By ERIC NAGOURNEY Millions of Americans have drunk alcohol on the job or before going to work, a new study suggests. Much has been written about how alcohol use and abuse affect work performance through absenteeism and other problems. This study, in the current Journal of Studies on Alcohol, set out instead to look at the extent of alcohol use and impairment. The researchers, led by Michael R. Frone of the Research Institute on Addictions at the State University of New York at Buffalo, surveyed 2,800 adults in 48 states, asking how often they drank alcohol within two hours of reporting to work, how often they drank it on the job and how often they worked feeling the effects of alcohol or having a hangover. In all, 15 percent of the people surveyed said that over the previous year, they had fallen into one of those categories at least once, with young people and those working nontraditional shifts most likely to do so. Among the jobs most affected by alcohol use are those in sales, entertainment, sports, media and maintenance. While the findings suggest that alcohol use or impairment at work is not commonplace, the incidence is still great enough to warrant closer attention from employers, Dr. Frone said. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8404 - Posted: 01.17.2006

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs - three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs - to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy. The study was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 80's that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue. Other researchers have shown that dogs, whose noses can pick up odors in the low parts-per-billion range, can be trained to detect skin cancers or react differently to dried urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer, but never with such remarkable consistency. The near-perfection in the clinic's study, as Dr. Donald Berry, the chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, put it, "is off the charts: there are no laboratory tests as good as this, not Pap tests, not diabetes tests, nothing." Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 8403 - Posted: 01.17.2006

By JOHN SCHWARTZ For Belding's ground squirrels, it's a smell world, after all. New research reveals at least five sources of body scent that the squirrels, Spermophilus beldingi, use as a symphony of smell to identify one another. Individual identification is important, said Jill M. Mateo, an assistant professor in the department of comparative human development at the University of Chicago and the author of the study. The squirrels can live a decade or more and dwell in high density. They develop distinctive personalities, laid back or cantankerous, so "it pays to be able to know who's who," Dr. Mateo said. Other scientists have studied the many ways social animals identify one another, and research by Robert E. Johnston of Cornell has yielded similar results with hamsters. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8402 - Posted: 01.17.2006

By Gregory Mott If recent reports are to be believed, those sleek iPod earbuds may carry risks beyond marking wearers as mugger-bait. As if to rain on Apple's holiday parade -- the company reported sales of 14 million iPods in the last quarter of 2005, bringing total sales for the product to more than 42 million -- audiologists and other hearing experts have been issuing warnings in recent weeks that improper use of iPods and other personal stereo systems can dramatically heighten risk of hearing loss, particularly in young people. Is this just a case of advocacy groups seizing upon a teachable moment to fly their banners -- or is there really a chance that being able to hold your entire music library in your palm can come at the cost of your hearing? Time for a reality check. Audiology experts agree that hearing loss is increasing in the United States. According to widely cited figures from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), the number of Americans age 3 and older with some form of auditory disorder has more than doubled since 1971, from 13.2 million to about 30 million today. Of those, one-third are said to be people with noise-induced hearing loss. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 8401 - Posted: 06.24.2010

This column is brought to you care of what the Australians call a "shonky molly-dooker." Not so much a left-hander as a leftish-hander. What I do is write and draw with my left hand but approach everything else the – ha-ha – right way. This anomaly has led me, over the years, to pay more than passing attention to what you might call the science of left-handedness. If it can find a believable explanation for why shonky molly-dookerness should persist in human evolution, maybe an extension of that reasoning will tell me something essential about myself. That's why my eyes opened when I started to read a recent paper published in the journal Brain by Sandra Witelson and her colleagues at McMaster University. They were interested in coming up with an as accurate as possible measure of the relationship of brain size to braininess. They approached people dying of cancer in a Hamilton hospital and asked whether they would take IQ tests. Afterwards, the scientists did an autopsy on the brains to see how volume compared with IQ score. The test group was divided between men and women and right- and left-handers. The handedness was measured because previous evidence has accumulated that there might be relationship between handedness and brain size. © CBC 2006

Keyword: Laterality; Intelligence
Link ID: 8400 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Every morning, sometime between packing four school lunches, sorting through hats and mittens, and making sure her kids' homework is in order, Luanne Hughes takes a light shower. For thirty minutes 38-year-old Hughes basks in the rays of a 10,000 candlepower light. Hughes is among an estimated four to six percent of Americans that develop seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression that sets in as the winter days grow short. People who develop seasonal affective disorder, also aptly known as SAD, begin to have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, they lose interest in social activities, tend to withdraw, and generally feel lackluster and blue. Other statistics suggests that up to 20 percent of Americans develop minor symptoms of SAD each winter. Hughes says her daily light shower is a way she can literally brighten her mood without relying on medications. "I just don't like being on drugs," she says. Light therapy is well established as a treatment for SAD. But doctors now have new recommendations for when SAD patients should receive light therapy. Columbia University psychologist and a leading SAD expert Michael Terman, and his colleague and wife Jiuan Su Terman, reported in the journal CNS Spectrums that SAD patients should time their daily dose of light therapy — ideally thirty minutes in front of a 10,000-lux light — according to their own biological clocks. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 8399 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Pearson The appetite-control hormone leptin staves off symptoms of stress in rats, and might lead to new ways to fight human depression, say researchers in the United States. Leptin is famed for controlling our weight and appetite. But the hormone, which is released by fat cells and gives the brain a reading of our fat stores, is also thought to act in brain areas involved in emotion. To explore this link, Xin-Yun Lu and her colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio stressed rats by, for example, separating them from other animals. The rats' leptin levels plunged at the same time that they showed behavioural changes such as losing interest in a sugary drink, the kind of apathy that is often associated with human depression. The team found that injections of leptin into otherwise healthy animals were as good as at least one known treatment in a test widely used to screen for new antidepressants. In this test, the researchers showed that leptin could help the animals to evade depression-induced behaviour when forced to swim. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 8398 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Regular exercise may reduce the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in the elderly by as much as 40%, according to a new study. And the effect is even more pronounced for those who are more frail, say the researchers. The US team, at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, studied a group of 1740 people aged 65 or over, all of whom began the study with good cognitive function. The participants reported how many days per week they had exercised for 15 minutes or more, in activities varying from walking to callisthenics to swimming. Their physical function was also recorded, including grip strength and walking speed. Each was evaluated again every two years and tests were performed to determine whether they had developed dementia. After six years, 158 people in the group had developed dementia, and 107 of these had Alzheimer’s. But those who had exercised at least three times a week were on average 38% less likely to have developed dementia than those exercising less than three times a week. "Those who had scored the lowest on the physical function tests, showed the most marked reduction in risk of dementia if they exercised,” says Paul Crane, one of the research team, from the University of Washington in Seattle. Amongst those with good levels of exercise, “people who scored 10 out of 16 in the physical tests had an average 42% reduction in risk of dementia, compared to 25% for those who scored 12 out of 16." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 8397 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer A team of Icelandic researchers has identified a gene that may play a part in up to one-fifth of the cases of Type 2 diabetes in the United States. The gene's function is not known for certain but it appears to play a role in the regulation of other genes involved in hormone secretion. The discovery was made by scientists at a Reykjavik company called DeCode Genetics Inc., which seeks the genetic underpinnings of disease using Iceland's population as a research tool. Iceland is a fruitful place for such work because the population is small and ethnically homogeneous, and has extremely good medical records. The findings were published online yesterday in the journal Nature Genetics. With diabetes, the body cannot adequately regulate glucose, its main fuel. In Type 1 diabetes, the body does not make enough insulin, the hormone that helps move sugar molecules from the bloodstream into cells. In Type 2 the body makes insulin, but cells resist its action. About 90 percent of diabetes cases are Type 2, with overweight people at increased risk. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Obesity
Link ID: 8396 - Posted: 06.24.2010

From a simple trick to a simply stunning feat, magic captivates us. But scientists are starting to pull the curtain back on how magicians dupe us with sleight of hand tricks. Turns out, it's not our eyes that buy in to sleight of hand tricks, but our brain's parietal cortex — the region that helps us focus. Because magicians know how to keep it occupied our eyes can fail to notice dramatic visual changes, says Nilli Lavie, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London in the United Kingdom. "A magician will load your eye by [performing] a dramatic act, including hand waving," she says. "And as you're focusing say on the magician's left hand you'll fail to notice the magical trick that's occurring with the right hand." Such David Copperfield-like deceptions induce what psychologists call change blindness, a phenomenon where people fail to notice dramatic changes because their attention is being held elsewhere. To test change blindness, Lavie used a classic attention test called the face test. As faces flash in succession and change onscreen, volunteers press a key to indicate when they see a change. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 8395 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Susan Milius No insult intended to human teachers, but a research team in England says that the first clear demonstration of true teaching among other animals comes from a species without much of a brain—an ant. A variety of animals do things that onlookers learn to copy, but biologists have a stricter definition for true teaching, explains Nigel R. Franks of the University of Bristol in England. First, teachers do a task less efficiently than they would outside the classroom. Second, pupils of a true teacher learn faster than they would by themselves. Franks and his Bristol colleague Tom Richardson added another requirement: feedback between teacher and student. The tiny ant, Temnothorax albipennis, from England's southern coast, meets the criteria, Franks and Richardson report in the Jan. 12 Nature. In lab tests, the species' teachers guided nest mates to a food source (To see a video of this behavior, click here). "One would have expected to see teaching in chimpanzees or [some other primate], but for the first fairly strong evidence of it to come from ants is surprising and interesting," says Bennett G. Galef Jr. of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Last year, Galef and his colleagues reported that mother rats didn't teach their young to tell good food from bad in a lab test. Copyright © 2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 8394 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, led by Prof. Michal Schwartz of the Neurobiology Department, has come up with new findings that may have implications in delaying and slowing down cognitive deterioration in old age. The basis for these developments is Schwartz's team's observations, published today in the February issue of Nature Neuroscience, that immune cells contribute to maintaining the brain's ability to maintain cognitive ability and cell renewal throughout life. Until quite recently, it was generally believed that each individual is born with a fixed number of nerve cells in the brain, and that these cells gradually degenerate and die during the person's lifetime and cannot be replaced. This theory was disproved when researchers discovered that certain regions of the adult brain do in fact retain their ability to support and promote cell renewal (neurogenesis) throughout life, especially under conditions of mental stimuli and physical activity. One such brain region is the hippocampus, which subserves certain memory functions. But how the body delivers the message instructing the brain to step up its formation of new cells is yet unknown. The central nervous system (CNS), comprising the brain and spinal cord, has been considered for a long time as "a forbidden city", in which the immune system is denied entry as its activity is perceived as a possible threat to the complex and dynamic nerve cell networks. Furthermore, immune cells that recognize the brain's own components("autoimmune" cells) are viewed as a real danger as they can induce autoimmune diseases.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 8393 - Posted: 01.16.2006

A collaboration, led by Sydney scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and University of New South Wales, has discovered the first risk gene specifically for bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness. This means that people who have a particular form of this gene are twice as likely to develop the disease. Dr Ian Blair, lead author of the research paper published in Molecular Psychiatry, says: “We are the first group in the world to take a multi-faceted approach to identify a bipolar risk gene - we used a number of families, unrelated patients, and therapeutic drug mouse models. Each of these three lines of investigation led us to a gene called FAT.” “We know that the FAT gene codes for a protein that is involved in connecting brain cells together, what we need to do now is find out exactly how the it contributes to the increased risk of bipolar disorder,” explains Dr Blair. Bipolar disorder is a major psychiatric illness affecting around one person in every 50. Tragically, around one in six people suffering from the condition will commit suicide. Mood-stabilising medications are typically prescribed to help control bipolar disorder. Lithium was the first mood-stabilising medication approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of mania. For decades it has been widely prescribed for the treatment bipolar disorder, yet no one knows for sure why it works.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8392 - Posted: 06.24.2010

In fruit flies, pathway differentiates between remembering for an hour or for a day Harvard University biologists have identified a molecular pathway active in neurons that interacts with RNA to regulate the formation of long-term memory in fruit flies. The same pathway is also found at mammalian synapses, and could eventually present a target for new therapeutics to treat human memory loss. The findings will be presented this week on the web site of the journal Cell. Even for a fruit fly, learning and memory are important adaptive tools that facilitate survival in the environment. A fly can learn to avoid what may do it harm, such as a flyswatter, or in the laboratory, an electric shock that happens when it smells a certain odor. "It has been known for some time that learning and long-term memory require synthesis of new proteins, but exactly how protein synthesis activity relates to memory creation and storage has not been clear," says Sam Kunes, professor of molecular and cellular biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "We have been able to monitor, for the first time, the synthesis of protein at the synapses between neurons as an animal learns, and we found a biochemical pathway that determines if and where this protein synthesis happens. This pathway, called RISC, interacts with RNA at synapses to facilitate the protein synthesis associated with forming a stable memory. In fruit flies, at least, this process makes the difference between remembering something for an hour and remembering it for a day or more."

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8391 - Posted: 01.13.2006

Just as a pocket watch requires a complex system of gears and springs to keep it ticking precisely, individual cells have a network of proteins and genes that maintain their own internal clock -- a 24-hour rhythm that, in humans, regulates metabolism, cell division, and hormone production, as well as the wake-sleep cycle. Studying this "circadian" rhythm in fruit flies, which have genes that are similar to our own, scientists have constructed a basic model of how the cellular timekeeper works. But now, a new report in this week's issue of the journal Science turns the old model on its head: By providing a glimpse into living cells, Rockefeller University researchers have uncovered a previously undetected clock inside the circadian clock. The scientists made the finding with a rarely used technique called FRET, which enabled them to follow circadian proteins over an extended period of time and watch the clock as it ticks away in a living cell. At the most basic level, an organism's sleep-wake rhythms are governed by 10 known genes. In the fly, two of those genes -- period and timeless -- produce proteins that fluctuate in a negative feedback loop that takes about 24 hours to complete. At night, two other genes (clock and cycle) stimulate production of Period and Timeless proteins, which begin to accumulate in the cell's cytoplasm. After about six hours, the two proteins move into the nucleus; their presence turns off the genes, which then remain inactive until Period and Timeless degrade and the whole cycle begins anew.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 8390 - Posted: 01.13.2006

Recent research has revealed that brains continue to produce new neurons throughout life, helping create new neural networks. This neurogenesis only takes place in a few specific areas, such as the area in which the brain and spinal column meet. The new cells, however, can migrate throughout the brain and turn up as far away as the olfactory bulb--a cluster of nerve cells at the front surface of the brain responsible for the sense of smell. A recent study in mice has revealed that these neurons make the long and complicated journey by going with the flow of spinal fluid circulating in the brain. Neurologist Kazunobu Sawamoto at Keio University in Japan and an international team of his colleagues used fluorescent dye and India ink to trace the flow of spinal fluid in mice and found that it followed the whiplike waving of hairlike projections known as cilia from cells lining the route. They then tracked neurons as they migrated from region to region of the brain and found that new neurons oriented in the direction of fluid flow rather than the direction of their ultimate destination in the olfactory bulb. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8389 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For some people sweets offer a treat or a little pick-me-up. "It boosts my mood, makes me a little happier and then I can get through my day," says Leanne Mercadante a student in New York. "I feel happy, a little more relaxed." For others it's more of an obsession. "It's just comfortable, just total comfort food," explains Mika De Young, a self-confessed chocoholic. "It makes you happy." "People that are stressed out, have any kind of anxiety, will definitely look to candy for relief," explains Kris Minkstein who meets many a sweet-lover while working at Dylan's Candy Bar in New York City. "When, a lot of times, a customer's had a long day… they'll pretty much indulge. They'll buy a lot of candy." To those of us with our hands in the candy jar, here's some sweet news. Scientists have now shown that sugar can calm the nerves, at least in rats. As reported on ScientificAmerican.com, brain researchers studied rats that were given water sweetened with sucrose — another name for sugar — twice a day for two weeks, as part of their regular nutritionally balanced diet, and compared them to rats that were not. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Obesity; Stress
Link ID: 8388 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The paper referred to is ‘Non-Advertized does not Mean Concealed: Body Odour Changes across the Human Menstrual Cycle’, Jan Havlíček, Radka Dvořáková, Luděk Bartoš and Jaroslav Flegr, Ethology, 112:1, page 81 - January 2006. To view the article in full, visit www.blackwell-synergy.com and Login/Register for free. Click on the My Synergy tab at the top of the screen and then on the blue Access tab. On the next screen type in the access token: ETHJan06 and click Continue. This will activate your free online access to Ethology. The Access Token is valid for 30 days. Next time you want to view the article, Login at Blackwell Synergy, click on the My Synergy tab and a hyperlink to the journal will be listed. For further information about this press release please contact: Jan Havlíček, Charles university in Prague, email address Jan.Havlicek@fhs.cuni.cz Ethology publishes original contributions from all branches of behavioural research on all species of animals, both in the field and lab. It contains scientific articles of general interest in English language that are based on a theoretical framework. A section on "Current issues - perspectives and reviews" is included as well as theoretical investigations, essays on controversial topics and reviews of notable books. Further details of the journal are available at www.blackwellpublishing.com/eth

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8387 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A gene involved in causing bipolar disorder in as many as 10% of patients with the condition has been identified by researchers in Australia. Other teams have previously claimed to have found bipolar susceptibility genes, but this is the first time that the evidence has been close to conclusive, the researchers claim. The work might also explain how lithium, which has been prescribed for bipolar sufferers for more than 30 years, can help patients. But while lithium works for some, one-third to one-half of patients do not benefit from existing treatments – none of which were created specifically for the disorder, which is characterised by extreme mood states. “The long term goal is to get new drug targets that are specific for bipolar disorder,” says team member Ian Blair of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney. The new study of about 1200 patients from Australia, the UK and Bulgaria implicates a gene called Fat on chromosome four. This gene plays a role in cell adhesion in the brain. People with the newly identified polymorphism, or form of this gene, appear to be at twice the risk of developing bipolar disorder, though it is not yet clear exactly why, says Blair. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8386 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Violent computer games may make people more likely to act aggressively, a study says. Previous research has found people who play such games are more likely to be aggressive but some say this just shows violent people gravitate towards them. But a team from the University of Missouri-Columbia said their study which monitored the brain activity of 39 game players suggests a causal link. The findings were published on the New Scientist website. The researchers measured a type of brain activity called the P300 response which reflects the emotional impact of an image. When shown images of real-life violence, people who played violent video games were found to have a diminished response. However, when the same group were shown other disturbing images such as dead animals or ill children they had a much more natural response. When the game players were given the opportunity to punish a pretend opponent those with the greatest reduction in P300 meted out the severest punishments. Psychologist Bruce Bartholow, the lead researcher of the study which will be published in full in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology later this year, said: "As far as I'm aware, this is the first study to show that exposure to violent games has effects on the brain that predict aggressive behaviour. (C)BBC

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 8385 - Posted: 01.12.2006