By CRAIG SMITH ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane. Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact. "It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8369 - Posted: 01.07.2006

By JR Minkel In 2002 a clinical trial of an experimental Alzheimer's vaccine was halted when a few patients began experiencing brain inflammation, a result of the immune system mounting an attack against the body. Now some researchers claim that inducing a mild autoimmune reaction could actually protect the central nervous system from a spectrum of neurodegenerative conditions, from glaucoma and spinal cord injury to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. "This is a hot-button issue right now," says Howard Gendelman of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. It all started with glaucoma. Once thought to result primarily from high pressure in the eyeball constricting the optic nerve, the disease has lately come to be seen as a form of neurodegeneration, propagating from the injured optic nerve to healthy cells in the brain. Before monkey studies had demonstrated as much, neuroimmunologist Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, observed in the late 1990s that crushing a small portion of a rat optic nerve creates a large zone of sickened cells. She and her team also found that T cells, the immune system's attackers, gathered at these wounds. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Regeneration
Link ID: 8368 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carolyn Gramling Pound for pound, females appear to be better at holding their liquor than males, and now scientists may have found one reason why. A new study in rats suggests that hormone levels in the brain may mediate alcohol's potency, giving females a leg up at certain times during their hormonal cycle. The gender gap in alcohol metabolism is no secret. Women metabolize alcohol more slowly than men and that makes them more susceptible to alcoholic liver disease, heart muscle damage, and brain damage. Rat studies suggest that males and females in their teenage years are equally affected by the equivalent of a stiff drink, but females are less sensitive to alcohol's sedative powers when they become adults. And, given an open "tab," female rats drink more than the males, but their consumption varies across their hormonal cycle. These findings suggest that hormone levels may mediate alcohol's potency, say H. Scott Swartzwelder of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. To examine this link more closely, Swartzwelder and colleagues studied the sedative effects of alcohol by injecting the equivalent of about 20 drinks of alcohol into adolescent and adult rats of both genders and throughout the females' estrous cycle. The researchers then observed how long it took for the rats to stand up on all four feet from a prone position. © 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8367 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Dennis O'Brien Do you generally trust other people? How do you react when you're frightened? Are you faithful to your spouse? The answer to these loaded questions may be tied to a natural chemical known mainly for helping mothers give birth. It's called oxytocin, and it's released by the brain during labor and to stimulate milk during breast feeding. Doctors have used a synthetic version for decades to induce contractions in pregnant women. Researchers also have linked increased levels of the so-called "attachment hormone" to sexual activity and the reaction to a good massage. "It's pretty wild stuff," said Dr. Thomas Insel, an oxytocin expert who is director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Last month, NIMH researchers published research involving 15 men whose brains were scanned after they sniffed oxytocin and then viewed several photos of threatening or frightened faces. The scans recorded two-thirds less activity in their amygdalae - the brain region that registers fear - than a control group that wasn't exposed to oxytocin. Differences were greatest when the men looked at threatening faces, suggesting the hormone plays a key role in regulating fear. © 2006 by The Baltimore Sun.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 8366 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Babies exposed to certain infections shortly before and after birth have a greater risk of cerebral palsy, Australian research suggests. Scientists tested over 1,300 babies, including 443 with cerebral palsy, for viruses, including the herpes group B virus, which can cross the placenta. The British Medical Journal study showed the cerebral palsy risk doubled with exposure to herpes group B virus. Cerebral palsy can cause physical impairments and mobility problems. It results from the failure of a part of the brain to develop before birth or in early childhood or brain damage and affects one in 400 births. The team from the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital found exposure to viral infections was common in all newborns - especially if they were born premature. This implied infections before birth may also be linked to pre-term delivery, the researchers said. But the team concluded only exposure to the herpes B virus, which causes chicken pox and shingles, seemed to be linked with cerebral palsy. A different herpes virus, group A, causes common cold sores and genital herpes. However, the researchers added that other factors such as growth restriction, clinical events and genetic susceptibility to infections could be a factor and plan to look at these in further research. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 8365 - Posted: 01.07.2006

Female hormones circulating in the brain determine masculine behavior, at least in mice. Estrogen--the quintessential female hormone responsible for regulating the reproductive cycle--turns lady mice into wannabe male mice when it is allowed to penetrate the brain during development, according to new research. Neuroscientist Julie Bakker of the University of Liege in Belgium and her colleagues proved this in the course of solving one of the longstanding riddles of brain development. Although it had long been known that a certain protein--alpha-fetoprotein (AFP)--plays a key role in mouse brain development by binding to estrogen, it was unclear whether AFP facilitates the development of female brains by carrying the hormone or simply by blocking it from entering the brain. The scientists used female mice incapable of producing AFP and set them loose in a Plexiglass aquarium with a sexually active male. To give them extra incentive to mate, they also received injections and capsules of female hormones. But, unlike their wild cousins, the AFP-deficient mice showed little interest in the male's advances and their brains had fewer cells devoted to producing certain chemicals critical to reproduction, just like males. Furthermore, when placed in a cage with a sexually receptive female, the mice without AFP tried to mimic their male counterparts by mounting the female and engaging in pelvic thrusting. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8364 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new device for detecting suspicious odors has an unusual component. Its brain consists of five tiny trained wasps. Their trainer, agricultural engineer Glen Rains, admits the idea may sound far-fetched at first. "I initially thought some people would kind of look at it like uh some kind of like a flea circus type thing," says Rains, associate professor at the University of Georgia. But as he wrote in the journal Biotechnology Progress, the sensor is cheaper to use than trained dogs and more sensitive than some electronic noses. Rains uses parasitic wasps that don't have stingers but do have sensitive sniffers. They've been studied for years for use in biological pest control. "We were trying to come up with ways to improve their efficiency for foraging… it turned out that they use their sense of smell to find food and hosts, filter out all this information they find in the field very, very efficiently," Rains says. Further study showed that the wasps actually learn odors in the field as they get positive or negative reinforcement. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 8363 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A protein that seems to be pivotal in lifting depression has been discovered by a Nobel Laureate researcher funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). "Mice deficient in this protein, called p11, display depression-like behaviors, while those with sufficient amounts behave as if they have been treated with antidepressants," explained Paul Greengard, Ph.D., a Rockefeller University neuroscientist who received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about the workings of such neuronal signaling systems. He and his colleagues found that p11 appears to help regulate signaling of the brain messenger chemical serotonin, a key target of antidepressants, which has been implicated in psychiatric illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorders. They report on their findings in the January 6, 2005 issue of Science. Brain cells communicate with each other by secreting messengers, such as serotonin, which bind to receptors located on the surface of receiving cells. Serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), medications commonly prescribed for anxiety and depression, compensate for reduction in serotonin signaling by boosting levels and binding of serotonin to receptors. Previous studies have suggested that serotonin receptors are essential in regulating moods and in mediating the effects of SSRIs, but given the complexity of the serotonin system, exactly how these receptors work remains a mystery.

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8362 - Posted: 01.05.2006

RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have found that genes contribute more strongly to the risk of depression in women than in men, and that there may be some genetic factors that are operating uniquely in one sex and not in the other. In the January issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers reported that heritability of depression is higher in women – approximately 42 percent -- than in men, where it is approximately 29 percent. “Our work, together with colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, represents the largest epidemiological study of depression in twins done to date. In addition, it broadly replicates what has been shown by our earlier work using the Virginia Twin Registry. In particular, we have shown that depression is a moderately heritable disorder, suggesting that genetic factors are important, but by no means overwhelming,” said Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and human genetics in VCU’s School of Medicine and lead author on the study. The research team employed twin study models to evaluate lifetime major depression of approximately 42,000 twins, including 15,000 complete pairs from the Swedish National Twin Registry.

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8361 - Posted: 06.24.2010

THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. The Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA) device will also be used to pinpoint fighters hiding in a combat zone, or even to spot signs of stress that might mark someone out as a terrorist or suicide bomber. In a call for proposals on a DoD website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the RPA, which will use microwave or laser beams reflected off a subject's skin to assess various physiological parameters without the need for wires or skin contacts. The device will train a beam on "moving and non-cooperative subjects", the DoD proposal says, and use the reflected signal to calculate their pulse, respiration rate and changes in electrical conductance, known as the "galvanic skin response". "Active combatants will in general have heart, respiratory and galvanic skin responses that are outside the norm," the website says. Because these parameters are the same as those assessed by a polygraph lie detector, the DoD claims the RPA will also indicate the subject's psychological state: if they are agitated or stressed because they are lying, for example. So it will be used as a "remote or concealed lie detector during prisoner interrogation". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 8360 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The Who guitarist Pete Townshend has warned music fans against potential hearing damage caused by headphones as portable players become more popular. The 60-year-old said studio headphones caused his hearing problems, rather than playing loudly on stage. "I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf," Townshend wrote on his website. My intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead." Townshend, who is preparing to tour with the Who this year, said he discovered he had "badly damaged" his hearing in the 1970s. "My ears are ringing, loudly," he wrote. "My own particular kind of damage was caused by using earphones in the recording studio, not playing loud on stage." He said he must take 36-hour hearing rests while recording a new album with fellow Who member Roger Daltrey, breaks he describes as "frustrating and agonising, but compulsory". (C)BBC

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 8359 - Posted: 01.04.2006

Some clinical studies have indicated that marijuana or its active cannabinoid ingredient alleviates symptoms of the inflammatory disease multiple sclerosis (MS). Also, researchers have found that the brain's natural "endocannabinoids" are released after brain injury and are believed to alleviate neuronal damage. However, scientists have not understood how such substances act within the brain's own immune system. Now, experiments by Oliver Ullrich and colleagues have pinpointed how one of the brain's endocannabinoids protects neurons from inflammation after such damage. They say their studies could lead to new drugs to treat the inflammation and brain degeneration from MS or other such disorders. In an article in the January 5, 2006, issue of Neuron, the researchers reported experiments showing how the endocannabinoid anandamide (AEA) protects brain cells from inflammation. Such a role in the brain's immune system is distinct from cannabinoids' effects on neuronal signaling that produce the behavioral effects of marijuana. When Ullrich and colleagues analyzed brain tissue from people with MS, they found elevated levels of AEA, compared to healthy tissue. And in studies with mouse brain slices, they found that inducing damage with a brain-cell-exciting chemical, called NMDA, caused an invasion of the brain's immune cells, called microglia, and an increase in AEA levels.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Glia
Link ID: 8358 - Posted: 01.04.2006

Researchers from the University of Chicago have uncovered an important mechanism used by the developing brain to pattern nerve connections in the part of the brain that interprets visual signals. In the process, they have provided the first experimental evidence for a decades-old model of how nerve cells establish distant connections in a way that can consistently relay spatial information. In the January 5, 2006, issue of the journal Nature, the researchers show that a gradient of a molecule known as Wnt3 counterbalances another force provided by the EphrinB1-EphB signaling system. The balance between these two signaling systems, they show, is necessary to establish the carefully controlled pattern of nerve connections required to convey spatial information in the correct order from the eye to the brain. "This is the first biological validation of a computational model developed in the early 1980s that suggested that two such forces would be necessary to guide axons as they establish the connections that relay spatial information from one part of the nervous system to another," said study author Yimin Zou, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Vision
Link ID: 8357 - Posted: 01.04.2006

Most of us assume that a hospital injection must have medicine in it to do any good, but University of Michigan psychiatrist Jon-Kar Zubieta proved that assumption wrong. He found that if he told patients that an injection contained an experimental painkiller--even though it actually contained nothing but salt water--most of them reported a decrease in the pain they felt from a previous shot. We may call it "mind over matter"; doctors call it the placebo effect. "The placebo effect has been known for a long time," Zubieta says. "Specifically in the context of pain, there is a clear effect of reductions of pain ratings by subjects when they believe that they are receiving a substance that is active, even though it is really inactive." In the early days of medicine when anatomy was poorly understood, the placebo effect--which occurs when a "dummy treatment" has positive therapeutic effects because a patient believes it will work--was a crucial component of all medical treatment. As medical knowledge progressed, scientists began to make educated guesses as to how the placebo effect worked, hypothesizing that the human brain could make its own painkilling chemicals and release them under certain high-stress circumstances. But because of technological limitations, no one was able to objectively observe these chemical processes--until now. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006. All

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 8356 - Posted: 06.24.2010

One of the puzzling questions in the evolution of bees is how some species developed social behaviors. Arizona State University Life Sciences associate professor Gro Amdam thinks part of the answer can be traced back to bee reproductive traits. A paper describing Amdam's experiments, "Complex social behavior derived from maternal reproductive traits," is the cover story of the current issue (Jan. 5, 2006) of Nature. Additional authors include M. Kim Fondrk and Robert Page from Arizona State University, and Angela Csondes from the University of California, Davis. Honeybees live in highly complex communal societies that include divisions of labor among worker bees. Workers are female bees whose jobs include cleaning, maintaining and defending the hive, raising the young and foraging for nectar and pollen. Other species of bees, like carpenter bees, do not engage in social behavior and instead lead solitary lives. This has prompted researchers to look into how social structures and divisions of labor have arisen in bees from their solitary ancestors. Amdam's research supports the idea that elements of the reproductive behavior of those ancestors evolved to form a basis for social living and divisions of labor.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 8355 - Posted: 01.04.2006

A person’s liking for a particular brand name is wired into a specific part of the brain, a new study reveals. The research may provide an insight into the brain mechanisms that underlie the behavioural preferences that advertisers attempt to hijack. It has long been known that humans and animals can learn to associate an irrelevant stimulus with a positive experience, for example the ringing of a bell with food, as in the case of Pavlov’s dogs. And neuroimaging studies have recently implicated two regions buried deep in the brain – the ventral striatum and the ventral midbrain – as having an important role in this learning. But now work led by John O’Doherty, currently at Caltech in Pasadena, US, shows that the actual level of preference is encoded in these brain regions, and that people access this information to guide their decisions. “The key message of our study is that we are able to make use of neural signals deep in our brain to guide our decisions about what items to choose, say when choosing between particular soups in a supermarket, without actually sampling the foods themselves,” says Doherty, who did the research while at University College London, UK. “This is because we can make use of our prior experiences of the items through which we fashioned subjective preferences – do I like it or not?” he told New Scientist. “The next time we come to make a decision we use those preferences.” © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 8354 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new UCLA imaging study shows that age-related breakdown of myelin, the fatty insulation coating the brain's internal wiring, correlates strongly with the presence of a key genetic risk factor for Alzheimer disease. The findings are detailed in the January edition of the peer-reviewed journal Archives of General Psychiatry and add to a growing body of evidence that myelin breakdown is a key contributor to the onset of Alzheimer disease later in life. In addition, the study demonstrates how genetic testing coupled with non-invasive evaluation of myelin breakdown through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may prove useful in assessing treatments for preventing the disease. "Myelination, a process uniquely built up in humans, arguably is the most important and most vulnerable process of brain development as we mature and age. These new findings offer, for the first time, compelling genetic evidence that myelin breakdown underlies both the advanced age and the principal genetic risks for Alzheimer disease," said Dr. George Bartzokis, professor of neurology at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8353 - Posted: 01.03.2006

By Elizabeth Agnvall Special to The Washington Post Just as we're taking down the tree, organizing the new toys and stepping onto the scale comes a study finding that may make us wonder why we do it all: Parents are more likely to be depressed than people who do not have children. Published last month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, the study of 13,000 U.S. adults found that parents, from those with young children to empty nesters, reported being more miserable than non-parents. The researchers analyzed data from a national survey of families and households that asked respondents how many times in the past week, for example, they felt sad, distracted or depressed. Unlike earlier studies, this one found moms and dads equally unhappy. So: After all the sleepless nights and drowsy mornings, the cycles of feeding and throwing up, the American Girl doll accessories bought on credit, the toothpick models of the solar system and the algebra tutors . . . we would have been happier without it all? In a word, says study author Robin Simon, an associate professor of sociology at Florida State University, yes. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Emotions; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8352 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR THE FACTS Some old bromides - like the one that holds that chocolate causes acne - were just plain wrong. But when it comes to one piece of dietary advice that many of us were brought up on, the old wisdom prevails: fish is apparently food for the brain. Like many old wives' tales about food and eating, how this claim got started is not entirely clear. Some believe that it may have grown out of a theory that humans evolved in coastal areas because certain nutrients in fish, particularly omega-3 fatty acids, were necessary for brain development. But whatever the origin of the claim, multiple studies have provided some evidence to support it. One study this year at Harvard, which looked at 135 mothers and their infants, found that the more fish the mothers ate during their second trimesters, the better their infants did on tests when they were 6 months old. But the researchers urged mothers to stick to canned light tuna or salmon while steering clear of shark, swordfish and other types of fish with high mercury levels. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8351 - Posted: 01.03.2006

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR They may not have hot flashes or experience drastic mood swings. But a new study of captive female gorillas suggests that like human females the animals go through physiological changes when their reproductive days are ending. Sylvia Atsalis, a co-author of the study and a primatologist at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, said, "Like humans, gorillas seem to go not only through menopause, but also through perimenopause, during which we have documented some hormonal changes and during which there is reduced likelihood of conception." Some scientists theorize that menopause is evolutionarily adaptive, giving grandmothers an opportunity to help with child care or leave mothers more time to care for existing offspring. Others see it as merely an artifact of the increased life span of animals in captivity, having no survival value for a species. In the study, researchers monitored the menstrual patterns of 30 gorillas in 11 zoos by measuring daily fecal samples for progesterone, the hormone whose levels increase sharply just after ovulation. Of the animals, 22 were older than 30, the age at which gorillas begin to have reduced pregnancy rates and poor survival of offspring. Of the 22, five had clearly passed through menopause and seven were in perimenopause. The oldest, a menopausal 51-year-old, last gave birth at age 11, but mated with her partner until she was 49. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8350 - Posted: 01.03.2006