COLUMBUS, Ohio – A genetically unusual population of ants is changing some of the fundamental ways researchers think about insect colonies. Social insects, like ants and bees, thrive on the caste system – a precise division of duties among colony members. In most of these societies, environment is thought to influence whether larvae develop into queens or sterile female workers, said Steve Rissing, a professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State University. But in a new study, Rissing and his colleagues found some genetically odd colonies of harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex), that don't seem to abide by the traditional rules of caste development. They found that genetics – not environment – determines the fate of a developing ant, and consequently the role it will play in the colony. The researchers report their findings in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology. The team was led by Sara Helms Cahan, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Vermont. A typical ant colony includes one queen and, in the case of harvester ants, hundreds or thousands of sterile female workers (worker ants are always female and, with a few exceptions, sterile. Soldier ants are larger versions of workers.) During her lifetime, which can last as long as 20 or 30 years, a queen produces mainly worker eggs.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 6685 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JAMES GORMAN My infatuation with the amygdala has led me to wonder where aphasia and amusia overlap, a subject that neurologists have been investigating for many years. Damage to the brain can interfere with spoken language - aphasia. But it can also harm the ability to hear and produce melody. All this goes on in some part of the temporal lobe, not the amygdala, which is an almond-size structure in the brain (the word comes from the Greek for almond) that is involved with fear, emotion, sexuality and other aspects of humanity that lie below or behind the conscious mind. But this is off the point. I am infatuated with the word "amygdala," not the brain structure, although I suppose the meaning and the science contribute to the word's appeal. But I like its sound, you might say its musicality. And that has made me wonder about how speech and music overlap. For example, can a word be an earworm? An earworm is a tune that lodges itself in the brain and will not be moved. Songs like "It's a Small World" or "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" can become earworms. In a different class, "Là ci darem la mano," from Mozart's "Don Giovanni," might insinuate itself into every waking moment, although it seems wrong to compare such a lovely aria to an invertebrate. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Hearing
Link ID: 6684 - Posted: 01.11.2005

NEW YORK, NY, Nearly 60 percent of children whose parents and grandparents suffered from depression have a psychiatric disorder before they reach their early teens, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). This is more than double the number of children (approx. 28 percent) who develop such disorders with no family history of depression. The study, published in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, is the first to follow three generations of high-risk families and has taken more than two decades to complete. The CUMC/NYSPI research team began studying 47 first generation family members in 1982; then interviewed 86 of their children several times as they grew into adulthood. The team has collected data from 161 members of the third generation, whose average age is 12. Results found that most of the prepubescent grandchildren with a two-generation history of depression developed anxiety disorders that developed into depression as they aged into adolescence. This trend was also found when the researchers previously followed the children's parents through adolescence and adulthood.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6683 - Posted: 01.11.2005

(Philadelphia, PA) – Cocaine dependence is a major public health problem affecting thousands of people around the globe. Despite years of active research there are still no approved medications for the treatment of this life-shattering addiction. Researchers are now hopeful that may soon change based on the results of a controlled study done at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The study's findings can be found in the January issue of Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology and on-line at www.neuropsychopharmacology.org. Penn investigators have identified Modafinil – a wake-promoting agent approved for the treatment of narcolepsy – as a possible medicinal treatment for cocaine dependence. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, researchers found Modafinil promoted cocaine abstinence in treatment-seeking outpatients. Modafinil was also shown to blunt cocaine-induced euphoria in a prior study conducted by the same research group, perhaps explaining its clinical advantage. "If confirmed by further investigation, this could be the breakthrough we have been waiting for," says Charles Dackis, MD, Chief of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center – Presbyterian, and the study's principal investigator. "Cocaine is capable of destroying not only the lives of those addicted, but also those around them," adds Dackis. "An effective treatment for cocaine addiction would help those most vulnerable in our society to overpower their addiction and regain control in their lives." The trial was conducted at Penn's Treatment Research Center between 2002 and 2003.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6682 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Females among many insects and animals, including humans, enjoy receiving gifts during courtship, but a new study on flies reveals that males can woo their intendeds with worthless, fake love tokens, even if such cheating is otherwise undocumented for the species. By the time the female fly realizes her lover is a cheapskate and beats him off with her wings, the male already has mated with her and leaves with his faux present to find another partner. For the study, researchers studied the dance fly Rhamphomyia sulcata. Although other, similar, flies are known to give their partners token gifts, males among this fly species usually bestow females with nutritious food gifts, such as big, juicy bugs, before mating. To see if even these spoiled females would fall for a fake, the scientists substituted the real food gifts with tiny bits of bugs or full-sized cotton balls, which resemble the fluffy, wind-blown seed tufts that cheating male flies often present to females. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6681 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A voicemail system that labels messages according to the caller's tone of voice could soon be helping people identify which messages are the most urgent. The software, called Emotive Alert, is designed by Zeynep Inanoglu and Ron Caneel of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US. It might be installed at the phone exchange or in an intelligent answering machine, where it will listen to incoming messages and send the recipient a text message along with an emoticon indicating whether the message is urgent, happy, excited or formal. It works by extracting the distribution of volume, pitch and speech rate - the ratio of words to pauses - in the first 10 seconds of each message, and then comparing them with eight stored "acoustical fingerprints" that roughly represent eight emotional states: urgent or not urgent; formal or informal; happy or sad; excited or calm. The fingerprints were created by "learning" software, which was fed hundreds of snippets from old voicemail messages that had been assigned emotional labels by the researchers. In use, the software looks for the acoustical fingerprint that is closest to the characteristics of the voice message and sends the recipient the corresponding emoticon. It also sends a text message indicating the two best-matching emotional labels. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 6680 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Zoologists have answered the intriguing question of why swordfish keep their eyes warm while the rest of the body remains resolutely cold-blooded: it's all the better to see their prey with. Heat-assisted eyes work more than ten times faster than those cooled to the coldest deep-sea temperatures of around 3 ºC, report Kerstin Fritsches of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues. This increased 'temporal resolution' helps swordfish to catch dinner in the inky depths. Researchers already knew that swordfish (Xiphias gladius) can selectively warm their eyes and brains. The fish have a specially adapted heating organ in the muscle next to their tennis-ball-sized eyes, which can raise temperatures in the surrounding tissue some 10-15 ºC above that of the water in which the fish is swimming. But heating takes a lot of energy, and until now experts were confused as to why the swordfish goes to the trouble. Heat is lost around 3,000 times more quickly to water than to air, and of the 25,000 or so species of bony fish, only 22 - including swordfish, marlin, tuna and some sharks - have been found to possess any kind of heating mechanism. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 6679 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Serious gamblers demonstrate a similar pattern of brain activity to people who are addicted to drugs, a new study has suggested. The researchers from Hamburg, Germany, said this showed gambling was also a form of addiction. They said the parts of the brain which are active when people feel rewarded, curbing activity, are less so in those who take drugs or gamble to excess. The research is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. In the study, the brains of 12 compulsive gamblers and 12 non-gamblers were monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they played a simple card guessing game. Players had to choose one of two face-down cards. If the card came up red, they won one euro. It was found that the ventral striatum, a part of the brain that signals reward, was less active in the pathological gamblers even though both groups won and lost the same amount of money. Reduced activity in the area is recognised as a hallmark of drug addiction. The researchers suggest the explanation could be that people with such addictions cannot maintain the amount of the brain chemical dopamine - which produces feelings of satisfaction and pleasure - which they need in the ventral striatum, through everyday life. Instead, they need stronger triggers - such as drugs or excessive gambling - to compensate. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6678 - Posted: 01.10.2005

Rats can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese, suggests a new study. But it is not because some spy agency has bioengineered them to eavesdrop on conversations in Tokyo or Amsterdam. They are simply recognising the difference in rhythmic properties of the languages, says Juan Toro, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona in Spain, whose study is part of an effort to trace the origins of the skills that humans use to analyse speech. Human infants are extremely sensitive to the rhythmic regularities of language, which researchers think may help infants to break sound into patterns they can decipher as words. Earlier experiments showed that both tamarin monkeys and human infants can discriminate between Dutch and Japanese - two languages with rhythmic content that differs greatly. Toro's team trained rats to recognise either Dutch or Japanese - by pressing a lever in response to a short sentence - and then exposed them to sentences they had not heard before, in both languages. They found that the rats responded significantly more often to the language they had been trained in - as long as the sentences were computer-synthesised or both languages were spoken by the same person. However, the rats could not tell the difference if the sentences were played backwards or were spoken by different people. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Hearing
Link ID: 6677 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Whether it's sipped from sleek stemware or a tin can, the alcohol in any type of cocktail, wine, beer, or hard liquor, for some people, is highly addictive. More than 17 million Americans already know this too well. They either abuse alcohol or have graduated to become alcoholics and have lost control of their drinking. Alcoholics have powerful cravings for the drug that typically overtake their ability to stop drinking on their own, even in the face of devastating consequences. Excess alcohol can ruin a person's health, family life, and career. Until recently, little could be done to help keep problem drinkers from consuming alcohol except for counseling programs, which can be costly and do not always work. Thanks, however, to discoveries on the chemistry of alcohol's effects, some biology-based treatments are now available and even more help is on the way. The research is leading to: An increased understanding of how various systems in the brain contribute to alcoholism. A wider range of treatment options for individuals with alcohol problems. A major step in medication development occurred in recent years when scientists discovered evidence that alcohol acts on several chemical systems in the brain to create its alluring effects. In the mid-1990s, the drug naltrexone, which targets one of these systems, termed the opioid system, was approved as a treatment for alcoholism. It's thought that alcohol's effects on the system may produce the euphoric feelings that make a person want to drink again. Naltrexone can block this reaction and helps cut cravings for alcohol in some alcoholic individuals. Copyright © 2004 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6676 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Information Will Come From Clinical Trials By Marc Kaufman, Washington Post Staff Writer The world's four main pharmaceutical trade groups announced yesterday that they will publish far more data about clinical drug trials than now required by law. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, along with industry groups in Europe, Japan and some developing nations, said they will begin posting expanded information about new and ongoing trials by summer. American companies are required by law to provide information on clinical trials dealing with life-threatening diseases, but the groups said yesterday they are now committed to going beyond that requirement and will provide information about trials for all diseases. "Patients and physicians have asked pharmaceutical companies to make available information about all clinical trials, not just some trials, and make that information more accessible," PhRMA President Billy Tauzin said. "We're doing this because our industry recognizes that sometimes what the law requires doesn't give patients all they need." © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6675 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Babies should get their Z's on their backs, most pediatricians advise parents. Beyond that, preventing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS—the number one cause of death in children under the age of one—has remained a mystery that researchers believe they may have finally cracked. Nino Ramirez, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, says that after nearly ten years spent unraveling the secrets of mouse nerve cells called pacemaker neurons he may have found the missing link that explains why some babies fall to SIDS. Ramirez and his team differentiated between two types of pacemaker cells active in the mouse brainstem that appear to control breathing—one group depends on calcium channels to operate and the other on sodium channels regulated by serotonin, a brain chemical known to influence mood. The latter held particular interest for Ramirez since prior research showed that babies who died of SIDS had serotonin deficits in brain areas that controlled breathing. "The idea with the serotonin is as follows," he explains. "It's present within the nervous system and these nerve cells are sitting in a soup of this serotonin. They need this…in order to generate this intrinsic ability to burst." That bursting triggers the respiratory system to gasp, which resets breathing. In healthy babies gasping kicks in when they start losing oxygen, but SIDS babies respond differently to plummeting oxygen levels. "We know from studies done in Germany and also from studies done in St. Louis that gasping is disturbed in these children" Ramirez explains. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2005.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 6674 - Posted: 06.24.2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- University of Florida stem cell scientists reported today (Jan. 3) that they have prevented blindness in mice afflicted with a condition similar to one that robs thousands of diabetic Americans of their eyesight each year. Writing in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers describe for the first time the link between a protein known as SDF-1 and retinopathy, a complication of diabetes and the leading cause of blindness in working-age Americans. Scientists explain how they used a common antibody to block the formation of SDF-1 in the eyeballs of mice with simulated retinopathy, ending the explosive blood vessel growth that characterizes the condition. Researchers effectively silenced SDF-1’s signal to activate normally helpful blood stem cells, which become too much of a good thing within the close confines of the eyeball. “SDF-1 is the main thing that tells blood stem cells where to go,” said Edward Scott, an associate professor of molecular genetics at the UF Shands Cancer Center and director of the Program in Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at UF’s College of Medicine. “If you get a cut, the body makes SDF-1 at the injury site and the repair cells sniff it out. The concentration of SDF-1 is higher where the cut occurs and it quickly dissipates. But the eye is such a unique place, you’ve got this bag of jelly -- the vitreous -- that just sits there and it fills up with SDF-1. The SDF-1 doesn’t break down. It continues to call the new blood vessels to come that way, causing all the problems.”

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 6673 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists say the way airflow around the nose is more complex than that in a jumbo jet's wing. Imperial College London researchers built a 3D model of the nose and used fluid to work out how air flows around it and how it senses different smells. They say the study, in Science, could help surgeons plan operations and the development of a cure for runny noses. The structure of the nose meant air eddied, whirled and re-circulated as it passed through the nose, the team said. Principal researcher Dr Denis Doorly said: "People are used to the flows around an aeroplane being complicated but that is in some ways simpler than understanding the flows inside the nose. "The geometry of the nose is highly complex, with no straight lines or simple curves like an aircraft wing and the regime of airflow is not simply laminar or turbulent." The team, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, found the human sense of smell relies on a sample of air reaching the olfactory bulb at the top of the nose and that requires a sharp breathe and a high velocity shot of air to reach it. The geometry of the nose causes the air to move around in the vicinity of the bulb allowing smell to be sensed. The team mapped the air flow by using coloured beads which were put through the model noses and mapped by fast digital cameras. They also concluded the air flow was more complex than how bloods travels around the heart. (C)BBC

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 6672 - Posted: 01.07.2005

Scientists have identified a faulty gene that causes epilepsy in dogs. The finding has allowed the researchers to develop a test that could soon help owners breed out the disease. But the discovery should also aid the quest to understand the more severe human form of the condition, Lafora disease, and other similar afflictions. The latest development, reported in Science magazine, is an example of how the human and dog genome projects are expected to benefit both species. Researchers are comparing and contrasting the "life codes" of the two mammals with other animals to track down the genetic causes of ill-health. The study in Science was produced by a Canadian/UK team led from the Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) in Toronto. The researchers showed that the jerky behaviour and seizures suffered by purebred miniature wirehaired dachshunds were caused by a form of epilepsy called EPM2. The affected dogs all share a mutation in their EPM2b gene involving multiple repeats in the DNA code that prevent the proper production of protein. It is thought 5% of miniature wirehaireds in the UK have the disease and perhaps as many as 25% may be carriers of the faulty gene. Owners usually start to notice a problem with their pets when they are about six years old. Although incurable, the disease can be managed with a controlled diet and drugs. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 6671 - Posted: 01.07.2005

By BARRY MEIER Faced with pressure from lawmakers and editors of medical journals, four trade groups representing the world's biggest drug makers said yesterday that their members planned to release more data about clinical drug trials. In a joint statement, the groups said their member companies had committed themselves to disclose more information about drug studies, both when the studies are started and when results are released. The groups included the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association in Washington and organizations in Europe and Japan. "Our companies have made a commitment to make this information available," said Caroline Loew, the American group's vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs. The plans, which are voluntary on the companies' part, appear to reflect an effort by the drug industry to defuse the controversy over clinical trials. Over the last year, companies have been accused of highlighting positive trials while playing down or burying negative data in areas like the pediatric use of antidepressants. The industry is confronting two immediate problems. Drug makers are facing the prospect of federal legislation that would require them to register studies in a public database and post their results in it as a condition for running a trial. Separately, several prestigious medical journals have said they will soon stop publishing the results of clinical drug trials unless certain data about those studies are disclosed in a public database when a trial starts. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6670 - Posted: 01.07.2005

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Certain female jumping spiders demand that their mates tap dance and sing before they will mate with them, according to new research. While it is well known that birds sing and bees dance, the addition of Fred Astaire spiders to the story of "the birds and the bees" is relatively new, and suggests that spiders engage in much more sophisticated communication and behavior than previously thought. For the study, researcher Damian Elias, a graduate student in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, observed the jumping spider Habronattus dossenus and documented its success in attracting mates. The spider "sings" by producing varying patterns of seismic vibrations from its abdomen. Elias prevented some of the spiders in his study from singing by affixing their abdomens to their heads with a tiny blob of beeswax. He noticed that male spiders that both sang and danced were successful in attracting female mates. Those who just danced got little love action, which indicates that the female spider's sensory perception of the singing, along with her visual approval of the male's dance routines, are both important elements within the jumping spider mating ritual. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6669 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A BIG brain is a sign of a healthy immune system, at least as far as male birds are concerned. Anders Møller at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and colleagues examined data from 127 bird species. They found that in species with larger brains for their body size, such as yellowhammers and barn swallows, the males also tended to have a larger spleen and bursa of Fabricius - two organs central to the immune system. The pattern did not hold for organs like the heart and liver not involved the immune system, or for females (Journal of Evolutionary Biology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2004.00805.x). Møller says that females choosing brainy males, perhaps by favouring a large song repertoire, may also be selecting for males with better immune systems. Previous research has shown that infections impair a bird's cognitive abilities, so a male displaying his braininess may also be showing off good genes for seeing off parasites. What's more the pattern may exist in other animals. "I can't see any reason why it should be restricted to birds," Møller says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6668 - Posted: 06.24.2010

When Dr Sylvia Bond's son James was slow to speak she worried about his development. She decided to have his hearing checked, but what the GP of eight years - and practice lead in child health services with a diploma in child health - did not expect to hear was that her little boy was autistic. Just after his third birthday, however, that is the diagnosis she was given. Despite her experience she had missed all the signs and says it showed her just how easy it can be for the professionals as well as lay people to miss the subtle signals. Unlike many autistic children James was affectionate to his family and a very happy little boy. And although he had no proper speech by the age of two his mother was sure there was another explanation. It is very difficult to put a date on when I first noticed there was a problem, she admits. "He was not speaking. I think he might have said dog and duck once, but a trip back to the park to see if he would say them again had no response. "And he never pointed at anything. "He did not develop speech and he was a child who did not understand speech. I thought he could understand the word 'no', but he just understood the tone of voice that I used. "He did understood the word 'pop' as in ice pop. "I did not see the lack of eye contact, you don't when your child is cuddled into you. It takes someone else to discover it. "As a parent you know something is wrong, but you do not know what. "If I had not been a GP I would have probably taken him to the doctor sooner. "If I had not been a doctor I would have asked for him to go for speech and language therapy." So she refered him to an audiologist. "I thought he had a hearing problem. "I refered him myself to the hearing clinic as I was aware there were waiting lists for the speech therapists. "I thought he needed intensive speech therapy." (C)BBC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 6667 - Posted: 01.06.2005

A family of antibiotics including penicillin may help prevent nerve damage in a variety of neurological diseases, research has found. In lab tests on mice a team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found the drugs turn on protective genes. This may have a beneficial effect on conditions such as dementia, stroke and epilepsy and Lou Gehrig's disease. However, the Nature study stresses it is too soon to recommend the use of antibiotics for this purpose. There is concern that the widespread over-use of antibiotics is leading to increased levels of resistance, rendering the drugs of less and less use. In the brain, a chemical called glutamate normally excites nerves so that electrical signals can travel from one to the next. But too much of the chemical can over stimulate and kill nerves, leading to disease. Antibiotics appear to tackle the problem by triggering genes which control production of a protein called GLT1, which can transport excess glutamate away from nerve endings. Researcher Professor Jeffrey Rothstein said: "It would be extremely premature for patients to ask for or take antibiotics on their own. "Only a clinical trial can prove whether one of these antibiotics can help and is safe if taken for a long time." The researchers engineered mice to develop the equivalent of Lou Gehrig's disease, which in people causes progressive weakness and paralysis and ends in death, usually within three to five years of diagnosis. (C)BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 6666 - Posted: 01.06.2005