Bruce Bower Ethan refused to play with the children who attended his first-birthday party. He ignored the presents that they brought for him. When Ethan's father tried to hold him in his lap, the boy wriggled free and returned to his true passion—scanning printed material. On this special day, Ethan plopped on the floor by his father's chair and intensely perused a pile of magazines. Although Ethan couldn't read, print riveted his attention with a power that neither brand-new toys nor gooey birthday cake could approach. Ethan's romance with print blossomed with time. At age 1, he scrutinized each license plate in the supermarket parking lot. At 2 1/2, he placed letter-emblazoned blocks in alphabetic order and corrected his mother, by moving her hand, when she pointed to the wrong line of text while reading to him. However, the boy was 3 before he uttered his first spoken word. Now nearly 11 years old and attending fourth grade in a public school, Ethan reads words and spells as well as most high school seniors do, although his comprehension of written passages is only average for his age. He's also learning to read Hebrew. Ethan talks to other children awkwardly and has difficulty maintaining conversations. Scientists refer to Ethan's unusual condition, which afflicts roughly 1 in 5,000 people, as hyperlexia. Initially described in 1967, hyperlexia combines autismlike speech and social problems with a jump-start on reading. Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Autism; Language
Link ID: 7277 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Christen Brownlee Most people require about 8 hours of sleep a night, but some lucky oddballs function well on 4 hours or even less. A new study in fruit flies provides evidence that genetics plays a strong role in determining who can get by with little rest. A single mutation in a gene that's also found in people can reduce the insects' sleep needs by about two-thirds. Although researchers have been studying sleep for decades, they've made little progress in teasing out the genetic components that control this phenomenon. In 2000, a team discovered that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster sleeps, much as mammals do. A sleeping fly simply sits motionless, usually for many hours a day. "We realized that if we really wanted to understand sleep, we'd have to take advantage of the powerful genetics of Drosophila," says Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Searching for genes that affect sleep requirements, Cirelli and her colleagues rounded up more than 9,000 mutant lines of fruit flies. The researchers then observed several flies of each type to determine how long the insects sleep per day and how they behave after 24 hours of sleep deprivation. Cirelli's team eventually narrowed its focus onto one line that they named minisleep flies. Unlike normal Drosophila, which spend 9 to 15 hours sleeping each day, minisleep flies doze only 4 to 5 hours daily. Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7276 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nathan Seppa Putting extra copies of the gene for a cellular growth factor into the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease slows the degenerative condition, a new study suggests. Alzheimer's disease kills neurons, the brain cells that orchestrate message signaling throughout the nervous system. The gene added in this study encodes nerve growth factor (NGF), a protein that keeps these cells alive and so facilitates signaling among them. The vehicle for the human gene was the patients' own skin cells. Researchers took a bit of skin tissue from each of eight people diagnosed with early Alzheimer's disease and used a non-replicating virus to transfer genes for human NGF into the skin cells. The scientists then injected these genetically modified cells into each patient's brain. However, two of the patients were excluded from the study soon after that surgery because of bleeding in their brains. Over the next 2 years, positron-emission tomography scans of the other patients revealed increased metabolic activity in their brains, a sign of neuron rejuvenation. An autopsy on one of the excluded patients, who died of a heart attack during the study, revealed that the implanted cells were making NGF. Nearby neurons appeared healthy. Copyright ©2005 Science Service

Keyword: Alzheimers; Trophic Factors
Link ID: 7275 - Posted: 06.24.2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Children exposed to cocaine before birth show subtle but discernible differences in their ability to plan and problem-solve once they reach school age, University of Florida researchers report. Still, most fare far better in the first few years after birth than many experts once predicted, contradicting the notion that as a rule, cocaine-exposed infants would be born with devastating birth defects or miss major developmental milestones. "I think the early information we had was that these children might be irreversibly damaged - that they would potentially have lots of problems in school, that they might have lots of behavior problems, that they might have problems thinking and learning," said UF neonatologist Marylou Behnke, M.D. Instead, UF researchers write in the April online issue of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, prenatal cocaine exposure is linked to smaller head circumference at birth and to less optimal home environments, which in turn have direct yet mild effects on developmental outcome at 3 years of age. Those effects persist at ages 5 and 7, once more demands are placed on the children during the formal school years, according to related findings the researchers presented at the recent annual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. © University of Florida,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 7274 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Being overweight in middle age increases a person's risk of developing dementia, US scientists believe. Obese people in their 40s are 74% more likely to develop dementia compared to those of normal weight, a US National Institutes of Health team found. The lifetime dementia risk in those who were overweight was 35% higher, their study of more than 10,000 US men and women over three decades revealed. The findings are published online at bmj.com. The authors warned that the present epidemic of obesity might lead to a boom of dementia in the future. For the study, obesity was defined as a body mass index 30 or above and overweight as a BMI of between 25 and 29.9. A normal BMI lied anywhere between 18.6 and 24.9 and is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by the square of their height in metres. All of the participants underwent detailed health checks from 1964 to 1973 when they were aged 40 to 45 and were monitored until 1994 to see whether any had developed dementia. Overall, 713 (7%) of the participants developed dementia. BMI predicted dementia more strongly among women than men. For example, obese women were 200% more likely to have dementia than women of normal weight, while obese men had a 30% increase in risk. Both men and women with the highest skinfold measurements - another indicator of obesity - had a 60-70% greater risk of dementia compared to those with the lowest measurements. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Alzheimers
Link ID: 7273 - Posted: 04.29.2005

Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers have discovered how the membrane protein that allows us to sense cold works and how this protein becomes desensitized so that one no longer feels the cold. The study, published this week as an advance online publication by Nature Neuroscience, focused on a specific region of the cold receptor which is found in many other receptors, including ones involved in taste, vision and fertilization. Therefore, the findings may have important implications across a wide range of areas. Diomedes Logothetis, PhD, Dean of the Mount Sinai Graduate School of Biological Sciences, post-doctoral fellow Tibor Rohacs and colleagues studied the receptor that is responsible for the sensation of cold. They found that a specific region of this receptor interacts with a signaling lipid in the cell membrane called PIP2. Cold or menthol stimulate this receptor and alter the electrical properties of the membrane, a process that leads to the sensation of cold. When the receptor is stimulated, calcium enters the cell and stimulates the breakdown of PIP2. When PIP2 is broken down, the receptor becomes inactive, thus ending the sensation or desensitizing the cell to the cold stimulus. "This finding provides critical information to help us understand how we sense heat and cold and from that to expand our understanding of temperature regulation," said Dr. Logothetis. "Additionally, because the region of this receptor that interacts with PIP2 is found in many similar membrane proteins, we now have a new lead in investigating regulation of the many functions in which these proteins are involved."

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 7272 - Posted: 04.29.2005

The cuckoo is a nasty bird, but you have to give it credit for cleverness. The cuckoo mother lays her egg in the nests of other bird species, and when it hatches, the baby cuckoo immediately pushes the other eggs out. From then on, the foreign newborn enjoys full-time feeding from its host parents--who are usually half its size. The European cuckoo makes begging noises many times louder than the parents' normal chicks, fooling mom and pop into thinking they've got a desperately hungry nest. And that's not the only trick. Now, two behavioral biologists at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan, have found another diabolical cuckoo ploy. An Asian species, called the Horsfield's hawk-cuckoo, has bright orange patches on its wings. When the host parents arrive at the nest, the cuckoo chick opens its wings and wiggles these patches. Because the patches look like the gaping mouths of chicks, Keita Tanaka and Keisuke Ueda wondered if the parents might be fooled into thinking there are more mouths to feed. To test the idea, they kept track of how often cuckoos were fed in 24 nests, but they painted the wing patches of some of the chicks black. Having the orange patches indeed made a difference. Parents fed cuckoo chicks with black patches about 15% less often than they fed those with orange patches, the team reports 29 April in Science. The parents sometimes even tried to stuff food into the faux mouths. Copyright © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 7271 - Posted: 06.24.2010

New research shows that farmers who used agricultural insecticides experienced increased neurological symptoms, even when they were no longer using the products. Data from 18,782 North Carolina and Iowa farmers linked use of insecticides, including organophosphates and organochlorines, to reports of reoccurring headaches, fatigue, insomnia, dizziness, nausea, hand tremors, numbness and other neurological symptoms. Some of the insecticides addressed by the study are still on the market, but some, including DDT, have been banned or restricted. These findings will be available online in April, and published in the June issue of Environmental Health Perspectives. The research is part of the ongoing Agricultural Health Study funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute, two of the National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency. "This research is really important because it evaluated the health effects of agricultural chemicals as they were commonly used by farmers. It's different from previous studies that focused on pesticide poisoning or high dose exposures, for example when large amounts of a chemical were accidentally spilled on the skin," said Freya Kamel, Ph.D., a researcher for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The NIEHS researchers examined questionnaires completed by farmers on lifetime exposure to herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and fumigants, and their history of 23 neurological symptoms. Those who reported experiencing more than 10 symptoms during the year prior to completing a study questionnaire were classified as having high levels of symptoms.

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 7270 - Posted: 04.29.2005

By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News — An innovative alarm clock guaranteed never to rouse you from that perfect dream could be available by 2006. The new Sleepsmart uses wireless and brainwave monitoring technology to track your sleep cycle and wake you during a light phase. "The science is quite good," said Jim Anderson, professor of cognitive and linguistic science at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The current prototype consists of a clock and a thin, lightweight headband that a person slips on before slipping under the covers. While the person rests, electrodes imbedded in the headband monitor brainwave activity and collect the information in a tiny microprocessor. Wireless technology in the headband communicates with a nearby clock that has already been programmed to go off at a specified time. During sleep, the brain cycles through various stages of sleep about every 90 minutes. The headband keeps track of those light, deep and REM states and will wake a person during the lightest phase, no more than 20 minutes before the alarm goes off. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 7269 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi The mere thought of beer or wine can influence your sex drive, according to a study of undergraduates. Alcohol has long been known to have a number of effects on dating behaviour: some good, some bad. Enough booze can wipe away inhibitions and act as an aphrodisiac, or it can dampen sexual performance. It can even produce what are jokingly called 'beer goggles', which mean you judge people as more attractive when you are drunk. But scientists now say that whatever effect someone expects from alcohol can be produced by simple exposure to flashes of alcohol-related words on a computer screen. Ronald Friedman, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and his colleagues tested the idea on 82 male undergraduate students. The researchers first questioned the men about how they felt alcohol affected their libido, and then presented them with rapidly flashing words and jumbled letters on a computer screen. One group was exposed to cue words that suggested alcohol, including beer, whisky, martini and malt; the other, control group was exposed to words such as smoothie, espresso and ice. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 7268 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists at Melbourne's Howard Florey Institute have uncovered a clue about the causes of dementia in Huntington's disease, one of the disease's symptoms, by showing that mice susceptible to Huntington's disease have problems with learning and memory before the diseases' typical movement problems appear. The Florey scientists also discovered that in Huntington's diseased brains, information processing between neurons is disrupted, but the neurons do not die, which means the brain may respond to new anti-dementia drugs that can restore memory. Huntington's disease is an incurable, inherited disorder of the nervous system that affects specific brain regions and inevitably leads to death. Symptoms range from disrupted control of movements and thought processes, and emotional problems. These include: jerky arm or leg movements; difficulties with speech, swallowing, concentration, memory and learning; and depression and personality changes. Huntington's disease is caused by a mutation in a single gene. When this defective gene is passed from parent to child, 50 percent of the offspring will inherit the disorder, which can be detected by genetic testing. Research leader Dr Anthony Hannan said his team's investigations were significant as they could lead to the development of memory restoring drugs designed especially for people with Huntington's disease.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 7267 - Posted: 04.28.2005

What is "normal" when it comes to brains, behavior, and emotional life? Some things, like hallucinations or debilitating melancholy, are clearly diagnosable. But what about "caffeine intoxication" --characterized by insomnia, muscle twitching, nervousness, perhaps even rambling thoughts after more than two to three cups of joe? Or how about premenstrual irritability? Since 1952, the American Psychiatric Association has published what over time became the complicated, much-criticized, often satirized, but endlessly utilized diagnostic arbiter of "normal" in the world of mental health. While the first two editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders did not make much of an impression, when DSM-III was published in 1980, it transformed the landscape of mental health--for good and ill. The slender paperback manual of 1952 ballooned to 943 pages in 2000 with the revised version of DSM-IV, cataloging more than 350 mental disorders. Practitioners celebrated the standardization of emotional disorders. Critics, however, were appalled at the oversimplification, lack of nuance, and arbitrariness being imposed on the infinite varieties of human behavior gone awry. Not to mention the way that the DSM seemed to pathologize what in many cases could reasonably be seen as simple quirks of normal human behavior, like getting jittery after too much coffee. Copyright © 2005 U.S.News & World Report,

Keyword: Emotions; Depression
Link ID: 7266 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Millions of people around the world live in a blurry or darkened world as a result of eye diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration and Retinitis Pigmentosa, which cause damage to the retina at the back of the eye. Normally, when light rays or images are focused by the lens of the eye onto the retina, light-sensitive cells called "rods" and "cones" convert the light into electrical impulses that travel to the brain and are interpreted as images of the world around us. "[The retina] actually does some of the image processing, and then sends this information to the brain, and so we see," explains Mark Humayun, Professor of Ophthalmology at the Keck School of Medicine and Associate Director of Research at the Doheny Retina Institute, both part of the University of Southern California. Now, Humayun, in collaboration with several national research centers and the U.S. Department of Energy, is developing a type of artificial retina that he hopes could restore some degree of sight to people blinded by the degeneration of retinal cells. "Once the vision is lost and patients can't see there are very few therapies, if any, that can help restore their lost vision," says Humayun. "And really it's the restoration of lost vision that is the goal of this retinal implant." (C) ScienCentral, 2000-2005

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 7265 - Posted: 04.28.2005

PORTLAND, Ore. – When it comes to her health, Janice Winfield of Portland, Ore., does her research. That's why the stay-at-home mom, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in July 2000, was willing to turn to popular, over-the-counter herbal supplements like ginkgo biloba to deal with memory problems, fatigue and occasional muscle pain. "I'm definitely interested in alternative medicine," said Winfield, 49, whose form of the neurological disease – relapsing-remitting MS – is characterized by frequent symptom flare-ups. Ginkgo "is not only given to someone like me with MS. There's benefit to anyone taking it." Findings by scientists in the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine's Department of Neurology and the OHSU MS Center of Oregon appear to back up that claim. A study presented this month at the American Academy of Neurology's 57th Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, Fla., suggests that ginkgo may be effective in improving attention in MS patients with cognitive impairment. Side effects also were minimal. The study's lead author, Jesus Lovera, M.D., a research fellow and instructor in neurology, OHSU School of Medicine, said those receiving ginkgo "performed better on a test that measures a person's ability to pay attention and to sort conflicting information."

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 7264 - Posted: 06.24.2010

YOU'VE had a blow to the head, but how do you know whether you are concussed or not? The answer could be a matter of life or death, yet it takes hours of testing by professionals to know for sure. Now a virtual-reality headset is being developed that can diagnose the extent of a head injury within minutes. Non-medical personnel will use it to quickly gauge the extent of brain damage, and the system works in noisy emergency rooms, on the battlefield or at the side of a sports field. It can also pick up early signs for dementia. For someone suffering even mild concussion, a second blow to the head can be fatal or lead to permanent disability. "Yet detailed neuropsychological assessment in an emergency room or on the football field is impossible to accomplish," says Jeffrey Lewine at the Hoglund Brain Imaging Center at the University of Kansas. That is where a VR device called DETECT comes in. The name stands for "display enhanced testing for concussion and mild traumatic brain injury", a portable diagnostic tool being developed by biomedical engineer Michelle LaPlaca at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and David Wright, assistant director of the Emergency Medicine Research Center at nearby Emory University. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 7263 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Some mutant flies can get by on 30% less sleep than their normal counterparts, thanks to a single mutation in one gene. The finding is important because it suggests the amount of sleep needed may be largely controlled by one gene, which may shed light on human sleep needs, says Chiara Cirelli at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US. “This isn’t some obscure fly gene - there’s a homologue in mammals and humans.” Surprisingly, sleep in the common fruit fly - Drosophila melanogaster - has many similarities with mammalian sleep, including sleep-deprivation leading to impaired performance. Cirelli’s group has been painstakingly testing how mutations on each of 14,000 fly genes might affect slumber. They discovered that flies with one particular gene variant, dubbed “minisleep”, needed only 3 or 4 hours’ rest per day, compared to 10 to 12 hours for a normal fly. Yet, despite the lack of sleep, “minisleepers” showed no signs of impairment. They also coped better with sleep deprivation - the escape responses of minisleepers remained almost as quick after 24 hours without sleep, while the responses of normal flies flagged. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7262 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR THE FACTS Is it safe to use deodorant again? About 20 years ago, scientists noticed that the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease had high levels of aluminum, leading many people to discard their pots and pans and shun almost anything that contained the metal - including antiperspirants. Today, the rumor lives on, but studies have found that there is probably no reason to sweat it. While no one disputes that aluminum can be toxic, the metal is so ubiquitous that some exposure is inevitable, and many scientists doubt that the trace amounts in antiperspirants pose any danger. Of all the studies that examined the rumor, at least one, in 1990, suggested a possible link. But the study, which compared the habits of 130 patients with the disease to those of a group of healthy subjects, had a serious flaw: It relied on surrogates to answer for the Alzheimer's patients. More rigorous studies have challenged the aluminum hypothesis. The most recent, published in 2002, followed 4,615 people for several years and found no increased risk of the disease in people who used antiperspirants or antacids, another common source of the metal. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 7261 - Posted: 04.27.2005

By ANDREW POLLACK Two participants in a discontinued clinical drug trial have sued Amgen, demanding that it resume giving them an experimental treatment for Parkinson's disease that they say helped them immensely but that the company says is ineffective and potentially dangerous. In their lawsuit, filed yesterday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the plaintiffs say Amgen "treated the patients as mere guinea pigs, as material to be discarded," and had violated a legal and moral obligation to continue to supply the drug. A spokeswoman for Amgen said that the company had only started to review the complaint but typically would not comment on litigation. The lawsuit is the latest step in a conflict that has raised questions about the obligations of drug companies to participants in clinical trials. Last year, Amgen said that a clinical trial showed that the drug - glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor, or G.D.N.F. - was not significantly better than a placebo. It also said that some monkeys given high doses had developed brain damage. So Amgen stopped giving the drug to about four dozen people in the trials. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 7260 - Posted: 04.27.2005

THE SINGULARITY: In futurology, a technological singularity is a predicted point in the development of a civilisation at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict. The singularity can more specifically refer to the advent of smarter-than-human intelligence, and the cascading technological progress assumed to follow. Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia CLEVER computers are everywhere. From robotic lawnmowers to intelligent lighting, washing machines and even car engines that self-diagnose faults, there's a silicon brain in just about every modern device you can think of. But can you honestly call any machine intelligent in a meaningful sense of the word? One rainy afternoon last February I decided to find out. I switched on the computer in my study, and logged on to www.intellibuddy.com, home to one of the leading artificial intelligences on the planet, to see what the state-of-the-art has to offer. Intellibuddy: Hi, I'm Intellibuddy! Nice to meet you. JM: I'm writing an article about artificial intelligence. Intellibuddy: Will you include me in your essay? JM: I will if you can persuade me you really are intelligent. Intellibuddy: Would you recommend this action to a friend? © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Robotics
Link ID: 7259 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have long known that mercury increases mortality and decreases fertility in fish, but the underlying metabolic processes are still unknown. New research posted on the ES&T Research ASAP website (es0483490) helps uncover some of the mystery by examining which genes respond when fish are fed methylmercury (MeHg). Although multiple genes turn on in the muscle and liver to help store and detoxify the metal, the brain appears unresponsive and accumulates high levels of mercury. This leads researchers to believe that neural tissue might be unable to defend itself against this toxic compound. The brains of zebrafish fail to mount a defense against methylmercury. "It was a big surprise when we found that genes in the neural system were not responding," says study author Jean-Paul Bourdineaud, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Bordeaux (France). Previous research has shown that mercury can cause lesions in the brain, and a recent study found that MeHg can decrease the density of neurotransmitters in otters that consume diets heavy in fish contaminated with MeHg. (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2005, 39, 218A) The zebra fish in the study were fed diets that contain MeHg at concentrations similar to those found in wild fish (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 877–883). Thirteen different genes were then tested in liver, muscle, and brain tissue. These genes encode for proteins known to be involved in different functions such as antioxidant defense, metal chelation, DNA repair, and cell death. "Testing this range of genes gives us a toxicological survey of mercury's effects," says Bourdineaud. Copyright © 2005 American Chemical Society

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 7258 - Posted: 06.24.2010