Maths shows why tonal music is easy listening. PHILIP BALL Ever felt as though a piece of music is speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to an Argentinian physicist. His analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones, which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to make sense of atonal works. In both written text and speech, the frequency with which different words are used follows a striking pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency. In other words, a graph of one plotted against the other appeared as a straight line. The economist and sociologist Herbert Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship. He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word "music" than the word "sausage". © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 5676 - Posted: 06.24.2010

SHARON BEGLEY, The Wall Street Journal After Heather Wood had been playing the harp for only two years, she was good enough for the principal harpist of the New Mexico Symphony to agree to give her lessons. By Thursday evening she had made it to performance nirvana: New York's Carnegie Hall. Ms. Wood, who just finished her freshman year at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minn., and three other students enchanted an invitation-only audience with a program that ranged from Faure's "Elegie" to Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm." But what got the students to Carnegie Hall was less their way with keys and strings than their brilliance with genomes and fractals. The four are recent winners of the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in science and math. When officials at the Siemens Foundation, Iselin, N.J., systematically asked entrants about their music background, says Executive Vice President Herb Carter, "we were shocked" that nearly three-quarters were gifted musicians. Thursday's recital, arranged by Siemens, was the result. There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence that some of the most brilliant scientists and mathematicians are gifted musicians. Einstein, for example, played the violin. (The reverse relationship doesn't hold, though: Few musicians can compute a Hamiltonian matrix or explain the Krebs cycle.) The link makes intuitive sense. Heather, who plans to double major in music and math, says the two "use the same kind of logic. Music is made up of numbers and patterns, and pattern recognition is one of the skills I developed in math." ©2004 Associated Press

Keyword: Intelligence; Hearing
Link ID: 5675 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists find promiscuous voles lack key brain function linked to monogamy Alan Zarembo, Los Angeles Times Scientists working with a ratlike animal called a vole have found that promiscuous males can be reprogrammed into monogamous partners by introducing a single gene into a specific part of their brains. Once they have been converted, the voles hang around the family nests and even huddle with their female partners after sex. "A mutation in a single gene can have a profound impact on complex social behavior," said Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University who reported the results in the current issue of the journal Nature. The research helps shed light on monogamy -- a rare social behavior -- and hints that perhaps specific genes could play a role in human relationships. Voles, found in the wild throughout much of North America, have been particularly useful in studying monogamy, which in biology refers more to the complicated social bonds based on partnership than to absolute sexual fidelity. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5674 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new study linking a once widely used vaccine preservative to behavioral problems in mice could renew parents' fears that vaccinations increase the risk of autism. As this ScienCentral News video reports, those fears can lead parents to take a much bigger risk with their children's health. Suzanne Walther heard stories about the risks of vaccines, and decided not to have her daughter Mary Catherine vaccinated. Then, when Mary Catherine was a year old, she got very sick. "We were afraid she would not ever walk again and through the ten days that we were in the hospital were not sure she would not be severely impaired by this disease," says Walther. Mary Catherine had bacterial meningitis, a serious infection of the central nervous system that can cause brain damage, hearing loss, blindness, paralysis, coma and even death. It is prevented by the Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) vaccine. "And even when she was in the intensive care unit and all the doctors had the chance to come in and say, 'Wow, you didn't have her vaccinated?', I didn't feel like, 'I'm a bad parent,' says Walther. "The gut-level feeling was anger. I was mad because that disease was out there and my child got it." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 5673 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor In the 1956 sci-fi adventure "Forbidden Planet," an American astronaut receives a "brain boost" from an alien machine that temporarily gives him enhanced mental powers. Before he dies from the effects of the boost, he helps unravel the mystery of how the civilization became extinct: It couldn't control its own immense mental powers. More recently, the characters in "The Matrix" film series are shown "downloading" knowledge into their brains nearly instantaneously. In "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" the lead character has the uncomfortable memories of a love affair removed from his mind, with unexpected results. What used to be confined to speculative fiction is fast becoming scientific fact. Brain boosting, or "neural enhancement," is already being done - and much more powerful techniques are on the way. Some observers say we're rushing into this brain-gain revolution without sufficient thought or preparation. "We're about to be handed a bunch of powerful new capabilities ... to refashion ourselves, improve ourselves," notes Martha Farah, a director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, in an e-mail. "We should always think through the ethical consequences of changing ourselves and our lives, for the individual and for society." Copyright © 2004 The Christian Science Monitor.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 5672 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANNE MCILROY He says he loves you, but doesn't want to settle down. Science soon may have an answer. Researchers have found a way to turn naturally promiscuous animals into monogamous ones, a discovery that one day could lead to a "commitment pill" for human males. Led by scientists at Emory University in Atlanta, the team worked with two species of voles. (Voles look like furry mice with short tails.) Male meadow voles are loners who like to play the field; prairie voles tend to get attached to one female. The researchers, in essence, were able to change the meadow vole's natural propensity to philander by inserting a single gene that changed the way the pleasure centre in their brains worked. After a single treatment, they became as monogamous as prairie voles. Human males appear to have a similar system, which involves the hormone vasopressin, in their brains. Theoretically, the discovery opens the door to the possibility of medical treatment for men who have trouble committing to a relationship. Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5671 - Posted: 06.18.2004

By Julianna Kettlewell BBC News Online science staff A single gene can turn the Don Juan of voles into an attentive home-loving husband, Nature magazine has reported. By altering the small animal's brain hormone chemistry, scientists have made a promiscuous meadow vole faithful - just like its prairie vole cousin. The researchers think this will lead to a greater understanding of how social behaviour is controlled in humans. The same hormone activity could play a role in disorders like autism where people can lack simple social skills. Fewer than 5% of mammals are habitually monogamous. Prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are among the select few. After mating, the males "fall in love": they stick close to their chosen one, guard her jealously and help her raise their young. Closely related meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus), on the other hand, take a more standard approach. They mate with several females and pay little attention to their babies. Previous studies indicated a hormone called vasopressin encourages pair-bonding in prairie voles. Scientists had also noticed that promiscuous voles have fewer vasopressin (V1a) receptors, in a bit of their forebrain called the ventral pallidum region. To prove vasopressin has a "taming" effect, the researchers gave meadow voles extra V1a receptors in the ventral pallidum region of their brains. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5670 - Posted: 06.17.2004

By Michael Behar The chime on H. Lee Sweeney’s laptop dings again—another e-mail. He doesn’t rush to open it. He knows what it’s about. He knows what they are all about. The molecular geneticist gets dozens every week, all begging for the same thing—a miracle. Ding. A woman with carpal tunnel syndrome wants a cure. Ding. A man offers $100,000, his house, and all his possessions to save his wife from dying of a degenerative muscle disease. Ding, ding, ding. Jocks, lots of jocks, plead for quick cures for strained muscles or torn tendons. Weight lifters press for larger deltoids. Sprinters seek a split second against the clock. People volunteer to be guinea pigs. Gene therapy could do for athletes what photo manipulation has done for this runner. But performance-enhancing drugs would undermine amateur athletics, which by definition are supposed to show how far natural skills can be advanced, says Richard Pound, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency. “I want athletes,” he says, “not gladiators.” Sweeney has the same reply for each ding: “I tell them it’s illegal and maybe not safe, but they write back and say they don’t care. A high school coach contacted me and wanted to know if we could make enough serum to inject his whole football team. He wanted them to be bigger and stronger and come back from injuries faster, and he thought those were good things.” © 2003 The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Muscles; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 5669 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Questions the current diagnosis criteria of low libido in women under 45 years of age. Australian researchers uncover new role for DHEA sulphate in signifying low libido. Researchers at the Australian based Jean Hailes Foundation are addressing the complex role of hormones. Their aim is to understand what is normal and whether women may benefit from therapy. In one of the world's most comprehensive studies into women's health and hormones researchers looked at 1423 randomly selected women aged 18-75. Professor Susan Davis, Director of Research at The Foundation is presenting these findings at the Endocrine Society's 86th Annual Meeting this week and said, "We undertook this study to determine whether women with low libido also had low levels of androgens. Until now experts have agreed that sexual dysfunction in women was illustrated by low levels of free and total testosterone. However this study has shown low testosterone bears no relationship to low libido in women under 45 years of age. "We found a strong relationship between the low scores for desire, arousal and responsiveness and low DHEAS levels in women under 45, " said Professor Davis.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5668 - Posted: 06.17.2004

Could gene therapy cure promiscuous behaviour? HELEN R. PILCHER Want to tame the eye of a philandering love rat? Then help is at hand. New research shows that gene therapy can turn promiscuous male voles into faithful bedfellows. Miranda Lim from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues used a virus to introduce a gene directly into the brain of male meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus). The gene encodes a protein called the vasopressin receptor, which helps to regulate social behaviour and pair bonding. A few days later, the normally promiscuous rodents developed high levels of vasopressin receptors and lost their lust for the ladies. The results are reported in this week's Nature1. The animals' brain chemistry and behaviour resembles that of their relative, the monogamous prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster). These faithful creatures mate for life and have many vasopressin receptors in the ventral forebrain, a brain region known to regulate addiction and reward. Increasing the number of vasopressin receptors in this area gives an animal a sense of reward when it forms a close pair bond, explains Lim. So lecherous animals calm their errant ways. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5667 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gia Scafidi Researchers from USC and the Technion Medical School in Israel have uncovered new clues into the mystery of the brain’s ultra-complicated cells known as neurons. Their findings — appearing in this month’s issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience — contradict a widely accepted idea regarding the “arithmetic” neurons use to process information. “It’s amazing that after a hundred years of modern neuroscience research, we still don’t know the basic information processing functions of a neuron,” said Bartlett Mel, an associate professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and contributing author of the journal’s article. “Historically, it has most often been assumed that a brain cell sums up its excitatory inputs linearly, meaning that the excitation caused by two inputs A and B activated together equals the sum of excitations caused by A and B presented separately.” “We show that the cell significantly violates that rule,” Mel said. The team found that the summation of information within an individual neuron depends on where the inputs occur, relative to each other, on the surface of the cell.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5666 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Men who have difficulty getting an erection could soon use an inhaler to help them have better sex. British scientists are trying to put the active ingredients of an anti-impotence drug into an inhaler. They believe breathing in the drug, rather than swallowing it, will enable men to get an erection more quickly. Wiltshire-based Vectura says its product, which at the moment is called VR004, has proved effective in early clinical trials. The active ingredient in VR004 is apomorphine hydrochloride, which has been available in Europe for the treatment of erectile dysfunction since 2001 as Uprima. The drug works by activating nerve cells in the brain which are linked to sexual response. These dopamine receptors help regulate the nerve signals which allow a man to achieve an erection (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5665 - Posted: 06.16.2004

As the U.S. anti-doping agency continues to call Olympic athletes into question regarding use of steroids, this ScienCentral News video reports that scientists are raising concerns about what they call the future of performance enhancement—genetic doping. Wrestler Kerry McCoy had a lot to be proud of even before winning a spot on the U.S. Olympic team that will compete in Athens this August: a silver medal in the 2003 world championships; winner of two NCAA wrestling championships at Penn State University; and a fifth place finish in the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney. McCoy says he earned his accolades with hard work in the gym, and the mounting charges against athletes accused of using performance-enhancing drugs are disappointing. "You think that once you get in any kind of competitive arena—you know, it's you and another person just trying to see who's the best, because of what time and energy and training you put in," he says. "And if someone wants to take a shortcut by doing something that's not legal or not moral, that's unfortunate. It's a disadvantage to the sport and disadvantage to the athlete, because their experience is really cheapened by not getting the full amount out of themselves." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5664 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heated tail display warns off would-be predators. MICHAEL HOPKIN Faced with an angry rattlesnake, you or I might freeze with fear. But California ground squirrels take the opposite approach: they heat their tails up to warn the snake that they will not take an attack lying down. It is the first time that an animal has been shown to send a deliberate signal using infrared radiation, or heat, says Aaron Rundus of the University of California, Davis, who presented the discovery on Monday at the Animal Behavior Society's annual meeting in Oaxaca, Mexico. Rattlesnakes are a constant menace to the squirrels, often poaching young from families. This threat gives rise to aggressive stand-offs between snakes and adult squirrels, in which the rodent kicks sand and brandishes its tail in a bid to harass the predator into submission. The snakes do much of their hunting by detecting heat, using sensitive structures called pit organs in their faces. The new discovery shows that the squirrels take advantage of this sensitivity by broadcasting their message in a language the snakes can understand. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Animal Communication; Vision
Link ID: 5663 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sherry Seethaler A discovery by a University of California, San Diego biologist that some species of bees exploit chemical clues left by other bee species to guide their kin to food provides evidence that eavesdropping may be an evolutionary driving force behind some bees’ ability to conceal communication inside the hive, using a form of animal language to encode food location. Bees can use two main forms of communication to tell their hive mates where to find food: abstract representations such as sounds or dances within the hive or scent markings outside the hive to mark the food and/or the route to it. In 1999, James Nieh, an assistant professor of biology at UCSD, published a paper in which he hypothesized communication within the hive may have evolved as a way of avoiding espionage by competitors. Nieh’s most recent study, a collaboration with Brazilian biologists published June 16 in the early on-line version of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, is strong support for that hypothesis because it shows that bees can indeed use the chemical markings deposited by bees of other species to home in on and take over their food source. The paper will appear in print in Proceedings of the Royal Society in August. Copyright ©2001 Regents of the University of California

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 5662 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sometimes it takes time to uncover nature's secrets. Take the case of callimicos, also called Goeldi's monkeys, a reclusive and diminutive South American primate. Discovered a century ago by Swiss naturalist Emil August Goeldi, the animals were once considered to be a possible "missing link" between small and large New World monkeys. But new findings from the first long-term studies of the monkeys in the wild seem to indicate that this is not the case, although the animals have a unique set of anatomical, reproductive and behavioral characteristics. Leila Porter, a biological anthropologist at the University of Washington, has spent nearly four years observing callimicos (Callimico goeldii) in the Amazon basin of Northern Bolivia. Her pioneering fieldwork has collected the first detailed data of the ecology and behavior of the animals, an endangered species, in the wild. Among other things, her observations show callimicos eat fungi during the dry season, making them the only tropical primate species to subsist on this food source for part of the year. They also have a different reproductive strategy from other small New World monkeys. Callimicos (Latin for beautiful little monkeys) have the capacity to give birth to a single offspring twice annually while their closest primate relatives – marmosets, tarmarins and lion tarmarins – give birth to twins once a year.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 5661 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ROB JORDAN In the early morning stillness, Michael Schroeder sits alone at his kitchen table and wonders who he is. Everyday, after his wife leaves for work, the 37-year-old tries to remember the once-familiar routines of a quiet life. What drawer do the socks go in? Where is the supermarket? Who are my friends? Almost a month after a passing motorist found him lying unconscious on the side of a lonely desert road in California, Schroeder still doesn't know how he got so far from home or why he wandered in the sand for two days without food, water or identification. He doesn't remember his name, where he's from or who his wife and 9-year-old son are. All he has are a handful of images from somewhere in his mind and his wife Sally's reassurance. "I know this is where we live, and I know this is my family," Schroeder said. "I can just put two and two together and figure things out intellectually." Police identified Schroeder after they traced the license plate on his abandoned pickup to a missing person report. A tattoo on his right shoulder - a heart with his wife's name on it - confirmed the link. Copyright © 2002 The Tuscaloosa News

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5660 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brain Recordings Can Capture Thinking As It Happens By Sherry Seethaler A team led by University of California San Diego neurobiologists has developed a new approach to interpreting brain electroencephalograms, or EEGs, that provides an unprecedented view of thought in action and has the potential to advance our understanding of disorders like epilepsy and autism. The new information processing and visualization methods that make it possible to follow activation in different areas of the brain dynamically are detailed in a paper featured on the cover of the June 15 issue of the journal Public Library of Science Biology (plos.org) The significance of the advance is that thought processes occur on the order of milliseconds—thousandths of a second—but current brain imaging techniques, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and traditional EEGs, are averaged over seconds. This provides a “blurry” picture of how the neural circuits in the brain are activated, just as a picture of waves breaking on the shore would be a blur if it were created from the average of multiple snapshots. “Our paper is the culmination of eight years of work to find a new way to parse EEG data and identify the individual signals coming from different areas of the brain,” says lead author Scott Makeig, a research scientist in UCSD’s Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience of the Institute for Neural Computation. Copyright ©2001 Regents of the University of California.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5659 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer WASHINGTON - One after another, teenagers trickle into Dr. David Rothner's office with the same complaint: almost daily headaches, despite popping over-the-counter painkillers four, then six, then eight times a week. Many get a diagnosis of rebound headache, a vicious cycle where the more painkiller some people use, the more likely new headaches are to crop up between doses. Headache specialists say it's not uncommon for adults to fall into that trap, and Rothner's check of records at the Cleveland Clinic suggests a surprising number of teens and preteens may, too. Of 680 patients referred to the hospital's pediatric headache center, 22 percent were overusing nonprescription headache medicine — meaning at least three doses a week for more than six weeks. The worst was one patient who reached 28 doses in a single week. "We have a lot of kids that are overusing OTC medicine," warns Rothner, a Cleveland Clinic pediatric neurologist who presented the data to the American Headache Society last week. Overuse increases the risk of such side effects as stomach bleeding or kidney or liver damage, problems many people don't realize can occur even with over-the-counter drugs. Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5658 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Why some doctors are moving away from performing surgery on babies of indeterminate gender. By Claudia Kolker Approximately 10 times a year in Houston, at the birth of a certain type of baby, a special crisis team at Texas Children's Hospital springs into action. Assembled in 2001, the unusual team includes a psychologist, urologist, geneticist, endocrinologist, and ethicist. Its mission: to counsel parents of infants sometimes referred to as "intersex" babies—that is, babies of indeterminate physical gender. That such a team exists—and that it often counsels deferring surgery for infants who are otherwise healthy—reflects a radical new thinking among doctors about gender identity and outside efforts to shape it. Instead of surgically "fixing" such children to make them (visually, at least) either male or female, a handful of U.S. specialists now argue that such infants should be left alone and eventually be allowed to choose their gender identity. The approach challenges decades of conventional wisdom about what to do with infants whose genitalia don't conform to the "norm." Until very recently, such children were automatically altered with surgery, often with tragic consequences. Each year, about one in 2,000 children is born with ambiguous-looking genitalia. A wide range of disorders may be responsible—genetic defects, hormonal abnormalities, or unexplained developmental disruptions that occurred in utero. ©2004 Microsoft Corporation.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5657 - Posted: 06.24.2010