By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer Kathleen Delano had suffered from depression for years. Having tried psychotherapy and a number of antidepressant drugs in vain, she resigned herself to a life of suffering. Then she tried Botox, the drug that became a rage a few years ago for smoothing out facial wrinkles. In 2004, her physician injected five shots of the toxin into the muscles between Delano's eyebrows so that the Glenn Dale woman could no longer wrinkle her brow. Eight weeks later, according to a unusual study published this month, her depression had lifted. "I didn't wake up the next morning and say, 'Hallelujah, I am well, I am healed,' " she said in an interview, but she noticed changes. "I found myself able to do the things I hadn't been doing. I feel I broke out of the shackles of depression to be in the mood to go out, to reconnect with people." The pilot study of 10 patients is the first to provide empirical support for what a number of clinicians say they have noticed anecdotally: People who get their furrowed brows eliminated with Botox (botulinum toxin A) often report an improvement in mood. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 8946 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TINA KELLEY Who knew there was a noise for this? And not just one noise, but a billionfold chirping, all night long, all spring, all fall, barely audible but as elemental as the grinding of the Earth on its axis. Jeff Wells, an avian ecologist, shared the tiny calls, slightly amplified, at a Nocturnal Bird Migration Concert Friday night at the Prospect Park Audubon Center. A simple high-powered microphone was set up on the center's roof, connected to Dr. Wells' computer, which displayed pictures of birds that migrate through the city at this time of year. He also showed spectrograms, or pictures of their calls as ascending or descending black zigzag ribbons, the audible thumbprint of each species. "I want to let you in on this great secret, a great mystery only a tiny, tiny number of people in the world ever know about," he told a group of about 25 people, his voice hypnotic in its wonderment. "They're all up there in the air, migrating while we sleep, on high highways of wind," said Dr. Wells, the senior scientist at the Boreal Songbird Initiative, a conservation group that tries to protect the endangered boreal, or northern, forest that stretches from Alaska to Newfoundland and is the summer home of three to five billion birds. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Migration; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 8945 - Posted: 05.22.2006

Sleep doesn't get much respect in today's fast-paced, productivity-obsessed society. It's just wasted time, a maintenance task forced on us by our biology. If we could hire someone else to do it for us, or engineer our bodies to require less of it, we surely would. We're so busy that we're now sleeping less per night than ever, and we're neglecting the consequences. Most of us are living in a continual state of sleep-deprivation, and it's making us sick, accident-prone, less intelligent and even less productive than we think. Paul Martin thinks we're a "sleep-sick society," and that it's time we gave sleep the attention it deserves in science, medicine, education and social policy. That thesis is at the heart of Martin's book, which is also an engaging tour of of the art in sleep science. We learn that sleep is more than just a lack of consciousness -- there's as much happening in our brains when we're asleep as when we’re awake. The purpose of all that activity is still somewhat mysterious, though, as sleep science is an immature field compared to our wakeful-mind sciences. The book is filled with information that ranges from basic to esoteric. What's behind circadian rhythms and sleep stages? Why is sleeping while sitting up never as restful as sleeping while horizontal? Is there a real difference between early- and late-risers or are some of us just lazy? How long can you go without sleep before it kills you? Why is "sleeping on it" a sound learning strategy? How do some animals manage to sleep with only half of their brain at a time?

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 8944 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The first evidence monkeys can string "words" together to communicate in a similar way to humans has been found. Putty-nosed monkeys in West Africa share the human ability to combine different sounds to mean different things, according to researchers. St Andrews University, UK, scientists found the creatures, in Nigeria's Gashaka Gumti National Park, used two main call types to warn of predators. But a particular sequence of calls also appeared to mean something else. The scientists identified two call types - "pyows" and "hacks" - which the monkeys use to alert each other to danger; but found a string of pyows warned of a loitering leopard, while a burst of hacks indicated a hovering eagle. A sentence made up of several pyows, followed by a few hacks, told the group to move to safer ground. Dr Kate Arnold, a primate psychologist, discovered the phenomena by playing variations of the calls back to the monkeys to see how they behaved. This showed they could encode fresh information by combining two existing calls, rather than creating a new sound, she said. "These calls were not produced randomly and a number of distinct patterns emerged," she said. "The pyow-hack sequence means something like 'let's go', whereas the pyows by themselves have multiple functions and the hacks are generally used as alarm calls. This is the first good example of animal calls being combined in meaningful ways. (C)BBC

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 8943 - Posted: 05.20.2006

Oxford University has applied to the High Court for an injunction against animal rights protesters who campaign against its biomedical research centre. It says that since building of the £20m centre resumed last November, threats and criminal damage have risen. QC Charles Flint said the injunction was needed to protect staff and students, adding an activist had made "clear threats" against the university. The university wants to extend the exclusion zone around the site. Mr Flint said Robin Webb of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) told the media that student accommodation was a legitimate target. He was also caught on camera showing an undercover journalist how to make a bomb, the QC said. "There can be no dispute whatsoever that the ALF is a criminal and terrorist organisation and there are persons unknown who have taken action in the name of the ALF against the university," he said. Mr Webb's counsel, Stephanie Harrison, applied for an adjournment of the case so he could answer properly. Oxford University already has temporary injunctions that limit when and how protests can take place, and also protect a wide group of university-related people from harassment. It allows a demonstration opposite the site on South Parks Road, on Thursday afternoons, but bans protest activities within the exclusion zone. It says builders have faced threats and disruption and there has been criminal damage at the site since work resumed there in November. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 8942 - Posted: 05.20.2006

Getting your first pair of reading glasses may not the happiest landmark in your life, but unfortunately it's one of the most inevitable; over 90 percent of people over 40 years of age need help seeing nearby objects. For many this means fumbling around for the reading glasses, or wearing bifocals — and the split-screen view of the world that comes with them — far-focused on the top half, near-focused on the bottom. Now scientists at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences see an alternative: new electronic lenses that can entirely switch focus from near to far with the flick of a switch. They could eventually replace bifocals or reading glasses for people with presbyopia, the age-related decline in vision. "Bifocals make some people dizzy because of the fact that the same lens, different areas of the lens, have different focusing powers. So when they look up or down they go through different lenses," says Nasser Peyghambarian, who heads the research. As he explains, these "electro-active" lenses don't have that problem because the entire lens changes focus, making it feel much more like natural vision. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 8941 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Not only did the evolutionary parting of human from chimpanzee ancestors occur more recently than had been indicated by previous data, but it also played out over an extended period during which forerunners of people and chimps interbred. That controversial possibility arises from a new genetic comparison of people, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and macaque monkeys. Various parts of the human genome diverged from those of chimps at times that span at least 4 million years, concludes a team led by geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston. A final genetic split, yielding reproductively separate ancestral species of humans and chimps, transpired between 6.3 million and 5.4 million years ago, the scientists report in an upcoming Nature. Most scientists had held that hominids and ancient chimps branched off from a common ancestor roughly 7 million years ago, with no interbreeding. Clues to ancient interbreeding lie on the X chromosome, Reich and his coworkers say. People and chimps exhibit far more similarity on that sex-linked DNA strand than on any of the other 22 chromosomes. Genetic detachment of human ancestors, or hominids, from chimps seems to have occurred on the X chromosome about 1.2 million years later than it did on other chromosomes, the scientists report. Copyright ©2006 Science Service

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 8940 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The deadly human form of mad cow disease, vCJD, may have infected far more people than previously thought, suggests a new study. The assumption that most people are genetically shielded from the devastating disease could be wrong, said the research published on Friday. But it cautions that the evidence for this remains sketchy. Variant Creutzfelt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is linked to eating meat infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad-cow disease. A rogue version of a prion protein proliferates in the brain, leading to distressing mental deterioration, loss of motor control, and eventually death. After vCJD was first identified in March 1996, some experts calculated it could inflict a death toll in the tens of thousands, especially in the UK, where the outbreak began. But these calculations were swiftly revised downwards to a few hundred or even fewer when it was realised that the toll was rising far slower than expected. At present, the UK has recorded 161 definite and probable cases of vCJD, six of whom are still alive. One reason for optimism about the potential extent of the vCJD epidemic has been the assumption that it is genetic. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 8939 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The story of human evolution that began when the earliest ancestors of humans and chimpanzees first separated from their common ancestor has taken a new turn with a claim that the epochal event may well have occurred millions of years more recently than the fossil record has long maintained. On top of that, the split of the two lineages was probably far more complex than anyone had thought -- with some of the earliest members of both lines interbreeding again and again before the two species finally separated permanently, according to scientists analyzing the genes of both modern chimps and modern humans. If that controversial claim turns out to be true, the famed fossil skull of the creature nicknamed Toumai -- and dated at roughly 7 million years old -- may have lived long before the final chimp-human split occurred, say researchers at the Broad Institute, a collaborative venture linking the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Toumai (Sahelanthropus tchadensis), discovered five years ago in the desert of Chad by French anthropologists, has until now been considered the earliest known hominid representative in the human lineages that split from a common ancestor of humans and chimps. ©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 8938 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Humans show remarkable foresight. From storing food to carrying tools, we can imagine, prepare for and, ultimately, steer the course of the future. Although many animals hoard food or build shelters, there is scant evidence that they ponder the long-term ramifications of their actions or the future more generally. But new research hints that our ape brethren may share our ability to think ahead. Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tested whether our closest great ape relative--the bonobo--and our most distant--the orangutan--share our ability to plan for the future. The researchers first trained five bonobos and five orangutans to use a tool to get a fruit treat from a mechanical apparatus. They then blocked access to the treat but allowed the apes to handle suitable and unsuitable tools for the task before ushering them into a waiting room for an hour. After that hour, they were brought back into the first room and, if they had brought the right tool, they could use it to get the treat. The apes both took a suitable tool out of the test room and brought it back in with them after the waiting period significantly more often than predicted by chance. A female orangutan named Dokana proved particularly adept, completing the task successfully in 15 out of 16 attempts. Even when the delay time was extended through the night--14 hours--Dokana succeeded in garnering the tool and the fruit more than half of the time. A bonobo named Kuno did even better with the long delay than the short one, completing the task in eight out of 12 attempts. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 8937 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Unger The battle of the sexes is a bit lopsided when it comes to illegal drugs. Men have higher rates of addiction to stimulants such as methamphetamine, and they're also more likely to suffer brain damage from "meth" use. Now researchers have shown that amphetamine inspires males to release up to 3 times more dopamine than women release. That could help explain sex differences in all kinds of diseases associated with dopamine release--including Parkinson's and schizophrenia--and could lead to sex-specific treatments. Often referred to as a "pleasure molecule," dopamine is released by the brain's striatum as a reward for everything from eating chocolate to having sex. It's also intimately linked with drug use: The high from dopamine helps keep addicts hooked. Previous studies have found that male mice release more dopamine after amphetamine injection than their females counterparts do, indicating that dopamine may play a role in the addiction disparity seen between men and women. To test the theory, neuroendocrinologist Gary Wand and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, recruited 28 men and 15 women who didn't take drugs and were psychologically normal. They got a baseline reading of available dopamine receptors in their brains by injecting subjects with saline mixed with a radioactive chemical that binds to dopamine receptors and found no difference in available receptors between men and women. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8936 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Understanding the meaning behind a person's posture or body movement comes easily to many people and helps guide how we react to others socially. But people with schizophrenia, even those who have mild to moderate symptoms and take medications, are not fluent in understanding body language, according to a University of Iowa-led study that included investigators Nirav Bigelow, Ph.D., Sergio Paradiso, M.D., Ph.D., and Nancy C. Andreasen M.D., Ph.D. The results appear in the April 2006 issue of Schizophrenia Research. Previous studies conducted by Paradiso and Andreasen showed that patients with schizophrenia have trouble deciphering emotion from human facial expressions. However, it was not well understood whether this perception problem extended to other socially relevant clues, said Sergio Paradiso, the study's corresponding author and assistant professor of psychiatry in the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine. "As we interact with people, we make judgments that we're not consciously aware of," Paradiso said. "If we see a coworker hunched over and don't see his face, we may approach him cautiously because we think something might be wrong and perhaps we can help. We don't see the face, but we glean information from the body language. People with schizophrenia are not as good at extracting this kind of information to guide their social interactions."

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8935 - Posted: 05.19.2006

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