Michael Hopkin Chimpanzees may be more eager to help than we thought. Research suggests that the apes can understand when a person is in need, and are unexpectedly willing to give aid. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have shown that young chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) will pick up a marker pen and hand it back after their keeper has 'accidentally' dropped it. The study shows that chimpanzees understand when another is in need, and can help out if they are in a position to do so, according to Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, who publish the research in Science1. The results are surprising because chimpanzees, although intelligent, are not regarded as being very cooperative unless they get a clear benefit. Last year, anthropologist Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that chimpanzees showed no preference for getting food for the group over eating solo, even when it cost them nothing (see "Chimps fall short on friendship"). So are chimps helpful or not? It is unclear, says Silk. She points out that her experiment looked at interactions between chimps, whereas the new study looked at chimps and humans. Things are further complicated by the fact that the new experiment involved interactions between young chimps, aged between three and five years, and their caregivers, who are more like parental figures. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8604 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists say they have identified a section of the brain which, when damaged by stress hormones, can cause the onset of dementia. High levels of stress hormone have been found to shrink the anterior cingulate cortex at the centre of the brain. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh say brain scans showing a shrunken cingulate indicates you could develop Alzheimer's in the future. It is the first time the link has been found in human brains. The study's author, Dr Alasdair MacLullich said he was "very excited" by the £130,000 study's findings. "If this part of the brain is smaller then you are likely to have higher levels of stress hormone and are at higher risk of developing dementia and depression," he said. "This could be a marker, an indicator that your brain might go wrong in the future." A team of six researchers looked at stress hormone levels in 20 healthy male volunteers aged between 65 and 70 for the study. It found that people with a smaller anterior cingulate cortex had higher levels of stress hormones. Doctors have known for years that certain diseases common in ageing like Alzheimer's disease and depression can be associated with shrinkage of the brain. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 8603 - Posted: 03.01.2006

by David Cohn • Some habits are hard to break. Others become addictions. The latter group could be a figment of the past thanks to a new universal addiction-blocking substance developed by an international research effort led by the University of Saskatchewan. The team created a peptide, a short chain of amino acids, from PTEN, a natural enzyme that acts on the ventral tegmental area, the reward center of the brain, where most drugs take effect. The peptide blocks the natural rewards that an addict experiences from an increase in serotonin—a neurotransmitter associated with learning, sleep and mood—when taking his or her substance of choice. The regulation of serotonin then modulates the levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter active in the brain’s pleasure system. "Our peptide decreases the activity of dopamine neurons located in the brain region responsible for rewards," said Xia Zhang, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan. The study published in the March issue of Nature Medicine found that rats given large doses of both nicotine and THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, for eight days straight would show no signs of addiction or withdrawal when treated with the peptide after their course of the illicit substance ran out. © Copyright 2006 Seed Media Group, LLC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8602 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Notebook by Mick Hume TO BE HONEST, I never expected to find myself in bed with Esther Rantzen. I now discover, however, that she is a patron of Patients’ Voice for Medical Advance (until recently known as Seriously Ill for Medical Research), a fine organisation that defends animal experimentation. Which puts us on the same side on one of the most divisive issues of the day. “Whose side are you on?” is a famous slogan of the old Left-Right divide, which you don’t often hear in our age of soulless managerial politics when, as the Monty Python song predicted, accountancy really does seem to make the world go around. But there are different divisions that matter today, drawing new lines in the political and cultural sands. One such divide is embodied by two protests around animal research due to take place in Oxford tomorrow. On one side will be the usual anti-vivisection demonstration against the building of Oxford University’s biomedical research laboratory. On the other side will be a demonstration in support of the lab and animal research. It has been called by a group called Pro-Test, set up by a 16-year-old from Swindon and now run by Oxford students, that stands for “science, reasoned debate, and above all, the welfare of mankind” (www.pro-test.org.uk). Neither of these is likely to be a mass demo. But the clash does symbolise something bigger, and to declare which side you are on is to make a statement about the sort of world in which you want to live. Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 8601 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Unger WASHINGTON, D.C.--Teetotalers, rejoice. Toasting with grape juice may carry brain-sparing benefits, according to research presented here 24 February at the World Parkinson's Congress. In a series of cognitive and motor tests, grape juice-drinking rats outshined their placebo-swilling counterparts, possibly due to an enhanced release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. As many oenophiles are well aware, studies have found that drinking wine lowers the risk of heart disease, possibly by reducing blood pressure or countering the effects of "bad" (LDL) cholesterol. Similar effects have been shown for the dark purple Concord grape juice, which contains polyphenols, a class of antioxidants found in wines. But neuroscientist James Joseph of Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues wanted to see if the compounds in grape juice might also serve to protect or preserve the brain--specifically, the elderly brain. So Joseph's group focused on 19 month- old rats--pretty ancient considering most rats live less than two years. The researchers fed the rodents a diet consisting exclusively of either grape juice (10% or 50%, diluted with water) or a calorie- and flavor-matched placebo. After six weeks, the team tested the rats for motor skills such as balance, stamina, and strength. Rats on the 50% juice diet outperformed those on either the 10% juice diet or the placebo diet; they were able to hang onto a wire for an average 2 seconds longer than the others, for example. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8600 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have identified the neural activity that occurs when the brain “sets the stage” for retaining a memory – a finding that could have important implications for memory research and help determine ways in which people can strengthen memories they want to retain while weakening ones they would rather forget. The results of the study appear as an advance online publication in the journal Nature Neuroscience. In two separate experiments with adults, UCI neuroscientist Michael Rugg, in collaboration with colleagues from University College London, looked at neural activity that preceded the presentation of single words. They found that measures of the activity could predict whether the words would be remembered in a later memory test. In the experiments, Rugg and his colleagues presented a group of young adults with a different word every four or five seconds, requiring them to make a judgment about a specific characteristic of the word, such as whether it referred to a living or a non-living thing. A moment before each word was presented, participants were “cued” with a visual signal that alerted them of the upcoming word. Neural activity caused by the cue was monitored through electroencephalograpy, or EEG, a method by which electrodes attached to the scalp measure underlying brain activity. Later, participants were shown the words again, along with words they had not previously been shown, and were asked to identify which ones had been presented in the first part of the experiment. © Copyright 2002-2006 UC Regents

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8599 - Posted: 06.24.2010

In addition to triggering a depression withdrawal syndrome, repeated defeat by dominant animals leaves a mouse with an enduring molecular scar in its brain that could help to explain why depression is so difficult to cure, suggest researchers funded by National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In mice exposed to this animal model of depression, silencer molecules turned off a gene for a key protein in the brain’s hippocampus. By activating a compensatory mechanism, an antidepressant temporarily restored the animals’ sociability and the protein’s expression, but it failed to remove the silencers. A true cure for depression would likely have to target this persistent stress-induced scar, say the researchers, led by Eric Nestler, M.D., The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who report on their findings online in Nature Neuroscience during the week of February 26, 2005. “Our study provides insight into how chronic stress triggers changes in the brain that are much more long-lived than the effects of existing antidepressants,” explained Nestler. In the study, mice exposed to aggression by a different dominant mouse daily for 10 days became socially defeated; they vigorously avoided other mice, even weeks later. Expression of a representative gene in the hippocampus, a memory hub implicated in depression, plummeted three-fold and remained suppressed for weeks.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 8598 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers has found that a delayed-release stimulant used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be less likely to be abused than other stimulant drugs. Study participants taking therapeutic oral doses of Concerta, a once-daily form of the drug methylphenidate, did not report perceiving and enjoying the drug's subjective effects, features that are associated with a medication's potential for abuse. The report appears in the March 2006 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry. "We know that drugs that cause euphoria are potentially abusable, and euphoria requires rapid delivery to the brain. Using sophisticated PET scan imaging, we were able to examine the rate of delivery of both rapid- and delayed-release formulations of methylphenidate and correlate those results with how the drugs felt to study volunteers," says Thomas Spencer, MD, of the MGH Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit, the paper's lead author. "The ability to show that rate of brain delivery may determine abuse potential is important to our understanding of the safety of different formulations." Methylphenidate and other stimulant drugs used to treat ADHD act by blocking the dopamine transporter, a molecule on brain cells that takes up the neurotransmitter dopamine, raising its level in the brain. Studies have shown that the brains of ADHD patients have abnormal regulation of dopamine, which plays a key role in the control of movement, behavior and attention. While stimulants are effective for controlling ADHD symptoms, the drugs are also subject to abuse, so the current study was designed to compare the abuse potential of two formulations of methylphenidate.

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8597 - Posted: 03.01.2006

Being born very premature can affect a child's personality into adulthood, a study has suggested. Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry studied 18 and 19-year-olds who had been born early, and compared them to those born at full-term. Premature babies, particularly girls, were found to be more likely to be anxious and withdrawn, and potentially at a higher risk of depression. The study is published in the American journal Pediatrics. The researchers assessed 108 young adults who had been born before 33 weeks gestation between 1979 and 1981. They were then compared with 67 people of the same age who were born at full-term. Everyone was asked to complete a personality questionnaire, which included 48 questions such as 'does your mood ever go up or down?' and 'do you enjoy co-operating with others?'. The results suggested those born prematurely had lower levels of a personality trait called 'extraversion', indicating that they may have less confident and outgoing personalities. They also had higher levels of the personality trait 'neuroticism', which indicates increased anxiety, lower mood and lower self-esteem. Girls' personalities were more likely to be affected by being born early. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8596 - Posted: 02.28.2006

ST. LOUIS PARK, Minn. (AP) -- Don Falk stretched his right arm over his head, past the faint marks where a surgeon sank two wires deep in his brain, to show how uncontrollable tremors in his hand used to slap him awake in the morning. It was just one of many difficulties he suffered as his Parkinson's disease advanced. Falk had trouble shaving and walking, and his medications caused his head to twitch awkwardly, making him self-conscious in church. ''It's the day-to-day living that is so hard with Parkinson's,'' he said. In May, Falk, 52, started to get better with the help of an emerging class of implantable medical devices called neuromodulators -- tiny machines that stimulate the central nervous system to treat a host of disorders. Analysts say they could be the next big thing for some of the market's hottest medical technology companies. Of course, the same hurdles that have stood in the way of other medical technologies will have to be overcome, including getting government approvals, securing adequate insurance reimbursements and persuading busy doctors to learn to use the devices. Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 8595 - Posted: 02.28.2006

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Expectant fathers within at least two primate species gradually gain weight during the course of their mate's pregnancy, a new study has found. Researchers observed this classic female pregnancy symptom in common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) and cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus) male primates. The scientists suspect that males in most monogamous primates, including gibbons, some lemurs species and humans, also show signs of pregnancy when their mates are expecting. While the new study represents the first evidence for gradual weight gain in non-human primate expectant fathers, earlier research found that between 11 and 65 percent of all human fathers have experienced some symptoms of pregnancy. The symptoms include weight gain, nausea, headaches, irritability, restlessness, backaches, colds, nervousness and hormonal changes, such as higher levels of the stress-fighting hormone cortisol and the strength-boosting hormone testosterone. Previously it was thought that these were just psychosomatic symptoms. For many such dads, however, it is likely that the changes help them to cope with the rigors of fatherhood once the baby is born. This is particularly important for the doting, yet squirrel-sized, marmoset and tamarin dads, whose job includes toting around their often hefty babies. Copyright © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8594 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Toni Baker A compound found in marijuana won’t make you high but it may help keep your eyes healthy if you’re a diabetic, researchers say. Early studies indicate cannabidiol works as a consummate multi-tasker to protect the eye from growing a plethora of leaky blood vessels, the hallmark of diabetic retinopathy, says Dr. Gregory I. Liou, molecular biologist at the Medical College of Georgia. “We are studying the role of cannabinoid receptors in our body and trying to modulate them so we can defend against diabetic retinopathy,” Dr. Liou says. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in working-age adults and affects nearly 16 million Americans. High glucose levels resulting from unmanaged diabetes set in motion a cascade ultimately causing the oxygen-deprived retina to grow more blood vessels. Ironically, the leaky surplus of vessels can ultimately destroy vision. Dr. Liou, who recently received a $300,000 grant from the American Diabetes Association, wants to intervene earlier in the process, as healthy relationships inside the retina first start to go bad. Copyright Medical College of Georgia

Keyword: Vision; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8593 - Posted: 06.24.2010

As much as neuroscientists know about the neural processes that signal touch, surprisingly little is understood about the neural correlates of conscious perception of tactile sensations. In a new study in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Felix Blankenburg, Jon Driver, and their colleagues turn to a classic somatosensory illusion--called the cutaneous rabbit--that is perfectly suited to decoupling real and illusory touch. In the illusion, a rapid succession of taps is delivered first to the wrist and then to the elbow, which creates the sensation of intervening taps hopping up the arm (hence the illusion's name), even when no physical stimulus is applied at intervening sites on the arm. Blankenburg et al. took advantage of this somatosensory illusion to investigate which brain regions play a role in illusory tactile perceptions. Previous studies had implicated the somatosensory cortex--the region of the cortex that first receives input from sensors in the body--in the rabbit illusion, but did not directly test this possibility. To do this, the authors used state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging technology (called 3T fMRI) to scan the brains of people experiencing the illusion. With the enhanced image quality and resolution of this scanner (deriving from the stronger magnetic field plus a specially customized imaging sequence), the authors show that the same brain sector is activated whether the tactile sensation is illusory or real.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 8592 - Posted: 02.28.2006

Thanks to my new best friend, US District Judge John Jones, public school science teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania may have some space to fill in their lesson plans. In December, in a triumph for sanity over “inanity” (his word), Jones decreed that intelligent design (ID) is not science. Advocates of ID claim that certain biological structures (the eye and the blood-clotting system of humans, for example) are too complex to have arisen via evolution and must have been designed by an intelligent force at work in the universe. ID’ists are unmoved by scientists’ explanations for the step-by-step evolution of these complex structures; for their part, scientists wish that ID’ists would ditch the wishy-washy appeal to an unspecified force and “out” their God. Judge Jones sided with science. He saw ID for precisely what it is, gussied-up religious creationism, and protected young Doverites’ right to learn science in science class. But what about those gaping holes in the lesson plans? Once science teachers trot out the voyage of the Beagle, and all those Galapagos Islands’ tortoises and finches, how else to turn curious young minds toward science? By showing reruns of Gilligan’s Island, that’s how. The brilliance of this curricular innovation came to me while reading Robert Sapolsky’s essay in the John Brockman collection, Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist. Readers of a certain age will join Sapolsky (born in 1957) and me (born in 1956) in remembering the Professor character from this show. Marooned on an island with Gilligan, Skipper, and assorted others, the Professor was a scientific know-it-all for the shipwrecked set.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 8591 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jonah Lehrer • Posted February 23, 2006 12:37 AM Elizabeth Gould overturned one of the central tenets of neuroscience. Now she’s building on her discovery to show that poverty and stress may not just be symptoms of society, but bound to our anatomy. Professor Elizabeth Gould has a picture of a marmoset on her computer screen. Marmosets are a new world monkey, and Gould has a large colony living just down the hall. Although her primate population is barely three years old, Gould is clearly smitten, showing off these photographs like a proud parent. Marmosets are the ideal experimental animal: a primate brain trapped inside the body of a rat. They recognize themselves in the mirror, form elaborate dominance hierarchies and raise their young cooperatively. If you can look past their rodent-like stature and punkish pompadour, marmosets can seem disconcertingly human. In her laboratory at Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, Gould is determined to create a marmoset environment that takes full advantage of their innate intelligence. She doesn’t believe in metal cages. “We are housing our marmosets in large, enriched enclosures,” she says, “and with a variety of objects to support foraging. These are social animals, and it’s important to let them be social. Basically, we want to bring our experimental conditions closer to the wild.” © Copyright 2006 Seed Media Group, LLC.

Keyword: Neurogenesis
Link ID: 8590 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For the first time, researchers have linked mutations in a gene that regulates how potassium enters cells to a neurodegenerative disease and to another disorder that causes mental retardation and coordination problems. The findings may lead to new ways of treating a broad range of disorders, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The study was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). "This type of gene has never before been linked to nerve cell death," says Stefan Pulst, M.D., of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the new study. The report will appear in the February 26, 2006, advance online publication of Nature Genetics.* In the study, the researchers looked for the gene that caused a neurodegenerative movement disorder called spinocerebellar ataxia in a Filipino family. This disorder typically appears in adulthood and causes loss of neurons in the brain's cerebellum, resulting in progressive loss of coordination (ataxia). Dr. Pulst and his colleagues traced the disease in this family to mutations in a gene called KCNC3. The gene codes for one of the proteins that form potassium channels – pore-like openings in the cell membrane that control the flow of potassium ions into the cell. The researchers found a different KCNC3 mutation in a previously identified French family with a disease called spinocerebellar ataxia type 13, which causes childhood-onset ataxia, cerebellar degeneration, and mild mental retardation.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 8589 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The question of why organisms have sex may seem trivially easy – any mortified kid who's sat through a birds-and-bees lecture knows that it's to reproduce. But biologists have for many decades struggled to puzzle out an ironic quirk of sexual reproduction: since males cannot produce offspring, sexual species have only half the raw reproductive capacity of asexual ones, in which every individual can crank out the young'uns. Despite decades of research, biologists still have not pinned down the theory of how sexual reproduction – which seems to work out okay in the real world – makes up for this huge cost. A study of the tiny water flea published in Science last week provides what might be the first direct evidence of why sex is so good – on a species level. The water flea was practically born for such research because it lives both in sexual groups and in asexual ones, which branched off from sexual groups at various times in the past. Two Indiana University biologists, Susanne Paland and Michael Lynch, looked at the genetic signatures of various flea populations from Illinois to Nova Scotia to see how the sexual and asexual groups differed. Their research showed that after the asexual groups stopped reproducing sexually, they all began picking up negative mutations – mutations that hurt their owners in the natural-selection game – faster than their sexual counterparts. So although the loner fleas could reproduce faster, over time, their gene pools became less desirable than ones who never broke up with sex. © 2005 Discover Media LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 8588 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Anabolic steroids not only make teens more aggressive, but may keep them that way into young adulthood. The effect ultimately wears off but there may be other, lasting consequences for the developing brain. These findings, published in February's Behavioral Neuroscience, also showed that aggression rose and fell in synch with neurotransmitter levels in the brain's aggression control region. Behavioral Neuroscience is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Neuroscientists are deeply concerned about rising adolescent abuse of anabolic-androgenic steroids (AASs), given the National Institute on Drug Abuse's estimate that nearly half a million eighth- and 10th-grade students abuse AASs each year. Not only do steroids set kids up for heavier use of steroids and other drugs later in life, but long-term users can suffer from mood swings, hallucinations and paranoia; liver damage; high blood pressure; as well as increased risk of heart disease, stroke and some types of cancer. Withdrawal often brings depression, and recent research suggests that some AASs may even be habit-forming. Overseen by Richard Melloni Jr., PhD, of Northeastern University in Boston, the current study of 76 adolescent hamsters compared how individual hamsters behaved when another hamster was put into their cages. Normally mild-mannered hamsters still defend their turf, learning aggression during puberty by play-fighting, much like humans. Their roughhousing normally includes wrestling and nibbling – pretty tame stuff.

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8587 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Ever struggled to recall something you knew you ought to remember? Part of the problem might be that your brain just wasn't ready to store the memory in the first place. Neuroscientists have discovered that how successfully you form memories depends on your frame of mind not just during and after the event in question, but also before it. "People didn't realize that what the brain does before something happens influences the memory of that event," says Leun Otten of University College London, UK, who led the research. "They looked just at the response." But it turns out that if your brain is 'primed' to receive information, you will have less trouble recalling it later. By scanning the brain during these memory tests, the researchers found they could see this priming in action. By watching brain activity they could predict whether the participant would remember a subsequent event, before the event itself had happened. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8586 - Posted: 06.24.2010

'Staggeringly stronger' immune response may be why socially isolated women seem to be less susceptible to illness and death than isolated men. Gender difference in immune inflammatory response may be related to demands of motherhood. Socially isolated female rats that experience stress generate a "staggeringly stronger" response to an immune challenge than similarly isolated and stressed males, according to a new study. The difference in the female rats' responses may stem from the demands of motherhood, researchers speculate in the study "Social isolation and the inflammatory response: sex differences in the enduring effects of a prior stressor" by Gretchen L. Hermes, Anthony Montag and Martha K. McClintock of the University of Chicago, and Louis Rosenthal of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The study appears in the February issue of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, published by the American Physiological Society. The study reinforces a growing body of evidence on health disparities between men and women and may shed light on why socially isolated men are more vulnerable to disease and death than isolated women, Hermes said.

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8585 - Posted: 02.27.2006