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

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have found that that a low dose of aspirin or similar painkillers, equivalent to the dose a human would take for a headache, can interfere with the wiring of the developing brain. Male baby rats exposed to aspirin, either in the womb or by nursing, have lower-than-normal sex drives when they grow up. "The pregnant rat was exposed to aspirin in her water for the last week of pregnancy and the first week of breast-feeding," explains Margaret McCarthy professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "This is a time of heightened sensitivity of the brain to determine if it's going to become male or female. When we raised those male pups to adulthood, they showed what we would call a mildly impaired sexual behavior." Scientists have known for a long time that aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs stop pain and inflammation by blocking the body's production of a group of signaling molecules called prostaglandins. But nobody knew that prostaglandins might be involved in regulating sex behaviors. McCarthy and her colleague Stuart Amateau found that by blocking prostaglandin production, the aspirin actually changed the rats' brain wiring in a region that's also involved in controlling human sex behaviors. They reported their findings in the June 2004 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5656 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO – Eating fruit may help protect against the development of age-related maculopathy (ARM), an eye disease that can cause blindness, according to an article in the June issue of The Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. According to information in the article, ARM is the leading cause of vision loss among people 65 and older. Because there are no effective treatments for ARM, prevention of this eye disease is important. Antioxidant vitamin and mineral supplementation has been found to help protect against ARM. In a recent study, supplementation with high-doses of vitamins C and E, beta carotene and zinc delayed the progression of ARM. Eunyoung Cho, Sc.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and colleagues examined the effect of antioxidant vitamins and carotenoids (compounds responsible for the red, yellow and orange pigments found in some fruits and vegetables) as well as fruits and vegetables on the development of ARM among 77,562 women and 40,866 men. The women were part of the Nurses' Health Study, and the men were participants in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Participants were at least 50 years old at the beginning of the study with no diagnosis of ARM. Women were followed for up to 18 years, and men were followed for up to 12 years.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5655 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The initial trial of a controversial method for treating spinal cord injuries within two weeks of an accident suggests it may be partly successful. More patients recovered some sensation and movement than would normally be expected, the company behind the trial claims. Independent experts say the results look promising, but caution that with just 16 people treated so far, it is too early to draw any conclusions. Some worry that the technique is risky and could cause serious problems in the long term. The method involves extracting immune cells from a patient's blood, "activating" them by incubating them with skin cells, and then injecting the cells directly into the damaged spinal cord. This must all be done within 14 days of the injury, so even if larger trials confirm its benefits, the method will not help the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide with existing injuries. The technique is being developed by ProNeuron Biotechnologies of Los Angeles, California, which has just submitted results from the first 10 patients for publication. All patients fell into the most severe spinal injury category, called ASIA-A. This is defined as having no sensation or ability to move below the site of injury. Normal sensation and movement is defined as ASIA-E. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 5654 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Testosterone damps pain sensation in males. LAURA NELSON It will come as no surprise to some... men are less sensitive than women, at least to pain. Researchers have found that the male hormone testosterone masks feelings of discomfort. They believe that such tolerance effects may help men to maintain their stamina in fights, when testosterone levels are high. "If men are less sensitive to pain, there is more willingness to fight and participate in further fights," says Michaela Hau, an animal physiology and behaviour scientist at Princeton University, New Jersey, and lead author of the study. The research team gave testosterone implants to male sparrows and measured their reaction times to pain. Testosterone allowed the birds to tolerate discomfort for longer periods, suggesting that the hormone somehow disguises pain. They determined the normal pain threshold of male sparrows by dangling one of their legs in a beaker of hot water and varying the temperature. "We measured how long it took for the bird to retract its leg," says Hau. The quicker the birds removed their legs, the more pain they were presumably feeling. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5653 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eight-limbed creatures have a favourite. MICHAEL HOPKIN Most octopuses have a favourite arm, zoologists have discovered. This is the first time they have been found to show any bias when choosing which of their eight limbs is right for the job. The creatures use their trusty first-choice appendage when exploring a new nook or cranny, says Ruth Byrne of the University of Vienna in Austria. She presented the discovery on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Oaxaca, Mexico. In terms of skill, octopus arms are created pretty much equal. "All eight arms are capable of the same tasks," Byrne told the meeting. "There's hardly any specialization." This had prompted experts to suspect that the creatures simply use whichever arm is handiest. Indeed, one of their preferred hunting strategies is to jump on top of a rock and curl all of their arms underneath, grabbing whatever they find. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 5652 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Adults often struggle trying to learn a second language, but the process may not be as tedious and slow as commonly believed. University of Washington researchers who followed college students learning first-year French have found that the students' brain activity was clearly discriminating between real and pseudo-French words after only 14 hours of classroom instruction. At the same time, however, the students performed at 50-50 levels when asked to consciously choose whether or not the stimuli were real French words. In addition, the researchers found that as the students had more exposure to French, the difference in brain response to words and pseudo words became larger. The study, which is one of the first to look at how fast second-language words are learned and how the brain responds to words with increasing experience with the new language, was published June 13 in the on-line edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience. The research team was headed by Judith McLaughlin, a UW research scientist, and Lee Osterhout, an associate professor of psychology. "Age and reduced brain plasticity are the classic reasons usually given for difficulty in learning a second language. But almost all thinking about this concerns syntax and grammar, while word learning has been ignored," Osterhout said. "Our results clearly show there are aspects of a second language that can be learned quickly and with amazing ease. A number of our subjects told us they hadn't been studying that hard because the course had just begun or because they were taking French to simply fulfill their language requirement. What's remarkable, considering those factors and that the language wasn't being taught in an immersion environment, was that we saw this rapid change in brain activity."

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 5651 - Posted: 06.15.2004

New Haven, Conn. -- The principal active ingredient in marijuana causes transient schizophrenia-like symptoms ranging from suspiciousness and delusions to impairments in memory and attention, according to a Yale research study. Lead author D. Cyril D'Souza, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, said the study was an attempt to clarify a long known association between cannabis and psychosis in the hopes of finding another clue about the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. "Just as studies with amphetamines and ketamine advanced the notion that brain systems utilizing the chemical messengers dopamine and NMDA receptors may be involved in the pathophysiology in schizophrenia, this study provides some tantalizing support for the hypotheses that the brain receptor system that cannabis acts on may be involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia," he said. "Clearly, further work is needed to test this hypothesis." D'Souza and his co-researchers administered various doses of delta-9-THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, to subjects who were screened for any vulnerability to schizophrenia. Some subjects developed symptoms resembling those of schizophrenia that lasted approximately one half hour to one hour. These symptoms included suspiciousness, unusual thoughts, paranoia, thought disorder, blunted affect, reduced spontaneity, reduced interaction with the interviewer, and problems with memory and attention.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5650 - Posted: 06.15.2004