By Robert Anderson VISITING A NEIGHBOR recently, I found her chatting in Armenian with a workman. I listened intently; I’d never heard Armenian spoken before. Noting my interest, the two speakers proudly informed me that their language was not related to any other. When I checked their claim on the Internet, I discovered, for one thing, that Armenian contains so many Farsi words, acquired during centuries of Persian influence, that early linguists mistakenly believed it was a Persian dialect. But I also found out that, though Armenian is a branch of the Indo-European family, the language evolved for thousands of years in the relative isolation of the Caucasus Mountains; it is, in fact, unlike any other. My curiosity piqued, I poked around for other language-specific sites and found an instructive Web page created by C. George Boeree, a professor of psychology at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania (www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/languages.html). I began by clicking on “Language Families of the World (maps),” and discovered a series of informative geographic charts, each one accompanied by brief but illuminating comments and statistics. The “Archaeolink” Web site provides a page with numerous links to sites that specialize in linguistic anthropology (www.archaeolink.com/linguistic_anthropology_index.htm). Click on the very first link to find a transcript of the PBS NOVA television program “In Search of the First Language.” The material focuses on the quest for the linguists’ holy grail—Nostratic—a hypothetical tongue that some maintain was once the universal spoken language. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2004

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 6265 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Greg Ross When Semir Zeki looks at a Picasso, he sees more than a fine painting. He sees a window into the workings of the visual brain. Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London, believes that great artists may have begun discerning fundamental truths about the visual brain years before neurobiologists came to appreciate them. For example, in preparing for seminal experiments in the 1970s, Edwin Land needed stimuli that would reflect the barest essentials of color vision, to avoid invoking factors such as memory and learning in his subjects. He settled on overlapping rectangles of simple colors, with no recognizable objects—images, it turns out, that closely echo the canvases of Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter who had been active some 50 years earlier. Zeki suggests that Land's discovery is not a coincidence. In painting his neoplasticist images, with their bold, straight lines and primary colors, Mondrian had declared that he was searching for "the constant elements of all forms." Thirty years later, physiologists discovered a central role played by cells that respond selectively to straight lines. Using only his intuition, Mondrian had correctly identified the essential building blocks of form perception. "You could say that Mondrian antedated or preceded the physiologists by at least three decades," Zeki says. "He was exploring the same question, but with different techniques." © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Vision; Emotions
Link ID: 6264 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers explore the science behind peer pressure PEGGY CURRAN Don't be alarmed, but Tomas Paus wants to look inside your teenager's head. Paus, a neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute, is intrigued by the neuro-cognitive roots of adolescent behaviour. Parents may tell themselves. "It's OK, she'll grow out of it," when their sweet young thing starts to dress like Britney Spears, swear like a rapper or cover her body with tattoos. Paus and his team want to know why they grow out of it. The Santa Fe Project, a joint study between Paus's unit at the Neuro and researchers in California, explores the science behind peer pressure - the reasons why some young people may feel compelled to look, act and sound just like everyone else in their circle of friends. Over the next five to seven years, Paus will use electroencephalogram (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission topography (PET) and a battery of neuropsychological tests to look at the brains of 120 Montrealers as they pass from childhood through puberty to find clues that may link brain development and activity to behavioural patterns. Copyright © 2004 CanWest Interactive Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 6263 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A select group of people have a unique ability to spot when someone is lying, US research shows. A University of San Francisco study found only 31 people out of 13,000 could identify in nearly all cases when someone was lying. The group used facial expressions, body language and ways of talking and thinking to spot liars while the others did little better than chance. The team are now using them to help train police and other investigators. In the tests, during which the participants were shown video clips of people, the select group, dubbed wizards, were able to observe a few seconds of footage and detect lying. The study said the wizards had a "natural talent" although they were highly motivated and tended to be older. Police, lawyers and FBI agents were all among the groups who were unable to tell if people were lying. The wizards' success rate was even higher than the traditional polygraph test, which is used in the US and is claimed to have a 60% to 70% success rate. Dr Maureen O'Sullivan, the university's professor of psychology, said: "We hope that by studying wizards, we'll learn more about the kinds of behaviours and ways of thinking and talking that can betray a liar to an experienced interviewer." (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 6262 - Posted: 10.16.2004

By GARDINER HARRIS Heeding the recommendation of an advisory committee, the Food and Drug Administration ordered pharmaceutical companies yesterday to add strong warnings to antidepressants, saying the drugs could cause suicidal thoughts and actions in some children and teenagers. The so-called black-box warnings will appear in boldface type, framed by a black border, on information sheets for patients and doctors. They are the toughest requirement that federal drug regulators can impose short of banning a medication. Black-box warnings accompany hundreds of other drugs. But in this case the agency also directed the manufacturers to print and distribute medication guides with every antidepressant prescription, to inform patients of the risks. Such guides are required for fewer than 30 other drugs. The agency's decision came after a year of intense controversy about antidepressants and one month after the advisory committee concluded that evidence linking them with suicidal behavior in children and adolescents was sufficient to warrant the strengthened warnings. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6261 - Posted: 10.16.2004

Richard Dawkins "Race" is not a clearly defined word. "Species" is different. There really is an agreed way to decide whether two animals belong in the same species: can they interbreed? The interbreeding criterion gives the species a unique status in the hierarchy of taxonomic levels. Above the species level, a genus is just a group of species whose members are pretty similar to each other. No objective criterion exists to determine how similar they have to be, and the same is true of all the higher levels: family, order, class, phylum and the various "sub-" or "super-" names that intervene between them. Below the species level, "race" and "sub-species" are used interchangeably and, again, no objective criterion exists that would enable us to decide whether two people should be considered part of the same race or not, nor to decide how many races there are. And of course there is the added complication, absent above the species level, that races interbreed, so there are lots of people of mixed race. The interbreeding criterion works pretty well, and it delivers an unequivocal verdict on humans and their supposed races. All living human races interbreed with one another. We are all members of the same species, and no reputable biologist would say any different. But let me call your attention to an interesting, perhaps even slightly disturbing, fact. While we happily interbreed with each other, producing a continuous spectrum of inter-races, we are reluctant to give up our divisive racial language. Wouldn't you expect that if all intermediates are on constant display, the urge to classify people as one or the other of two extremes would wither away, smothered by the absurdity of the attempt, which is continually manifested everywhere we look? But this is not what happens, and perhaps that very fact is revealing.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 6260 - Posted: 10.16.2004

The underwater Manhattan depicted in the animated movie Shark Tale, with its skyscrapers and trendy restaurants, may exist only on the silver screen. But the story, about a tiny cleaner fish that dreams of climbing the social ladder—and getting the right "girl"—on a reef terrorized by sharks, may not be that far-fetched. Real everyday life underwater is about survival and mating. To mix a metaphor, it can be a dog-eat-dog world. "There's a constant struggle that goes on" to get ahead among fish, said Mike Heithaus, a marine biology professor at Florida International University in Miami. "But we don't know a whole lot about [their] social order." The main character in Shark Tale, Oscar (voiced by Will Smith), is a cleaner wrasse, a tiny fish with blue stripes and an elongated body. He is told that he ranks at the bottom of the sea hierarchy. © 2004 National Geographic Society.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6259 - Posted: 06.24.2010

In 1979 Jack O’Neil, 69, from New York City, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS, or amytrophic lateral sclerosis. "The prognosis indicated that I had between two and five years to live," says O'Neil. Fortunately the disease was unusually slow to affect him, allowing him to keep working for more than 15 years. But finally in 1985 he was forced to stop working as he lost control of his muscles. "I had no energy. I couldn't fulfill my work obligations and I couldn't travel. I was just exhausted all the time," O'Neil remembers. "I could walk a little bit, but gradually I didn't have strength to do anything—to move my hands or my arms or anything like that." ALS, a rapidly progressive, invariably fatal neurological disease, is one of the most common neuromuscular diseases worldwide. The specialized nerve cells of the spine that control muscle movements in the body selectively die, leading to progressive paralysis. It strikes people mostly between 40 and 60 years of age, but sometimes even younger, and typically more men than women. As many as 20,000 Americans have ALS and around 5,000 Americans are diagnosed each year. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2004.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 6258 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Dishonest cooks have used herbs and spices to mask the odor of spoiling food for thousands of years. Now scientists studying how odors interact in the brain may have discovered the reason certain spices are especially effective at covering up the stench of rotting meat. As foods decay, they release chemicals into the air, where they are inhaled and detected by receptor cells in the nose. The information is sent to the olfactory bulb, then to other brain regions that eventually identify the odors as foul. To study how the brain copes with competing odors, researchers led by Kensaku Mori of the University of Tokyo exposed rats to a fatty, fishy odor released by rotting meat and to two spices known to mask it. The researchers identified clusters of cells in the olfactory bulb that were particularly responsive to the fishy odor, which is a combination of alkylamines, fatty acids, and aliphatic aldehydes. The cells were activated by each of the three chemicals but not by other molecules (such as their amino acid precursors), strongly suggesting that the cells are "tuned" to this odor. The scientists then exposed the rats to cloves and fennel oil, which mask the fishy odor. Each odor lit up clusters of cells adjacent to the clusters of cells sensitive to the fishy odor and suppressed their response to that odor, the researchers report in the 6 October issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. "It was surprising that the interaction between spoiled food smells and herb spice odors occurred at the level of the olfactory blub," says Mori. "Such interactions were thought to occur at higher centers." Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 6257 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A brain protein already known to play a central role in the "feast or fast" signaling that controls the urge to eat has now been found to influence appetite in a second way. The discovery identifies a potential new target for drugs against obesity. Earlier research has shown that this protein, called MC4R, is a receptor on neurons in the hypothalamus region of the brain and receives signals through at least two pathways about the status of the body's fat reserves. If fat stores are increasing, theses signals stimulate MC4R, triggering physiological responses that decrease appetite. If fat reserves are decreasing, these signals turn off, deactivating MC4R and increasing appetite. Pioneering genetic studies of extremely obese people carried out since 1998 by Christian Vaisse, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at UCSF, have revealed that mutations that impair MC4R's response to the signals are the most common genetic cause of severe obesity. The protein has become a prime target in efforts to develop drugs to combat obesity. But the new research at UCSF and the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease shows that MC4R also affects appetite in a way unrelated to the signaling loop that has been the focus of most appetite-suppression research. Scientists found a new group of mutations in this receptor that cause obesity not by interrupting the MC4R receptor's response to the appetite signals, but by affecting its intrinsic, or baseline, level of activity.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 6256 - Posted: 10.16.2004

Female mice that are abnormally small due to gene "knockout" technology are also bad mothers whose poor parenting skills cause their young to die within a day or two of birth, scientists report this week in the on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since Chawnshang Chang, Ph.D., cloned the gene for testicular orphan receptor 4 (TR4) 10 years ago, he and other scientists have tried to learn its function – scientists call it an "orphan" receptor because they don't know what protein links up with it. So a team led by Chang, director of George Whipple Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Rochester Medical Center, knocked out the gene in mice, then watched what happened. They found that many of the mice died before birth. Those that lived are markedly smaller than their normal counterparts: They're born far smaller and then make up some of the difference as they grow, but generally they are about 20 to 30 percent smaller by the time they reach adulthood. The miniature mice are not as fertile as normal mice, having only about half the offspring as other mice. Most visibly, the females have very bad parenting skills: They don't build nests, nurse their young, or tend to their offspring, which die within a day or two as a result.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6255 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A perceptual decision-making hub at the front of the brain makes the call on whether you're looking at a face or a house – and likely many other things – scientists at the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered. It works by gauging the strength of competing signals from lower brain areas specialized for recognizing different objects, report Drs. Hauke Heekeren, Leslie Ungerleider, and colleagues, in the October 14, 2004 Nature. Although earlier studies in monkeys had suggested that such a decision-making hub exists, its location in the human brain was not previously known. The researchers took advantage of the fact that it takes the brain longer to figure out what it's looking at when an image is very blurred or obscured – like trying to recognize people standing on a street corner in a downpour versus on a clear day. Hard to discern images evoke a relatively slower and reduced response in the decision-making area, as it mulls the strength of competing signals from specialized visual processing areas, where neurons fire only to the extent that they see certain objects or features, the monkey studies showed. While their brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), twelve healthy subjects pressed buttons to indicate whether they saw a face or a house, as images flashed on a computer monitor. Some of the images were so noisy that they were barely discernable, reducing accuracy from 95 percent to 82 percent.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 6254 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Pollution Suspected Cause of Anomaly in River's South Branch By David A. Fahrenthold MOOREFIELD, W.Va. -- The South Branch of the Potomac River is as clear as bottled water here, where it rolls over a bed of smooth stones about 230 miles upstream from Washington. But there is a mystery beneath this glassy surface. Many of the river's male bass are producing eggs. Scientists believe this inversion of nature is being caused by pollution in the water. But they say the exact culprit is still unknown: It might be chicken estrogen left over in poultry manure, or perhaps human hormones dumped in the river with processed sewage. Chances are, it is not something that federal and state inspectors regularly test for in local waters. The discovery has made the South Branch the latest example of an emerging national problem: Hormones, drugs and other man-made pollutants appear to be interfering with the chemical signals that make fish grow and reproduce. While researchers look for answers in West Virginia, other scientists are testing Rock Creek, and another group is seeking financial support to test the rest of the Potomac to see whether they can find the same troubling effects downstream. "Whatever's doing this to the fish may be the canary in the mineshaft," said Margaret Janes, a West Virginia activist with the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment. © Copyright 1996-2004 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 6253 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Time-lapse movies show brain cells move like a two-stroke engine Following the often-quoted advice of Yogi Berra — "You can observe a lot by just watching" — Rockefeller University scientists show that nerve cells in the developing brains of humans and other mammals move in a two-part "step" led by a structure within the cell called the centrosome. Once the centrosome, the key organizing point for the cell's internal skeleton, moves forward, the cell nucleus follows. The Rockefeller scientists produced time-lapse movies that show nerve cell migration in unprecedented clarity and detail. The finding, reported in the October 10 online issue of Nature Neuroscience, overturns a widely accepted view of how nerve cells, or neurons, move in the young developing brain. Until now, researchers generally thought that the explanation for how a neuron migrates to its destination in the brain lies in the way the cell adheres to, and later releases, thread-like cells called radial glia. The researchers, led by Mary E. Hatten, Frederick P. Rose Professor and head of the Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology at Rockefeller, also discovered that a protein called Par6-alpha plays an important role in spurring the centrosome to action. "Scientists have spent the last 15 years focusing on adhesion as the most important aspect of cell migration," says Hatten. "These experiments illustrate that we've been looking in the wrong place. Adhesion is necessary, but not sufficient for neuronal migration."

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6252 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Imagine finding unexplained condoms around your house and then waking up one night to find your partner having sex with a stranger. It might sound like an affair, but what if your 'cheating' partner was fast asleep during the act? The phenomenon, called sleep sex, was described to doctors at a meeting in Australia. Sleep physician Peter Buchanan, from Sydney's Royal Alfred Hospital, described this real life case. Mr Buchanan told the Australasian Sleep Association how a patient of his, who was a respectable middle-aged woman with a steady partner, would leave the house while sleepwalking and have sex with strangers. The woman was totally unaware of her double life until her partner became suspicious and found her engaged in the act. "He was aware of some sleepwalking and there was circumstantial evidence, including the unexplained presence of condoms around the house," Mr Buchanan told the conference. Mr Buchanan ran a series of tests on the woman and diagnosed her problem - sleep sex. Whatever they are dreaming about, which at that time is their reality, they actually do This is a condition completely distinct from sleepwalking and is a form of sleep disorder called REM behavioural disorder. Normally, when a person enters the deepest phase of sleep, the REM (rapid eye movement) phase in which we dream, our bodies are immobilised. In the case of sleep sex, this doesn't happen and the person can act out their dreams. (C) BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6251 - Posted: 10.15.2004

A protein deep in the ear is a key factor for normal hearing and could be used to help develop treatments for deafness, US researchers believe. For decades scientists have been trying to figure out what translates sound into the nerve impulses which are interpreted by the brain. Now a Harvard Medical School team says it is down to a protein, TRPA1, on the tips of hair cells of the inner ear. Their animal research findings are published in the journal Nature. Scientists already know that in order to hear, sound waves travel along the passage of the ear until they hit the eardrum and cause it to vibrate. This causes three tiny bones behind the ear drum, called the ossicles, to start moving. They, in turn, pass on vibrations to a thin layer of tissue at the entrance of the inner ear called the oval window. The movement of the oval window then sets off wave-like motions in the fluid in an organ shaped like a snail's shell which is called the cochlea. The cochlea contains thousands of minute hair cells that are linked up to nerves, which transmit impulses to the brain to interpret the sound. However, it was unclear exactly how these microscopic hair-like structures in the inner ear convert or "transduce" the sound waves into electrical signals to be transmitted to the brain. Experts had suspected that the process involved some sort of pore or channel that allows electrical charge to flow into the cells bearing the hairs. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 6250 - Posted: 10.15.2004

Implications range from economic theory to addiction research You walk into a room and spy a plate of doughnuts dripping with chocolate frosting. But wait: You were saving your sweets allotment for a party later today. If it feels like one part of your brain is battling another, it probably is, according to a newly published study. Researchers at four universities found two areas of the brain that appear to compete for control over behavior when a person attempts to balance near-term rewards with long-term goals. The research involved imaging people's brains as they made choices between small but immediate rewards or larger awards that they would receive later. The study grew out of the emerging discipline of neuroeconomics, which investigates the mental and neural processes that drive economic decision-making. The study was a collaboration between Jonathan Cohen and Samuel McClure at Princeton's Center for the Study of Brain Mind and Behavior; David Laibson, professor of economics at Harvard University; and George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Their study appears in the Oct. 15 issue of Science. "This is part of a series of studies we've done that illustrate that we are rarely of one mind," said Cohen, also a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh. "We have different neural systems that evolved to solve different types of problems, and our behavior is dictated by the competition or cooperation between them."

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 6249 - Posted: 10.15.2004

By SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON, - A federal panel of medical experts studying illnesses among veterans of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf has broken with several earlier studies and concluded that many suffer from neurological damage caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, rejecting past findings that the ailments resulted mostly from wartime stress. Citing new scientific research on the effects of exposure to low levels of neurotoxins, the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses concludes in its draft report that "a substantial proportion of Gulf War veterans are ill with multisymptom conditions not explained by wartime stress or psychiatric illness." It says a growing body of research suggests that many veterans' symptoms have a neurological cause and that there is a "probable link" to exposure to neurotoxins. The report says possible sources include sarin, a nerve gas, from an Iraqi weapons depot blown up by American forces in 1991; a drug, pyridostigmine bromide, given to troops to protect against nerve gas; and pesticides used to protect soldiers in the region. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 6248 - Posted: 10.15.2004

From language to literature, from music to mathematics, a single protein appears central to the formation of the long-term memories needed to learn these and all other disciplines, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health. Their findings appear in the October 15 issue of Science. The protein is known as mBDNF, which stands for mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It appears to chemically alter neurons, boosting their ability to communicate with one another. "Most of what we accomplish as human beings depends on what we learn," said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "This discovery brings the possibility of studying this protein system in people with disorders of learning and memory and perhaps designing new medications that might help to compensate for these problems." Researchers recognize two broad categories of memory--short term memory, and long term memory. Short term memory refers to the transient memories that last from minutes to hours. Long term memory refers to the ability to remember things for more than a day--sometimes for many years.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Trophic Factors
Link ID: 6247 - Posted: 10.15.2004

EVANSTON, Ill. --- False memories are the controversial subject of hotly contested arguments about the validity of repressed memories that can surface years after a traumatic event and about the credibility of eyewitness accounts in criminal trials. Because memories are imperfect under ordinary circumstances -- forming, storing and retrieving them, with great variations in factors influencing those processes -- it is unlikely that a one-answer-fits-all will settle those controversies soon. But a group of researchers from various disciplines at Northwestern University literally have peered into the brain to offer new evidence on the existence of false memories and how they are formed. Published in the journal Psychological Science, the new study used MRI technology to pinpoint how people form a memory for something that didn't actually happen. "Our challenge was to bring people into the laboratory and set up a circumstance in which they would remember something that did not happen," said Kenneth A. Paller, professor of psychology and co-investigator of the study. (Brian Gonsalves, who was a doctoral student of Paller's and who now is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, is the first author of the paper.)

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 6246 - Posted: 10.15.2004