Carina Dennis A Melbourne university has emptied the top floors of one of its buildings after a spate of brain-tumour cases were reported during the past month. Most affected staff worked on the top floor, raising fears that cell-phone masts on top of the building are responsible. But experts say it is far more likely to be an unfortunate coincidence. Since mid-April, five staff from the business school of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University have reported developing brain tumours. Two other cases have been reported since 1999. Of the seven, two are malignant and five benign. "We suspect there might be other cases, but these haven't been confirmed," says National Tertiary Education Union representative Matthew McGowan, who adds that the union and the university have received phone calls and e-mails from additional staff reporting health concerns. Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor, and all except one have worked in the building for a decade, mostly on the top level. Some staff are concerned that mobile-phone-transmitter towers on top of the building are to blame. "It is too much of a coincidence to simply be chance," says McGowan. The university has offered staff on the two top floors alternative office space while it carries out a two-week investigation. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 8934 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute are unveiling a new resource that they say will speed scientists' understanding and treatment of a group of inherited disorders called ataxias that kill cells in the brain, causing loss of balance, coordination and often death. The scientists are making new data available on hundreds of interacting proteins that are involved in dozens of inherited forms of ataxia. The approach to mapping the global set of interacting proteins—called an “interactome”—could also be applied to disorders as diverse as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and hypertension. Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Huda Y. Zoghbi and her colleagues reported on their studies in an article published in the May 18, 2006, issue of the journal Cell. Zoghbi and her colleagues at the Baylor College of Medicine collaborated on the studies with researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Notre Dame. Since proteins are the major machines that work inside cells, understanding how they interact may give researchers an opportunity to learn how they can go awry and cause disease. Furthermore, understanding these interactions offers scientists targets for drugs that can help restore normal function to such malfunctioning machinery. © 2006 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8933 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Moderate stress during pregnancy does not harm the unborn child but can instead aid its later advancement, US research suggests. The team asked 137 healthy women with low-risk, normal pregnancies to report on their stress between the 24th and 32nd week of pregnancy. The study in Child Development found the children of those who reported more stress were more advanced at age two. Earlier studies suggest stressed out mothers can pass it on to their babies. They also suggest high stress levels can lead to restricted growth and birth defects in the unborn child. And the researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore expected to find that distress during pregnancy would be linked to bad behaviour and temperamental dysfunction in children at age two. Research author development psychologist Professor Janet DiPietro said: "We thought maybe they would show some signs of being difficult or of emotional dysfunction. Instead we found the reverse was true." There were two possible explanations for this, she said. Women who have high stress levels would be generating more of the stress hormone cortisol. It is one of the chemicals produced naturally in the body when stress triggers a 'fight or flight' response. "Cortisol has a bad rap as the stress hormone - but every organ in the body needs cortisol to develop properly. It could be enhancing the development of organs before birth," said Professor DiPietro. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8932 - Posted: 05.17.2006

By JANE E. BRODY Recent reports of bizarre sleepwalking behaviors, including middle-of-the-night binge eating and even driving a car, among patients taking the popular sleeping pill Ambien have led some health professionals to focus on drug-free methods of treating chronic insomnia. Sleep therapists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a brief form of psychotherapy called cognitive behavioral therapy. Through it, patients learn to restructure their thinking about sleep, which is often erroneous, and to change counterproductive bedtime habits. Should insomnia recur after formal therapy ends, patients have the tools to make corrections on their own. Or, if self-help fails, they see the therapist for a refresher session. Jack D. Edinger and his psychology colleagues at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, N.C., reported five years ago that, among 75 patients with chronic primary insomnia, cognitive behavioral therapy — known as C.B.T. — produced "clinically significant sleep improvements within six weeks," and these improvements persisted for at least six months, the length of follow-up in the study. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 8931 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Hochman It may not taste like Starbuck's coffee, but caterpillars apparently have their own version of brew to get them going: plant chemicals. A new study has found that nocturnal caterpillars called Mythimna separate spring to life each evening when they get a whiff of certain plant scents. Most organisms can tell the difference between night and day simply by taking a look outside. But some may rely on more subtle clues. A few years ago, scientists discovered that corn plants release a different set of chemicals into the air in the morning and evening. Might the M. separate caterpillars, which live on corn plants throughout Asia, use these odors to plan their schedules? A group of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan decided to test the theory by collecting gas from the plants during the day and at night. They then exposed one set of caterpillar larvae to the daytime fumes and another set to the evening fumes and observed the larvae for several hours. The creatures were almost 50% more likely to go into hiding--which they typically do during the daytime--after being exposed to the "day" fumes than they were when exposed to the "night" fumes. Night fumes made the caterpillars come out of hiding to feed on leaves, their typical evening activity. Surprisingly, changing the lighting conditions had no effect on the caterpillar behavior, indicating that the insects use plant scent alone as an alarm clock, says study co-author Junji Takabayashi. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 8930 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Can one literally "lose oneself" in an experience? Many theoretical models of the mind reject this notion, proposing that awareness is dependent on the mediation of areas involved in self representation – a vigilant, self-aware "observer" network – in the human brain. Prof. Rafael Malach, Ilan Golberg and Michal Harel of the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department found a scientific means of addressing this question – by scanning the brains of volunteers performing various mental tasks. The results of their study, which were published recently in the journal Neuron, were unanticipated: When subjects were given outwardly-focused tasks that demanded their full attention, areas of the brain that relate to the self were not only inactive – they appeared to be vigorously suppressed. The functional brain scans were done with an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) system, which maps brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow and oxygenation. Volunteers either viewed photos or listened to short music segments. For each stimulus, however, participants were asked to perform two different tasks. In one, "introspective" assignment, they were asked to think about themselves and how the image or musical selection made them feel. In the second, "sensory-motor" task, they performed quick recognition exercises – such as identifying pieces that included a trumpet's sound. The scientists were particularly interested in certain regions in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain known to be involved in personality and self-knowledge, among other things.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 8929 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONALD PIES, M.D. I don't think I will ever eat Greek pastry again without thinking of Mr. Z., or of his wife's expression as the nurse and I left Mr. Z.'s house for the last time. He was not a complainer, and even during his final days, Mr. Z. seemed grateful to the nurse and to me, his psychiatrist. Plainly, he was astonished that we would travel the few miles from the mental health clinic to his house, simply to look in on him. He had come to this country from Greece 30 years before and had run a successful business for two decades. Then, the Furies descended upon him, seemingly out of the blue, though Mr. Z. always felt that he was atoning for some evil deed. I took this as part of his depression: guilt, self-loathing — these were part of the picture I had seen in a thousand such cases. It was not until a few weeks before his death that I learned the truth about Mr. Z., or at least, one family member's version of the truth. In my field, there's major depression, and then there's Major Depression. With proper treatment, some depressive bouts seem to blow away like dead leaves in a spring breeze. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 8928 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Lesbians react to the smell of certain bodily odors in ways similar to heterosexual men and different from heterosexual women, new research suggests. Building on their previous studies that showed significant differences in the ways heterosexual and homosexual men's brains process odors, the researchers may be narrowing the search for the elusive human pheromone. The existence of pheromones, the sex-specific chemicals that send messages by smell to other members of the species, is well known in animals, but their existence among humans is in dispute. The authors do not claim that they have discovered human pheromones or even that odors are a major factor in human sexual choices. But they have found suggestive differences in physiological responses to odor. The study appeared online on May 8 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The substances involved are a progesterone derivative produced in male sweat and an estrogenlike steroid that has been detected in female urine. The two smells are processed in the brain differently from ordinary odors. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 8927 - Posted: 05.16.2006

New findings from a study supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health, show that girls and boys who exhibit high levels of risky behaviors have similar chances of developing symptoms of depression. However, gender differences become apparent with low and moderate levels of risky behaviors with girls being significantly more likely than boys to experience symptoms of depression. The study, which incorporates data from almost 19,000 teens, is published in the May 15, 2006 issue of the Archives of Women’s Mental Health. “The burden of illness associated with depression during adolescence is considerable, and psychosocial problems — including substance abuse — are associated with depressive disorders in teens,” says NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. “The findings from this study create a more complete picture of commonalities and differences of the risk of depression among boys and girls who engage in risky behaviors, and provide information for healthcare providers to consider as they screen, evaluate, and treat their young patients.” Symptoms of depression include loss of appetite, feeling blue, loss of interest in things that used to be of interest, being bothered by things that previously were not bothersome, and not feeling hopeful about the future. Dr. Martha Waller, of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, and her colleagues provided new findings from teen interviews conducted as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in 1995.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8926 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi A potent molecule that causes more regeneration of eye nerves than any other known has been found by researchers. The damaged eye nerves of rats that received injections of the protein showed five times better recovery than those that did not. Drugs developed from the newly isolated protein – called oncomodulin – might one day even help heal spinal cord injury in humans. But experts stress that they have not yet tested to see if spinal cells respond to the molecule. Several years ago, Larry Benowitz of the Children’s Hospital Boston, Massachusetts, US, and his colleagues demonstrated that the inflammatory response triggered by eye injury somehow promoted nerve regeneration in that organ. The body usually shuts down nerve regeneration after injury, probably to prevent erroneous re-connections being made, but the eye seems to be an exception in this instance. Nonetheless, isolating the molecule that promoted this healing remained a tough task. Using biochemical methods, researchers separated the proteins produced by immune cells called macrophages, which drive the inflammatory response. They then embarked on the time-consuming task of individually testing each of the isolated proteins on nerve cells in a dish. The cells came from the rat retina, part of the back of the eye that translates light into nerve signals. Among all of the isolated proteins, oncomodulin caused significantly more nerve cell growth than the rest. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Regeneration
Link ID: 8925 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jessica Marshall A new mouse model may help explain exactly what happens in the brain in response to antidepressants like Prozac. The research may hold huge potential for understanding and screening new treatments for depression. And the wide variety of existing treatments may have more in common than was previously thought, the researchers suggest. Prozac (fluoxetine), one of the most common drug treatments for depression, acts by stimulating the growth of new neurons in the brain’s hippocampus. Grigori Enikolopov and his team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, US, wanted to narrow down which steps in this growth process, called neurogenesis, Prozac was influencing. So the team engineered mice with nuclei in their nerve cells that glow green during neurogenesis. This made it easy to count and compare the number of developing neurons. By tracking other factors associated with different stages of neurogenesis, Enikolopov’s team found that only one step was influenced by Prozac. The drug did not promote neuron growth by stimulating stem cells, but rather by stimulating the division of cells just "downstream" of the stem cell, called amplifying neural progenitor cells, which have already committed to becoming neurons. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 8924 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Working mothers with steady relationships are the healthiest women - while housewives are the most likely to be obese, a UK study suggests. Experts followed 1,200 women from 15 to 54 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health study. Some 23% of those with multiple roles were obese, compared with 38% among the long-term homemakers. The researchers say the findings show the short-term stress of juggling roles is outweighed by long-term benefits. They used data on women taking part in the Medical Research Council's National Study of Health and Development, which tracks the long-term health of British men and women born in 1946. The women's health at 26 and at 54 was assessed using a questionnaire, while details were taken about employment history, marital status, and whether they had children, for every decade from their mid-20s. Their weight and height were also measured at regular intervals. Analysis of the information showed that by the age of 54 women who had been partners, parents and employees were significantly less likely to report ill health than women who did not fulfil all three roles. Women who had been homemakers for all or most of their lives, and had not held down a job, were most likely to say their health was poor, followed by lone mothers and childless women. Thirty-eight per cent of long-term homemakers were obese compared with 23% of working mothers who had had steady relationships. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stress; Obesity
Link ID: 8923 - Posted: 05.15.2006

New mothers with postnatal depression experience poor care and are usually given pills when they should have therapy, a mental health charity says. Mind's snapshot survey of 148 women in England found one in 10 had to wait over a year for treatment. And four-fifths of those admitted to psychiatric wards were separated from their babies. The government's mental health tsar said it was working on improving access to effective care and treatment. Mind said one in six women is known to be affected by mental distress during pregnancy or following childbirth, and 25% of all maternal deaths are linked to mental health problems. Its survey found 75% of the women were given medication, with the remainder offered counselling. Over two-thirds had to wait more than a month for treatment. Ninety per cent of the women said the problems they experienced in accessing care were due to a lack of understanding by health professionals The situation was worst in the north of England. The charity said its key concerns were a lack of mother and baby units - with just 17 in England and Wales, two in Scotland and none in Northern Ireland - poor treatment choice, and lack of training for health professionals leading to diagnosis problems. A spokeswoman added: "Although postnatal depression is publicly recognised, many people, including health professionals, don't recognise it quickly enough as being more than just 'baby blues'. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 8922 - Posted: 05.15.2006

By MELANIE THERNSTROM Who hasn't wished she could watch her brain at work and make changes to it, the way a painter steps back from a painting, studies it and decides to make the sky a different hue? If only we could spell-check our brain like a text, or reprogram it like a computer to eliminate glitches like pain, depression and learning disabilities. Would we one day become completely transparent to ourselves, and — fully conscious of consciousness — consciously create ourselves as we like? The glitch I'd like to program out of my brain is chronic pain. For the past 10 years, I have been suffering from an arthritic condition that causes chronic pain in my neck that radiates into the right side of my face and right shoulder and arm. Sometimes I picture the pain — soggy, moldy, dark or perhaps ashy, like those alarming pictures of smokers' lungs. Wherever the pain is located, it must look awful by now, after a decade of dominating my brain. I'd like to replace my forehead with a Plexiglas window, set up a camera and film my brain and (since this is my brain, I'm the director) redirect it. Cut. Those areas that are generating pain — cool it. Those areas that are supposed to be alleviating pain — hello? I need you! Down-regulate pain-perception circuitry, as scientists say. Up-regulate pain-modulation circuitry. Now. Recently, I had a glimpse of what that reprogramming would look like. I was lying on my back in a large white plastic f.M.R.I. machine that uses ingenious new software, peering up through 3-D goggles at a small screen. I was experiencing a clinical demonstration of a new technology — real-time functional neuroimaging — used in a Stanford University study, now in its second phase, that allows subjects to see their own brain activity while feeling pain and to try to change that brain activity to control their pain. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 8921 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak Strange images appear from long-forgotten memories. Or out of nowhere: You're roller-skating on water; your mother flashes by on a trapeze; your father is in labor; a friend dead for years sits down at the dinner table. Here are moments of unspeakable terror; there, moments of euphoria or serenity. Shakespeare wrote, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," and 300 years later, Sigmund Freud gave the poetry a neat psychoanalytic spin when he called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious." The movies that unfold in our heads some nights are so powerfully resonant they haunt us for days--or inspire us. Mary Shelley dreamed of Frankenstein before she created him on paper; the melody to "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney as he slept. Everybody dreams--yet no one, throughout history, has fully grasped what the dreaming mind is doing. Are the nightly narratives a message from the unconscious to the conscious mind, as Freud believed? Or are they simply the product of random electrical flashes in the brain? Today, researchers aided by powerful technologies that reveal the brain in action are concluding that both schools of thought hold truth. "This is the greatest adventure of all time," says Harvard psychiatrist and dream researcher J. Allan Hobson. "The development of brain imaging is the equivalent of Galileo's invention of the telescope, only we are now exploring inner space instead of outer space." Mind-brain dance. The dream researchers' new tools, functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, have been used for some time to capture the waking brain at work--making decisions, feeling frightened or joyous, coping with uncertainty. © 2006 U.S.News & World Report,

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 8920 - Posted: 06.24.2010

New research reveals that a mother's touch early in life could trigger a child's future mothering skills. Columbia University neurobiologist Frances Champagne says that previous research across species showed that maternal behaviors are passed down from mother to daughter. "So if your mother held you a lot, you will hold your infants a lot," Champagne says. But she wanted to know whether mothering tendencies are passed on through genetics or experience. Her team studied mother rats that spent time licking and grooming their babies, and others that didn't. Chemical tags can attach to DNA and act like "stop signs" to turn genes off. As she wrote in the journal Endocrinology, without enough licking and grooming, female rats had certain genes turn off, also known as methylation. When a gene is methylated, chemical tags called methyl groups attach to the DNA, preventing the production of certain hormones key to future mothering behaviors, including estrogen and oxytocin, also known as the love hormone. Licked rats had less of these methyl groups attach to the genes, allowing the production of those hormones. These hormones, in turn, affect behavior when these baby rats become mothers themselves. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8919 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kim Krieger Many molecules have a reverse twin--a mirror-image, but otherwise identical, version of the other. Now, chemists have developed a method to tell these twins apart--and surprisingly, it works similarly to the human tongue. The technique could be particularly useful for the pharmaceutical industry, as opposite twins of the same molecule can have very different effects. The most famous examples of mirror-image molecules are amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Each amino acid has left-handed version and a right-handed one, but life on Earth uses only the left-handed form. Humans can easily taste the difference: left-handed aminos are usually sweet, whereas right-handed aminos tend to be bitter. The tongue tells the two apart with taste receptors that preferentially latch on to either the right- or left-handed version. Without realizing how the tongue works, Eric Anslyn and colleagues at the University of Texas in Austin set out to create a device that could distinguish right- and left-handed amino acids. First, they invented a set of copper-containing compounds that acted as amino acid receptors. Each receptor preferentially latched on to either the left- or right-handed version of a specific amino acid, although they would react with other aminos too, to some degree. The researchers then set up a test array containing numerous rows of amino acid solutions: Each row contained a different amino acid, and each well contained a different type of receptor. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 8918 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Julie Rehmeyer Need a new excuse for why you haven't lost weight? Maybe one that even makes you feel good about yourself? Try this: If you are highly motivated and willing to work hard for what you want, your brain may be making it difficult for you to resist the urge to overeat, a new study has shown. Psychologists have found that people who are prone to obesity tend to be highly motivated by rewards. They go out of their way to get the things they want, are willing to take risks, and are more thrilled than the average person when they succeed. Meanwhile, neuroscientists have found that the need for reward is hardwired into various regions of the brain (ScienceNOW, 16 June 2005). When researchers stimulate these regions in the lab, animals overeat, particularly seeking out sweet and fatty foods. Cognitive neuroscientist John Beaver and colleagues at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, United Kingdom, wondered if the two results were connected; that is, do the brain reward regions of highly motivated people ramp up their activity at the sight of appetizing food more than those of unmotivated people? Using a questionnaire, the team assessed how strongly rewards motivated 14 people, asking volunteers if they would say things like "I go out of my way to get things I want." The researchers then put the volunteers into an fMRI scanner, which measures brain activity, and showed them pictures of pizza, ice cream, and cake. The images lit up the brain's reward centers twice as strongly in highly motivated people as in laid-back people, the team reports in this week's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 8917 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Parental roles for at least one fox species are reversed, according to a new study that found bat-eared fox mothers bring home most of the food while dads stay in the den with their offspring and take care of everything from grooming to chaperoning. This seemingly modern arrangement is quite rare in the animal world, since male parental care has been observed in only 5 to 10 percent of all mammal species. The find suggests that male/female cooperation can benefit the young, particularly when parents are monogamous and dedicated to their duties. The study also indicates that insect-eating foxes, such as Otocyon megalotis,along with the Hoary fox from South America and Blanford's fox from the Middle East, may particularly benefit by having "house husbands." Most other fox males bring prey back to the den, but it is hard to cart back a load of insects, so females usually forage on their own. In this case, bat-eared moms have a taste for termites. "Bat-eared foxes probably differ from (the parenting norm) because their termite prey can't be carried back to the den by males, which don't regurgitate, but can only be done so by females in the form of milk," explained Harry William Yorkstone Wright, who authored the study. Copyright © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8916 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sexual harassment is a burden that females of many species face, and some may go to extreme lengths to avoid it. In a new paper from the June issue of the American Naturalist, Darren Croft (University of Wales) and a research team from the University of Leeds suggest that female guppies, a popular aquarium fish, may risk their lives to avoid too much attention from males. Observing wild population of guppies in the rainforest of Trinidad, the researchers found that female guppies swim in habitats that contain few males – but many predators. "Male guppies spend most of their time displaying to females. But if their courtship displays don't impress the females, males will attempt to sneak mating with them when they aren't looking," says Croft. Male guppies are brightly colored to attract female attention, while female guppies are a dull brown color. The researchers show that female guppies might use this color difference to their advantage, venturing into the deep water where predators lurk. The males' bright coloring also attracts predators, making it too dangerous for them to follow.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 8915 - Posted: 06.24.2010