The dream of saving and sharing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is quickly becoming a reality, according to Dartmouth researchers who run the fMRI Data Center, which archives and distributes the raw data from studies that track brain activity using fMRI. The Dartmouth researchers wrote an essay in the May issue of Nature Neuroscience about the initial reluctance and gradual acceptance of the center, and they describe the many attributes a center such as theirs offers the scientific community. "The fMRI Data Center was created with sharing information in mind," says John Van Horn, the lead author on the paper and a Research Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "We wanted to advance and expand the cognitive neuroscience field by making the raw data accessible to more people for free." According to the essay, the faculty who created the fMRI Data Center in 2000 were met with initial resistance from fellow neuroscientists. Some researchers were hesitant to give away their data; some questioned whether new science could arise from old data; and others thought that the technical hurdles could not be overcome. Despite these concerns, the Dartmouth group went ahead and teamed up with the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and made it a requirement to include raw fMRI data when submitting research to the publication. With initial support from the National Science Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health, the computer equipment was purchased and fMRI Data Center was established. Copyright © Trustees of Dartmouth College, All Rights Reserved

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5449 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Preadolescents who reported high levels of conduct problems were nearly four times as likely to have experienced an episode of depression in early adulthood than were children who reported low rates of conduct problems, according to a new University of Washington study. The research published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry looked at possible links between early childhood behavior problems and depression, violence and social phobia at age 21. The study collected data on children when they were 10 or 11 years old and again a decade later. It found that 20 percent of them had suffered from depression in the previous year as young adults and 21 percent had committed two or more violent acts. Seventeen percent experienced social phobia, an anxiety disorder marked by an unreasonable fear of social situations involving strangers, of being judged in such settings and avoiding those kinds of situations. In some cases, the young people in the study met the criteria for two or all three of these disorders.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5448 - Posted: 05.12.2004

Researchers at the University of Warwick have for the first time been able to detail how and why specific neurons in the brain control the hunger response. They have revealed a set of pacemaker nerve cells in the brain that appear to underlie the drive to feed which itself feeds on a complex web of signals. The level of complexity they have found is such that the system could be much more at risk of serious repercussions from a single error in how those signals are processed than anyone had previously thought. Any number of a range of errors could lead to over activity of these pacemaker cells and explain why many people find difficulty in eating less. In the research, published in the May Issue of Nature Neuroscience, Dr David Spanswick and his research team in the University of Warwick’s Department of Biological Sciences, looked at a part of the brain called the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus which was known to deal with hunger and satiety signals but how it achieves this is poorly understood. The University of Warwick team have identified very specific neurons that act as feeding “pacemakers”. This specific group of neurons- which they have dubbed the “ARC pacemaker” produce regular bursts of electrical activity. However these cells integrate and process a wide variety of signals indicating the energy needs of the body signals most often transmitted by the use of chemical messengers such as hormones like ghrelin, released from the gut and leptin from fat cells.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5447 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Melissa Jackson Ray has not been to the West End theatre for about 25 years, despite his yearning to see a play. He finds it difficult to do most things people take for granted, like walking in the park or going shopping. Ray has suffered from agoraphobia - a fear of open spaces and public places - for the best part of his adult life. He is overcoming his condition and now wants to help others do the same with a new scheme to help agoraphobics "walk to freedom". Ray's agoraphobia started out of the blue 24 years ago when he had the first of many inexplicable and irrational panic attacks. His life would never be the same again. He said: "One day at work I started to panic. I didn't understand what it was and tried to ignore it. "It didn't make sense." The panic attacks became more frequent and began to destabilise him. "I could have been in a chip shop and something would cause me to panic, but I couldn't explain it." A pattern started to emerge whereby he was forced to avoid situations and places because he feared the onset of a panic attack. It became progressively worse - and a panic attack could happen anywhere at any time.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5446 - Posted: 05.11.2004

By DENISE GRADY People who spend long hours in the summer sun have an increased risk later in life of developing an eye disease that can cause blindness, researchers have found. But sunglasses and hats that shade the eyes can prevent some of the damage. The disease, age-related maculopathy, is the leading cause of vision loss in older people in the United States. Scientists think people who develop the disease may have a genetic predisposition to it, brought out by an environmental exposure to something like sunlight. As the population ages, the number of people who are blind or suffering from impaired vision from the disease is expected to increase significantly, according to the National Eye Institute. Patients begin losing their eyesight as abnormal blood vessels and opaque deposits form on the retina, the delicate layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. There is no highly effective treatment for the disease, although zinc and antioxidants like vitamins C and E are recommended. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5445 - Posted: 05.11.2004

By VICKY LOWRY Debra and Patrick Doyle of Aspen, Colo., go skiing every weekend in the winter and, in summer, take long mountain bike rides in the hilly terrain where they live. What helps this 36-year-old couple feel so energetic? They say it is the cans of Red Bull they consume every morning. "It jump-starts my day," Ms. Doyle said of the so-called energy drink, made in Austria and sold in supermarkets and delicatessens around the United States. Once the province of young extreme athletes and the nightclub crowd, which mixes it with vodka, Red Bull has gone mainstream. Sleepy college students drink it because they say they like its amphetamine-like effect; weekend athletes vouch for the buzz it gives them while exercising. A Red Bull spokeswoman said 1.5 billion cans of the drink were consumed worldwide in 2003, a 10 percent increase from the previous year. In the United States, Red Bull controls roughly 50 percent of the $1 billion energy drink market. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5444 - Posted: 05.11.2004

By CAROL KAESUK YOON In Ivory Coast, the jungle is theater for a boisterous symphony of sound: the penetrating buzz of cicadas; the barks, whistles and moans of monkeys; the deafening roar of leopards; and the melodies of songbirds from earth to treetop. These animal Towers of Babel are so overwhelming that it would seem a challenge for any creature to decipher its own species' calls, let alone translate the language of another. But in a study in the April 7 issue of The Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, scientists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland report that in the African rain forest, large fruit-eating birds known as hornbills can decipher calls of the Diana monkey. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 5443 - Posted: 05.11.2004

A preliminary study has shown for the first time that it may be possible to help people who have suffered partial damage to their spinal cord by applying a magnetic therapy to their brain. Writing in this month's Spinal Cord, a team of UK doctors describe how patients with incomplete spinal cord injuries received repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), leading to improvements in their ability to move muscles and limbs, and ability to feel sensations. rTMS uses an electromagnet placed on the scalp to generate brief magnetic pulses, about the strength of an MRI scan, which stimulate the part of the brain called the cerebral cortex. Incomplete spinal cord injuries are a type of spinal injury where the spinal cord has not been entirely severed, but the patient has still lost the ability to move or feel properly below the injury point.

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 5442 - Posted: 05.11.2004

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Computers, for all of their computational muscle, do not hold a candle to humans in the ability to recognize patterns or images. This basic quandary in computational theory – why can computers crunch numbers but cannot efficiently process images – has stumped scientists for many years. Now, researchers at Arizona State University have come up with a model that could help unlock some of the secrets of how humans process patterns and possibly lead to smarter robots. The advance concerns oscillatory associative memory networks, basically the ability to see a pattern, store it and then retrieve that pattern when needed. A good example is how humans can recognize faces. "It is still a really big mystery as to how human beings can remember so many faces, but that it is extremely difficult for a computer to do," said Ying-Cheng Lai, an ASU professor of mathematics and a professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5441 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Obesity researchers have found that the mere presence of food triggers brain regions associated with motivation and pleasure. This ScienCentral report has the skinny on what might be making us fat. Whether we live to eat or eat to live, Americans are tipping the scale more and more these days. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity has increased by epidemic proportions since the 1980s. How did we get to this point? Studying the brain mechanism involved in feeding behaviors, obesity researcher Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory has found that food stimuli—sights, smells and sounds—trigger the brain regions that are also associated with addictive responses to cocaine and other drugs. “The high sensitivity of this brain region to food stimuli, coupled with the huge number and variety of these stimuli in the environment, likely contributes to the epidemic of obesity in this country," says Wang. Wang used a brain-scanning technique called positron emission tomography, or PET, to see what happened inside the brains of 12 hungry subjects of normal weight when they saw, smelled and tasted—but didn’t eat—food. The volunteers fasted for at least 17 hours before the test, and then they relaxed on the scanning bed while the smell of their favorite foods wafted in their direction. The PET machine captured snapshots of brain metabolism, or activity, in response to these food stimuli. The subjects also described their hunger sensation, on a scale of 1 to 10, at five-minute intervals for a total of 45 minutes. © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5440 - Posted: 06.24.2010

As pain sufferers can attest, there’s room for improvement in painkilling medications. Many of the current ones can cause side effects, such as stomach ulcers, particularly in people who have to take them over long periods of time for conditions such as arthritis. Now, recent research points to what may be a good new target for analgesic drugs. It also sheds light on inflammatory pain sensitization, which causes patients to feel intense pain even in response to normally innocuous stimuli, such as a light touch. In the 7 May issue of Science, an international team led by Ulrike Müller of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, reports having identified the α3 form of the receptor for the neurotransmitter glycine as a key intermediate in transmitting pain signals from the spinal cord to the brain. The work shows that the receptor is needed for pain sensitization--the first time that a function has been identified for this particular receptor. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5439 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Cancer strategy could be used to treat obesity. NADJA NEUMANN Chubby mice have shaped up with a new slimming aid, based on a technique used in cancer therapy that destroys blood vessels. The researchers say that after clinical trials on humans this may become a useful weapon in the war on obesity. One promising technique for treating cancer involves starving a tumour of the nutrients it needs to grow. The most effective way to do this is by killing off the blood vessels that supply the cancer cells. This technique is currently being evaluated in clinical trials. In the same way, each fat cell relies on a network of capillaries to deliver the chemicals it needs to reproduce and grow. So Mikhail Kolonin and his colleagues from the University of Texas and Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, reasoned that if they could kill off these blood vessels, the fat cells would die too. To do this, they targeted a molecule called prohibitin. It is present on the surface of fat cells, but not other types of cells, and it helps to regulate the growth of surrounding blood vessels. The researchers took a fragment of protein that binds to prohibitin, and attached it to another protein fragment that is used in cancer therapy to kill blood vessels. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5438 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Pat Hagan Hearing a skilled musician play a piece note-perfect is one of the joys of life. But do some professional musicians pay a terrible price for their talent? A team of British researchers has recently embarked on a study that they hope will shed light on a mysterious condition that can affect the brains of up to one in ten musical artists. Aided by a grant of over £92,000 from the charity Action Medical Research, experts from the Institute of Neurology and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London hope to come up with a treatment for a condition called occupational dystonia - which leaves many experienced players with involuntary muscle spasms of the hand. The disorder can affect people in many occupations that involve high levels of skill in performing certain types of movement. But it appears to be particularly striking in musicians and for some, the consequences for their performing career can be catastrophic. Experts believe the root cause of occupational dystonia is that the brain somehow becomes "overspecialised" in carrying out very specific movements. In short, part of the brain becomes permanently "rewired" so that it is highly adept at the skills it has been using for years but unable to learn new, more flexible movements. (C)BBC

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 5437 - Posted: 05.09.2004

By AMY HARMON NO sooner was Peter Alan Harper, 53, given the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder last year than some of his family members began rolling their eyes. To him, the diagnosis explained the sense of disorganization that caused him to lose track of projects and kept him from completing even minor personal chores like reading his mail. But to others, said Mr. Harper, a retired journalist in Manhattan, it seems like one more excuse for his inability to "take care of business." He didn't care. "The thing about A.D.D. is how much it affects your self-esteem,'' Mr. Harper said. "I had always thought of myself as someone who didn't finish things. Knowing why is such a relief.'' As the number of Americans with brain disorders grows, so has skepticism toward the grab bag of syndromes they are being tagged with, from A.D.D. to Asperger's to bipolar I, II or III. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Autism
Link ID: 5436 - Posted: 05.09.2004

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News To woo females, some male fish take on motherly duties while others emit love calls that researchers liken to human snoring, according to two recent studies. The first paper, published in the current Behavioral Ecology journal, found that male sand gobies — small fish native to European waters — act like mothers when females are present. The fish fathers play Mr. Mom by building nests, guarding eggs and nests, and even fanning eggs with their pectoral fins to freshen and oxygenate water when the real mother is in sight. However, when mother is not around, the sand goby dads slack off their motherly ways and have a tendency to gulp down the eggs. The finding represents the first time that "courtship parental care" has been documented for any species. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5435 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Channels help cells cope with the stress and strain of everyday living By Megan M. Stephan Stress - the bane of modern existence. Even cells have to deal with it, in its mechanical forms, at least. Osmotic pressure and shear forces from the environment signal dangerous situations that threaten the integrity of the cell membrane. Membrane channels sense and respond to these signals allowing cells to cope. In complex organisms, specialized cells go beyond mere coping, turning the signals into interpretable sensations such as touch and hearing. In recent years, biologists have discovered a wide array of mechanosensitive channels that mediate responses to physical forces, including members of at least four major protein families. The challenge now is to separate the wheat from the chaff and find which channels are directly responsible for mechanosensation and which ones play secondary roles. Even more fundamental questions as to how physical force regulates these channels remain unanswered. Very little is known about "how these proteins sense variation in shape and pressure in the bilayer," says Michel Lazdunski, at the Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology Institute, Valbonne, France. Cells experience both internal and external forces. Internal forces such as hydrostatic pressure, cytoskeletal changes, and molecular motors affect cell shape, growth, and motility. External forces can be as simple as Brownian collisions and osmotic pressures experienced by single cells, or as complex as the hemodynamic forces experienced by blood vessel epithelia, or the sound waves that are transduced into hearing by inner-ear hair cells (see Research | Listen Up). © 2004, The Scientist LLC, All rights reserved.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Hearing
Link ID: 5434 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS A top federal drug official said yesterday that he rejected not only the judgment of an advisory panel but also the recommendations of his own staff when he refused to allow a morning-after pill to be sold over the counter. Dr. Steven Galson, acting director of the Food and Drug Administration's center for drug evaluation and research since October, acknowledged in an interview that his action was not the norm. "I am not trying to convey this decision as being common or usual," Dr. Galson said. The morning-after pill, called Plan B, is an emergency birth-control medicine that is currently sold only by prescription. Made of high-dose birth-control pills, it can interfere with ovulation and perhaps prevent a fertilized egg from being implanted if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5433 - Posted: 05.08.2004

Roman Kyzyk was standing on his Brooklyn brownstone's rooftop with a clear view of the World Trade Center when the second plane hit the second tower on September 11th, 2001. Ever since he then he has been unable to fly. "I was constrained and disabled by this," he says. "I had an incident where I literally was on a plane, and I was sitting in the middle seat in the back of the aircraft, and I was overwhelmed. I literally had to get off and leave the plane before take-off, before they closed the doors, because it was too difficult for me to be able to tolerate it." Kyzyk knows that, statistically, flying isn't actually very dangerous. But nearly three years later he's still unable to fly anywhere and he's in cognitive behavioral therapy to try to remedy that. His psychologist says his predicament is a common one. © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5432 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The first inkling of maleness began when parasitic bacteria jumped between cells, dragging their host's genes with them. And according to the researcher who came up with the controversial idea, the vestiges of this inauspicious beginning persist in the sperm of animals today. Some time between 2000 million and 700 million years ago, bacteria entered into an uneasy truce with larger cells. These cells were the precursors of complex eukaryotic cells, that eventually evolved into today's multicellular animals and plants. The bacteria wound up losing around 90 per cent of their genes to the host nucleus and became mitochondria - the energy-generating components of complex cells. But modern mitochondria are so intimately involved in sexual reproduction that one scientist thinks they may even have been responsible for the evolution of sex itself. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5431 - Posted: 06.24.2010

But antidepressant Paxil has no effect on physical symptoms PORTLAND, Ore. – A well-known drug used to treat hyperactive children boosts the potency of another drug that reduces Parkinson's disease symptoms, an Oregon Health & Science University study has found. Scientists at the OHSU Parkinson Center of Oregon found that methylphenidate, known commercially as Ritalin, bolsters the effects of levodopa, a drug converted in the brain to dopamine. Methylphenidate inhibits the reabsorption of dopamine into nerve cells, increasing the neurotransmitter's potency. Parkinson's disease is caused by a deficiency of nerve cells that produce dopamine. A parallel study by Parkinson center researchers found that paroxetine, a popular antidepressant best known under the brand name Paxil, doesn't augment the effects of levodopa and has little benefit in reducing physical symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 5430 - Posted: 06.24.2010