NewScientist.com news service One form of a common brain protein makes us rather worse at remembering things, researchers have discovered. It is a first step towards finding the genes for intelligence. Human intelligence is partly inherited - studies of parents and children show that about half our cleverness, or lack of it, is down to genes rather than environment. Now Dominique de Quervain and colleagues at the University of Zurich in Switzerland have found one of those genes. People who inherit the less common form of a serotonin receptor have worse short-term memory than people with the more common form. It is not - by itself - a gene for intelligence. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4395 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Yankees star says he visited firm last year John Shea, Mark Fainaru-Wada, Chronicle Staff Writers New York Yankees star Jason Giambi is among a number of high-profile athletes called to testify in a San Francisco federal grand jury investigation of a Burlingame nutritional supplement laboratory, the former A's first baseman told The Chronicle before Game 2 of the World Series on Sunday. Giambi joins Giants home run slugger Barry Bonds and Union City track standout Kelli White among as many as 40 athletes who have been subpoenaed to testify in the case that has targeted Victor Conte and his Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO). Conte and BALCO are in the middle of a burgeoning steroid scandal sparked last week by an announcement from U.S. Olympic drug- testing officials. Giambi said he visited BALCO last fall to ask about nutritional supplements. He said he knows Greg Anderson, who is Bonds' personal trainer and who also is connected to the probe. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4394 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower In a cruel double whammy, poor people endure material deprivation while experiencing more than their share of mental disorders. Some scientists theorize that this disproportion of mental illness stems from individuals with genetically based psychological ailments drifting into poverty and staying there. Other researchers suspect that the stress of financial hardship undermines emotional health. An unusual new study boosts the latter view. During the 4 years after their families moved out of poverty thanks to a community-wide economic windfall, Cherokee children in rural North Carolina exhibited marked declines in behaviors such as delinquency, violence, disobedience, and truancy, according to epidemiologist E. Jane Costello of Duke University Medical School in Durham, N.C., and her coworkers. Mental-health clinicians typically diagnose kids with these problems as having either conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder, a penchant to defy authority. "In families that moved out of poverty, parents were better able to supervise their children, apparently leading to fewer behavioral symptoms," Costello says. "Poverty or any other single factor can't fully explain the development of such symptoms." Copyright ©2003 Science Service

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4393 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON, — The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new option for people with Alzheimer's disease, the first treatment specifically for late stages of the illness. The drug, memantine, has long been sold in Germany, and many people in the United States have bought it over the Internet. Now that memantine has been approved, Forest Laboratories will sell it in the United States under the brand name Namenda for patients with moderate to severe symptoms of Alzheimer's. The company said the drug should be on pharmacy shelves in January. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4392 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By EMILY EAKIN Radiant Cool" has the makings of a gripping noir thriller: a missing body, a tough-talking female sleuth and a mustachioed Russian agent mixed up in a shadowy plot to take over the world. But the novel, by Dan Lloyd, a neurophilosopher at Trinity College in Hartford, is also a serious work of scholarship, the unlikely vehicle for an abstruse new theory of consciousness. Lured in by the sinister atmospherics (a possible murder victim turns up on Page 1) and clipped, Sam Spade narration ("He was a fool and a moron, but I never wanted to see him dead"), readers soon find themselves enrolled in a heady tutorial on Husserl, phenomenology, neural networks and multidimensional scaling. Mr. Lloyd says that embedding his theory of consciousness in a novel was essential for making his scholarly case. "I'm trying to show the way that consciousness is personal and idiosyncratic and especially bound up with time," he said. "If you put those factors together, you end up with a novel as a way to express those ideas." ("Radiant Cool," which will be published by M.I.T. Press in December, has a 100-page appendix explaining the theory in technical terms, in case scholars fail to grasp the literary version.) Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 4391 - Posted: 10.18.2003

NewScientist.com news service A skin patch that boosts the "male" hormone testosterone markedly improves the sex lives of women suffering from a loss of sexual desire, following the removal of their ovaries. Testosterone increased desire scores and sexual activity in these women by about 40 per cent compared to a placebo. The international team of researchers tested the patch in European and Australian women who had suffered early menopause due to the surgery and developed hypoactive sexual desire disorder. The disorder is the most common female sexual dysfunction and can be caused by depression, medication or natural menopause. "The results are striking for two specific reasons," says study leader Susan Davis, at the Jean Hailes Foundation, in Melbourne. "There was an extremely low placebo response, so it's a true treatment effect. Also, we are not just talking about sex, this study is really about quality of life. This is about women wanting to feel better." The work was funded by the multinational company Procter & Gamble. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4390 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JERE LONGMAN A previously undetected steroid has been identified and a new test indicates that as many as a half-dozen athletes in track and field have recently used the performance-enhancing drug, American drug-testing officials said yesterday. That is considered a significant number of athletes from one country in a single sport, and would constitute the biggest drug scandal to hit track and field since the Canadian Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal for 100 meters at the 1988 Summer Olympics after testing positive for a steroid. "I know of no other drug bust that is larger than this," Terry Madden, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, an independent group that conducts drug testing for Olympic-related sports, said in a conference call with reporters yesterday. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4389 - Posted: 10.17.2003

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In 1998, scientists found the mammalian version of a gene, known as timeless, which in flies is crucial for the biological clock. However, all but one of the research groups involved determined that timeless did not have such a role in mammals. Now that research group says timeless is indeed a key timekeeper in mammals. In a new complex molecular study of rats, published in the Oct. 17 issue of Science, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign blocked the functional ability of timeless, leaving the circadian clock in disarray. The key difference between the previous studies and this new one was the identification of two timeless proteins -- one a full-length protein and the other a shorter, incomplete version.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 4388 - Posted: 10.17.2003

Radioactive materials for medical imaging produced at lower cost. PHILIP BALL PET scanning could become cheaper and more widespread, thanks to a new bench-top way to produce rare radioactive atoms1. Current methods of making radioisotopes render the medical-imaging technique cumbersome and expensive. Positron-emission tomography (PET) scans of tumours and organs rely on the radioactive decay of isotopes such as carbon-11 and fluorine-18. Isotopes are versions of chemical elements that differ in the number of neutrons in each atom. Carbon's most common isotope, carbon-12, for example, has six neutrons per atom, whereas carbon-11 has five. The isotopes used for PET decay by emitting positrons, which are like positively charged electrons, made from antimatter; normal electrons have a negative charge. When positrons collide with electrons, they annihilate each other in a flash of gamma rays. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 4387 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bird parents typically raise their young in seemingly peaceful cooperation and were therefore seen as reflecting the ideal of monogamous partnership. This view has changed dramatically over the last decade: since molecular ‘fingerprinting’ techniques became available, behavioural ecologists have routinely used paternity analyses to study mating systems. We now know that unfaithful behaviour – referred to as extra-pair copulations – is more the rule than the exception, in particular in socially monogamous songbirds. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Research Centre for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and from the Zoological Museum in Oslo, Norway, now show the evolutionary advantages of this behaviour, using data from a long term study on the blue tit, a small hole-nesting songbird (Nature, October 16 2003). Through extra-pair copulations with distantly breeding males, females produce offspring that are more outbred and therefore genetically more diverse, compared to their half-siblings sired by the social father. Monogamy is rare among animals. Even species that form socially monogamous pairs of one male and one female are often not monogamous in the strict sense. Males and females commonly copulate with more than one partner during a single reproductive event. Therefore, young raised in the same brood are often sired by different males. The evolutionary advantage of unfaithful behaviour is obvious for males: the clutch- or litter size of the partner limits the maximum number of offspring that can be produced. Extra-pair copulations with other females provide the only opportunity for a male to sire additional young. For females, the significance of promiscuity is less obvious. If evolution only favours high numbers of offspring, then females would not benefit from mating with multiple males. However, evolutionary biologists have convincingly shown that the genetic quality of the young has a crucial influence on their subsequent survival and reproductive success. Consequently, not only the quantity, but also the genetic quality of the progeny determines how successfully an individual will spread its genes in future generations.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4386 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alzheimer's disease is the single most common cause of dementia, a chronically progressive brain condition that impairs intellect and behavior to the point where customary activities of daily living become compromised. Over 4 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease. Its high prevalence may lead people to believe that dementia is always due to Alzheimer's disease and that memory loss is a feature of all dementias. However, an article by Alzheimer's disease expert M.-Marsel Mesulam, M.D., in the Oct. 16 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reports that nearly a quarter of all dementias, especially those of presenile onset, may be caused by diseases other than Alzheimer's disease and that some of these so-called atypical dementias involve cognitive abnormalities in areas other than memory. Mesulam is Ruth and Evelyn Dunbar Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and professor of neurology at the Feinberg School of Medicine and director of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4385 - Posted: 10.17.2003

By Lori Valigra | Special to The Christian Science Monitor Ask any aquarium curator, and you'll discover just how much an octopus likes to explore its environment. A master escape artist whose soft body can contort itself through the smallest of openings, the octopus is the brainiest of animals without backbones, and it has keen eyesight. Those attributes attracted Albert Titus, a University of Buffalo professor, to study how an octopus sees, and to mimic that structure and function in a silicon chip called the o-retina. His goal is to create electronic vision systems that could be used in robots to explore the oceans, outer space, and harsh environments. Professor Titus and his colleagues developed an experimental version of the o-retina chip, which is about the size of a narrow Post-it Note. The chip acts as a retina, a sensory membrane in the eye that distills relevant visual information to be sent to the brain. "We'd like to be able to explore new things in a more intelligent way, to have a vision system that perceives its environment and makes decisions without a human always telling it what to do," says Titus. One big challenge is figuring out how the brain uses information to understand and reconstitute an image, and then translating that process onto a chip. The octopus retina provides a simple, yet elegant visual system which, Titus says, is relatively easy to simulate in silicon. Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 4384 - Posted: 06.24.2010

At birth, a child's brain is a work in progress. The initial framework with the capacity for joy, happiness, shyness, and fear is laid down in development, determined by "nature" or the genetic blueprints from the parents. From there, the structure of the brain is shaped by nurture and early experience. Experience can enhance or reduce the mental and emotional capacities in the framework. ©Waukon Standard 2003

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4383 - Posted: 06.24.2010

No one is better at navigation than taxi drivers. Now neuroscientists are turning people into virtual cab drivers to learn how our brains navigate. "Going places is one of the most fundamental of human activities," says Itzhak Fried, professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles and professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute."We are talking about a memory system. We learn our environment, so that when we have to get from one place to another, we use some knowledge or some map which we have created in our own brain, so that we can do it over and over again, probably with increasing efficiency. And that map is going to be based on where you are at any particular point in time, what you see at any particular point in time, and what you are actually looking for." The research team—which included Fried, Michael Kahana, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Computational Memory Lab at Brandeis University, and Brandeis University graduate student Arne Ekstrom—studied seven epilepsy patients who had electrodes placed inside their brains for another study, one that would allow doctors to focus on the source of their seizures. Since the electrodes were already there, the patients could be tested for other things as well. So the scientists had them play a video game in which they acted as virtual taxi drivers, taking virtual passengers to various locations and stores in a virtual city. © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4382 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LINDA GREENHOUSE WASHINGTON, - The Supreme Court, in a silent rebuff on Tuesday to federal policy on medical marijuana, let stand an appeals court ruling that doctors may not be investigated, threatened or punished by federal regulators for recommending marijuana as a medical treatment for their patients. As a result, doctors in California and six other Western states where voters or legislators have approved marijuana for medical uses like pain relief may now discuss it freely with their patients without fear of jeopardizing their federal licenses to prescribe drugs. Advocates of medical marijuana greeted the court's action as a significant and surprising victory. In 1996, immediately after California voters approved a medical marijuana initiative known as the Compassionate Use Act, the Clinton administration warned doctors that recommending marijuana ``will lead to administrative action by the Drug Enforcement Administration to revoke the practitioner's registration.'' The Bush administration carried the policy forward and appealed the ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last October that the federal policy violated both the free speech rights of doctors and the ``principles of federalism.'' Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4381 - Posted: 10.15.2003

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms include inattention, motor hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Roughly half of the adults who report ADHD symptoms also report a co-existing substance-abuse disorder. New findings published in the October issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research have identified a distinct phenotype or "profile" of individuals with co-existing ADHD and alcoholism. Although prior studies have suggested a genetic commonality of ADHD and alcoholism, the study found no significant contribution of two specific candidate genes, the promoter polymorphism of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT) and the 5-HT2c receptor Cys23Ser polymorphism. "Our results indicate that individuals with persisting ADHD symptoms in adulthood seem to be at high risk of developing an alcohol-use disorder," said Monika Johann, medical doctor and research associate at the University of Regensburg and first author of the study. "Moreover, there is evidence for a highly increased severity of alcohol dependence in subjects with ADHD."

Keyword: Drug Abuse; ADHD
Link ID: 4380 - Posted: 10.15.2003

Contrary to what your music teacher told you, it does not take decades of piano practice to learn to play phrases on the piano without looking at your fingers. A brain map linking finger movements with particular notes begins to form within minutes of starting training, according to research published this week in BMC Neuroscience. Recent brain imaging studies of professional musicians have demonstrated that silent tapping of musical phrases can stimulate auditory areas of the cortex and hearing music can stimulate areas of the motor cortex. Moreover, according to anecdotal evidence, hearing music can cause pianists to move their fingers involuntarily. To find out how fast links between these two brain areas could be formed Marc Bangert and Eckart Altenmüller, from the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians' Medicine in Hanover, examined the effects on the brain of taking up a musical instrument from scratch. Their results showed that patterns of brain activity when listening to music or silently tapping a keyboard could be altered after just 20 minutes of piano practice. These changes were enhanced after five weeks of training.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 4379 - Posted: 10.15.2003

By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA Today "King Lear": Alzheimer’s disease At the opening of this play, the once-mighty King Lear divides his kingdom in a way that seems to defy logic, a move that might be seen as the subtle onset of Alzheimer’s, a disease that afflicts 4.5 million Americans today. As the play unfolds, Lear’s once effective decision-making starts to deteriorate, and he experiences flares of strong emotion, key signs of Alzheimer’s. Shakespeare wrote about the aging King Lear long before scientists had identified the destruction of brain tissue that causes symptoms of the disease. Yet Lear often looks like a classic Alzheimer’s patient. "Richard III": Sociopathic disorder In this play, Richard III schemes to usurp the crown and feels no guilt for his immoral actions. People have long been fascinated by the mind of an evil person, and Richard III gives us a chilling portrait of a sociopath -- a man who seemingly kills not for revenge or out of hatred, but just for sport. Recent scientific findings suggest that damage to certain parts of the brain involved in judgment can sometimes lead to such behavior. "Hamlet": Depression Copyright © 2003 The Desert Sun

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 4378 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DAVID BERREBY AUSTIN, Tex. — Ambition or love? Freedom or security? Perfect job here or perfect mate in Utah? Life forces painful choices on Dr. Michael J. Ryan's colleagues, but it is even harder on his research subject, the male túngara frog: the more sex it gets, the surer it is to be eaten. Dr. Ryan, who leads the integrative biology section at the University of Texas, is best known for work on the túngara, but he ponders other animals that live between a rock and a hard place: an all-female species of fish that clones itself but must mate with an alien male to do it; tiny salamanders with cells too big for their body plans; birds that must feed the chicks of another kind of bird to support their offspring. Biologists should learn from life's existential quandaries, he says, but many do not. Instead, they sweep the difficulties under the rug of "adaptationism," the notion that everything about an animal's body and behavior has been honed to enhance its "fitness" or chance of passing on genes. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4377 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Discovery shows power of mouse genome to identify human genes for rare genetic diseases ANN ARBOR, MI – In a small town on Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean, people are living with a serious neurological disorder, called Cayman ataxia, found nowhere else in the world. People born with this rare, inherited condition have poor muscle coordination, some degree of mental retardation, uncontrollable head and eye movements and difficulty speaking or walking. Now, in a discovery that reinforces the importance of the mouse to human genetics, scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School have discovered two mutations in a gene called ATCAY, which appear to be responsible for Cayman ataxia in humans and for similar neurological disorders in mice.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 4376 - Posted: 06.24.2010