By Owain Bennallack Computer games have long been derided by critics as mindless, brain-rotting fun. But a new wave of games is turning the cliché on its head. Nintendo has sold nearly five million copies of its three Nintendo DS brain training games since the series launched in Japan a year ago. The first title in the series, Dr Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?, sees players follow a daily regime of brain-enhancing exercises and is due to be released in the UK in June. Dr Kawashima's Brain Training comprises a variety of mini-games designed to give brains a workout. Activities include solving simple maths problems, counting people going in and out of a house, drawing pictures on the Nintendo DS touchscreen, and reading classic literature aloud into the device's microphone. Players are given a brain age reflecting their performance. Over time, your brain age should get younger as you achieve better scores. Dr Kawashima's Brain Training has sold some 1.8 million copies, and it is still in the Japanese top 10 a year after release. But the brain training games' success is down to more than just a neat gameplay gimmick. Unlike Nintendo's fictional creations, such as Donkey Kong or Mario, Dr Kawashima really is a leading Japanese brain expert. A graduate of the Tohuku University School of Medicine, Dr Kawashima works at the same university's New Industry Creation Hatchery Centre, and is one of the country's top researchers into brain imaging. He is also a best-selling author. His two books on brain training have sold more than a million copies in Japan. (C)BBC

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 8826 - Posted: 04.25.2006

By Margaret Webb Pressler Alex Perez, 2 1/2 , stared blankly as his mother pushed his little limbs into his blue footie pajamas. Alex had spent the afternoon running around the play area at a local mall and had been allowed only a short nap, so he was good and tired -- just the way his parents wanted him. For the next 40 minutes, the boy sat nearly motionless, watching a cartoon of "The Three Musketeers," as 14 electrical sensors on long wires were taped to his legs, chest, neck, temples, cheeks and scalp. "I can't believe how good you're being, Alex," his mother, Yolanda Rodriguez, cooed at him. Alex fell asleep before the connections were finished, his eyelids closing improbably as two grown-ups hovered over him. For the rest of the night, he slept attached to the mass of rainbow-colored wires, while technicians with computers in another room monitored his respiratory, neurological and physical activity throughout the night. Yolanda Rodriguez had been waiting for this night for months. She wanted to know why her youngest son snores so loudly, wakes constantly throughout the night, is always congested, gets repeated ear infections and has delayed speech. His sleep problems have ruled her life almost since he was born. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8825 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sarah E. Igo World As Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men. Rebecca Lemov. vii + 291 pp. Hill and Wang, 2005. $30. What do two-headed worms, laboratory experiments on babies, miniature mazes, thinking machines, "coercive stimuli," remote-controlled cats and military-sponsored anthropologists have in common? Each, according to Rebecca Lemov, was a key instance in the service of a 20th-century idea: If one could quantify and control the internal arena of the personal self—its urges and wants, its worries and fears—then the running of a modern society would require less brute external force. In the long term, putting this idea into practice would make it possible to regulate human beings in tune with the needs, demands, desires, and models of the social order, so that people would want to do whatever they were instructed to do (for example, to die for one cause, shop for another . . .). Lemov, an anthropologist by training, delves into the history of this idea, from its origins in the agricultural hybrids of Luther Burbank at the turn of the century to its expression in behaviorist psychology in the first three decades of the 20th century and eventually to the most disturbing and science fiction-like scenarios, of which Stanley Milgram's 1961 "obedience to authority" experiments, wherein the social scientist easily convinced laboratory subjects to administer electrical shocks to total strangers, are only the best known. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8824 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Unger Plaque on the brain doesn't sound good, but the condition may not be as crippling as once thought. Mice with the gummy deposits-- usually a symptom of Alzheimer's disease--can still have normal memories, according to a new study. The findings suggest a novel target for Alzheimer's drugs and a new way of understanding how the disease ravages the brain, say the researchers. Alzheimer's is thought to be caused in part by sticky build up of a toxic peptide called â amyloid, produced when the amyloid precursor protein (APP) is cut in two. Recent research, however, has shown that early signs of the disease are present even before these plaques show up in the brain. When APP is cut at another point, a different protein, called C31, is released. It too has toxic properties, but until now, its role in Alzheimer's has been a mystery. Neuroscientists led by Veronica Galvan and Dale Bredesen of the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, California, decided to examine what would happen when mice were prevented from making C31. They used a strain of mice that gets Alzheimer's-like symptoms and bred them so that APP couldn't be cut into C31. Although the animals could still make â amyloid and plaques, other signs of Alzheimer's were absent. For one, their brains were a normal size and contained a higher density of neuronal synapses compared to the shrunken brains of C31-producing mice. And they did twice as well on a standard test for memory in mice, the researchers report online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 8823 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Men become more jealous of dominant males when their female partner is near ovulation, researchers at the University of Liverpool have found. Previous studies have found that women's preferences for male physical appearance vary according to their fertility status. During ovulation women tend to find masculine looking men more attractive and prefer their voices and odour. During this fertile phase women are more likely to have an affair with a masculine-looking man, as their features are linked to high testosterone levels, demonstrating good genetic qualities that can be passed on to offspring. New research at the University has found that men sense this preference shift in their female partners and find masculine men more threatening during their partner's most fertile phase. Rob Burriss and Dr Anthony Little, from the University's School of Biological Sciences, also found that men only behave in this way if their female partner does not use oral contraception – and is therefore more fertile. Images of male faces that were either high or low in dominant features, such as a strong jaw lines and thinner lips, were shown to male participants who provided ratings of dominance for each image. A dominant person was defined as someone who looked like they could 'get what they wanted'.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8822 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Many patients with Parkinson's Disease get worse when they are admitted to hospital, research suggests. Parkinson's Disease Society survey of 210 nurse specialists suggests patients have problems as a result of their stay as medication is missed or delayed. Not one, of the 40% of Parkinson's Disease nurse specialists across the UK who responded, said patients' medicines were guaranteed to be given on time. The Department of Health said patients missing medication was unacceptable. We want all hospitals to immediately implement the standards laid down by the Department of Health for medicines management Parkinson's Disease patients have a shortage of the brain chemical dopamine, which controls connections between nerve cells, leading to symptoms such as tremors. They rely on a number of drugs that are tailored and timed to their particular needs. These stimulate a complex and carefully timed release of chemicals in the brain and control movement Without these, a person may become very ill and may suddenly not be able to move, get out of bed or walk down a corridor as they could if they were receiving their drugs on time. Bowel and kidney function can become disturbed and digestion, mood and sleep can also be affected. Some patients will experience severe hallucinations. Once this careful balance of chemical has been upset it can take days or even weeks for the patient to stabilise enough to be able to get on with their life again. Nine out of 10 specialists surveyed by the society said patients experienced clinical problems or unnecessary long hospital stays as a result of missed medication. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 8821 - Posted: 04.24.2006

The individual cells responsible for responding to sensory inputs--the strong scent of a flower, the light touch of a spring breeze--can cope with only a small amount of input. Yet the human ear can hear and process sounds ranging from a pin drop to the roar of a jet engine. Scientists have struggled to account for how this individually narrow range combines in a network to produce the wide range of sensed experience. Now physicists have shown how the mathematical models that describe phase transitions in physical systems might also explain our capacity to hear, see, smell, taste and touch. Mauro Copelli and Osame Kinouchi of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil used a mathematical formula to show how a random network of "excitable elements," such as neurons or axons, have a collective response that is both exquisitely sensitive and broad in scope. When subtle stimuli hit the network, sensitivity is improved because of the ability of one neuron to excite its neighbor. When strong stimuli hit the network, the response is similarly strong, following what are known as power laws--mathematical relationships that do not vary with scale. But although a mathematical model seems to fit a natural phenomenon it does not necessarily follow that the two are actually related, according to some scientists. In a paper published last September in BioEssays, Evelyn Fox Keller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained that just because mathematical models help explain physical systems, like the density of a gas, it does not mean that they also apply to biological systems, even if they seem to fit. "Fitting available data to such distributions is suspiciously easy," she wrote. "Even when the fit is robust, it adds little if anything to our knowledge of the actual architecture of the network." © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 8820 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A scientific paradox linking artificial sweeteners such as saccharin with a sensory experience in which plain water takes on a sweet taste has guided researchers to an increased understanding of how humans detect sweet taste. Reporting in an advance online publication in Nature, scientists from the Monell Chemical Senses Center describe how certain artificial sweeteners, including sodium saccharin and acesulfame-K, paradoxically inhibit sweet taste at high concentrations. The researchers further report that taste perception switches back to sweetness when these high concentrations are rinsed from the mouth with water, resulting in the aftertaste experience known as sweet 'water taste.' The Nature article describes the phenomenon of sweet 'water taste' and then goes on to explain it at the level of the sweet taste receptor. "These findings will open doors for tweaking the sweet taste receptor and finding new sweeteners and inhibitors that can be used both by food industry and in medicine," states senior author Paul A.S. Breslin, PhD, a Monell geneticist. Lead author Veronica Galindo-Cuspinera, PhD, noted while working on a separate study that saccharin – commonly used at low concentrations as an artificial sweetener – loses its initially sweet taste when tasted at high concentrations. Galindo-Cuspinera subsequently observed that strong sweetness returned when the high concentrations of saccharin were rinsed from the mouth with water.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 8819 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) suffer from a variety of behavioral alterations. For example, they may exhibit alterations in sleeping and eating patterns, which may indicate that their circadian systems – which control biological rhythms – have been affected by alcohol exposure during development. A rodent study in the May issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research confirms that alcohol exposure during a period equivalent to the third human trimester influences the ability to synchronize circadian rhythms to light cues. "Human infants with FASD may suffer from sleep disorders, including a reduced amount of sleep, abnormal brain wave activity, and fragmented rapid eye movement and slow-wave sleep, which may be related, in part, to circadian dysregulation," explained Jennifer D. Thomas, associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University and corresponding author for the study. "Disruptions in circadian rhythms can also influence other behaviors, including attention and mood regulation. In fact, individuals with FASD may suffer from depression and other psychopathologies." Although sleeping, eating and mood can be influenced by many factors, she said, the circadian systems are responsible for coordinating multiple physiological systems with environmental cues. "Most of our body processes are regulated in the circadian fashion," concurred David Earnest, a professor in the department of neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at Texas A&M University Health Sciences Center. "We know that these circadian rhythms are important in human health, although we still need to fully determine how alterations in circadian rhythmicity are linked to human mental and physical disorders."

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 8818 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Celeste Biever Retinal implant AN IMPLANT that squirts chemicals into the back of your eye may not sound like much fun. But a solar-powered chip that stimulates retinal cells by spraying them with neurotransmitters could restore sight to blind people. Unlike other implants under development that apply an electric charge directly to retinal cells, the device does not cause the cells to heat up. It also uses very little power, so it does not need external batteries. The retina, which lines the back and sides of the eyeball, contains photoreceptor cells that release signalling chemicals called neurotransmitters in response to light. The neurotransmitters pass into nerve cells on top of the photoreceptors, from where the signals are relayed to the brain via a series of electrical and chemical reactions. In people with retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, the photoreceptors become damaged, ultimately causing blindness. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 8817 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KATE ZERNIKE A Food and Drug Administration statement on Thursday denying any medical benefits of marijuana reinforced the divide between federal officials and the states that have approved the drug's use to ease some medical conditions. "It's consistent with the long-held federal view on this medicine, and that is that marijuana is the equivalent of heroin and cocaine," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer. "California voters disagree." State officials said the announcement would not affect their laws. But they and federal officials said it clarified the federal government's intention to continue enforcing its laws against marijuana, even in states that allow it for medical purposes. "It's a very good statement so that people can clearly see what the policy of the United States government is," said Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. While it has always been the drug enforcement agency's policy to enforce laws against marijuana, Ms. Waite said, "now it's clearly out there, so that people don't have to look everywhere to figure this out." Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8816 - Posted: 04.22.2006

Bruce Bower It lurks in the mind's dark basement, secretly shaping our opinions, attitudes, and stereotypes. This devious manipulator does its best to twist our behavior to its nefarious end. Its stock in trade: stirring up racial prejudice and a host of other pernicious preconceptions about members of various groups. Upstairs, our conscious mind ignores this pushy cellar dweller and assumes that we're decent folk whose actions usually reflect good intentions. Welcome to the disturbing world of implicit bias, where people's preferences for racial, ethnic, and other groups lie outside their awareness and often clash with their professed beliefs about those groups. In the past 15 years, most social psychologists have come to agree that implicit biases, also known as unconscious attitudes, play an often-unnoticed role in our lives. Researchers study implicit biases using any of several techniques, such as tracking participants' feelings and behaviors after subliminally showing them pictures of black or old people. However, one measure—the Implicit Association Test, or IAT—has proved especially popular. Since its introduction in 1998, more than 250 IAT-related studies have been published. More than 3 million IATs have been completed on a Web site (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) established by the test's major proponents—Anthony G. Greenwald of the University of Washington in Seattle, Mahzarin R. Banaji of Harvard University, and Brian A. Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Other online venues run by organizations concerned about various types of discrimination also offer the IAT to visitors. Copyright ©2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 8815 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Peter Weiss A new type of eyeglasses with electrically adjustable focus might someday render bifocals and reading glasses obsolete, the device's inventors say. So far, the researchers have made a battery-powered prototype with close-up focus that flicks on and off with a switch. Future versions of the eyeglasses may incorporate a distance sensor to automatically adjust the focus as the viewer's gaze changes between far and near viewing, says one of the inventors, electrical engineer David L. Mathine of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Most people by their late 40s can no longer focus on close objects. This visual defect is known as presbyopia. The company PixelOptics of Roanoke, Va., plans to create a commercial version of the electrically adjusted eyeglasses to market to presbyopic people, who typically wear bifocals, trifocals, or graded lenses. Worldwide, about 50 million people per year become presbyopic, according to the company's Web site. In bifocals, some portion of the lens remains unfocused for the distance of interest at any given time, notes Mathine. In the new eyeglasses, the entire lens switches to the desired focus. For close vision, for instance, "you don't have just the bottom half of your eyeglasses. You get the whole view," he says. Copyright ©2006 Science Service

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 8814 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Fears of a link between aluminium and Alzheimer's disease have been reignited by the case of a British woman who died of the illness 16 years after an industrial accident polluted her local drinking water. An autopsy on Carole Cross's brain showed that she was suffering from a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's when she died in May 2004, and also revealed the presence of high levels of aluminium in her tissues. The researchers who investigated her brain cannot say whether the aluminium was the cause, but point out that the woman had no family history of dementia. The polluting incident occurred in 1988 when a truck driver mistakenly emptied some 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate — used in the early stages of wastewater treatment — into a tank containing drinking water destined for the village of Camelford in Cornwall, UK. An estimated 20,000 people may have been exposed to high levels of the chemical for several weeks. Concerned residents are waiting to see whether more people will be similarly affected. Anecdotal reports state that several other villagers are suffering from dementia. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 8813 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer An intense battery of medical and psychological tests of people with chronic fatigue syndrome has strengthened the idea that the mysterious ailment is actually a collection of five or more conditions with varying genetic and environmental causes, scientists reported yesterday. But though the syndrome comes in many flavors, these experts said, the new work also points to an important common feature: The brains and immune systems of affected people do not respond normally to physical and psychological stresses. The researchers predicted that continued clarification of the precise genes and hormones involved will lead to better diagnostic tests and therapies for the ailment, which may affect close to 1 million Americans. "This is a very important step forward in the field of chronic fatigue syndrome research," said Julie L. Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which sponsored the project. The new findings come from the largest clinical trial ever to focus on people with the syndrome, a debilitating condition accompanied by unexplained extreme fatigue, memory and concentration problems, sleep disorders and chronic pain. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8812 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS WASHINGTON, — The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of highly regarded scientists. Susan Bro, an agency spokeswoman, said Thursday's statement resulted from a past combined review by federal drug enforcement, regulatory and research agencies that concluded "smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States and is not an approved medical treatment." Ms. Bro said the agency issued the statement in response to numerous inquiries from Capitol Hill but would probably do nothing to enforce it. "Any enforcement based on this finding would need to be by D.E.A. since this falls outside of F.D.A.'s regulatory authority," she said. Eleven states have legalized medicinal use of marijuana, but the Drug Enforcement Administration and the director of national drug control policy, John P. Walters, have opposed those laws. A Supreme Court decision last year allowed the federal government to arrest anyone using marijuana, even for medical purposes and even in states that have legalized its use. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8811 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Whether it's from surgery, an accident or stroke, when the brain is injured, the damage is usually permanent. Most of the time, the cells of the brain don't grow back. But two researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working to change that. "The problem we're trying to solve with the research is how to reconnect disconnected parts of the brain," says one of the researchers, neuroscientist Rutledge Ellis-Behnke. He and professor Gerald Schneider of the M.I.T. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences are using nanotechnology to create tiny bridges that can help brain cells grow back together. The bridges assemble themselves from protein fragments called peptides, which are injected into the injured area. The bridges are similar to the normal structures among brain cells. "It would be easy to fool an anatomist into thinking that this was part of the brain," says Schneider about these bridges that are smaller than the width of a human hair. He adds that "it's functioning like it's part of the natural material that fills spaces between the nerve cells in the brain." The peptide nano-bridges are not permanent. After a while they dissolve. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Regeneration; Stroke
Link ID: 8809 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan S. Lang A honeybee swarm bivouacs on a tree branch, waiting for scout bees to select candidate sites for a new home, deliberate among the choices and then reach a verdict -- a process "complicated enough to rival the dealings of any department committee," says Cornell biologist Thomas Seeley. When 10,000 honeybees fly the coop to hunt for a new home, usually a tree cavity, they have a unique method of deciding which site is right: With great efficiency they narrow down the options and minimize bad decisions. Their technique, says Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley, includes coalition building until a quorum develops. The Seeley group's study, which is published in the May-June issue of American Scientist, might well be used to help improve human group decision-making, he says. Scientists had known that honeybee scouts "waggle dance" to report on food. Seeley and his colleagues, however, have confirmed that they dance to report on real estate, too, as part of their group decision-making process. The better the housing site, the stronger the waggle dance, the researchers found, and that prompts other scouts to visit a recommended site. If they agree it's a good choice, they also dance to advertise the site and revisit it frequently.

Keyword: Animal Communication
Link ID: 8808 - Posted: 04.21.2006

By Katherine Unger Written words have only been around for about 6000 years, but that hasn't kept some scientists from believing that there's a specific part of our brain devoted to reading. Now this controversial idea is getting an important piece of support from a man whose surgical procedure may have disrupted this region. The existence of a brain region dedicated to reading was first proposed by neurologist Jules Déjerine in the late 19th century. Brain scans appear to support the hypothesis: The region--called the visual word form area (VWFA) and located in the rear of the brain's left hemisphere--lights up when individuals read words. But skeptics note that the same thing happens when subjects gaze upon faces or objects, indicating that the area isn't specialized to process only written language. A chance opportunity allowed neuroscientists led by Laurent Cohen of INSERM, the Université Paris and the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in France to put the theory to the test. The team became aware of a man who was about to have brain surgery to treat epilepsy. The surgery was to remove a small area next to the VWFA, so Cohen's team carried out a set of experiments. Prior to the surgery, the man took 600 milliseconds to read common words of three to nine letters. The word's length didn't affect the speed of his response. Functional MRIs and electrodes implanted in the man's brain showed activation specifically in the VWFA when he read words; distinctly different areas lit up when he named objects such as tools. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 8807 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News — A rat nerve cell attached to a semiconductor chip has exchanged a signal with the chip, an achievement that could lead to organic computers that process information like a brain, say researchers. In the long term, the technology also could lead to prosthetic limbs that are controlled by a person's brain and nerves. "If you know how single neurons couple to a chip, you can learn how whole tissue couples to a chip," said Peter Fromherz, professor of biophysics at Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany and coordinator of the so-called NaChip project, which also involves researchers from the University of Padua, Italy, and the University of Zurich, Switzerland. To make the nerve cell and the chip compatible, the researchers worked with German microchip company Infineon to modify the chip's surface. The resulting one-millimeter chip has more than 16,000 transistors that match up with ion-carrying channels in the nerve cell. The chips were specially coated so that they could be immersed in a solution meant to keep the nerve cell alive. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 8806 - Posted: 06.24.2010