BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A behavioral neuroscientist at the University at Buffalo holds that the ingestion of afterbirth by a mother, a feature of pregnancy in nearly all non-human mammals, not only relieves postpartum pain, but optimizes the onset of maternal behavior by mediating the activity of specific opioid activity circuits in the brain. Mark Kristal, Ph.D., professor of psychology at UB and director the graduate program in behavioral neuroscience, has received a two-year $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, to test his hypothesis. In 1986 Kristal discovered an opioid-enhancing molecule he called the Placental Opioid-Enhancing Factor or POEF. His discovery led to a series of studies that shed light on the way in which POEF modulates how opioids inhibit nociceptive processing in the nervous system -- processing in specific areas of the brain that recognize certain kinds of pain. Kristal says this research may lead to novel ways of treating addiction in humans by manipulating the effectiveness of the opiates we produce in our own bodies. It also may enable physicians to obtain current levels of pain relief, he says, "by administering much, much, much smaller amounts of opioid analgesics."

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6859 - Posted: 02.12.2005

Nathan Seppa Terrible sadness, a sudden fright, or other emotional stress can bring on heart attack symptoms in people not actually experiencing a heart attack, according to two new reports. The researchers examined people who showed up at hospitals with chest pain and an impaired capacity to pump blood but no heart-tissue damage or clogged coronary arteries. Rather, the patients turned out to be experiencing physical effects after stressful events, such as the death of a loved one. Cardiologist Hunter C. Champion of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore and his colleagues treated 18 women and 1 man with severe symptoms. After initial tests had ruled out a heart attack, bedside talks revealed that all the patients had recently had a stressful experience. These included the death of spouse, a car accident, an armed robbery, a family dispute, a court appearance, and a surprise party. The patients had blood concentrations of catecholamine hormones that were more than seven times normal and two to three times as great as those in five patients having heart attacks triggered by coronary artery blockages. Catecholamines, which include adrenaline and dopamine, are powerful hormones that regulate heart rate, blood pressure, and other body processes. The researchers report their findings in the Feb. 10 New England Journal of Medicine. Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 6858 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A German study has added weight to the argument that a herbal remedy is an effective treatment for depression. Researchers compared the effectiveness of St John's wort to anti-depressant drug paroxetine in treating moderate and severe depression. The team found half of those with the condition improved when given the herb, compared with a third using the drug, the British Medical Journal reported. UK experts said the study of 244 people should be treated with caution. The study also found patients on paroxetine - also known as Seroxat - suffered more side effects. In both cases the most common side effect was stomach upsets, the study by Karlsruhe-based Dr Willmar Schwabe Pharmaceuticals and the Institute for Medical Research Management and Biometrics in Nurnberg found. Report co-author Dr Meinhard Kieser said: "Our results support the use of St John's wort as an alternative to standard anti-depressants in moderate to severe depression, especially as it is well tolerated." The herb is not recommended for use by the UK's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) because of uncertainty about what constitutes an appropriate dose, and its potential side effects when mixed with other drugs. However its guidelines do acknowledge there is some evidence to suggest St John's wort could benefit people with mild or moderate depression. Previous studies have produced mixed results about whether it is effective in treating more serious forms of depression. The herb, which is extracted from bright yellow star-shaped flowers, has been used for centuries as a folk medicine for anxiety and stress. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6857 - Posted: 02.11.2005

By GARDINER HARRIS and BENEDICT CAREY ASHINGTON, - A day after Canadian officials suspended the use of a hyperactivity drug amid reports of deaths associated with its use, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa contended that United States health officials had asked the Canadian regulators not to do so. Senator Grassley, a Republican, said on Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration had made the request of Canadian health officials because the F.D.A. could not handle another "drug safety crisis." Mr. Grassley said he was basing his contentions on reports from whistle-blowers within the agency. Dr. Robert Peterson, director general of the therapeutic products directorate at Health Canada, said through a spokeswoman that reports that F.D.A. had asked Health Canada to refrain from suspending the drug "are untrue." Brad Stone, a spokesman for the F.D.A., declined to respond directly to Mr. Grassley's contention but said of Dr. Peterson's rejection that, "We believe the Canadian response is the correct one."Canadian health officials, citing 20 deaths among patients taking the British-made drug Adderall XR, said on Wednesday night that they were suspending sales of the hyperactivity drug indefinitely. The F.D.A. is allowing the drug to continue to be sold in the United States, saying there is little evidence that Adderall XR caused the deaths. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 6856 - Posted: 02.11.2005

Psychologists from McMaster University have discovered that the aging process improves certain abilities -- the ability to grasp the 'big picture'. The study, published in the journal Neuron dispels the myth that older people perform slower and worse than younger people. "Going into the study, we knew that ageing changes the way people see the world," says Allison Sekuler, one senior author of the study. "But these results are an unusual twist on the standard 'ageing makes you worse' story, and they provide clear insight into what is changing in the ageing brain." The researcers measured how long it took for study participants to indicate which direction a set of bars moved across a computer screen. Younger participants were faster when the bars were small or low in contrast. When the bars were large and high in contrast, however, the older people were faster. "The results are exciting not only because they show an odd case in which older people have better vision than younger people, but also because it may tell us something about how ageing affects the way signals are processed in the brain" says Patrick Bennett, the other senior author. Copyright © 2005 Plebius Presstm

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 6855 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Carved out in our collective imagination is a carpenter's workshop in the Italian story "Pinocchio," where a wooden puppet with an ever-growing nose informs millions of children what might happen if they lie. In real life, who hasn't wished the liars in their world were as transparent? The good news is that researchers are finding clues in the body that—with the right training—might tell you how to spot when someone's trying to pull a fast one. Psychologist Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco is working with the Department of Defense on software that analyzes facial muscles to help detect liars. "There are movements of the face that can show an emotion that doesn't fit with what the person's saying," Ekman explains. "We call that a 'hot spot,' which means that you are not getting a full account." To first prove that people's faces differ when they lie, Ekman videotaped 11 men truthfully discussing a topic they felt strongly about and nine men lying about their stance. Volunteers watched the tapes and tried to spot liars. Ekman reported that 90 percent of the liars' faces showed fear and disgust whereas only 30 percent of truth tellers displayed these emotions. He calls these concealed emotions 'microexpressions.' "They look just like ordinary expressions except that they are on the face for about a 25th of a second," explains Ekman. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2005.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 6854 - Posted: 06.24.2010

How do you make babies, give them a decent start in life, and send them off to perpetuate the species from a lightless, toxic environment in the bowels of the ocean? Scientists studying deep-sea tubeworms have unmasked one secret to their success: Females fertilize their eggs internally and release the resulting embryos at an early developmental stage, optimizing their chances for survival and long-distance dispersal. Ever since the discovery of gutless vestimentiferan worms in 1977, researchers have puzzled over how the worms colonize highly ephemeral, unstable hydrothermal vent habitats spaced hundreds of kilometers apart. The prevailing theory holds that, like other marine invertebrates, tubeworms release masses of eggs and sperm in a hit-or-miss manner, called broadcast spawning, into the surrounding waters. But the new study indicates that this isn't the case. Biology graduate student Ana Hilário of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, and her colleagues used a deep-sea submersible to collect tubeworms of five species from Pacific vents and cold seeps in the Gulf of Mexico. In thin slices of the females' reproductive tracts, Hilário found a hook-shaped region, called the spermatheca, where sperm are stashed and eggs undergo fertilization before spawning. At the study sites, fertilized eggs released naturally and collected over a period of days proved to be in very early stages of development, indicating that fertilization occurs internally rather than outside the worms. Copyright © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6853 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Communication in the brain travels from one nerve cell to another through critical connections called synapses. These neuron-to-neuron junctions form early in brain development, and their construction was thought to be guided by the nerve cells themselves. Now, investigators supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health, have discovered that cells called glia, known to provide support for neurons in the mature brain, also play a crucial role in formation of synapses during the surge of development following birth. This key insight into the process of normal synapse development may lead to improved treatment of conditions such as drug addiction and epilepsy, which are characterized in part by too many synapses. The research, led by Dr. Ben Barres of Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California, is reported in the February 11, 2005 issue of the journal Cell. “Synapses are the key connections between cells in the brain. We know that drugs alter these connections, and that the developing brain is vulnerable to addictive drugs’ disruption of normal communication,” says NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. “Compounds that direct synapse formation may offer a therapeutic option for people fighting drug addiction or other neurologic conditions.” Glia account for 90 percent of the cells in a mammalian brain, but until recently scientists focused mainly on the supportive role that glial cells play in helping mature neurons survive. Dr. Barres, along with Stanford postdoctoral fellows Dr. Karen Christopherson and Dr. Erik Ullian, developed a method for growing neurons in a laboratory without glial cells.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6852 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ATLANTA – When it comes to aging, women may have another reason to be thankful. Research conducted in nonhuman primates at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University shows male nonhuman primates are more susceptible to age-related cognitive decline. The February issue of Behavioral Neuroscience reports this finding, which the researchers say has implications for developing sex-specific therapies to help humans guard against age-related memory loss. By observing that older male nonhuman primates' spatial memory, which is responsible for recording environmental and spatial-orientation information, declines at a greater rate than that of females, researchers led by Agnčs Lacreuse, PhD, assistant research professor, and James Herndon, PhD, associate research professor, both in Yerkes' Division of Neuroscience, concluded a species' sex may influence age-related cognitive decline. "Given that spatial memory is sensitive to sex differences in humans and in nonhuman primates, we decided to focus our study on determining how cognitive aging differs between the sexes," said Lacreuse. According to Lacreuse, such sex differences have not been studied frequently in humans, and when they have, the data has been inconsistent.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6851 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Listen up: mammals seem to have evolved the delicate bone structure of the middle ear at least twice. The surprising discovery comes from a fossil, found off the southern coast of Australia, that belongs to an ancestor of the platypus. Modern mammals are unique among vertebrates for possessing three tiny bones in the middle ear. The malleus, incus and stapes (commonly known as the hammer, anvil and stirrup) work as part of a chain that transmits sound towards the skull. Birds and reptiles have only one bone to perform this function. Because the mammalian arrangement is so complex, scientists believed that the set-up had evolved on just a single occasion, in an ancestor that gave rise to placental animals (including humans), marsupials and monotremes (such as the duck-billed platypus). All this changed when James Hopson, a vertebrate palaeontologist at University of Chicago, Illinois, took a trip to Australia. There he met a team of researchers including Thomas Rich of Museum Victoria in Melbourne. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution; Hearing
Link ID: 6850 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A spray that helps increase women's enjoyment of sex has undergone successful trials. The spray, developed by Australian company Acrux, contains the male sex hormone testosterone. It was initially designed with post-menopausal women in mind, but has also been shown to work for young women with a low libido. Acrux plans to carry out larger trials, and does not expect the spray to come to market for several years. The spray was tested over four months in three doses on 261 women with a low sex drive and low testosterone levels. Researchers found a statistically significant rise in the number of satisfying experiences at the end of the fourth month for women taking the second highest dose of the spray. The only apparent side effect was a small increase in body hair among some of the participants. This prompted two women taking the highest dose of the spray to drop out of the study. The spray delivers testosterone and a substance to ensure the hormone is held in the skin and absorbed over 24 hours - similar to the way sunscreen remains on the skin. Lead researcher Professor Susan Davis, of Monash University, Principal investigator, said previous research had focused on postmenopausal women known to have low testosterone levels. "But many younger women also report having low sexual interest and enjoyment and traditionally," she said. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 6849 - Posted: 02.10.2005

San Diego, CA, -- Researchers in California, Israel, and Germany have compared three distantly related species – baker’s yeast, a worm, and the fruit fly – and reported that protein “wiring” connections in one species are often conserved in all three. This first-of-its-kind analysis of three higher level organisms published in the February 8 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports both the concept of a basic wiring diagram for all eukaryotic cells, and the idea that more selective pharmaceuticals could be designed to tweak the wiring plan of human cells to more effectively treat diseases while also generating fewer side-effects. These wiring diagrams show the patterns of protein interactions in the cells of yeast, worm, and fly that are involved in an essential garbage-disposal function. The horizontal dotted lines indicate protein similarities between species, and the thick and thinner solid lines indicate direct and indirect, respectively, protein interactions within a species. Click here for high-res version. "We're basically now able to open the hood of yeast, worm, and fly cells and look at the protein interactions inside,” said Trey Ideker, a bioengineering professor at the University of California, San Diego and one of the nine co-authors of the paper. “Ultimately, this type of wiring analysis will help us more fully explain how the diversity of life developed on the planet, and more practically, how a pathogen differs from its human host, or a diseased cell differs from it healthy counterpart at the most informative level of detail.”

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 6848 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The adult male zebra finch knows only one scratchy tune learned in its youth, which it performs repeatedly and intensely when females are listening. But occasionally, the finch might improvise, experimenting with a slower, more sultry variation or emphasizing different notes. Neurobiologists studying the finch now say the improvisation arises from a component of a crucial learning circuit in a section of the forebrain that seems to generate the trial and error necessary to master sophisticated motor skills, such as singing in birds or speech and sports in humans. "It means this part of the brain is important for instructing or allowing changes in the song," said Mimi Kao, first author of a paper in the February 10, 2005, issue of the journal Nature that demonstrates how the region modulates bird song in real time. Kao, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) predoctoral fellow, is in the final months of her doctoral training in the laboratory of co-author Allison Doupe at the University of California, San Francisco's Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience. A similar brain pathway in humans may explain how children learn to talk by listening to themselves and others, and how adults learn and hone new motor skills, such as tennis. The process relies on feedback about what works and what doesn't, also called experience-dependent or performance-based learning.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 6847 - Posted: 02.10.2005

All is fair in love and war—especially when the two are intertwined. Just ask the male Australian cuttlefish. "The male cuttlefish has quite a challenge on his hands when it comes to the end of their yearly life cycle," explains Roger Hanlon, senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory. "There are four, five even ten males for every female on the spawning grounds, so the challenge they face is, 'How do I get my genes into the next generation?' There's enormous competition among the males for the relatively few females that are on the spawning ground." Hanlon and his team spent five spawning seasons observing cuttlefish underwater in a remote coastal area of Australia. As one might expect, the largest males used their size advantage to find a female partner and guard her from other males. Hanlon observed that smaller males were able to get to the female while the guard male was fighting other males away, or by meeting the female in a "secret rendezvous" under a rock, for instance. But he found that the small males with the biggest success rate employ the same camouflage trick that allows them to escape predators: these so-called "sneaker" males change their skin pattern and body shape to disguise themselves as females, and swim right past a large guard male, who thinks he's getting another girlfriend. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2005.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6846 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The red Mozambique spitting cobra stiffens, fixing its gaze on the victim's face, which is moving backwards and forwards in front of it. For several seconds it remains erect like this; then its head flashes forwards. For an instant the fangs in front of its pale pink throat are visible in its wide-open mouth, as they squirt the venom at high pressure towards the victim. On the plastic visor two red spiral patterns appear. The eyes behind it look surprisingly unperturbed. "I sprayed the visor beforehand with rhodamine," Katja Tzschätzsch calmly explains, "It's a pigment which dyes liquids red. This makes the traces of venom easier to see." In her undergraduate dissertation the trainee teacher investigated what spitting cobras aim at when spitting. "In the literature it often says: they aim at the eyes," her supervisor Dr. Guido Westhoff, junior lecturer in Professor Horst Bleckmann's team, explains. "However, up to now nobody has investigated it." The cocktail of toxins partly consists of nerve poisons, but also contains components which are harmful to tissue. Through a narrow channel in their fangs the snakes can spray the liquid at high pressure – similar to a bullet in the barrel of a gun. If they manage to hit an eye, the sensitive cornea reacts with severe stinging pain. In the worst case these burns can ultimately lead to blindness.

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 6845 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Although most parents, educators, and researchers believe that children can't learn specific words until well into their second year, children younger than 1 year can, in fact, learn certain words for things that are not a regular part of their daily lives, according to new research being published in the January/February 2005 issue of the journal, Child Development. The findings, based on research by Graham Schafer, D.Phil., of the University of Reading in Reading in the United Kingdom, suggest that what is considered a "formal" learning of a word may be underway long before children say much. "It appears that young children may understand word use more flexibly than scientists and parents have previously thought," says Dr. Schafer. The findings call into question earlier beliefs that before their second year most children only learn words for things they are interested in, or when those words are linked to certain routines, such as "bath," "car," or "cat." To investigate this issue, Dr. Schafer asked parents of 52 nine-month-olds to use 12 board books and a set of 48 picture cards depicting common objects like keys, apples, fish, and chairs in simple games with their children four times a week for up to 10 minutes a session. The games were designed to build on the kind of routines parents already used in the home: Naming and pointing, sorting, finding the odd one out. No reading was required for either parents or children.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 6844 - Posted: 02.10.2005

— The octopus may have flexible arms, but it uses them in the same three-jointed way as vertebrates, a finding that sheds intriguing light on how limbs evolved, a new study says. An Israeli research team filmed octopuses as they stretched out an arm from a hidey-hole in an aquarium to grab a piece of food with their tentacles and bring it to their mouths. The octopuses, filmed about a hundred times, used a vertebrate-like strategy to carry out the complex movement. Even though their arms are supple and rubbery, the creatures stiffened the limbs through muscle control and articulated them in a way eerily like that of animals with rigid skeletons, the scientists found. To carry out the fetching movement, the octopus flexes its arm to form three "joints," located in similar locations to the shoulder, elbow and wrist in humans. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 6843 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jessica Ebert Being 'broken-hearted' as a result of emotional trauma may be a more apposite turn of phrase than we imagined. US researchers have shown how sudden emotional stress can release hormones that stun the heart into submission, resulting in symptoms that mimic a typical heart attack. People suffering from stress cardiomyopathy, or 'broken-heart syndrome', seem to be having a heart attack: they have chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure. But although the ability of the heart to pump is significantly reduced and the heart muscle is weakened, it is not killed, or infarcted, as in a classic attack. "The tissue is alive," says Hunter Champion of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, who led the study. "It's just not moving." In 1999, Champion and a fellow Johns Hopkins cardiologist, Ilan Wittstein, noticed something unusual about certain heart-attack patients. They were particularly struck by results from postmenopausal women who had experienced an intense emotional event before their attack, such as the loss of a loved one or a court appearance. These patients had unique electrocardiogram and ultrasound patterns, lacked coronary artery disease and recovered quickly. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 6842 - Posted: 06.24.2010

This remarkable collection of over 30 essays makes its first impact for two reasons. Firstly, it is beautifully produced and profusely illustrated, while being marketed at a reasonable price. The publishers deserve praise for this increasingly rare event in hardback publishing. Secondly—and one must take this to be an editorial decision—the focus of the collection is the history, not of tobacco or opium, but of smoke and smoking. This simple manoeuvre opens up what can only be called a cultural universe, one with its origins in the earliest known history of humankind and which takes us right up to current debates about very modern objects and their uses: the cigarette and its alleged dangers or the recent fashion for smoking rocks of cocaine, now of course called "crack." As a result, the central importance of smoking in all cultures and the highly complex and differing practices and meanings behind smoking are wonderfully displayed. Smoking as religious ritual; smoking as a possible source of medical healing in early modern Europe; smoking as pleasure, espe-cially in groups—all receive attention. And this is where the illustrations and the photographs play such a vital part, providing amazing examples of artefacts (pipes, above all), places (the opium den, the cocktail bar), and icons who almost are their cigarettes or their cigars (Bogart, Dietrich, Castro). Text and illustrations blend perfectly. © 2005 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6841 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan Okie Rudolph L. Leibel’s genes may have predisposed him to become a scientist, but his decision to spend his life trying to discover the causes of obesity was environmental happenstance, the result of a chance encounter. In the spring of 1977, Randall, a severely overweight child, and Randall’s mother showed up at the pediatric clinic of Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts, where Leibel was a specialist in hormone disorders. Leibel could find no evidence that hormone deficiency or, indeed, any other known medical condition, was the cause of Randall’s obesity. But what struck the young doctor was the response of Randall’s mother when Leibel told her there was little he or anyone else could do for her son: “Let’s get out of here, Randall,” she snapped. “This doctor doesn’t know s--t.” Chastened by her words, Leibel soon traded his hospital post for the low-paying toil of a rookie laboratory scientist. At the Rockefeller University laboratory of Jules Hirsch, a leading figure in research on obesity, Leibel and Hirsch conducted extensive studies of weight homeostasis: how the body responds both to weight gain and weight loss by fighting to restore the status quo ante. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2005

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 6840 - Posted: 06.24.2010