duke study, published in 2001, rated throwing up as a good thing to avoid. If only it could be avoided. Somehow, the wonders of modern medicine have not quite reached this queasy zone. Nausea and vomiting, a blight since the dawn of ether, are still among the most common complications of surgery, anesthesia and pain medicine, affecting anywhere from 20 to 80 percent of patients. Is this really so hard to fix? Or are doctors just too busy with more pressing matters? “It’s an overwhelming problem,” said Dr. Charles Berde, chief of pain medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston. “It’s right at the center of what everybody who studies postoperative pain tries to deal with. There’s an enormous amount of interest in how to do a better job.” Part of the problem is that it’s hard to predict who will get sick, because people respond differently to drugs and to surgery. And once the symptoms start, they are hard to quell. Antinausea medicines can help, but not enough, Dr. Berde said. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 9428 - Posted: 06.24.2010