By MICHAEL WINES GONDOLA, Mozambique — Just about every method of detecting land mines has a drawback. Metal detectors cannot tell a mine from a tenpenny nail. Armored bulldozers work well only on level ground. Mine-sniffing dogs get bored, and if they make mistakes, they get blown up. The Gambian giant pouched rat has a drawback, too: It has trouble getting down to work on Monday mornings. Other than that, it may be as good a mine detector as man or nature has yet devised. Just after sunup on one dewy morning, on a football field-sized patch of earth in the Mozambican countryside, Frank Weetjens and his squad of 16 giant pouched rats are proving it. Outfitted in tiny harnesses and hitched to 10-yard clotheslines, their footlong tails whipping to and fro, the rats lope up and down the lines, whiskers twitching, noses tasting the air. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 5489 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINA KOLATA Macie Mull was 82 and had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for more than a decade when she developed pneumonia. Her nursing home rushed her to the hospital where she spent the night, receiving intravenous antibiotics. The next day she was back at the nursing home, more confused than ever. Now she was choking on her puréed food; eating was becoming impossible. And so, one Sunday afternoon, the administrators of her nursing home in Hickory, N.C., asked Mrs. Mull's daughter what to do: Did she want a feeding tube inserted? At that point, Mrs. Mull muttered only a few random words and could no longer recognize her daughter. The feeding tube would almost certainly prolong her life, but was it worth it? The question of how aggressive to be in treating late-stage Alzheimer's patients is one of the most wrenching and contentious issues in medicine. For every patient who, like Mrs. Mull, reaches the final stage of the disease, there typically are about five or six family members faced with decisions about whether to authorize medical treatments for patients whose bodies live on though their minds are gone. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5488 - Posted: 05.18.2004

The Centers for Disease Control announced in March that obesity is the second leading cause of death in the United States. In 1999–2000, an estimated 64 percent of U.S adults aged 20 years and older were either overweight or obese, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more. Meanwhile, this country's big appetite is being explored in the documentary "Super Size Me," in which filmmaker Morgan Spurlock gained 24 pounds and compromised his liver by eating nothing but fast food for a month. While proponents of the film say it's meant to be entertaining and thought-provoking, the American Council on Science and Health, a consumer education consortium concerned with issues related to food, nutrition, lifestyle, the environment and health, is concerned that the film trivializes obesity by aiming the blame solely at fast food companies instead of his general excessive calorie intake and lack of exercise. "The important thing about obesity is that it carries with it the risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke," says Joseph Vasselli, a biopsychologist at St. Luke's Hospital Obesity Research Center. "If you allow obesity to go unchecked in our population, then you are going to have an increase incidence of other serious medical disorders." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5487 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Creatures of the night, rats rely on their supersensitive whiskers to grope through a dim and dangerous world. Researchers have long known that bending a rat's whisker tells it where it will encounter an object. Now a new study demonstrates that sweeping a whisker across a surface allow rats to distinguish between textures that confound even human fingertips. Rats devote a huge portion of their brains solely to processing whisker sensations. This somatosensory "map" is so extensive that scientists can pick out the area of the brain responsible for handling individual whisker signals. Last year, neuroscientist Christopher Moore of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and colleagues demonstrated that rat whiskers resonate like plucked harp strings--each wiggles most strongly at one specific frequency. A sweep across a surface such as sandpaper is enough to make a whisker vibrate. The longer, thicker whiskers at the back of a rat's face, they found, resonate at lower frequencies than the shorter, finer feelers near its mouth. The group then set out to determine whether vibrations that occur at a whisker's resonance frequency were more likely to be detected by the rat's brain than others were. While wiggling individual whiskers at ever increasing speeds, they recorded the neural impulses received by the brain. They report in the 13 May issue of Neuron that the neurons fired with particular gusto at each whisker's resonance frequency. The results suggest that rats know where their whiskers are and how fast they're wiggling. "It's space and time overlaid on the same somatosensory map," Moore says. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Hearing
Link ID: 5486 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brain's center of reasoning and problem solving is among the last to mature, a new study graphically reveals. The decade-long magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of normal brain development, from ages 4 to 21, by researchers at NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that such "higher-order" brain centers, such as the prefrontal cortex, don't fully develop until young adulthood. A time-lapse 3-D movie that compresses 15 years of human brain maturation, ages 5 to 20, into seconds shows gray matter – the working tissue of the brain's cortex – diminishing in a back-to-front wave, likely reflecting the pruning of unused neuronal connections during the teen years. Cortex areas can be seen maturing at ages in which relevant cognitive and functional developmental milestones occur. The sequence of maturation also roughly parallels the evolution of the mammalian brain, suggest Drs. Nitin Gogtay, Judith Rapoport, NIMH, and Paul Thompson, Arthur Toga, UCLA, and colleagues, whose study is published online during the week of May 17, 2004 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "To interpret brain changes we were seeing in neurodevelopmental disorders like schizophrenia, we needed a better picture of how the brain normally develops," explained Rapoport.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 5485 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Finding may help illuminate other related disorders -- A team led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is one step closer to understanding the function of a protein linked to an inherited form of the movement disorder dystonia. The protein, torsinA, is defective in patients with DYT1 dystonia, an inherited condition that causes uncontrollable movements in the limbs and torso. Learning what torsinA does could be an important step toward developing a treatment for the disorder. "The hope is that understanding as many forms of dystonia as we can will give us some insight into how we might treat movement disorders generally," says Phyllis I. Hanson, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of cell biology and physiology and senior investigator for the study. "Any new insights might also be helpful for understanding secondary dystonias. These are conditions in which dystonia is a complication of another disorder, such as Parkinson's disease."

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 5484 - Posted: 05.18.2004

By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer CHICAGO - The earlier deaf children get cochlear implants, the more likely they are to speak and comprehend language normally later in life, new research suggests. In fact, some doctors say doing the surgery in infancy may produce the best results. In one study, children ages 12 months to 3 years showed rapid improvement in understanding speech during the first year after receiving one of the electronic devices, with the best results in the youngest children. In another study, 43 percent of children who got implants at age 2 had normal oral language abilities at ages 8 to 9, compared with just 16 percent of youngsters who got implants at age 4, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School researcher Ann Geers found. Geers said the longer implant use by the youngest children studied does not explain her results. Instead, she and other researchers say that very early childhood is an especially critical period in the development of language skills, during which children hear and imitate sounds around them. Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 5483 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Julianna Kettlewell A widely-held theory explaining why we have frequent sex has been questioned by a report in Science. According to the "Red Queen" hypothesis , sex exists to help organisms protect themselves against parasites. Parasites are constantly developing new ways to take advantage, so animals need to evolve defences quickly - and sex, say some, allows them to do this. But scientists have constructed a model, which suggests this "arms race" alone is not enough to account for sex. Evolutionary biologists are obsessed with sex and why we have it. It is one of nature's great mysteries because there are not many obvious reasons why we should do it - but plenty why we should not. Firstly, sex is a very inefficient way to make babies. Asexual organisms can produce twice the amount of young than their sexual counterparts. "Clones have a tremendous advantage," explained Curt Lively, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Indiana, US. "If you have a sexual population and you introduce a clone, that clone will have an advantage, because its intrinsic growth rate is higher. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 5482 - Posted: 05.17.2004

By MILT FREUDENHEIM Spending on drugs to treat children and adolescents for behavior-related disorders rose 77 percent from 2000 to the end of 2003, according to a study of prescription purchases by Medco Health Solutions, a pharmacy benefits management company. The increase, to $536 a patient a year on average, reflected rising prices as growing numbers of young people used newer and more expensive drugs, said Robert S. Epstein, chief medical officer of Medco. The report is to be released today. Sales of the behavioral drugs are growing faster than any other type of medicine taken by children, pulling ahead of the previous leaders, antibiotics and asthma treatments, he said. Most of the drugs were treatments for depression and attention deficit disorder, including prescriptions combining both treatments for the same patient. Use of attention disorder drugs by children under age 5 rose 49 percent from 2000 to 2003, to half of all children taking any behavior-related medication. Scientists who have studied the trend called for more research on side effects and benefits. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Depression
Link ID: 5481 - Posted: 05.17.2004

Berlin - Big-city noise levels prompt birds to sing louder in order to be heard by other birds over the din, according to research by German ornithologists. The study of free-ranging nightingales in and around Berlin showed that chocolate male birds "singing in the dead of night" have to raise their little voices in order for females of their species to hear them. An analysis of sound pressure levels revealed that males at noisier locations sang with higher sound levels than birds in territories less affected by background sounds, according to research headed by Dr Henrik Brumm of the Institute for Biology at Berlin's Freie University. This is the first evidence of a noise-dependent vocal amplitude regulation in the natural environment of an animal. ©2004. All rights strictly reserved.

Keyword: Animal Communication
Link ID: 5480 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Doctors often have a difficult time diagnosing a physical cause for some patients’ lower back pain, which can be debilitating. A new report suggests that psychological distress may be a better indicator than medical imaging or injections when it comes to predicting who will develop aching backs. Eugene J. Carragee of Stanford University and his colleagues tracked nearly 100 people over a four-year period to try to determine how effective predictive measures for lower back pain are. At the start of the study, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which can identify small cracks or tears in cartilage, to examine the spines of 46 volunteers who did not suffer from lower back pain. In addition, the subjects underwent a procedure known as discography in which a doctor injects fluid into the spine. If the injections cause pain, the theory holds, the patient may later develop back pain even if he doesn’t currently suffer from it. Over the course of the study, the volunteers, along with a control group, completed yearly physical and psychological evaluations. The researchers determined that patients suffering psychological distress were three times more likely to develop back pain than those with better coping skills. "The structural problems were really overwhelmed by the psychosocial factors," Carragee says. Experiencing other types of chronic pain was also linked to developing back pain, but discography results did not successfully predict future back problems and the association between MRI results and back pain was not statistically significant. The team is now working on a five-year-long study that examines a more high-risk group of patients who already have common back pain. Notes Carragee: "The question is, can we better identify groups that have a greater chance of being helped by surgery." The study results appear in the May 15 issue of the journal Spine. --Sarah Graham © 1996-2004 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Stress; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5479 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Detailed scans of brain cells in Parkinson's disease patients have revealed the action of the placebo effect on an unprecedented scale. "It's the first time we've seen it at the single neuron level," says Fabrizio Benedetti, head of the team which conducted the experiments at the University of Turin Medical School in Italy. When the patients in the study received a simple salt solution, their neurons responded in just the same way as when they had earlier received a drug which eased their symptoms. "The research provides further evidence for a physiological underpinning for the placebo effect," says Jon Stoessl, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His team demonstrated in 2001 that placebos can relieve symptoms by raising brain levels of dopamine, a beneficial neurotransmitter. "We suggest that the changes we ourselves observed are also induced by release of dopamine," says Benedetti. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5478 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People with epilepsy are not being given proper advice to help them manage their condition, a survey suggests. The poll of 197 patients found half have never discussed the possible side effects of medication with doctors. Two out of three said they were never told they may not be able to drive because of their condition. The survey was carried out by the National Society for Epilepsy to mark National Epilepsy Week, which starts on Sunday. About one in every 200 adults in the UK has epilepsy. There are around 1,000 epilepsy-related deaths each year. Some people who take anti-epileptic drugs suffer side-effects. However, they are rare and if they occur they are usually mild, ranging from rashes to dizziness. But the drugs can interact with other medication, including antibiotics and the contraceptive pill. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 5477 - Posted: 05.17.2004

Mind map PD Smith explores the fascinating frontiers of neuroscience in Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open Saturday May 15, 2004 The Guardian Buy Mind Wide Open at Amazon.co.uk by Steven Johnson The final frontier lies not in outer space but inside your skull. Understanding the matter of the mind preoccupies today's most brilliant brains, some of whom have concluded that the secret of its subtle complexity may forever elude our own grey cells. Ironically, self-understanding may be impossible for the smartest animal on the planet. Perhaps wisely then, Steven Johnson steers clear of the ultimate questions about consciousness. Instead he focuses on the practical advances being made by neuroscientists in mapping the "brain's inner geography" and tries to discover what neuroscience can tell him about his own mental landscape. To do this Johnson sets himself the novel task of tracking down "as many charts, real-time displays and three-dimensional-models of my mental life as I could find". With the help of a new neurofeedback device called Attention Trainer, he learns how to control his own brainwaves. Developed as a non-chemical alternative to Ritalin, it teaches children with Attention Deficit Disorder to train their brains to pay attention. "It feels like telepathy," says Johnson, as he makes a computer-generated cyclist pedal furiously using just mental muscle. Later a neuropsychologist teaches him how to use brainwaves to improve his "brain self-regulation". The mental focus of a Tiger Woods or the meditative peace of mind of a Buddhist monk are all down to using the right brainwaves. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5476 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It's a mystery, but it clearly makes us smarter and healthier By Nell Boyce and Susan Brink Health education teacher Pacy Erck remembers what it was like back when Edina High School students had to show up by 7:25 a.m. "The kids were always very tired," she recalls. But these days, Erck rarely has a kid nod off in class. That's because in the fall of 1996, officials at this Minnesota school decided to ring the first bell an hour later, at 8:30 a.m. Sleep researchers had reported that teens' natural slumber patterns favor a later bedtime, and the school wanted to ensure that its high schoolers weren't being shortchanged by an early wake-up call. The change means that students average five more hours of sleep a week, and teachers can see a difference. "You don't have the kids putting their heads down," Erck says. "The class is livelier." Research confirms real benefits not only at Edina but also at many other high schools that have made similar scheduling switches, says Kyla Wahlstrom, an education policy expert at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Grades have gone up, and dropout rates have declined. The results are impressive enough that other school systems have started to take notice. In Poquoson, Va., the school board has held public hearings over the past few months to consider making the first bell later. "We do believe our children aren't getting as much sleep as they ought to," says Jonathan Lewis, superintendent of schools in Poquoson. "We have children getting up at 5:30, quarter of 6 in the morning." Copyright © 2004 U.S.News & World Report, L.P. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 5475 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An estimated 25 percent of adults over the age of 20 and close to 50 percent of adults over the age of 50 have the component risk factors that make up Metabolic Syndrome. The emerging health problem is the focus of a symposium for health professionals on Friday, May 21, hosted by the Emory University School of Medicine. Thirteen nationally recognized experts on this increasingly common disorder will present at a daylong conference called "Metabolic Syndrome: An Obesity-Related National Epidemic---Mechanisms, Clinical Care and Future Directions. The event is CME-accredited and will include session topics on the clinical characteristics, pathogenesis and treatment of the metabolic syndrome, its associated conditions, and future research directions. It will be held from 8:00 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. in the auditorium of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Administration Building on the Emory campus at 1440 Clifton Road. Metabolic Syndrome, also known as Syndrome X, is a clustering of cardiovascular disease risk factors that is highly linked to obesity. It causes an increased risk of coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and other diseases related to plaque buildups in artery walls, such as stroke and peripheral vascular disease. The diagnosis of the condition is based on the presence of three or more cardiovascular disease risk factors, including increased abdominal fat, pre-diabetes, high blood pressure, evidence of mild generalized inflammation, low blood levels of "good" cholesterol (HDL cholesterol) and/or high blood levels of triglycerides (circulating fats in the blood).

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5474 - Posted: 05.15.2004

What does it feel like to be swimming with a 15-metre-long, 45-tonne sperm whale - and feel a powerful click pulse through your body as it investigates you with its sonar? Hal Whitehead is one of the few who know. He follows sperm whales across the ocean to study their behaviour. He has found evidence that they have cultures and, as he tells Michael Bond, they possibly have patterns of cooperation more advanced than any other mammal - humans included How do you go about studying sperm whales? It is not easy. They spend almost all their lives deep in the ocean, where they are invisible to us. There is so much we don't know about them. I prefer to stick to simple technologies. I like to spend my time out at sea among the animals, collecting lots of data then trying to make sense of it. One thing we are about to try out is recording with an array of hydrophones. That will enable us to work out where each sound is coming from and so where each whale is in the group. But for it to work the whales have to be virtually within the array. This is difficult because sperm whales are always on the move, so we have developed model boats to carry the hydrophones to allow us to keep abreast of the whales. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 5473 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new synthetic chemical may provide the framework for future drugs that can treat a variety of brain-based ailments, ranging from overeating and drug dependency to neuropathic pain. Daniele Piomelli, professor of pharmacology at the UC Irvine College of Medicine, and colleagues at the University of Connecticut have created a molecule, AM1172, that regulates the processing of a neurotransmitter called anandamide. In tests on mice, Piomelli found AM1172 to be effective in increasing brain anandamide activity, in much the same way as the antidepressant drug Prozac increases activity of the neurotransmitter serotonin. The study appears in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 10. Anandamide is a natural marijuana-like compound that responds to hormones and external stimuli and activates cannabinoid receptors in the brain. This endocannabinoid system helps regulate pain, mood and appetite, along with dependence on drugs such as alcohol and marijuana. Because of this, anandamide is sometimes referred to as the “bliss” molecule. © Copyright 2002-2004 UC Regents

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 5472 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Shyunti Das Steven Platek is an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology with a minor in music from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. from the University of Albany, State University of New York, where he began conducting his research on the evolutionary psychology and the brain. The Triangle: Evolutionary cognitive neuroscience -- what does this mean for someone who doesn't know anything about biology or psychology? Steven Platek: Evolutionary biology is Darwin's theory of natural selection. So we apply that theory to a field that's called cognitive neuroscience, which is basically understanding the relationship between the brain and behavior. [Why] does your brain make you think the way you do, or why when you feel a certain way do certain parts of your brain become recruited for that activity? So for example, [when] you see an angry or a happy face, a part of your brain called the amygdala will become active. And what we're trying to do is understand why that's becoming active so that we can understand how the brain has evolved to deal with things like looking at angry faces or how you react socially [to someone] who's yelling at you [might be important for your survival], these sorts of things. Copyright © 2004 The Triangle and College Publisher.

Keyword: Evolution; Emotions
Link ID: 5471 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nature article reports photoreceptors involved in sensing the earth's magnetic field Migratory birds, as well as many other animals, are able to sense the magnetic field of the earth, but how do they do it? "A fascinating possibility is that they may actually see the earth's magnetic lines as patterns of color or light intensity superimposed on their visual surroundings," said John B. Phillips of Blacksburg, associate professor of biology at Virginia Tech. The results of more than two decades of research allow him to let such an image cross his mind. A paper in the May 13 issue of Nature, "Resonance effects indicate a radical-pair mechanism for avian magnetic compass," reports evidence that the earth's magnetic field is sensed by light-absorbing molecules in the retina of a bird's' eye. Any effect of the earth's magnetic field on a photoreceptor's response to light is expected to be extraordinarily weak -- so weak in fact that the possibility of such effects have been largely ignored. But animals have developed specialized visual systems. "Some animals can see ultraviolet light. Some animals can see polarized light," Phillips said.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Vision
Link ID: 5470 - Posted: 05.14.2004