By JAN HOFFMAN When Janet Golden was kicking around in utero 53 years ago, pregnant women of her mother's generation were encouraged to enjoy their 5 o'clock cocktails. A martini calmed nerves; a glass of wine helped a woman to sleep. But don't drink too much, obstetricians cautioned: all those empty calories! By the mid-1960's, many obstetricians even believed that alcohol could halt premature labor. As noted by Dr. Golden, now a medical historian at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., when women arrived at the hospital in premature labor, they were often handed a vodka and orange juice or given alcohol intravenously. But in 1973, a new diagnosis, fetal alcohol syndrome, had been identified in the children of women who drank heavily during pregnancy. The symptoms included diminished I.Q., small stature, flat face and drooping eyelids. In her new book, "Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome" (Harvard University Press), Dr. Golden argues that the political, legal, medical and social response to fetal alcohol syndrome has been inconsistent, often illogical and frequently volatile. If alcoholism has been acknowledged as a disease, she observes, then why have pregnant women who drink been charged with child abuse? Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6759 - Posted: 01.26.2005

Scientists say they have found the brain regions that help us to decide whether to look someone in the eye or look away. Using brain imaging, the Imperial College London team pinpointed specific areas deep within the frontal cortex. One region works when we decide to look at something, while another works if we change our mind at the last minute. It might help doctors better understand certain brain diseases, they told the journal, Current Biology. Where we choose to look is fundamental to how we interact with other people. On some occasions we might want to look someone straight in the eye, but at other times we might decide to avert our gaze and look away. It has been thought that the frontal lobe is involved in helping a person select between conflicting voluntary actions such as this. It is also known that people who have damage to their frontal lobe have difficulties in spontaneously initiating voluntary actions. To investigate further, Dr Masud Husain and colleagues asked volunteers to perform a visual task while undergoing a brain scan. The volunteers were shown an image and asked to either choose which part they looked at and fixate on that, or change their minds and look elsewhere. (C)BBC

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 6758 - Posted: 01.26.2005

A study by New York University researchers reveals a new function for the nerve cells that regulate circadian rhythms of behavior in fruit flies. The nerve cells, called pacemaker neurons, contain a molecular clock that controls a 24-hour circadian rhythm in activity similar to the rhythms in sleep/wake cycles found in humans and many other organisms. It was previously known that pacemaker neurons receive visual signals to reset their molecular clocks, but scientists did not have any evidence that they transmitted information to their target cells, as most other neurons do. The current study shows that pacemaker neurons do in fact transmit signals and are required for a rapid behavior, according to the paper, published in the January 20th issue of Neuron. The study was conducted by Esteban O. Mazzoni, a graduate student in NYU's Biology Department, Biology Professor Claude Desplan, and Assistant Biology Professor Justin Blau. The finding suggests it may be possible to identify genes that can be used to treat problems such as sleep disorders and jet lag. The researchers examined the role that pacemaker neurons play in helping Drosophila larvae avoid light. Drosophila is a species of fruit fly commonly used in biological research. Fruit fly larvae foraging for food avoid light, presumably to keep away from predators. Unlike adult Drosophila, the larvae only have one structure for gathering visual cues, called Bolwig's Organ. This organ senses the amount of light in the environment and transmits that information to the pacemaker neurons to reset their molecular clocks.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 6757 - Posted: 01.26.2005

There’s a reason why we listen to music on the FM dial of our radios – it just sounds better than it does on AM. And this reason also holds true for cochlear implants and hearing aids. UC Irvine School of Medicine researchers have found that improving frequency modulation, or FM, reception on cochlear implants and hearing aids may increase the quality of life for the millions of Americans who use these devices. Dr. Fan-Gang Zeng and his colleagues at UCI and the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing discovered that enhancing the detection of frequency modulation may significantly boost the performance of many hearing aids and automatic speech recognition devices by separating and blocking out background noise and increasing tonal recognition, which is essential to hearing music and certain spoken languages. Study results appear this week in the early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Some 30 million Americans have some form of hearing loss, and some 4 million of these people benefit from using hearing aids or cochlear implants. But limitation on sound quality and overamplification of background sound can hinder their uses. © Copyright 2002-2005 UC Regents

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 6756 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Children who live with younger siblings during the first six years of childhood are much less likely to develop multiple sclerosis later in life, a new study suggests. The finding backs the so-called "hygiene hypothesis" which proposes that exposure to infectious bugs early in life - lurking in household dirt or carried by younger siblings - reduces the risk of allergic and autoimmune diseases by stimulating the immune system. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system is thought to attack the fatty coat which insulates nerve cells. Damage to this sheath stops the nerves conducting electrical signals properly. The study showed that living with a toddler sibling for over five years could reduce the risk of developing MS by almost 90%. "This possibly occurs by altering childhood infection patterns and related immune responses," says Anne-Louise Ponsonby at the Australian National University in Canberra, who led the study. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 6755 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Monitoring the change in specific brain waves could be the first quantitative method for measuring libido, new research suggests. The technique measures attention, rather than sexual desire specifically, but Yoram Vardi, at Rambam Hospital and the Technion, both in Haifa, Israel told NewScientist: "We found that sexual stimuli are the most potent." So far 30 people with normal sexual function have been tested, but if further tests are successful, Vardi hopes his method will have many applications. These could include quantitatively analysing the libido-lowering (or enhancing) side effects of medication or even supporting legal claims of a reduction in sex drive after an accident. But he cautions that it is too early to say for sure whether it will be possible to establish an absolute measurement scale for libido. David Ralph, chairman of the British Society for Sexual Medicine, says the technique is "an interesting concept and the first of its kind - there has never been any quantitative measurement of libido". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6754 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Parts of the human brain think about the same word differently, at least when it comes to prepositions, according to new language research in stroke patients conducted by scientists at Purdue University and the University of Iowa. People who speak English often use the same prepositions, words such as "on," "in," "around" and "through," to indicate time as well as location. For example, compare "I will meet you 'at' the store," to "I will meet you 'at' 3 p.m." These examples show how time may be thought of metaphorically in terms of space. Just because it's the same word, however, doesn't mean the brain thinks about it the same way, said David Kemmerer, an assistant professor of psychological sciences and linguistics at Purdue's College of Liberal Arts. "There has been a lot of cognitive neuroscience research about how the brain processes language pertaining to concrete things, such as animals or tools," said Kemmerer, who also is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Iowa's Department of Neurology, where this research was conducted. "This is the first cognitive neuroscience study to investigate brain regions for spatial and temporal relations – those involving time – used in language.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 6753 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jessica Ebert Chimpanzees will tolerate unfair treatment, as long as it benefits someone they know well, say US researchers. This is the first time such behaviour has been demonstrated outside the human race. Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, primatologists at Emory University in Atlanta, gave chimpanzees a piece of plastic and rewarded them for giving it back. If a subject is given a paltry payoff, such as a cucumber slice or celery stick, and it can see another getting a grape, the short-changed ape refuses to cooperate. But the strength of each chimpanzee's response depends on its social life. Those that had lived together for more than 30 years ignored the unequal treatment; whereas animals from a group formed eight years ago and pairs of chimpanzees reacted strongly, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B1. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 6752 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Blind people have been shown to recruit visual areas of the brain to pinpoint the direction of sounds. The finding, published this week in PLoS Biology1, gives the first clear link between superior hearing abilities in blind people and increased activity in the visual centres of their brains. "These results tell us about the plasticity of the brain," says neuroscientist Franco Lepore of the University of Montreal, Canada. He believes that when people who were born blind, or went blind at a young age, use noise to navigate their environment, their mental processing adapts. Previous experiments have shown that people who lose their sight at an early age often excel at non-visual tasks, such as speech perception, verbal memory and musical ability. Some scientists have claimed that blind people can pinpoint sound in space better than the sighted. But other researchers have failed to find this advantage. Lepore and his colleagues decided to investigate why only some blind people are better at locating noises. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing; Vision
Link ID: 6751 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Map reading and parking may prove difficult for some women because they were exposed to too little testosterone in the womb, researchers suggest. The study, in the journal Intelligence, fuels the age-old male myth that women are deficient in these skills. Scientists from the University of Giessen, Germany, found a lack of the hormone affects spatial ability. Low testosterone levels are also linked to shorter wedding ring fingers, they say. The research looked at the spatial, numerical and verbal skills of 40 student volunteers. Spatial skill is the ability to assess and orientate shapes and spaces. Map reading and parking are spatial skills which men often say women lack. Women tend to disagree. The researchers also looked at the length of the students' wedding and index fingers. In women, the two fingers are usually almost equal in length, as measured from the crease nearest the palm to the fingertip. In men, the ring finger tends to be much longer than the index. For one of the spatial tests, volunteers had to tell which of five drawings could not be rotated so it looked like the other four. The other test involved the ability to think in 3D by mentally "unfolding" a complex shape. Overall, men achieved higher scores in the tests than women. But women with the male pattern of finger length did better than those whose wedding finger was shorter. They also scored better on the numerical tests. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6750 - Posted: 01.25.2005

By JONATHAN KOLATCH My introduction to floaters came on a sunny September afternoon in the orchard. I was high on a ladder picking Jonagold apples when I felt a pop in my left eye, followed by blurriness. I thought that maybe a branch had slapped across my glasses, dirtying the lens, and I went inside to clean it. But the blurriness - a sort of floating haze - persisted overnight. After hearing the symptoms, my ophthalmologist, Dr. William Kirber, diagnosed a posterior vitreous detachment, one of several causes of floaters, sensations that many people describe as specks, bugs or cobwebs floating in their fields of vision. In 85 percent of cases, the floaters caused by posterior detachment are mere annoyances, but when they occur suddenly, immediate medical examination is essential. The most common type of floater is caused by aging. Sitting directly between the lens and the retina is a cavity known as the vitreous or vitreous humor. Its outer boundary is defined by a crust like the skin of Jell-O. The function of the vitreous, which makes up four-fifths of the volume of the eye, is to give it its shape, to be a shock absorber in younger eyes and, some argue, to nourish the inner eye. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 6749 - Posted: 01.25.2005

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Old beagles, like old humans, act younger and smarter when they get the right diet and plenty of intellectual stimulation. A report published in the January issue of Neurobiology of Aging found that a diet rich in antioxidants combined with a stimulating environment slowed the canine aging process. The scientists divided the 48 beagles, ages 8 to 11, into four groups, giving them an enriched diet, an enriched environment, neither or both. The diet was fortified with vitamin E, vitamin C and other antioxidants. The dogs in the enriched environment group were housed with kennel mates, exercised twice a week for 15 minutes and challenged with tasks like learning to distinguish between a white box and a black box. By the end of the two-year trial, it was clear that the enriched diet alone and the enriched environment alone were each helpful in preventing decline. But the mental functioning of the dogs given a combination of enriched diet and stimulating environment was considerably higher than that of the dogs in the other three groups, the researchers found. One author of the paper works for the company that sells the dog food used in the study. Dr. William Milgram, the paper's lead author and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, said that one of the dogs, Scamps, "was basically a stupid dog." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 6748 - Posted: 01.25.2005

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. As a psychopharmacologist, I know that every patient responds slightly differently to medication. But it wasn't until I met Susan that I understood just how differently. She'd come to see me because she was depressed, and I'd successfully treated her with a course of Zoloft, a popular antidepressant. But as often happens, Susan's desire for sex had vanished along with her depressed mood. "I kind of miss it, but I feel really bad for my husband, who's getting very frustrated," she said. The sexual side effects of antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac - the class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s - are well known. The drugs frequently cause diminished libido, erectile dysfunction in men, and delayed orgasm or an inability to climax at all in women. The same flooding of the brain with serotonin that alleviates depression leads to sexual effects in many patients. Early on, the rates of sexual side effects from S.S.R.I.'s reported in the medical literature were quite low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent. But clinicians knew better. Most of their patients reported some sexual effects, and it quickly became clear that the early reports were wrong. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6747 - Posted: 01.25.2005

Yawn. Stretch. Grumble. Retch. No matter. All muscle motion starts with a nerve signal: Move, muscle, now! You know the drill: Brain activates nerve, nerve stimulates muscle cell, and something happens. Things are different in the fruitfly. This mainstay of the compost heap and the biology lab beats its wings 200 times a second. Even Why Filers can do the math: 200 contractions of the muscles that lift the wings, and another 200 in the muscles that pull them back down. All in one second. That's a problem because it's much faster than nerves can trigger muscles, says Thomas Irving, associate professor of biology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and director of the Biophysics Collaborative Access Team . "Human muscle needs a nerve impulse, but the insect has got to do it 200 times a second," and so the triggering "has to be done at the molecular level." To explore the molecular level, Irving and colleagues, including fruit-fly flight expert Michael Dickinson of Caltech, triggered some muscular activity of their own. They glued the head of a living fruitfly to a wire and placed it in a bath of X-rays at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. They put on a light show to force the fly to adopt a steady wingbeat, and aimed brief surges of tightly focused X-rays at the critter's wing muscles. You can read their results in this week's Nature. ©2005, University of Wisconsin, Board of Regents.

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 6746 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles are often cited as anecdotal evidence that blindness confers superior musical ability. In fact, systematic studies have shown that blind persons perform nonvisual tasks better than those with sight. Neuroimaging studies have suggested that areas of the brain normally devoted to vision become active when blind persons perform nonvisual tasks, but much remains to be learned about the nature and extent of this phenomenon. A new study published in the open-access journal PLoS Biology finds a strong correlation between superior sound localization skills and increased activity in the brain's visual center. The task of localizing sound--which requires integrating information available to one ear only (monaural sounds available, for example, when one ear is plugged) or information derived from comparing sounds binaurally--is particularly suited to investigating the neural remapping that seems to follow vision loss. In a previous study, Franco Lepore and colleagues showed that people who lost their sight at an early age could localize sound, particularly from monaural cues, better than those who could see. These findings suggested that areas of the brain normally dedicated to processing visual stimuli (the visual cortex, located at the back of the brain in the occipital lobe) might play a role in processing sound in these individuals. In the new study, the authors hypothesized that if visual cortex recruitment bolstered auditory function in some individuals, then visual cortex activity would correlate with individual differences in performance, and the degree of activity should predict such differences.

Keyword: Hearing; Vision
Link ID: 6745 - Posted: 01.25.2005

Why females fall for captivating males that apparently give them nothing but their genes and little else is a puzzling question for evolutionary biologists. Females typically incur more survival costs than males in rearing offspring, especially when they choose flashy mates. So why do they do it? Megan Head and colleagues now report in the freely-available online journal PLoS Biology, the results of simultaneously measuring both the costs and benefits of mating to female crickets and their offspring and provide new evidence that the costs that females pay for mating with attractive males are balanced by, and may even be outweighed by, the indirect benefits of spawning offspring with elevated fitness. The authors paired females with either "attractive" or "unattractive" males (determining which males were attractive by running the equivalent of speed dating "tournaments") and measured the overall fitness consequences of the various unions. Although female crickets, they found, paid a higher survival price for mating with attractive males, these females produced both daughters that laid more eggs within a given time and sons that were more attractive. The benefit stems in large part, the authors argue, from siring "sexy" sons. Thus, by evaluating both the direct effects of mating on female lifetime fecundity and the indirect effects of offspring fitness, the authors determined the net consequences of a mating strategy.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 6744 - Posted: 01.25.2005

DALLAS – – Jumping on that treadmill or bike is not only good for one's health, but also can help significantly reduce depression, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found. The first study to look at exercise alone in treating mild to moderate depression in adults aged 20 to 45 showed that depressive symptoms were reduced almost 50 percent in individuals who participated in 30-minute aerobic exercise sessions three to five times a week. The results, published in the January issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, are comparable to results from studies in which patients with mild to moderate depression were treated with antidepressants or cognitive therapy, said Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, professor of psychiatry and director of UT Southwestern's mood disorders research program. "The effect you find using aerobic exercise alone in treating clinical depression is similar to what you find with antidepressant medications," said Dr. Trivedi, a study author and holder of the Lydia Bryant Test Professorship in Psychiatric Research. "The key is the intensity of the exercise and continuing it for 30 to 35 minutes per day. It's not for the faint of heart."

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6743 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kristen Philipkoski You can try, but you can't ignore that angry voice yelling at you, or anyone else. Whether it's your dad, your girlfriend, your sister or a stranger, you must pay attention. Human brains are just wired that way, according to a study published in the Jan. 23 issue of Nature Neuroscience. Wrathful voices trigger a strong response in the brain, even when we are trying not to pay attention or the comments are meaningless, say researchers at the University of Geneva. The brain appears to place a high priority on processing urgent sounds, like angry voices, that might indicate a threat is present. So, try as we might, when someone is angry the brain cannot avoid noticing, regardless of what the fuss is all about. "The new finding (is) that the influence of attention cannot diminish the brain activity associated with certain types of salient input: in this case, angry voices," said G. Ron Mangun, a cognitive neuroscience professor at the University of California at Davis, who did not participate in the research. © Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 6742 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A high resolution x-ray scanning technique can look inside a single brain tissue cell. Scientists say it will help to pin down the role of iron and other metals in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The new technique, developed by Keele University, can identify where the compounds are within the brain, and thus whether they are harmful. Details are published in the journal Interface. The researchers hope the scan will aid the development of new treatments and techniques for early diagnosis. High concentrations of iron compounds in brain tissue have been linked to degenerative neurological diseases for more than 50 years. Iron is an essential element for living organisms - but in some circumstances it can be toxic. However, its precise role in the development of conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease is not known. This is because the staining techniques used for identifying iron compounds to date cannot identify precisely where the iron is or what type of iron compound it is. Researcher Professor Jon Dobson said: "This work will enable scientists to understand the properties of iron compounds and where they are in relation to structures in the tissue. "Using this information, we are designing techniques that can identify them in the early stages for people at risk which will aid the development of suitable treatment. "It also means that we may be able to develop treatments for those whose symptoms are already well-established." (C)BBC

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 6741 - Posted: 01.24.2005

By NATALIE ANGIER and KENNETH CHANG hen Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this month that one factor in women's lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point? Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular? Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women - in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain. Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6740 - Posted: 01.24.2005