Behind well-manicured suburban lawns, Susan Cheever learned to become an alcoholic. At six, she could mix a martini. Later, she could name the drinks dominating cocktail hour, sipping from adult glasses to feed a palate already growling for alcohol. With dependence on drink firmly anchored, Cheever grew to adulthood, slipping behind steering wheels with beer in hand, spinning in and out of marriages and penning memoirs thick with the haze of drinks past. To curtail the devastating impact of alcohol dependency on people like Cheever, now a sober, successful writer, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) have been studying the effects of alcohol exposure in worms. They've discovered a gene that seems to turn off the master switch that triggers drunkenness, a finding that may lead to a drug that would make alcohol less appealing to alcoholics. "Whether one looks at a fruit fly, a worm, a fish or a mammal, they all become intoxicated at essentially the same dose of alcohol," explains Steven McIntire, lead scientist of a UCSF study that was profiled in the March issue of Discover Magazine. "This has led people in the field to believe that there's likely to be a molecule or set of molecules in the brain that alcohol interacts with to cause intoxication." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5249 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Turning certain neurons on or off in fly brains creates wildly erotic or sexually withdrawn animals, a new study shows. The findings point to new players in a complex circuit activated in the fly brain during courtship. Fruit fly males go to great lengths to cozy up to females, singing and even jumping to attract their lover's attention. Researchers had long known that a handful of sex-specific neurons must be present in male brains for the first steps of this courtship ritual to commence. But it still wasn't clear whether other parts of the central nervous system help regulate the flies' elaborate wooing techniques. With this in mind, Sue Broughton, now at University College London, and her colleagues at New York University and the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, selectively switched neurons on and off in adult male flies. To do this, they used specially bred flies with proteins that could be turned off in groups of nerve cells at high temperature. To see how courting is affected when neurons are hyperactivated, they used flies with a version of a protein that was stuck in an altered state. Then they observed whether the animals could still properly court females. Upping the activity of neurons in one region of the brain, they found, made flies court like crazy, while stifling nerve cell activity in the same brain zone left males disinterested. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5248 - Posted: 06.24.2010

— Chimps and humans differ by only a tiny percentage in their genetic make-up, but the reason why they're in trees and we're not lies in who has the most active genes, a leading scientist said Monday. Svante Paabo, who has been helping to decipher the genetic code of chimps, said the key lies in the degree to which genes are used in each species. Human and chimpanzee genomes differ by just 1.2 percent, he told the annual meeting in Berlin of the Human Genome Organization. Yet around 10 percent of the genes are differently active, said Paabo, who studies at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, eastern Germany. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5247 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service A massive research programme to find out whether BSE is circulating in British sheep has turned up its first suspicious result. But while scientists say the sheep did not have conventional BSE, they cannot rule out the possibility that it could have had a new form of mad cow disease that has adapted to sheep. Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has announced that the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, England, had found "a type of scrapie not previously seen in the UK". Scrapie is a sheep disease similar to BSE which is not generally thought to harm people. DEFRA said the disease-causing prion detected in the sheep's brain "had some characteristics similar to experimental BSE in sheep", but that on other tests it resembled neither BSE nor "previously recognised types of scrapie". The UK's Food Standards Agency said in a statement: "Uncertainties still remain on this issue. However, based on the best scientific evidence to date, we are not advising against eating lamb and sheep meat." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5246 - Posted: 06.24.2010

As attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects around 1 in every 25 school-aged children, managing this condition is of huge social importance. An article published in BMC Psychiatry this week shows that zinc supplements could increase the effectiveness of stimulants used to treat children with the disease. The effects of ADHD on individual children differ, but symptoms include inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Stimulants are the most common treatment prescribed, but recent findings that vitamin and mineral deficiencies correlate with ADHD suggest that dietary supplements could also play a role in disease management. Researchers from Iran carried out a controlled trial to assess the benefits of prescribing supplementary zinc alongside the more conventional methylphenidate treatment. They found that children taking additional zinc sulphate on a daily basis improved faster than those taking a placebo. "The efficacy of zinc sulphate to increase the rate of improvement in children, seems to support the role of zinc deficiency in the pathogenesis of ADHD," say the authors.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 5245 - Posted: 04.10.2004

Finding genes linked to mental illness may yield new drugs. HELEN R. PILCHER A massive project to probe the genetics of depression was launched this week at the Human Genome Meeting in Berlin, Germany. The multinational study aims to aid the development of the novel drugs against the condition. "Antidepressant drugs haven't changed much for the past 30 years," says the project’s leader, Bill Deakin of the University of Manchester, UK. "We have to find new molecules that are involved in depression so that new treatments can be developed." Most drugs for depression boost levels of the brain chemical serotonin, which helps nerve cells to communicate effects mood. But this treatment can take weeks to take effect, and even then works only for around half of patients. The study, called NEWMOOD, should yield new drug targets, aid diagnosis and boost understanding of depression’s causes, perhaps helping the 120 million people worldwide who suffer from the condition. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5244 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Chinese spices drive away hungry voles MARK PEPLOW Farmers could stop prairie voles from eating their crops by spraying extracts from Szechuan pepper around the plants. The hot sauce could deter animals that seem immune to other fiery chemicals, such as the capsaicin in chillies. Chemicals in the peppercorn-like plant sting the rodents' mouths and noses and send them looking for less painful foods, scientists report in the journal Pest Management Science1. "Voles are particularly bad in apple orchards — they attack the roots in winter," says lead researcher Gisela Epple, a sensory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The rodents breed quickly and live in dense groups, so they can cause a lot of damage, she says. Some farmers use synthetic repellents, but Epple suspects these may be toxic to the voles. Dousing fields with predator scents scares the rodents off for a while, but they soon get used to the smell. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5243 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mapping mental responses to texture could lead to designer foods. HELEN PEARSON Filling our mouths with fat lights up pleasure centres in the brain, scientists have found, which may help us understand why we cannot get enough of certain foods. Plenty of researchers have studied how tastes and smells trigger different spots in the brain. But few have examined how our brains respond to texture, such as the oiliness of cream, the thickness of gravy or the grittiness of nuts. Ivan de Araujo and Edmund Rolls of the University of Oxford placed 12 hungry people inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and fed them differently textured foods through a tube. They watched subjects' reactions as they consumed slurries of tasteless cellulose mixed to the thickness of water, corn oil or runny syrup, and a mouthful of bland vegetable oil. The thicker solutions triggered a brain area that partly overlaps with one known to be activated by taste, they report in the Journal of Neuroscience1. This suggests that the brain builds a picture of what is in the mouth based on both taste and texture, says Rolls. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Obesity; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5242 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO -- New research bolsters evidence that stimulants like Ritalin used for attention deficit problems may stunt children's growth, but it does not address whether the effect is permanent. Children who took stimulants during the two-year study grew more than half an inch less and gained more than 8 pounds less than those who were not medicated. The study involved 540 youngsters with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, who were ages 7 to 9 at the outset of the study and were randomly assigned to receive common treatments that included medication, behavior management, and a combination of the two. Girls generally reach their final height around age 16 and boys around age 18, so it is too soon to tell if the growth delays continued or were permanent, the researchers said. © 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 5241 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Huntington's disease may be more straightforward to fight than doctors have feared, paradoxically because the genetic brain disorder is more complicated than anyone knew, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. Their research in fruit flies shows that nerve cells modify the mutated protein responsible for Huntington's disease, and this basic cell process could in theory be altered with a drug. The researchers believe their finding, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, opens a new approach to treating the fatal and incurable disease. Huntington's disease affects about 30,000 people in the United States. It is a dominant genetic defect, meaning that a child who inherits just one copy of the bad gene from a parent has a 50 percent chance of eventually developing Huntington's. It hits late in life, usually after people have had children. It causes uncontrolled movements, loss of intellectual capacity and severe emotional disturbances before killing the patient. Larry Marsh, a developmental geneticist at the University of California Irvine, has been looking for a way to fight the disease and has been focusing on just what goes wrong inside the cells carrying the mutated gene, called huntingtin, which controls production of a protein also called huntingtin. Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 5240 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A quick read of a person's facial expression reveals key information, such as their emotional state. You can tell, for instance, if someone feels happy, sad, surprised, scared, angry, or disgusted. In turn, these insights influence your behavior and interaction with the individual. A sad face may trigger you to offer comfort. An angry scowl could prompt you to cross the street and avoid contact. Once a mystery, researchers now are uncovering how the brain participates in this process. Some of the findings indicate that a small brain area, the amygdala (uh-mig-dah-la), is one major player. In particular, evidence suggests that it may act as the brain's pessimist, perpetually on the lookout for facial cues that signal danger and helping a person form judgments about whether to trust people. Copyright © 2004 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5239 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Two-stage surgery for high risk obese patients could drastically improve their health, surgeons say. Doctors first removed part of the stomach and then, in a separate operation, inserted a bypass in the intestines. The first stage allowed significant weight loss so the second stage could go ahead. A study of 75 patients was presented to the Society of American Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons. The morbidly obese patients, aged from 23 to 72, first had a laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy. This removes a large part of the stomach. They were later given a gastric bypass, which involves constructing a pouch and bypassing a small segment of the intestines. University of Pittsburgh researchers found this reduced the average body mass index (BMI) of patients by 19 points to 49 points after six months. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5238 - Posted: 04.04.2004

By ADAM ZEMAN In the beginning soul was everywhere -- in fire, air, earth and water. There were ''tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.'' The human impulse to anthropomorphize, to explain the workings of nature in human terms, was irresistible. As scientific culture took shape, the spiritual, anthropomorphic element of nature was beaten back. Anima -- the breath of life, the soul -- was chased from trees and running brooks into the human heart, its home in many classical and medieval writings. Since then, the progress of science has driven it into the brain, where most of us locate it now, though even here it is an endangered species. Unlike their scientific colleagues, artists never repudiated our perennial tendency to experience ourselves at the center of a spiritual universe. Looking out at an Irish mountain stream, W. B. Yeats could ask: ''What's water but the generated soul?'' The ''melancholy, long, withdrawing roar'' of faith in a spiritual reality had troubled the poet and critic Matthew Arnold 50 years earlier, but his pessimism may have been premature: a recent survey of students in my home city of Edinburgh reveals that a majority believe that some spiritual part of us lives on after our death; the popularity of magical fiction testifies to our continuing fascination with the elastic boundaries of mind evidenced by telepathy, telekinesis and prophetic dreams. Reports of the death of the soul are exaggerated. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5237 - Posted: 04.04.2004

By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG A 29-year-old paralegal was lying in the middle of Congress Street in downtown Boston after being run over by a bicycle messenger, and her first thought was whether her skirt was hiking up. ''Oh, why did I wear a skirt today?'' she asked herself. ''Are these people all looking at my underpants?'' Her second thought was whether she would be hit by one of the cars speeding down Congress -- she wasn't aware that other pedestrians had gathered around, some of them directing traffic away from her. And her third thought was of a different trauma, eight years earlier, when driving home one night, she was sitting at a red light and found herself confronted by an armed drug addict, who forced his way into her car, made her drive to an abandoned building and tried to rape her. ''I had a feeling that this one trauma, even though it was a smaller thing, would touch off all sorts of memories about that time I was carjacked,'' said the woman, whose name is Kathleen. She worried because getting over that carjacking was something that had taken Kathleen a long time. ''For eight months at least,'' she said, ''every night before I went to bed, I'd think about it. I wouldn't be able to sleep, so I'd get up, make myself a cup of decaf tea, watch something silly on TV to get myself out of that mood. And every morning I'd wake up feeling like I had a gun against my head.'' Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5236 - Posted: 04.04.2004

By Kristen Philipkoski Drug addicts want one thing: more drugs. And a new way to approach addiction calls for just that. These drugs, however, won't have the effect a user might want. In fact, they'll have the exact opposite result. Anti-addiction medications prevent drugs like cocaine, nicotine and methamphetamine from getting to the brain where they trigger pleasure receptors that create a "high" feeling. The race is on for the first drug to blunt addiction. Researchers around the world are using basic vaccine strategies to block the effects of addiction. They say these treatments will vastly improve the way we treat drug habits. "People can still smoke, but they have no benefit from it," said Dr. Henrik Rasmussen, senior vice president of clinical, medical and regulatory affairs at Nabi Biopharmaceuticals, whose nicotine vaccine is in the second of three FDA human clinical trials. "Our rationale is if you have no benefit from it, why would you do it? Most people who smoke really want to quit it; they just need some incentive to be able to do that." Traditional methods of treating addiction simply aren't working, experts say. The majority of the 55 million people who smoke in the United States want to quit, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But each year, only about 1 million manage to quit for good. Smoking is the leading cause of death among Americans, and incurs $155 billion in medical costs and productivity losses each year, according to the CDC. Worldwide, smoking kills 5 million people every year, according to the World Health Organization. © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5235 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Do the quirks of capuchins make them creatures with culture? Sorcha McDonagh It's not easy keeping up with pint-size monkeys in the jungle. The teams of researchers who've been doing it for the past 14 years have had to put up with a lot: barreling face-first into spider webs before sunrise, hacking through dense, bug-infested undergrowth, getting droppings in their hair, and being heckled by cantankerous little monkeys called capuchins. Still, there's no place Susan Perry would rather be than the forests of the Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve in Costa Rica. Perry is a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and she's been studying white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus) at Lomas Barbudal since 1990. Each day in the field, she and her colleagues get to observe these monkeys' curious interactions, some of the quirkiest behavior in the animal kingdom. For example, one game begins when one monkey bites a clump of hair from another monkey's face. The two monkeys use their teeth to pass the clump back and forth, dropping a little hair each time. When the hair runs out, the game begins again. In another unusual duet, two monkeys sit together for long periods, swaying gently—with their fingers up each other's nose. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 5234 - Posted: 06.24.2010

New findings at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute demonstrate the potential of a substance found in yohimbe tree bark to accelerate recovery from anxiety disorders suffered by millions of Americans. In the latest in a series of studies of how mice acquire, express and extinguish conditioned fear, the UCLA team finds yohimbine helps mice learn to overcome the fear faster by enhancing the effects of the natural release of adrenaline. Adrenaline prompts physiological changes such as increased heart and metabolism rates in response to physical and mental stress. Writing in the March/April edition of the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Memory, the team reported that mice treated with yohimbine overcame their fear four times as fast as those treated with vehicle or propanolol, a medication commonly used to treat symptoms of anxiety disorders by blunting the physiological effects of adrenaline. Yohimbine is most commonly used to treat erectile dysfunction. It can cause anxiety in susceptible persons, and should never be used without a doctor's recommendation and supervision.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 5233 - Posted: 04.03.2004

Doctors in the US have carried out brain surgery on a 31-year-old man in a bid to cure him of Tourette syndrome. Jeff Matovic from Ohio has had the disorder, which is characterised by uncontrollable vocalisations and movement, since he was six. Doctors used a technique called deep brain stimulation, which involves placing tiny electrodes inside the brain to regulate electrical activity. They say his symptoms have all but disappeared since the operation. "We were genuinely amazed at the patient's response," said Dr Robert Maciunas, who carried out the surgery. Deep brain stimulation has been used on patients with Parkinson's disease, to help reduce the shaking associated with the condition. The electrodes are placed deep inside the brain beside the thalamus, which controls movement. (C)BBC

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 5232 - Posted: 04.02.2004

It made room for larger brain, researchers theorize David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor A tiny genetic change in the muscles of prehumans millions of years ago may have played a major role in endowing modern Homo sapiens with the larger brains and the capacity for thought, language and tool-making that distinguishes us from apes, researchers are reporting today. The novel theory, advanced by a team of biologists and surgeons, suggests that a mutation in a single gene some 2.4 million years ago was largely responsible for a crucial change in the shape of our ancestors' jaws and allowed for skulls with room for brains far larger than earlier members of the hominid line. The discovery of the gene by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is being reported today in the journal Nature. It has already evoked surprise, excitement and also some controversy among anthropologists who study the fossil history of humanity. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 5231 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINA KOLATA New studies in mice suggest that the hormone leptin can fundamentally change the brain's circuitry in areas that control appetite. Leptin acts during a critical period early in life, possibly influencing how much animals eat as adults. And later in life, responding to how much fat is on an animal's body, it can again alter brain circuitry that controls how much is eaten. Researchers say the findings, published today in the journal Science, are a surprise and add new clues to why weight control is so difficult in some humans. Scientists knew that leptin is released by fat cells and tells the brain how much fat is on the body. They knew that animals lacking leptin become incredibly obese, as do a few humans who because of genetic mutations did not make the hormone. Leptin injections immediately made animals, and the patients with leptin deficiencies, lose their appetites. Their weight returned to normal. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5230 - Posted: 04.02.2004